The pictures were made to be read.

For five hundred years the alchemists, the Rosicrucians, the tarot makers and the visionaries put what they knew into pictures, because a picture could hold what a sentence could not: a hand, a sun, a crown, a serpent, each one a word in a language its first readers spoke. The pictures survived. The reading did not. They are everywhere now, on walls, on skin, on screens, and almost no one can say what a single sign in them means.

We think that is a loss worth repairing and a pleasure worth having. To stand in front of the Hand of the Mysteries and know why the fish burns in the palm. To look at the Sun card with Waite's own sentence beside it. To watch the same eye look out of a Rembrandt, a Dürer and a plate from 1928. The knowledge was never lost; it is in books that are free to read. Nobody had put it back onto the pictures. Symbolica does.

So every picture here is shown large and whole, filed by what it is a picture of, with every symbol on it marked, and every meaning attributed to who said it, in what book, when. Nothing is asserted about whether the metaphysics is true. Nothing is guessed. Where no one has read a sign, the page says so, and waits.

The dream is a complete map: every great image of the Western esoteric tradition, read symbol by symbol, in one place, free, and kept for good. A few hundred works, a few hundred symbols, each explained once and properly and cross-referenced with every other. We are at the start of it, and we would rather be slow and right than fast and vague.