The main purpose of the paper is to refute the rigid psychoanalytic determinism which holds that we cannot help attributing an exclusively male or female meaning to certain sexual symbols. Simultaneously it attempts to show that symbols are not as context-bound as structuralists are inclined to think, since the reversals of meanings discussed mostly refer to the individual symbol without affecting the context. A series of iconographic symbols and paradoxical associations of Hindu gods and goddesses derived from ritual and legend is adduced to demonstrate that the "highway" of symbolic thought corresponding to Freudian theory does not prevent us from occasionally taking a "scenic opposite route." Contrary to the linguistic near universal and the cultural universal of the greater importance of the male category, in Hinduism not only may the predominantly male symbol be extended to include a female meaning, but also the predominantly female symbol may receive a male association. A margin of arbitrariness in the interpretation of symbols is shown to exist, as we may not only avoid the dominant association but also play with binary opposites at will. The Hindu philosophico-religious concepts of monism and the gods' sports perhaps predispose to such paradoxical reasoning, but it also occurs elsewhere in the world.