The Window to Your Soul: The Symbolic Significance of The Eye

No body part has been as symbolically significant throughout history as the eye. 

It is not known who first coined the phrase ‘the eyes are windows to the soul.’ Examples of similar phrases can be found in the Bible, Cicero’s Roman plays, and the works of Shakespeare. What is certainly known are the many ways in which the eye has been held as significant in a representational way. 

We have looked into eyes for signs of fear, deception, arousal, power, magic, wisdom, certainty, and evil throughout history. We have compiled a shortlist of some of the most significant readings of the eye. This is not an exhaustive list but a whistle-stop tour through our ocular obsessions. 

Horus, the ancient Egyptian sky god, possessed an eye that became significant to Middle Eastern and North African symbology. The eye of Horus often painted on boats and worn as an amulet, symbolized many things to the ancient Egyptians. It represented protection, completion, and the cycles of the moon. Horus was said to have sacrificed his eye in order to ease the passage into the afterlife. For this reason, many believers in the power of the eye were buried with tokens that depicted it. 

The symbolic significance of blindness is no more clearly displayed than in the mythology of ancient Greece. Milky-eyed blind characters are often ‘seers’ in Greek myths - able to access vision beyond the physical plain by virtue of their lack of sight.

The most famed ‘seer’ in Greek myth is Tiresias, who offered wisdom to characters in several plays. Tiresias lived as both a man and a woman and was blinded by the gods after weighing in on an argument about which sex had more pleasure during intercourse! 

The symbology of a clouded eye was often used to represent a detachment from worldly concerns or chronological rigidity. 

In more modern times, it is rare to see an adult with milky eyes. Modern cataract surgery, combined with multifocal intraocular lenses like PanOptix, has ensured that the phenomena is far less common now. 

Symbolically, the eye has not always been representative of beauty or wisdom. One of the oldest and most widespread symbolic eyes is the ‘evil eye.’ The curse of the evil eye has been a part of multiple cultures since at least 3500BC. Believers in the curse thought that an envious or malicious glare could transfer some kind of symbolic or real curse to the person it was cast upon. 

Amulets against the curse of the evil eye often took the form of blue cobalt eyes worn around the neck. Virtually every ancient culture had a version of the evil eye myth.

The concept of a harmful, malicious glare has carried over into modern culture. The ‘eye of Sauron’ in J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings inflicts a quasi-physical doom on those noble creatures that it beholds.