Brand allegories | The Symbolism of the Knot

Have you ever observed that certain patterns repeat themselves in your life?
There’s a recognized marking—perchance a star, a flower, or a spiral—it’s a wheel, perhaps a tower, some object of significance; it’s a sign—you see it at one pivotal moment in your life, and then it returns.

If you’re like me, a person that lives around the symbolic space, a symbologist—everything has an allegorical value: gestures, words, designs, ideas and ideals.

There’s the story that is the immediately obvious—what’s on the surface, and then there’s what lies beneath—even as these symbols migrate through time, revealing themselves inter/intra-culturally.

A Girvin Journal on Mūdra

When you think about a patterning, a symbol that appears—and it strikes you—“this just about sums up what I’m experiencing right now.” Then, later it appears and it could be another circumstance, but it returns—“there’s that mark again, and for me, it means that at this moment, there’s a pathway forward.”

In a recent conversation, I was talking with a colleague about the practice of weaving, threads, macramé, sewing and most particularly—knots.

You, brand designer, manager, strategist, and steward—likely you’d grasp the notion of “the ties that bind,” or “the red thread of strategy” an expression of a lineal, central ideal that runs as a woven filament through brand experience. As practitioners of the brandcraft, our goal is to place points of recognition with our audience, our clients, and to build a bound relationship between what we develop as an integrated strategy, to design expressions and experience processions.

We’re tying knots—and, for me, this is a recurrent symbol.

The Grand Mosque, Casablanca, Morocco

For me, aside from the Raven, and the patterning of surfable waves,
it’s the knot that is a recurring patterning. It speaks to inextricability, syncing and cinching, circularity, containment and packaging, time, storytelling and the labyrinthine.

And like the one pinned below my neck, above, I’ve created them, had them made, and worn them for a long time. And I’ve come in contact with the knot, all over the world. The knot’s parlance speaks in Mongolian, Tibetan and Bhutanese, as the knot figures are an important element in spiritual connection—symbolizing life consequences in action, endless cycling and the interweaving of wisdom and compassion. But the symbolism is migratory, and finds many cultural manifestations.

Eadfrith of Lindisfarne (presumed), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

During my college years, I studied the knot in the Celtic and Lindisfarne traditions, as another decorative and deeply symbolic form of contemplation and worship. The knot is the “endless” or “eternal knot.” And, in that exploration, the Islamic world has perhaps the deepest legacy of this application, yet the scarcest registration of meaning. It is an archetypal symbol, and long prevalent as a motif of the intertwining opposites, in a perpetual non-conclusion.

Attributes of the symbol are:

•  The intertwining of wisdom and compassion.
•  Interplay and interaction of the opposing forces in the dualistic world of manifestation, leading to their union, and ultimately to harmony in the universe.
•  The mutual dependence of religious doctrine and secular affairs.
•  The union of wisdom and method.
•  The inseparability of emptiness (shunyata) and dependent origination, the underlying reality of existence.
•  Symbolic of know symbolism in linking ancestors and omnipresence and the magical ritual and meta-process of binding.
•  Since the knot has no beginning or end it also symbolizes the infinite wisdom of the Buddha.

But, given the fascination with the symbolism of the knot, and of weaving—the interlacing of warp and weft, heaven and earth, the known and the unknown, the solid and the formless—I ponder the meaning of the knot in the context of a remarkable form of art in the Islamic festival of celebrating spirit. Geometry, given its non-illustrative character, is a predominant decorative them in Muslim art, usually dominating other ornamental motifs. The application of geometry, as a decoration, appears both in architecture and in the applied arts: ceramics, textiles and in the arts of the book. Regardless of material, scale and technique, the motifs used are practically always the same.

According to the specialists at Discover Islamic Art, “Muslim artists did not ‘invent’ geometric decoration, but they developed it to its fullest potential. The achievements of the Muslim world in geometric decoration were made possible to some extent by the interest that mathematical studies, such as Pythagorean mathematics, generated in Islam.

This is evident in the geometric knot, inherited from pre-Islamic decoration, which was developed into complex combinations of intertwining ribbons or knot-work. Starting from the circle, an extraordinary variety of figures were generated (squares, diamonds or rhombuses, hexagons, octagons, stars with six-, eight-, ten-, twelve- and more points) by applying the principles of symmetrical repetition, multiplication or subdivision on any material and any scale.

Images from the Grand Mosque, Casablanca:

The wealth of colours and the skill used to combine different tones help the compositions to stand out, creating the illusion of several different planes. Three-dimensional effects were used to enrich compositions, either through the repetition of motifs (such as the sebka pattern created from a network of diamond shapes), contrasting textures or the widespread use of muqarnas (known as muqarbas in North Africa) a three-dimensional geometric stalactite-like decoration.

Geometric motifs, occasionally based on abstractions from the natural world, also have a symbolic meaning in keeping with the function of the object or building—and in any application, these interweaving applications bespeak the creation of a kind of geometric “breakdown”, or analyses, of the physical world, transformed to the ethereal realm of contemplation. Perhaps it’s the cartography of physical space, translated to a new dimensionality of psychic comprehension.
A door to another world…

But, to my review and research, there’s nothing more that describes this character of ruled, and demarcated, mapping of space, making place—magical.

Rather a lengthy journey, but coming back to the allegorical nature of the patterning of the knot, I consider it particularly relevant, as designers, brand managers, and enterprise stewards, to look into the deeper space of the work that we do, and the underlying rhythm of the quest for meaning and the utility of our collaborative efforts.

Every brand is made by a human, for humans—and in the emotional depth of that adhesion—it’s on our efforts to examine the deeper substrate, the psychic and emotional placemaking of customer journeys and navigation to our brand design and architectural experientiality.

Moroccan Photos © 2026 Tim Girvin

Tim | Queen Anne Studios
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Girvin | Osean | Tim.Girvin | Wanderer

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