Sacred Signs: Myth, Symbol, and the Search for Meaning

We live in a world saturated with symbols-crosses and crescent moons, logos and emojis, dreams we can't shake and stories we tell on repeat. Most days, we hurry past them. Yet beneath the noise of modern life, an old intuition persists: the world is trying to speak to us.

Sacred Signs is an invitation to remember how to listen.

Drawing on mythology, depth psychology, and spiritual insight from across traditions, Rowan C. Danner explores how symbols have always carried the weight of what matters most: love and loss, fear and courage, death and transformation, the search for a life that feels genuinely our own. From fire, rivers, and the turning seasons to animals, sacred places, and the body itself, this book traces how ancient images still quietly structure our inner lives-even when we no longer "believe" in them.

Without preaching a doctrine or asking you to join a tradition, Sacred Signs gently opens up questions like:

• Why do certain stories, images, and dreams haunt us for years?
• How do myths from the "great traditions" still shape our relationships, politics, and sense of self?
• What do modern myths-films, brands, memes, and fandoms-reveal about what we really worship now?
• How can we create honest, grounded rituals and live more attentively with the signs already in our days?

Moving from big-picture reflection to the texture of everyday life, Danner shows how sacred meaning doesn't only live in temples and texts, but also in kitchens, sidewalks, phone screens, and small repeated gestures. The goal is not to decode every coincidence as a message from beyond, but to recover a way of seeing in which the symbolic and the ordinary belong to each other.

Sacred Signs is for seekers, skeptics, and quietly curious souls who sense that there is more to life than "just this"-and want language, stories, and practices to help them live inside that "more" with depth, clarity, and care.