Symbols?

So reading the Tale of Genjii got me thinking about how people used to (at least in story) communicate with each other through poetry and picture. As someone who loves the deeper-than-words communication that can be conveyed through these, I feel as though, in part, I miss the days when this was much more commonplace. Of course, part of the reason that we could never communicate this way in the modern day is that for many cultures, symbols had sort of a standard meaning. Now due to the mixing of cultures and experiences, things such as fall and autumn have many different meanings to many different people. I personally think that ultimately this can lead to deeper and richer symbolic communication, though it has also contributed to its disuse and to miscommunication in logical and *normal* communication due to the symbolic nature of language itself.

This also lead me to think about how in the Golden Dawn part of the requirements of the material is to absorb the symbolic aspect and then manipulate the symbols through ritual.
Part of the reason I feel compelled to write this down is how strange the idea of an almost-standardized symbology is to me. Due to human nature fully standardizing symbols is, of course, impossible, but it is just striking when a concept that was extremely commonplace for a long time is completely alien. I guess this is also true of racism, but that I just chalk up to mass ignorance and try not to think about.