Hidden in Plain Sight: Allegory, Metaphor, and the Compression of Meaning
Allegory, Metaphor, & Information Theory
On a dimly lit desk, a scholar pores over an ancient text filled with strange images. To the untrained eye, it’s a simple story about travelers and treasures, but the scholar suspects a deeper code lies beneath the surface. Much like a cryptographer deciphering a coded message, she reads between the lines, uncovering a hidden teaching about virtue and vice. This scene illustrates a timeless human endeavor: we often hide meaning in plain sight through allegory and metaphor, folding ideas into stories and symbols as if encrypting them. In our digital age of bytes and algorithms, these age-old literary devices take on new significance. We can explore allegory and metaphor through the lens of information theory (treating them as encoding and compression of meaning) and consider how allegoresis, the act of interpretation, serves as a kind of decryption. On this journey, I will gradually unpack these concepts, drawing connections between how we tell stories and the way we transmit information. Along the way, we will see how allegory preserves meaning in a shroud of silence (an apophatic medium) and how interpretation can collapse that hidden potential into tangible understanding.
Allegory, Metaphor, and Hidden Meaning
Human beings have long used allegory and metaphor to convey ideas indirectly. An allegory is essentially a complete narrative that carries a second, hidden layer of meaning. In an allegory, characters, places, and events aren’t just themselves — they symbolically represent something else, often moral or philosophical. A classic example is Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, in which prisoners in a cave represent humanity trapped in ignorance, and the journey out of the cave symbolizes enlightenment. On the other hand, a metaphor is a more compact comparison: a phrase or sentence equating two seemingly unrelated things (for example, “time is a thief”). Metaphor is often seen as a single spark, while allegory is a sustained flame. Indeed, allegories are sometimes described as “extended metaphors.” Both devices allow a message to be about something without stating it outright. In effect, they hide meaning within a form accessible to readers, but only if those readers know how to look or are willing to interpret.
Allegory and metaphor operate on two levels: a surface and a subtext. The surface is the literal storyline or statement, and the subtext conveys the hidden meaning or truth. We enjoy the surface story in its own right – as a fable, a myth, a poem – but there’s a parallel satisfaction in discovering the subtext. In everyday life, we constantly use metaphors (“a wave of emotion,” “food for thought”) to communicate abstract or complex ideas through familiar terms. These metaphors carry implicit meaning that listeners unpack without even thinking about it. In both cases, something important is happening: meaning is being conveyed in a hidden or oblique manner, folded into a wrapper of narrative or figurative language. It is as if the author has encoded an insight into a form that only reveals itself upon reflection. This dual-layer communication is the hallmark of allegory and metaphor.
Before moving on, it’s helpful to introduce the term allegoresis, which refers to interpreting a work as an allegory. If an allegory is a coded message, allegoresis is the decoding process. Sometimes, authors deliberately encode a message; other times, readers practice allegoresis even if the hidden meaning wasn’t intended, finding allegory in myths or literature after the fact. Allegoresis has been practiced for millennia – ancient scholars used it to find philosophical truths in Homer’s Odyssey, and medieval theologians used it to extract spiritual lessons from scripture. We’ll delve more into what happens during allegoresis later, but for now, imagine it as the counterpart to allegory: the active reading that teases out the concealed significance. Allegory (or metaphor) and allegoresis form a cycle of hidden expression and revealed interpretation, akin to writing and reading a secret code.
Apophatic vs. Cataphatic: Saying Without Saying
Why do we sometimes choose to communicate indirectly? To answer this, we can borrow concepts from theology: the apophatic and cataphatic approaches to expression. In theology, apophatic (from the Greek apophasis, “to deny”) refers to describing the divine by negation or by what cannot be said, whereas cataphatic (“to affirm”) refers to making positive statements about what God is. For example, a cataphatic statement might declare, “God is love,” while an apophatic approach would respond, “But God is beyond even what we mean by love.” Apophatic or negative theology seeks understanding by unsaying – by hinting, negating, or pointing beyond standard descriptions. The idea is that some truths are ineffable and can only be approached indirectly. In contrast, cataphatic statements try to pin things down in clear, direct terms.
When we apply this lens to language and literature, metaphor can be seen as having an apophatic effect, and straightforward literal language as cataphatic. A metaphor doesn’t assert a fact in the plain sense; it suggests a likeness or evokes an image that hints at what cannot be easily stated. If I say, “Her mind was a labyrinth,” I don’t spell out the intricacies of her thought process (that would be the cataphatic approach, explaining directly); instead, I evoke the image of a labyrinth, indirectly suggesting complexity and mystery. The metaphor operates by saying and not saying: it conveys an impression while leaving the specific meaning unspoken for the listener to intuit. In this way, metaphor behaves like apophatic discourse – it preserves a sense of mystery and openness, gesturing to an idea without fully circumscribing it in words.
Allegory, being an extended metaphor, similarly embraces this indirectness. An allegorical story can be enjoyed at face value without ever declaring its hidden message. The meaning lives in a kind of limbo – present but not explicitly voiced, latent, virtual, or abeyant. This hiddenness is powerful. It allows allegory to tackle ideas that might be too contentious, sacred, or complex to state outright. For example, many religious texts use parables and allegories to discuss spiritual truths that might lose their force if put in plain doctrinal statements. The indirect form protects these truths in a virtual, imaginal space, where they can be contemplated without the rigidity of literal wording.
Meanwhile, allegoresis (allegorical interpretation) often provides a counterbalancing cataphatic effect. When a reader or commentator performs allegoresis, they take the inchoate, implied meaning and articulate it in definite terms. It’s like taking a shimmering mirage and solidifying it into a clear image. In doing so, one might say allegoresis has a sublimatory function: it elevates the literal narrative to a higher plane of meaning. A famous example comes from religious tradition – the Song of Songs in the Bible is an erotic love poem on the surface, but for centuries, it has been read allegorically as a dialogue of love between the soul and God (or Christ and the Church). Through allegoresis, the sensual imagery is sublimated into spiritual significance. The original poem never explicitly mentions God; the interpretive act (the allegoresis) adds that layer, effectively transmuting the poem’s cataphatic content (love between two humans) into a spiritual lesson. Here, allegoresis contrasts the poem’s literal, more straightforward (one could say cataphatic) depiction of love by insisting on a hidden divine analogy – an interpretation beyond what’s openly said.
In summary, metaphor and allegory thrive on a certain silence or indirection – an apophatic quality – allowing meaning to glow in the background. On the other hand, interpretation speaks the unsaid aloud, giving us a cataphatic outcome (a clear statement of “this means that”). Both modes are essential: one creates the fertile ambiguity where insight can reside, and the other harvests insight into communicable knowledge. This dynamic of hiding and revealing is not just poetic fancy; it has deep connections to how we generally handle information, to which we turn next.
Metaphor as Encryption of Meaning
Consider how encryption works in the realm of information technology: a message (plaintext) is transformed via an algorithm into an unreadable format (ciphertext) that hides its content, and only someone with the proper key can decrypt it back into plaintext. Metaphors, interestingly, can be thought of in similar terms. When we speak metaphorically, we take an idea and express it in a disguised form. The literal words are the “ciphertext,” the listener’s mind is the decoder that must use context and insight as the “key” to unlock the intended meaning. In effect, a metaphor is an encryption of meaning in the medium of language. The content is there but not apparent to a naïve or out-of-context reader.
Let’s illustrate this with a simple metaphor: “Achilles was a lion on the battlefield.” The literal statement seems false – Achilles was not actually a four-legged feline. But this metaphor encrypts the meaning “Achilles was brave and fierce” into an image of a lion. The key to decoding it lies in cultural and linguistic knowledge: we know lions symbolize courage and ferocity. The sentence might be puzzling or meaningless to someone unfamiliar with this symbolic association (just as a coded message is gibberish without the key). However, for those who share the context, the metaphor instantly decrypts into a rich understanding of Achilles’ prowess in battle.
This encryption-like quality of metaphor is tied to an apophatic effect. The metaphor does not explicitly state the qualities of Achilles; it doesn’t list “he was brave, fearless, strong…”. Instead, it leaves those qualities unspoken, implied by the image of the lion. It is an economical way of communicating – much is conveyed in a single compact phrase, and importantly, it engages the listener’s interpretive faculty. In a sense, the speaker trusts the listener to participate in meaning-making and supply the key from their own mind to decipher the image. This participatory aspect is one reason metaphors can be so resonant; the meaning, once decrypted, feels “earned” or personally realized by the listener.
Beyond literature, we often use metaphorical or coded language in everyday situations that function like encryption. Think of slang, idioms, or in-group references – they carry meanings apparent to those in the know but hidden to outsiders. For example, during times of censorship or social repression, people have resorted to allegorical speech to hide subversive messages. A folktale might cloak criticism of a king, or a spiritual teaching might be embedded in a seemingly mundane story to avoid persecution. This is analogous to what cryptographers call steganography, “the practice of representing information within another message… such that the presence of the concealed information would not be evident to an unsuspecting [observer]”. A famous case is that of certain fairy tales and fables (like some of Aesop’s fables), which on the surface appear to be simple animal stories but, in fact, carry sharp social or political commentary – a hidden message in an innocent wrapper. The metaphorical encryption is successful when the casual reader sees only a children’s story, while the intended audience, possessing the interpretive key, sees the critique or truth embedded within.
Crucially, a good metaphor balances concealment and accessibility. Communication fails if it’s too obscure (like an unbreakable cipher with no key) – the reader cannot decrypt it. If it’s too obvious, it ceases to be a metaphor and becomes a plain statement. The optimal metaphor is like a well-designed cipher: it hides the message just enough to satisfy the revelation but not so much that it is lost forever. We have all experienced reading a poem or line and suddenly “getting it” – a rush of understanding when the metaphoric code is cracked. At that moment, the distance between minds collapses: what was concealed by one person (the writer) is now unveiled in another’s mind (the reader). A metaphor is a powerful encryption of meaning that is paradoxically revealed by hiding.
Allegory as Compressed Knowledge
If metaphor can be likened to encryption, an allegory – an extended metaphor or symbolic narrative – can be likened to information compression. In information theory, compression means finding a more compact representation of data without losing essential information. Allegories often compress sprawling, complex ideas into a concise narrative where each element of the story corresponds to a piece of the idea. Rather than writing a treatise on humanity's moral failings and redemptions, an author might compress those abstract concepts into the journey of a single fictional pilgrim or the adventures of a wayward knight. The story serves as a code that encapsulates far more meaning than is evident from the mere words describing concrete events.
For example, consider George Orwell’s Animal Farm. On the surface, it’s a short novel about barnyard animals who revolt against their farmer. But this simple tale is a compressed commentary on the complex history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. In a few chapters, Orwell conveys insights about revolution, power, and corruption that would otherwise require a lengthy historical or political analysis. Each animal and event in the story is doing double duty: Napoleon the pig isn’t just a character; he’s an allegorical stand-in for Stalin; the entire scenario of animals running a farm compresses the dynamics of Soviet society into a familiar farmyard drama. The allegory preserves the meaning of those historical events in a kind of capsule form. Readers who grasp the correspondence can decompress the narrative to retrieve a rich understanding of real-world politics from a seemingly simple fable.
In terms of information theory, one might say allegory finds patterns and correspondences that allow a reduction in description length. A literal discussion of Soviet history would involve many specifics, but by using an allegory, Orwell relies on the reader’s recognition of patterns (e.g., a dictator’s rise) to fill in details. It’s akin to how a compressed file relies on the decompression algorithm to reconstruct the full data. The allegorical writer assumes an active, pattern-matching reader who will supply context to unpack the story. Indeed, a hallmark of human cognition is our ability to detect patterns and make inferences, effectively decompressing sparse clues into full concepts. Cognitive scientists have suggested that much of human learning and understanding works by compressing information – finding the simplest representation that captures data. When we say “life is a journey” as an allegorical statement, we compress countless observations about the phases of life, the striving and discovery, into one succinct metaphorical image. Our minds then unravel that image, elaborating on it: there are paths, obstacles, destinations, companions, and so forth. The allegory gives a framework that hints at all these things without spelling them out.
Metaphors and allegories act like semantic-syntactic wormholes in language. This fanciful phrase suggests that they create shortcuts (wormholes) between distant concepts in the universe of meaning by using the structure of language (syntax) cleverly. Normally, to explain a complex idea, we might travel a long route of logical exposition. But a well-chosen allegory or metaphor collapses that distance. It connects two far-flung semantic realms through a brief turn of phrase or a straightforward narrative. Take the metaphor “the mind is a computer.” In one quick leap, it bridges the gap between biology and technology, inviting us to transfer our understanding of computers (memory, processing, programs) onto the human mind. That single sentence behaves like a wormhole: one end is anchored in the concept of “mind,” the other in “computer,” and the meaning flows through the tunnel between them. This is immensely powerful for compression – we don’t have to detail all the specific similarities because the metaphor invites the listener to explore the analogy and unpack the implications on their own.
In allegory, this wormhole effect is extended over an entire story. Think of it as a network of wormholes: every character and plot point in the story corresponds to something in the target meaning domain. These multiple connections map a large conceptual structure (like a moral philosophy or a political critique) onto a narrative structure. The result is a kind of semantic compression – a dense mapping where a relatively short text encodes a much larger web of ideas. The beauty of this compression is that it often makes the complex idea more accessible and engaging. We experience it concretely (through the story) and emotionally (through identification with characters), which means when we decompress it, we don’t just retrieve dry facts but a meaningful experience. In information terms, allegory can pack intellectual content and emotional resonance into its compressed form, something few formal compression algorithms can do! The “data” here is multi-dimensional: rational and affective.
However, just as with any compression, loss or distortion is possible. In data compression, we distinguish between lossless and lossy compression. A lossless compression (like a ZIP file) can be perfectly reversed to get the original data. In contrast, a lossy compression (like MP3 audio) throws away some details to save space, so the original can’t be fully recovered. One might ask: is allegory lossless or lossy? In an ideal sense, a carefully constructed allegory is meant to be functionally lossless – the key ideas are all present in coded form. However, interpretations can vary, and some nuances may not survive the journey if a reader misses a clue or the allegory oversimplifies for clarity. In practice, allegorical communication is redundant and resilient: often, multiple symbols in the story reinforce the same underlying point, so even if one symbol is missed, another might convey it. In Orwell’s Animal Farm, even if readers don’t equate Napoleon with Stalin, they can still grasp the general message about tyranny and betrayal of ideals through other elements of the story. This built-in redundancy is akin to error correction in a transmitted message.
In short, allegory is a masterclass in doing more with less. It is the art of encoding a high-density payload of meaning into a story that might seem straightforward. The listener or reader, through interpretation, performs the complementary act of decompression, expanding that story back into a broader understanding. The gap between a simple tale and a profound truth is bridged almost instantaneously – a cognitive wormhole connecting the tale we read to the ideas we apprehend.
Preserving Virtual Meaning: Allegory’s Apophatic Medium
One fascinating aspect of allegory (and metaphor) is how they preserve meaning in a virtual state. By virtual, we mean that the meaning exists potentially or implicitly, not yet realized in a single explicit formulation. The more profound significance is real in an allegorical narrative because it’s intentionally built-in but remains untold and unspoken within the text. It is, in effect, meaning that it has not yet collapsed into a singular interpretation. This is reminiscent of the apophatic approach we discussed: its content is present through absence or obscurity. Therefore, the allegory can be thought of as an apophatic medium – it communicates by not directly communicating the message.
Maintaining meaning in a virtual state has certain advantages. It allows multivalence – the capacity for multiple coexisting interpretations. Different readers might extract different nuances from the same allegorical work, each finding a valid insight. The meaning is rich, like a field of possibilities, and it hasn’t been forced into one corner. For example, consider the rich allegory in C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. To one reader, it’s a Christian allegory (with the lion Aslan as a Christ figure); to another, it’s a broader battle between good and evil with no specific religious mapping. The text supports both readings because it never explicitly says “Aslan represents Christ” – that meaning remains virtual, hinted at, but never mandated. This is akin to an ‘uncollapsed’ quantum state in physics (i.e., a superposition) – multiple potential outcomes exist simultaneously until an observation (or, in our case, an interpretation) selects one. In allegory, the virtuality of meaning gives the work a timeless or universal quality. It can speak to people in different eras or contexts, who will actualize the meaning in ways that resonate with their situation.
Furthermore, preserving meaning virtually can imbue a work with a sense of mystery or the sublime. Because the full meaning is never on the page, it always seems slightly beyond, evoking what philosophers might call transcendence. Readers often feel that an allegorical story “means more” than they can quite put into words – and they are right because the story doesn’t do the final step of fixing the meaning into a single set of words. This can be emotionally or spiritually powerful. It mirrors experiences in life where meaning is sensed rather than explicit – like symbols in a dream that we feel have significance even if we can’t fully explain it. By operating in this apophatic register, allegory guards the sacredness or complexity of its subject matter. It refuses to reduce it to plain speech, preserving a virtual space where the idea can live in a purer, more fluid form.
That virtual reservoir of meaning also correlates with information entropy in a message, in the sense that before decoding, the allegory is high in potential information (many possible interpretations). In information theory, higher entropy means more uncertainty or potential information content. An allegory’s meaning before interpretation is high-entropy – uncertain, not fixed – whereas a direct statement would be low-entropy (completely confident in meaning). Interpretation will reduce this uncertainty, carving out one path of meaning from the many. But until that happens, allegory maintains a fertile ambiguity. Far from being a flaw, this ambiguity is often the point. It engages readers to think, to discuss, to explore. It's why people can return to an allegorical novel or a poem and find new meaning upon each reading; the text replenishes itself with meaning because it never expended all of it explicitly.
There is also a protective aspect to this virtuality. Historically, authors who had dangerous truths to tell could hide them in allegory to avoid persecution. The unsaid nature of the content gave them plausible deniability. Mystics wrote in layers of metaphor to guard spiritual secrets, sharing them only with those “in the know” who could interpret. One might say the truth was placed in a secure vault of narrative, only accessible with the right key of allegoresis. The meaning remained virtual (and thus safe) until a sympathetic mind came along to realize it. This dynamic underscores how allegory can serve as both an artistic and a survival strategy – encoding messages in an apophatic medium that keeps them safe from the uninitiated or hostile yet intact for future revelation.
Allegoresis: Decoding and Liminal Reality
Now, what happens when someone performs allegoresis – that is, when they interpret an allegory or metaphor and draw out a specific meaning? We earlier likened allegoresis to decryption or decompression. It is the moment where virtual meaning becomes actual meaning in the mind of the interpreter. This process can be seen as collapsing the possibilities into a particular understanding, much as a decoder takes a garbled cipher and produces one clear message. The result is often a feeling of revelation: “Aha, so that’s what it means!” The formerly hidden truth is brought into the open.
In doing so, allegoresis inherently has a cataphatic character, making an affirmative statement about meaning. For instance, a reader might conclude, “In this fable, the journey up the mountain represents the struggle for wisdom.” That statement is direct and positive (in the sense of asserting something). It has moved away from the indirectness of the allegory itself and provided a definitive link between the story and reality. We can say that allegoresis collapses the virtuality of allegory’s meaning into a concrete interpretation. The many potential meanings narrow (even if just by a bit) to the one the interpreter has chosen to emphasize. In the language of logic, the interpretive act is a function that takes the allegorical text as input and outputs a proposition or set of propositions as the decoded message.
Interestingly, this interpretive leap often happens in a liminal space – at the threshold between the world inside the story and the world outside. The term liminal means “on the boundary or threshold.” When we interpret allegory, we are half in the story’s universe and half in our own. We say, “X (in the story) is really Y (in reality or another frame of reference).” For example, Aslan is Christ (story world meets spiritual reality), or the ring in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings represents absolute power (fantasy meets political reality). The act of allegoresis creates a portal at the boundary of fiction and reality, where the two intersect. Here, in this liminal junction, the story’s virtual meaning steps into real-world significance. The virtual ideas within the fiction become actionable, discussable truths outside of it.
This transition from virtual to actual can feel almost magical. Many readers experience a thrill in decoding allegories precisely because it’s like seeing two images align in a stereogram – suddenly, a 3D shape pops out from a 2D pattern. There is pleasure in that convergence, seeing how a clever author laid clues that all point to a coherent hidden message. But there’s also a responsibility in interpretation. By choosing one meaning, an interpreter might exclude or downplay others. Allegoresis often privileges a particular interpretation as the “real” meaning. In some cases, especially in religious or academic contexts, particular allegorical interpretations become authoritative, and alternative readings are marginalized. When medieval scholars declared that the phoenix in a bestiary allegory “really” symbolized Christ’s resurrection, that became the standard reading; other possible meanings of the phoenix tale (perhaps psychological or natural-philosophical) were overshadowed. In information terms, the decoder decides on one key, uses it, and maybe throws away the other keys.
We might think of allegoresis as performing an information retrieval and reduction. The allegory held much potential information (as discussed, a high entropy of meaning). The interpreter retrieves the information – but, in doing so, reduces the uncertainty by locking in a particular interpretation. This is efficient in one sense: now we have a clear takeaway. But it can also be limiting if done rashly. Good interpreters often remain aware that their decoding is not the only possible one. Some texts invite multiple layers of allegoresis without contradiction. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy can be read on a literal level (a journey through afterlife realms), a moral level (the soul’s journey toward God), a political level (comments on 14th-century Italian politics), and an allegorical theological level – all at once. Dante encouraged readers to understand that his poem has “several senses” of interpretation. In modern terms, it’s a multi-encrypted message requiring multiple keys to appreciate fully. Each act of allegoresis (moral, political, spiritual) decodes one layer but doesn’t exhaust the text.
When allegoresis is done with sensitivity, it serves a sublimatory function, as mentioned earlier – it can elevate the reader’s mind from the mundane details of the story to a loftier concept. Once allegorized, a parable about a mustard seed becomes a lesson about faith and spiritual growth. The literal tiny seed growing into a big tree is left behind, and in its place, the interpreter sees the development of a religion or an idea from humble beginnings. The process has sublimated agricultural imagery into a principle of life. In contrast, a purely literal, cataphatic approach to that parable would have just said from the start, “Faith can start small and become great.” Allegory avoided saying it directly, but allegoresis finally articulates it. Together, both produce a powerful pedagogical effect: the listener first puzzles over the story (engaging actively), then receives the explanation and experiences a fusion of concrete image and abstract lesson, likely remembering it more deeply.
However, one must also acknowledge the tension here. Some argue that explaining an allegory too explicitly can kill its magic. The virtuality of meaning is part of its allure, and collapsing it into one reality might feel like clipping a coin from a hologram – you get one solid piece of truth but lose the shimmer of possibilities. This is why many authors and teachers prefer to let the audience come to their own interpretations rather than spell it out. In the realm of fiction and poetry, overzealous allegoresis (especially by external interpreters) can even lead to seeing meanings that weren’t intended – sometimes insightful, other times far-fetched. It’s analogous to finding data patterns that aren’t significant (a kind of “overfitting” in machine learning terms). But done judiciously, allegoresis is the necessary complement to allegory’s hidden meaning. It is how knowledge encoded in metaphor finally enters the stream of communicated ideas as something we can directly grasp, debate, and apply.
From Scripture to Software: Real-World Reflections
The interplay of allegory, metaphor, and information – hiding and revealing meaning – isn’t just an abstract theory. It has very real applications and analogs across various domains, from ancient religion to modern technology. Let’s take a brief tour of a few areas where these concepts play out: Religious traditions are steeped in metaphor and allegory. Myths and sacred scriptures often carry multiple layers of meaning so that they can speak to both the novice and the wise. In many spiritual traditions, teachings were embedded in stories (think of Jesus’s parables, Sufi teaching tales, and Buddhist sutras full of symbolism) to protect deeper truths and reveal them only to those ready to understand. For instance, in the New Testament, Jesus frequently teaches in parables about seeds, vineyards, or merchants. To an everyday listener, these were relatable agrarian tales. But to the seeker, allegoresis unfolds divine principles from them (the seed is the word of God planted in hearts, etc.). The Gospel of Mark even describes Jesus explaining privately to his disciples the secret meanings of his parables, essentially handing them the decryption key.
In apophatic theology, which we discussed earlier, metaphor becomes crucial because the ultimate subject (God) is considered beyond human description. Thus, theologians resort to poetic negations and analogies. They might say “God is light” or “God is a consuming fire” – not to equate God literally with photons or combustion, but to encrypt an aspect of the divine nature in a sensory image. The meaning (perhaps that God illuminates truth or purifies like fire) is conveyed indirectly. Only through meditative allegoresis does the devotee peel back the metaphor to approach the ineffable truth. Meanwhile, explicit doctrinal statements (cataphatic theology) are also present in religions – more like straightforward information transmissions. Both play a role, but the metaphors and allegories often linger in the imagination and carry mystical resonance.
Religious allegoresis has a long history. Early Jewish and Christian scholars famously employed allegorical interpretation to make sense of difficult scriptures. Philo of Alexandria, for example, read the anthropomorphic stories of the Hebrew Bible (like God having hands or getting angry) as allegories for philosophical ideas, thus preserving a transcendent concept of God that aligned with Greek philosophy. In the Christian tradition, the medieval fourfold sense of scripture taught that a single biblical passage could have literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical (heavenly) meanings. This is an explicit recognition of multi-layered encoding in sacred text. Through allegoresis, a simple verse could yield doctrine, ethical guidance, and mystical insight simultaneously – a remarkably efficient “compression” of content for a single line of scripture! It also shows an early awareness of managing information density: scriptures were seen as divinely inspired messages designed to convey infinite meaning in finite words.
Literature and Art: Speaking Truth Slant
Poets, novelists, and artists have always known that one effective way to tell people the truth is to tell it slant (to paraphrase Emily Dickinson). Literature is rife with allegory and metaphor used to comment on reality under the safe cover of fiction. We already discussed Orwell’s Animal Farm as a political allegory. Consider medieval and Renaissance works like Everyman or The Pilgrim’s Progress, which are morality allegories where personified virtues and vices enact dramas that teach ethical lessons. These works compress abstract virtues (charity, pride, etc.) into characters and narratives that people can more easily remember and understand. Rather than a sermon about why pride is dangerous, we get the tale of a character named Pride who leads others to destruction – a story that shows rather than tells. It’s essentially an educational compression algorithm: dramatize the principle so that the audience absorbs it intuitively.
In times of censorship or social danger, allegory becomes a survival tool. Writers under oppressive regimes have resorted to metaphorical storytelling to critique authority without stating seditious facts. For example, folk tales and songs in various cultures have hidden messages about unjust rulers (so-called “Aesopian language” in Soviet contexts). These are cases of steganography in art – the true message is hidden in a cover story. Only those attuned to the symbols recognize the critique. A modern example can be seen in films or novels that use science fiction or fantasy settings to explore contentious issues (like racial injustice, war, or totalitarianism) at a remove. By displacing the issue onto aliens or fantastical kingdoms, creators encrypt their social commentary just enough to slip it past heavy scrutiny while allowing audiences to decode it. The apophatic medium of fiction will enable them to say what cannot be said outright.
Even on the level of individual language, literary authors employ metaphor to pack layers of meaning into a single line. With one dense image, a poet like T.S. Eliot might invoke a whole tradition of literary and religious allusions – effectively compressing a library of references into a verse, which scholarly readers then expand through analysis. This interplay between concise symbols and extensive interpretation is a dance of compression and decompression. We often find that the more compressed a poetic image is, the more expansive its possible interpretations. That’s why haiku, with its extreme brevity, can yield endless commentary; every word is doing multiple jobs, and the reader must unpack the season, emotion, and insight hidden in those seventeen syllables.
Computation and Code: New Allegories
It may seem like a leap from poetry to programming, but the concept of hiding and compressing meaning also echoes in the digital realm. Computer science and mathematics even have something called “allegory” (a concept in category theory and relational algebra), though that’s more a terminological coincidence. More concretely, think about software code. High-level programming languages allow a programmer to compress complex operations into a few lines of text. For instance, a single line of code can invoke a function that, behind the scenes, executes perhaps hundreds of machine-level instructions. This is a form of allegory or metaphor – the code is a symbolic representation of a process. The programmer must know how to read that code and mentally expand it to understand what actual work is being done by the computer. When we see encryption (data, key) in code, it stands in for all the mathematical transformations that perform encryption – an expert can allegorically interpret that one-word encryption to understand the hidden mechanism (this is akin to allegoresis in a technical context).
Encryption algorithms themselves present a literal parallel to metaphor. The algorithm is deliberately mixing up data according to a key. One retrieves the original message only by applying the inverse process with the correct key. This is essentially what a reader does with a challenging poem: they might need a “key” (perhaps knowledge of the poet’s life or an allusion to classical mythology) to decrypt the lines. Without it, the poem’s meaning may remain scrambled. Cryptographers speak of keys, ciphers, and plaintext; literary scholars speak of references, symbolism, and themes. The domains are different, but the logic of hidden meaning is surprisingly aligned.
Another connection is in the field of data compression and retrieval. Modern search engines and AI language models encounter difficulty interpreting human language – including metaphors. Teaching a computer to understand “Juliet is the Sun” is non-trivial; it requires context and a kind of decompression of meaning that humans do naturally. As AI develops “semantic understanding,” one could say we are trying to formally encode the processes of allegoresis. We want machines to get the allegories and metaphors we use to retrieve the correct information, even if it’s expressed in roundabout ways. This is a cutting-edge problem: how to design algorithms that handle not just the syntax of the language but the allegorical, metaphoric content – essentially, how to get computers to perform apophatic reading and cataphatic explanation.
In computation theory, there’s also the notion of Kolmogorov complexity (algorithmic information content), which asks for the shortest program to produce a given output. The metaphor could be seen as a human way of doing something similar – finding a brief description (a phrase, an image) that encapsulates a larger concept. If one were to encode a concept like “the passage of time and the loss of opportunities” into a minimal message, one might come up with an image like “sand slipping through fingers.” That metaphor is a compressed program, so to speak, that unfolds in the mind into the full concept. It’s intriguing to imagine a future where we measure the efficiency of metaphors by how well they compress and decompress meaning in human minds, much as we measure compression algorithms by their fidelity and size reduction.
Media and Communication: Information Highways
Finally, consider how allegory and metaphor function in modern media and communication systems. In an age of information overload, compression of messages is key. Think of the limited characters of a tweet: people often resort to metaphors, emojis, and memes (which themselves are image-based metaphors) to pack meaning into small packages. A meme might show a popular image with a caption – instantly conveying a complex societal commentary by referencing a known metaphorical scenario. This is a visual allegory of traveling at internet speed. The creators and sharers of memes rely on the audience’s ability to decode the reference and appreciate the parallel to whatever situation is being commented on. The entire meme culture is essentially a game of allegory and allegoresis: nothing is stated plainly; it’s all winks and nudges through shared symbols.
In journalism and political discourse, metaphor is often used to frame issues. Politicians might use war metaphors to tackle problems (“war on poverty,” “battle against climate change”). These phrases compress a whole approach and attitude into a simple frame. The public then unpacks that metaphor, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, and it influences how they think about the issue (a fight that can be won, an enemy to defeat, etc.). Here, we see metaphor as a tool for information shaping – a kind of cognitive compression that guides interpretation. Communication strategists effectively choose the “encryption” to lead people to a desired decryption.
Moreover, cross-cultural communication often faces the challenge of metaphors not translating well. A phrase that compresses meaning neatly in one language might be meaningless or even misleading in another. This is why machine translation and international communication efforts emphasize finding equivalent metaphors or unpacking them into more universal concepts. It underscores that metaphors are code that assumes a specific shared knowledge base. The encoded meaning can fail without the proper key (cultural context). In response, communicators sometimes choose to be more explicit (cataphatic) when addressing a broader audience, using plain language where a metaphor might not travel well. Yet, paradoxically, some metaphors have proven to be nearly universal – often those drawn from widespread human experiences (like “the heart is broken” to indicate sorrow, which resonates across many cultures).
In sum, from tweets and textbooks to advertising and activism, the principles of hiding and revealing through language are at play. Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said, “The medium is the message,” but one might add that the medium can also hide the message. Sometimes, it must be hidden for the message to survive or to have an impact. A dry statistic might be ignored, but embed it in a touching allegory, and it reaches hearts. A controversial idea might be banned, but disguise it in a parable and spread it. The informational dynamics of allegory and metaphor are deeply woven into how we share knowledge and persuade each other in society.
Conclusion
Allegory and metaphor, those age-old instruments of language and literature, reveal their full brilliance when viewed through the prism of information theory. At their core, they are methods of encoding meaning – encrypting ideas in images and compressing concepts into narratives – to overcome the limitations of direct communication. This exploration has shown that what poets and storytellers have been doing for millennia resembles what engineers and mathematicians do in the digital domain: finding clever ways to store, transmit, and retrieve information. The difference is that allegory deals in the currency of meaning and human experience, which are far richer and more elusive than binary data.
We saw how allegory preserves meaning in an apophatic way, keeping it implicit and therefore expansive, much like an unopened file that contains great detail within. We saw how allegoresis and exegesis act as the decoding functions, opening that file and rendering its contents legible, sometimes at the cost of freezing one interpretation. Metaphors emerged as a kind of linguistic cipher that the human mind is uniquely equipped to solve, often instantaneously. The notion of a semantic-syntactic wormhole illustrated that these figurative devices create shortcuts in understanding, connecting disparate ideas in a flash of insight and thereby compressing what would otherwise require a long explanation. In practical realms – from the interpretation of holy texts to the crafting of political speech, from educating through fables to protecting information via cryptography – the interplay of hidden and revealed meaning is omnipresent. It’s a dance between the virtual and the real, the possible and chosen meanings, much like a communication system oscillating between signals and decoded messages.
For a general reader, recognizing allegory and metaphor as both literary flourish and powerful information processes can deepen appreciation for how we communicate. It highlights the active role of the listener or reader as one who doesn’t just passively receive a message but actively reconstructs it – a co-creator of meaning. Reading a metaphor is a small feat of decryption; every understanding of an allegory is an act of extracting knowledge from a compressed capsule. In an era saturated with information, this ancient wisdom of saying things without directly saying them offers a reminder that sometimes compression is needed to save space and meaning itself – to ensure an idea survives the perilous journey from one mind to another. By wrapping truth in a story or shielding it with symbols, we give it a better chance to take root in the receptive imagination.
Ultimately, allegory and metaphor demonstrate a beautiful synergy between creativity and cognition. They engage our pattern-finding brains and our love of mystery, challenging us to look beyond the obvious. Information theory teaches us that a message sent is not received until it’s successfully decoded; allegory and metaphor embrace this fully, requiring decoding as part of their design. They trust the receiver to be clever and attentive and, in doing so, establish a deeper connection. As we navigate both the libraries of literature and the networks of digital data, understanding these parallel principles enriches our interaction with both. We become better readers, better interpreters, and maybe even better communicators ourselves, aware that how something is said (or not said) can be as important as what is said.
In closing, one might say that our entire world of knowledge is built on layers of allegory and metaphor encoded by others and decoded by us. Learning itself is often discovering the hidden analogies that link new information to what we already know. So, whether we are aware of it or not, we are all constantly performing allegoresis and enjoying allegory, hopping through wormholes of meaning. By viewing metaphor as encryption and allegory as compression, we gain a conceptual and poetic insight: that all understanding is a kind of unraveling. And perhaps there is a gentle lesson in humility here – that no matter how much we decode, there may always be another layer of meaning waiting quietly beneath the surface, hidden in plain sight.