Bread

Bread holds a special place in human culture and traditions, with countless rituals and religious beliefs. At its core, it is a symbol of nourishment, of life’s sustenance—“our daily bread.” 

The strong symbolism of bread stems, not least, from its inherently symbolic production: the cultivation of grain, the harvesting, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, the grinding, mixing, kneading, and finally, the transformation in the hot oven. (Compare to Kitchen.) Each step in this process carries its own symbolic meaning that most people intuitively sense. The final product is bread—humanity’s most everyday but perhaps most sacred food—shared at the meal when each person breaks their piece of it.

Unlike fish, meat, or fruit, bread is something created by humans themselves; it is a product of the diligent and industrious cultural human. It is so inherently human that we have an almost intimate relationship with our bread, which, in Christianity, even symbolizes the body of Christ.

Eating bread (and other food) can symbolize a realization, an assimilation of ideas and current circumstances; they become reality instead of abstractions. The Bible uses this imagery, such as in, “You have fed us with the bread of tears” (Psalms, 80:5) and “They eat the bread of wickedness” (Proverbs, 4:17). Bread is a concretization of psychological content.

Bread, as an archetypal image, possesses a distinctly spiritual quality; it is a symbol of the spiritual nourishment we need to sustain our soul. For the Jews, the Torah is bread; for Christians, the Gospels. Christ speaks of himself as "the bread of life" (John, 6:51).

In dreams, bread almost always has a positive meaning, usually with a touch of the physical, down-to-earth, human aspect rather than the sacred or lofty. For example, one who needs bread in a dream may need to examine his or her bodily, entirely human needs. In alchemy, the symbol of coagulatio is closely related, and in Jung’s typology, it corresponds to the sensation function; both are expressions of the concrete. (See also Consumption.)

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