b) Codes of meaning

The first element to watch when translating from other cultures is the system of archetypes. In cultures like the Egyptian, that are tied to river flood waters, the notion of time is cyclic. The world is a temple whose halls are entered by different doors. Thus the door is a metaphor of resurrection, whereas the eye, as an expression of knowledge revealed, is a metaphor of death. For the Greeks, on the other hand, the eye of the owl indicated knowledge and insight.
In Mycenaean culture, the eye beholding the door in the pediment of the palace of Knossus expressed the reincarnation of souls; whereas our sensitivity would be more ready to see an illusion in those last truths that are revealed only at death’s door. In the culture of the German Nibelunsglied, death is a swaying of crests, a gleaming reflection of shining helmets; the battle between the Saxons and the Sarmatian tribes from the East, whose high crests were used to hold plumes of sparrow-hawk feathers and the hair of killed enemies, has always led the German collective unconscious to see an image of destruction in reflections and "eagle feathers". Thus, when Schumann, a passionate reader of skaldic epic poetry, sought a subtitle for his Fantasia op. 17, the expression "ruins and eagle feathers" came as though from the past of an entire nation.
There is also a geographic appendix to this historical ‘marking’: a country of woods and swamps, like Germany, fighting a fated war against the armies of Varus, the general of Augustus, could only see swaying crests - the sign of a full cavalry charge that was so natural to the unrefined strategy of the Sarmatian warriors from the steppes - with pure horror. The result of all this is that when Odin’s ash-tree, inscribed with the words of the law, sways in the wind, the god is sure of the next inevitable twilight of the gods. In German culture, the end of the world is always accompanied by a gust of wind.