CONCEPTUALIZAREA SIMBOLULUI „PIATRĂ” ÎN TRADIŢIA CULTURALĂ ROMÂNEASCĂ.

Symbols represent a means by which complex ideas difficult to verbalize in natural languages are conveyed to the people who belong to the same culture; they agglutinate rich series of metaphors or associations. This paper starts from the assumption that initial 'primitive' human emotional reactions to nature turned into mythological explanations and eventually into beliefs conveyed from a generation to another. Stone as a symbol is as old as mankind. It has preserved its original significance: the rock and the hole in the rock (grotto, cave) represented a protective space associated to the womb, Mother Earth. Stone signifies strength, resilience, durability, eternity and points to the passage from the profane to the sacred, as can be illustrated by oronyms and toponyms in Romanian culture. As building material for shelters, places of worship and graves, stone has become a symbol of cultural transmutation assimilated to the act of creation and to the passage from obscurity to light. Stone represents the result of global perception which does not follow the logic of conceptual reasoning; it is multidimensional and communicates with other symbols while expressing various relationships: ephemeral-eternal, history-eternity, immanenttranscendent. This paper investigates which particular meanings have been attached to the symbol of stone in Romanian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]