During the week leading up to Easter and Passover a house in our neighborhood had an eye-catching seasonal display out front. A big line of colored eggs came tumbling down the sloping lawn, presided over by a large, cheerful bunny. They made me smile every time I passed. Of course I know that bunnies and eggs have nothing to do with Easter, or Passover. They are echoes of a different and much more ancient tradition, the celebration of spring, which may be as old as humanity. In other words they are fertility symbols. I had to discover this for myself. My mother never told me. But it is a striking symbol of how powerful symbols are, and how they can outlast their original meaning and be appropriated for quite different purposes. The swastika was originally a symbol of the sun or of divinity in Eastern religions, and in the early twentieth century it was the logo cheap brand of cigarettes. Written language began, not with alphabets, but with symbols like Egyptian hieroglyphs. These