Eugène Goblet D'Alviella
1890
|
NOTE |
Eugène Goblet D'Alviella (1846-1925) was a professor of religion and a Belgian senator of liberal persuasion. He founded the discipline of religious archaeology with his book The Migration of Symbols, which covered the development of iconography over time. The articles below were the foundation for this book.
|
THE MIGRATION OF SYMBOLS.
By the COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA.
I.
MEN, to communicate their thoughts, address themselves sometimes to the ear, by speech, song, or music; sometimes to the eye, by gesture, drawing, and the plastic arts generally, including writing. These modes of expression may have an imitative character, as when a savage describes an animal by its cry, or as in a photograph; but even then they have a symbolical bearing, in that they recall only some of the features of the original, and leave the rest to the imagination or to memory. We might define a symbol as a representation which does not aim to be a reproduction. Reproduction supposes that the representative sign is identical with, or at least like, the object represented; symbolism demands only that one may recall the other, by a natural or conventional association of ideas. In this sense there is nothing that may not furnish matter for a symbol. We live among symbolical representations, from the flags over our public buildings to the bank-note in our strong-box; symbolism is mingled with all our intellectual and social life, from the morning hand-shaking to the applause we give to the actor in the evening. Our arts are symbolical, even when they are believed to be only servile imitations of nature. We speak and write in symbols—and even think in them, according to the philosophical systems that are based on our impotency to grasp the reality of nature.
Sentiment, particularly religious sentiment, recurs most largely to symbolism in order to enter into a more intimate communication with the being or abstraction which it desires to approach. Hence we everywhere see men either adopting natural or artificial objects that remind them of the great absent one; imitating systematically the acts and gestures they assign to it; or objectizing, by processes as various as significant, all the shades of feeling which it inspires in them, from the deepest humility to the most ardent love. Hence the extreme diversity of symbols, which may be divided into two classes, as they consist in acts or rites, or in objects and emblems. We shall occupy ourselves here with the second category, or rather with the figured representations which it has inspired, and which past generations have transmitted to us as material vestiges of their faiths. Studies in comparative symbology fell, toward the second half of the century, into a discredit which is accounted for by their previous history. Syntheses premature as they were brilliant, built up with insufficient and defective materials by the rationalistic school, were succeeded, about fifty years ago, by the system, more philosophical than historical, which found, in all the religious practices of antiquity, the disguised or transfigured reflection of a profound primitive wisdom. These theories all having given way under the contradictions brought against them by discoveries in archæology, ethnography, linguistics, etc., a reaction ensued as extreme as the former infatuation. A disposition appeared to banish hypothesis entirely from all research into the origin and significance of symbols; as if hypothesis—provided it is not treated as an assured fact—were not an essential factor of all scientific progress.
But the situation has greatly changed within thirty-five years. Data permitting comparison under all desirable conditions of authenticity, of the figured representations of different peoples, have accumulated in such proportions that the principal obstacle will lie hereafter in their multiplicity and dissemination. Excavations of ancient monuments in Asia and Africa, the archæological collections of even the smallest states, the societies devoted to every special branch of the subject, and the studies of the whole, directed from the most varied points of view, have made the tasks relatively easy of students who would follow the traces and elucidate the meaning of the principal symbols. On the other hand, the deciphering of inscriptions, the classification and interpretation of written documents, and the general advance of history, of religious history in particular, by informing us concerning the beliefs of peoples, enable us the better to define the relation of their symbols with their myths and their ceremonies, at the same time that a more exact knowledge of the social and geographical medium in which the symbols originated assists us in tracing the origin of the images which have given body to the ideas.
After this there are no reasons why we should not reach as positive results in the study of symbols as in the study of myths. The comparative examination of myths long ago assumed a scientific phase, both with Mr. Max Müller and the linguistic school that is correlating the traditions of nations speaking allied languages, and with Mr. Andrew Lang and his fellow ethnographers who are comparing the mythologies of all known peoples. Now, the myth, which we may define as a dramatization of natural phenomena or of abstract events, offers more than one common trait with the symbol. Both rest on reasoning by analogy, which in the one case creates a figurative story, and in the other a material image. There is, however, the difference that in the symbol we are aware of a distinction between the image and the being or object represented by it, while an essential character of the myth is that the story shall be supposed to be conformable to the reality. But it is easy to see that both are frequently formed by the aid of the same processes and are transmitted by the same ways.
At all events, there are religions that we can not explain unless we endeavor to supplement the insufficiency of the texts by the study of the figured monuments; and there is an increasing disposition among students of particular religions to make use of the texts to prove the symbols, and of the symbols to prove the texts—as in M. Senart's recent works on the history of Buddhism; MM. Gaidoz's and Al. Bertrand's on the symbols of ancient Gaul; those of M. J. Menant on the engraved stones of upper Asia; and those of M. Ch. Lenormant, Clermont-Ganneau, Ledrain, and Ph. Berger on the figured representations of the Semitic religions. These labors are the best demonstration of the services which the interpretation of symbols can render to the history of religions, provided we observe all the rigor of scientific methods.
It is not necessary to insist here upon the interest which the study of symbolism offers, aside from the services which it may be called upon to render to archæological science. Representation by symbolism is, in literature, religion, and art, a necessity of the human mind, which has never been able to content itself with pure abstractions, or to restrict itself to the external shape of things. Under the material and often incoherent forms by which past generations have expressed their aspirations and their faith, we can discern the beating of a heart, the appeal of a soul to other souls, a mind that seeks to embrace the infinite in the finite, to objectize, under features furnished by Nature or the imagination, its conceptions most approaching a reality indiscernible in its plenitude. The symbols which have attracted in the highest degree the veneration of multitudes have often been indeed absurd and gross representations of gods; but what have the gods themselves ever been, except symbols more or less imperfect of the Being, superior to all definition, which the human mind has discerned more clearly according to its development, through and above them all?
It seems as if the variety of symbols should be without limits, as are the combinations of the human imagination. But we not rarely find the same symbolical figures among the most distant peoples. Such coincidences can hardly be explained as matters of chance, like the combinations of the kaleidoscope. Aside from the case of symbols found among peoples belonging to the same race, which can be traced back to the common cradle, there are only two possible explanations of them. The images have either been conceived separately, by virtue of some law of the human mind, or they have passed from one country to another by borrowing.
There is a symbolism so natural that, like certain implements peculiar to the Stone age, it does not belong to any particular race, but constitutes a characteristic trait of mankind at a certain phase of its development. Of this class are representations of the sun by a disk or radiating face, of the moon by a crescent, of the air by birds, of water by fishes or a broken line, of thunder by an arrow or a club, etc. We ought, perhaps, to add a few more complicated analogies, as those which lead to symbolizing the different phases of human life by the growth of a tree, the generative forces of nature by phallic emblems, the divine triads by an equilateral triangle or, in general, by any triple combination the members of which are equal, and the four principal directions of space by a cross. How many theories have been built up on the presence of the cross as an object of veneration among nearly all the peoples of the Old and New Worlds! Roman Catholic writers have justly protested, in recent years, against attributing a pagan origin to the cross of the Christians because there were cruciform signs in the symbolism of religions anterior to Christianity. It is also right by the same reason to refuse to accept the attempts to seek for infiltrations of Christianity in foreign religions because they also possess the sign of redemption.
When the Spaniards seized Central America, they found in the native temples crosses which passed for the symbol sometimes of a deity at once terrible and beneficent, Tlaloc; at other times of a civilizing hero, white and bearded, Quetzacoatl, who, according to the tradition, came from the East. They concluded that the cross had been brought to the Toltecs by Christian missionaries of whom the trace had been lost; and, as there must always be some known name to a legend, they gave the honor to St. Thomas, the legendary apostle of all the Indies. Although there were men to defend this theory in the last Congress of Americanists, it may be regarded as definitely rejected. It is now established that the pre-Columbian cross is a wind-rose representing the four principal directions from which rain comes, and is thus the symbol of the god dispenser of the celestial waters. If the Toltec cross could be related with a similar figure of the Old World, it would rather be the cross of ancient Mesopotamia—where that sign was also adopted to symbolize the four directions of space, and by extension the sky, or the god of the sky, Anou. But it would have to be established first that direct or indirect relations could have existed between the religious art of Mesopotamia and that of ancient America. To remove this hypothesis—even if we refuse to admit the development of a pre-Columbian civilization—it is only necessary to reflect upon the number of centuries that separate the American races from the great empires of the Euphrates and the Tigris. It would be wiser to see in the coincidence the simple result of two courses of reasoning identical in their simplicity.
On the other hand, we can not contest the facility with which symbols have been transmitted. Current products of industry, favorite themes of artists, they have passed continually from one country to another with articles of exchange and objects of adornment: witness the specimens of Hindoo, Chinese, and Japanese symbolical works and iconography which have come to us with the potteries, ivories, cloths, and all the curiosities of the extreme East. Soldiers, sailors, and travelers of every profession in former days could not start on a journey without taking in some form or another their symbols and gods, of which they carried the knowledge to a distance, bringing back in return those of the foreigner. Slavery would likewise favor the importation of symbols by the intervention of innumerable captives whom the fortunes of war or the hazards of piracy brought and caused to flow in from the most distant regions without taking away from them the remembrance of their gods or their worship. Coins, also, have never been wanting to carry to enormous distances the symbols of the nations which issued them: Gallic pieces are only counterparts of the Greek coinage of Philip and Alexander; and pieces rudely imitating Bactrian money have been found in the tumuli of Scandinavia.
Nothing, except perhaps a superstition, is as contagious as a symbol; much more contageous should both be when they are united—as they usually were with the people of antiquity, who seldom adopted a symbol without attaching to it the value of a talisman. Even now there are tourists who come back from Naples with a coral charm hung, according to their sex, from the bracelet or the watch-chain. Do they really believe that they find a defence against the evil eye in this Italian survival of an ancient Chaldean symbol? To many among them it is certainly only a local curiosity, a souvenir; but there are some in v the number who allow themselves to be influenced, unconsciously perhaps, by the Neapolitan superstition. "It can do no harm, and may do some good," they might be tempted to reply to you, as some gamblers do when you jest with them concerning their fetiches. This kind of reasoning is quite general among polytheistic populations, where every one thinks it good to do homage to other peoples' gods, and to unknown gods as well as his own; for who knows which one he may not need in this world or the next? Egyptian scarabs are found by the thousand, from Mesopotamia to Sardinia, wherever the armies of the Pharaohs or Phoenician ships have gone. Everywhere, also, in these regions, native scarabs have been collected, made in imitation of those of Egypt, and reproducing with greater or less exactness the symbols which the engravers of the valley of the Nile lavished upon the faces of their amulets. So also, long before the diffusion of coins, pottery, and jewels, the figurines of Greece and Etruria furnished all central and western Europe with divine types and symbolical images.
Are there any indications that permit us to distinguish whether like symbols have been engendered separately or are derived from the same source? The complexity and oddness of the forms, when they exceed certain limits, go to sustain the second of these hypotheses. The double-headed eagle of the old German Empire has now passed into the arms of Austria and Russia. The Englishmen Barthe and Hamilton were surprised when, traveling in Asia Minor some fifty years ago, they discovered a two-headed eagle of the same pattern engraved among religious scenes in the basreliefs of Pteria, which went back to the ancient Hittites. It is hard to suppose that a representation identical in features, so contrary to the laws of nature, was spontaneously imagined in both instances. M. Longperier furnished a solution to the riddle when he pointed out that the two-headed eagle did not replace the oneheaded eagle on the arms of the empire till after the expedition of Frederick II to the East; that it figured at the beginning of the thirteenth century on the coins and banners of the Turkoman princes, then masters of Asia Minor. The latter adopted it as the symbol of all power, perhaps to figure the hamca, the fabulous bird of the Mussulman traditions, which carries off buffaloes and elephants as the kite carries off mice. Thus the Turkish race, M. Perrot observes, saw the entrance to the West closed at Lepanto and Belgrade by the eagle which had led it triumphantly on the banks of the Euphrates, and the image of which it also had borrowed from the sculptures cut by its predecessors on the rocks of Eniuk and Jasilikaïa.
If sufficient indications can not be drawn from the form, identity of signification and use may give strong presumptions respecting the affiliation of symbols. It is not surprising that the Hindoos and Egyptians should both have adopted as the symbol of the sun the lotus-flower, which opens its petals to the dawn and infolds them on the approach of night, and which seems to be born of itself on the surface of the still waters. But the hypothesis of a borrowing becomes much more probable when, in the iconography of both peoples, we see the flower at once serving as a support to the solar gods—as Horus or Vishnu—and figuring in the hands of the goddesses associated with those gods—Hathor or Lakshmi, the Venuses of Egypt and India. The probability at last changes into a half-certainty when we find the lotus employed on both sides to render the same shade of thought in the rather indirect applications of solar symbolism. With either, the plant represents less the sun itself than the solar matrix, the mysterious sanctuary to which the sun retires every night to draw from it a new life.
We do not know and shall probably never know how the first communications of ideas were made between Egypt and India, But we can, by comparing monuments, discover some of the intermediate steps of the route which the symbolism of the lotus followed toward the East. Thus, in the sculptures of Phoenicia we find goddesses holding lotus-cups in their hands, and in the Persian bas-relief of Tak-i-Bustan the solar god Mithra is seated on the opened flower of the plant. Among the Mesopotamians and the Persians it is not rare to see this flower adorning tall trees, in which it is easy to recognize the sacred tree of the Semites or the Iranian tree that secretes the liquor of immortality. On a patera of Phoenician workmanship, found at Anathontis, the flowers of the lotus, borne by these conventional trees, are gathered in one hand by persons clothed in the Assyrian style, holding a key of life in the other hand. While the rosy lotus of the Egyptian monuments does not now grow wild anywhere in the valley of the Nile, it is, by a curious coincidence, preserved in the flora as well as in the symbolism of India.
One of the most frequent forms of the cross is called the gamma cross, because its four arms are bent at a right angle so as to form a figure like that of four Greek gammas turned in the same direction and joined at the base. We meet it among all the peoples of the Old World, from Japan to Iceland, and it is found in the two Americas. There is nothing to prevent us from supposing that in the first instance it was spontaneously conceived everywhere, like the equilateral crosses, circles, triangles, chevrons, and other geometrical ornaments so frequent in primitive decoration. But when we see it, at least among the peoples of the Old Continent, invariably passing for a talisman, appearing in the funeral scenes or on the tombstones of Greece, Scandinavia, Numidia, and Thibet, and adorning the breasts of divine personages—of Apollo and Buddha—without forgetting certain representations of the Good Shepherd in the Catacombs, we can not escape the conviction that, in significance if not in form, it proceeds from a single source. This assertion seems to be confirmed in the class of monuments in which it is met. It appears, in fact, from prehistoric times among the people originating in the basin of the Danube, who colonized on either hand the shores of the Troad and of northern Italy; thence it extends, with the products of that ancient civilization, on one side to the Greeks, Etruscans, Latins, Gauls, Germans, Bretons, and Scandinavians, and on the other side to Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Persia, India, and finally to China and Japan.
It is not always necessary, for two figures to have the same origin, that they should have the same primitive signification. Sometimes it happens that a symbol changes its meaning in changing its country. It may possibly preserve only a general value as a talisman or amulet, like those crucifixes, degraded into fetiches, which are the only vestiges of the Christianity left among certain tribes of the Congo by the Portuguese domination of the last century. Sometimes, again—especially in the case of an image proper—its new possessors will seek to explain it to themselves by some more or less ingenious interpretation, and will thus restore to it a symbolical bearing, although by means of a new conception. The rising sun has often been compared to a newborn child. The comparison led the Egyptians to represent Horus as a child sucking its finger. The Greeks fancied that he was putting his finger to his lips to admonish the initiated to be discreet, and made of the representation a figure of Harpocrates, the god of silence.
Such changes of sense may also be reconciled with knowledge of the primitive significance. It is a pleasant thing to find everywhere the image or idea we are fond of. The Neo-Platonists believed in good faith that they could distinguish representations of their own doctrines in the symbols as well as in the myths of all the contemporary religions. The early Christians saw a cross in every figure that presented an intersection of lines—in the anchor, the mast and its yard, the standard, the plow, the man swimming, the bird flying, the praying man with outstretched arms, the paschal lamb on the spit, and the human face, where the line of the nose is crossed by that of the eyes. When the Serapeum at Alexandria was demolished, the Christian authors of the time related that a number of ansated crosses were found. They themselves observed that the figures were the same as the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, but that did not keep them from seeing in them a prophetic allusion to the sign of the redemption. Sozomenus adds that the fact provoked numerous conversions among the pagans.
It may also happen that the significance of a foreign symbol is knowingly modified, in order to adapt it to an idea or a faith previously destitute of all material expression or restricted to a few rudimentary representations. When the Persians had possessed themselves of Mesopotamia, they appropriated to themselves nearly all the imagery of the conquerors, in order to give form to their own religious conceptions, which the absence of a national art had left without any well-defined plastic representations. So, when the Christians began to reproduce on the walls of the Catacombs the scenes of the Old Testament and the parables of the New, they borrowed their primary models from classical and mythological art. Mercury Criophorus furnished the type of the Good Shepherd. Orpheus taming the wild beasts became a symbol of Christ and his preaching. The Christian holding to a cross to overcome temptation was represented by Ulysses tied to the mast of his ship, in order to resist the songs of the sirens. By an ingenious application of a myth which paganism has already spiritualized, Psyche offered the figure of a human soul to Love, whose place was taken by an angel. The religions of Gaul and India furnished examples of like assimilations from the time they came in contact with the symbolism of more advanced nations.--Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
Sentiment, particularly religious sentiment, recurs most largely to symbolism in order to enter into a more intimate communication with the being or abstraction which it desires to approach. Hence we everywhere see men either adopting natural or artificial objects that remind them of the great absent one; imitating systematically the acts and gestures they assign to it; or objectizing, by processes as various as significant, all the shades of feeling which it inspires in them, from the deepest humility to the most ardent love. Hence the extreme diversity of symbols, which may be divided into two classes, as they consist in acts or rites, or in objects and emblems. We shall occupy ourselves here with the second category, or rather with the figured representations which it has inspired, and which past generations have transmitted to us as material vestiges of their faiths. Studies in comparative symbology fell, toward the second half of the century, into a discredit which is accounted for by their previous history. Syntheses premature as they were brilliant, built up with insufficient and defective materials by the rationalistic school, were succeeded, about fifty years ago, by the system, more philosophical than historical, which found, in all the religious practices of antiquity, the disguised or transfigured reflection of a profound primitive wisdom. These theories all having given way under the contradictions brought against them by discoveries in archæology, ethnography, linguistics, etc., a reaction ensued as extreme as the former infatuation. A disposition appeared to banish hypothesis entirely from all research into the origin and significance of symbols; as if hypothesis—provided it is not treated as an assured fact—were not an essential factor of all scientific progress.
But the situation has greatly changed within thirty-five years. Data permitting comparison under all desirable conditions of authenticity, of the figured representations of different peoples, have accumulated in such proportions that the principal obstacle will lie hereafter in their multiplicity and dissemination. Excavations of ancient monuments in Asia and Africa, the archæological collections of even the smallest states, the societies devoted to every special branch of the subject, and the studies of the whole, directed from the most varied points of view, have made the tasks relatively easy of students who would follow the traces and elucidate the meaning of the principal symbols. On the other hand, the deciphering of inscriptions, the classification and interpretation of written documents, and the general advance of history, of religious history in particular, by informing us concerning the beliefs of peoples, enable us the better to define the relation of their symbols with their myths and their ceremonies, at the same time that a more exact knowledge of the social and geographical medium in which the symbols originated assists us in tracing the origin of the images which have given body to the ideas.
After this there are no reasons why we should not reach as positive results in the study of symbols as in the study of myths. The comparative examination of myths long ago assumed a scientific phase, both with Mr. Max Müller and the linguistic school that is correlating the traditions of nations speaking allied languages, and with Mr. Andrew Lang and his fellow ethnographers who are comparing the mythologies of all known peoples. Now, the myth, which we may define as a dramatization of natural phenomena or of abstract events, offers more than one common trait with the symbol. Both rest on reasoning by analogy, which in the one case creates a figurative story, and in the other a material image. There is, however, the difference that in the symbol we are aware of a distinction between the image and the being or object represented by it, while an essential character of the myth is that the story shall be supposed to be conformable to the reality. But it is easy to see that both are frequently formed by the aid of the same processes and are transmitted by the same ways.
At all events, there are religions that we can not explain unless we endeavor to supplement the insufficiency of the texts by the study of the figured monuments; and there is an increasing disposition among students of particular religions to make use of the texts to prove the symbols, and of the symbols to prove the texts—as in M. Senart's recent works on the history of Buddhism; MM. Gaidoz's and Al. Bertrand's on the symbols of ancient Gaul; those of M. J. Menant on the engraved stones of upper Asia; and those of M. Ch. Lenormant, Clermont-Ganneau, Ledrain, and Ph. Berger on the figured representations of the Semitic religions. These labors are the best demonstration of the services which the interpretation of symbols can render to the history of religions, provided we observe all the rigor of scientific methods.
It is not necessary to insist here upon the interest which the study of symbolism offers, aside from the services which it may be called upon to render to archæological science. Representation by symbolism is, in literature, religion, and art, a necessity of the human mind, which has never been able to content itself with pure abstractions, or to restrict itself to the external shape of things. Under the material and often incoherent forms by which past generations have expressed their aspirations and their faith, we can discern the beating of a heart, the appeal of a soul to other souls, a mind that seeks to embrace the infinite in the finite, to objectize, under features furnished by Nature or the imagination, its conceptions most approaching a reality indiscernible in its plenitude. The symbols which have attracted in the highest degree the veneration of multitudes have often been indeed absurd and gross representations of gods; but what have the gods themselves ever been, except symbols more or less imperfect of the Being, superior to all definition, which the human mind has discerned more clearly according to its development, through and above them all?
It seems as if the variety of symbols should be without limits, as are the combinations of the human imagination. But we not rarely find the same symbolical figures among the most distant peoples. Such coincidences can hardly be explained as matters of chance, like the combinations of the kaleidoscope. Aside from the case of symbols found among peoples belonging to the same race, which can be traced back to the common cradle, there are only two possible explanations of them. The images have either been conceived separately, by virtue of some law of the human mind, or they have passed from one country to another by borrowing.
There is a symbolism so natural that, like certain implements peculiar to the Stone age, it does not belong to any particular race, but constitutes a characteristic trait of mankind at a certain phase of its development. Of this class are representations of the sun by a disk or radiating face, of the moon by a crescent, of the air by birds, of water by fishes or a broken line, of thunder by an arrow or a club, etc. We ought, perhaps, to add a few more complicated analogies, as those which lead to symbolizing the different phases of human life by the growth of a tree, the generative forces of nature by phallic emblems, the divine triads by an equilateral triangle or, in general, by any triple combination the members of which are equal, and the four principal directions of space by a cross. How many theories have been built up on the presence of the cross as an object of veneration among nearly all the peoples of the Old and New Worlds! Roman Catholic writers have justly protested, in recent years, against attributing a pagan origin to the cross of the Christians because there were cruciform signs in the symbolism of religions anterior to Christianity. It is also right by the same reason to refuse to accept the attempts to seek for infiltrations of Christianity in foreign religions because they also possess the sign of redemption.
When the Spaniards seized Central America, they found in the native temples crosses which passed for the symbol sometimes of a deity at once terrible and beneficent, Tlaloc; at other times of a civilizing hero, white and bearded, Quetzacoatl, who, according to the tradition, came from the East. They concluded that the cross had been brought to the Toltecs by Christian missionaries of whom the trace had been lost; and, as there must always be some known name to a legend, they gave the honor to St. Thomas, the legendary apostle of all the Indies. Although there were men to defend this theory in the last Congress of Americanists, it may be regarded as definitely rejected. It is now established that the pre-Columbian cross is a wind-rose representing the four principal directions from which rain comes, and is thus the symbol of the god dispenser of the celestial waters. If the Toltec cross could be related with a similar figure of the Old World, it would rather be the cross of ancient Mesopotamia—where that sign was also adopted to symbolize the four directions of space, and by extension the sky, or the god of the sky, Anou. But it would have to be established first that direct or indirect relations could have existed between the religious art of Mesopotamia and that of ancient America. To remove this hypothesis—even if we refuse to admit the development of a pre-Columbian civilization—it is only necessary to reflect upon the number of centuries that separate the American races from the great empires of the Euphrates and the Tigris. It would be wiser to see in the coincidence the simple result of two courses of reasoning identical in their simplicity.
On the other hand, we can not contest the facility with which symbols have been transmitted. Current products of industry, favorite themes of artists, they have passed continually from one country to another with articles of exchange and objects of adornment: witness the specimens of Hindoo, Chinese, and Japanese symbolical works and iconography which have come to us with the potteries, ivories, cloths, and all the curiosities of the extreme East. Soldiers, sailors, and travelers of every profession in former days could not start on a journey without taking in some form or another their symbols and gods, of which they carried the knowledge to a distance, bringing back in return those of the foreigner. Slavery would likewise favor the importation of symbols by the intervention of innumerable captives whom the fortunes of war or the hazards of piracy brought and caused to flow in from the most distant regions without taking away from them the remembrance of their gods or their worship. Coins, also, have never been wanting to carry to enormous distances the symbols of the nations which issued them: Gallic pieces are only counterparts of the Greek coinage of Philip and Alexander; and pieces rudely imitating Bactrian money have been found in the tumuli of Scandinavia.
Nothing, except perhaps a superstition, is as contagious as a symbol; much more contageous should both be when they are united—as they usually were with the people of antiquity, who seldom adopted a symbol without attaching to it the value of a talisman. Even now there are tourists who come back from Naples with a coral charm hung, according to their sex, from the bracelet or the watch-chain. Do they really believe that they find a defence against the evil eye in this Italian survival of an ancient Chaldean symbol? To many among them it is certainly only a local curiosity, a souvenir; but there are some in v the number who allow themselves to be influenced, unconsciously perhaps, by the Neapolitan superstition. "It can do no harm, and may do some good," they might be tempted to reply to you, as some gamblers do when you jest with them concerning their fetiches. This kind of reasoning is quite general among polytheistic populations, where every one thinks it good to do homage to other peoples' gods, and to unknown gods as well as his own; for who knows which one he may not need in this world or the next? Egyptian scarabs are found by the thousand, from Mesopotamia to Sardinia, wherever the armies of the Pharaohs or Phoenician ships have gone. Everywhere, also, in these regions, native scarabs have been collected, made in imitation of those of Egypt, and reproducing with greater or less exactness the symbols which the engravers of the valley of the Nile lavished upon the faces of their amulets. So also, long before the diffusion of coins, pottery, and jewels, the figurines of Greece and Etruria furnished all central and western Europe with divine types and symbolical images.
Are there any indications that permit us to distinguish whether like symbols have been engendered separately or are derived from the same source? The complexity and oddness of the forms, when they exceed certain limits, go to sustain the second of these hypotheses. The double-headed eagle of the old German Empire has now passed into the arms of Austria and Russia. The Englishmen Barthe and Hamilton were surprised when, traveling in Asia Minor some fifty years ago, they discovered a two-headed eagle of the same pattern engraved among religious scenes in the basreliefs of Pteria, which went back to the ancient Hittites. It is hard to suppose that a representation identical in features, so contrary to the laws of nature, was spontaneously imagined in both instances. M. Longperier furnished a solution to the riddle when he pointed out that the two-headed eagle did not replace the oneheaded eagle on the arms of the empire till after the expedition of Frederick II to the East; that it figured at the beginning of the thirteenth century on the coins and banners of the Turkoman princes, then masters of Asia Minor. The latter adopted it as the symbol of all power, perhaps to figure the hamca, the fabulous bird of the Mussulman traditions, which carries off buffaloes and elephants as the kite carries off mice. Thus the Turkish race, M. Perrot observes, saw the entrance to the West closed at Lepanto and Belgrade by the eagle which had led it triumphantly on the banks of the Euphrates, and the image of which it also had borrowed from the sculptures cut by its predecessors on the rocks of Eniuk and Jasilikaïa.
If sufficient indications can not be drawn from the form, identity of signification and use may give strong presumptions respecting the affiliation of symbols. It is not surprising that the Hindoos and Egyptians should both have adopted as the symbol of the sun the lotus-flower, which opens its petals to the dawn and infolds them on the approach of night, and which seems to be born of itself on the surface of the still waters. But the hypothesis of a borrowing becomes much more probable when, in the iconography of both peoples, we see the flower at once serving as a support to the solar gods—as Horus or Vishnu—and figuring in the hands of the goddesses associated with those gods—Hathor or Lakshmi, the Venuses of Egypt and India. The probability at last changes into a half-certainty when we find the lotus employed on both sides to render the same shade of thought in the rather indirect applications of solar symbolism. With either, the plant represents less the sun itself than the solar matrix, the mysterious sanctuary to which the sun retires every night to draw from it a new life.
We do not know and shall probably never know how the first communications of ideas were made between Egypt and India, But we can, by comparing monuments, discover some of the intermediate steps of the route which the symbolism of the lotus followed toward the East. Thus, in the sculptures of Phoenicia we find goddesses holding lotus-cups in their hands, and in the Persian bas-relief of Tak-i-Bustan the solar god Mithra is seated on the opened flower of the plant. Among the Mesopotamians and the Persians it is not rare to see this flower adorning tall trees, in which it is easy to recognize the sacred tree of the Semites or the Iranian tree that secretes the liquor of immortality. On a patera of Phoenician workmanship, found at Anathontis, the flowers of the lotus, borne by these conventional trees, are gathered in one hand by persons clothed in the Assyrian style, holding a key of life in the other hand. While the rosy lotus of the Egyptian monuments does not now grow wild anywhere in the valley of the Nile, it is, by a curious coincidence, preserved in the flora as well as in the symbolism of India.
One of the most frequent forms of the cross is called the gamma cross, because its four arms are bent at a right angle so as to form a figure like that of four Greek gammas turned in the same direction and joined at the base. We meet it among all the peoples of the Old World, from Japan to Iceland, and it is found in the two Americas. There is nothing to prevent us from supposing that in the first instance it was spontaneously conceived everywhere, like the equilateral crosses, circles, triangles, chevrons, and other geometrical ornaments so frequent in primitive decoration. But when we see it, at least among the peoples of the Old Continent, invariably passing for a talisman, appearing in the funeral scenes or on the tombstones of Greece, Scandinavia, Numidia, and Thibet, and adorning the breasts of divine personages—of Apollo and Buddha—without forgetting certain representations of the Good Shepherd in the Catacombs, we can not escape the conviction that, in significance if not in form, it proceeds from a single source. This assertion seems to be confirmed in the class of monuments in which it is met. It appears, in fact, from prehistoric times among the people originating in the basin of the Danube, who colonized on either hand the shores of the Troad and of northern Italy; thence it extends, with the products of that ancient civilization, on one side to the Greeks, Etruscans, Latins, Gauls, Germans, Bretons, and Scandinavians, and on the other side to Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Persia, India, and finally to China and Japan.
It is not always necessary, for two figures to have the same origin, that they should have the same primitive signification. Sometimes it happens that a symbol changes its meaning in changing its country. It may possibly preserve only a general value as a talisman or amulet, like those crucifixes, degraded into fetiches, which are the only vestiges of the Christianity left among certain tribes of the Congo by the Portuguese domination of the last century. Sometimes, again—especially in the case of an image proper—its new possessors will seek to explain it to themselves by some more or less ingenious interpretation, and will thus restore to it a symbolical bearing, although by means of a new conception. The rising sun has often been compared to a newborn child. The comparison led the Egyptians to represent Horus as a child sucking its finger. The Greeks fancied that he was putting his finger to his lips to admonish the initiated to be discreet, and made of the representation a figure of Harpocrates, the god of silence.
Such changes of sense may also be reconciled with knowledge of the primitive significance. It is a pleasant thing to find everywhere the image or idea we are fond of. The Neo-Platonists believed in good faith that they could distinguish representations of their own doctrines in the symbols as well as in the myths of all the contemporary religions. The early Christians saw a cross in every figure that presented an intersection of lines—in the anchor, the mast and its yard, the standard, the plow, the man swimming, the bird flying, the praying man with outstretched arms, the paschal lamb on the spit, and the human face, where the line of the nose is crossed by that of the eyes. When the Serapeum at Alexandria was demolished, the Christian authors of the time related that a number of ansated crosses were found. They themselves observed that the figures were the same as the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, but that did not keep them from seeing in them a prophetic allusion to the sign of the redemption. Sozomenus adds that the fact provoked numerous conversions among the pagans.
It may also happen that the significance of a foreign symbol is knowingly modified, in order to adapt it to an idea or a faith previously destitute of all material expression or restricted to a few rudimentary representations. When the Persians had possessed themselves of Mesopotamia, they appropriated to themselves nearly all the imagery of the conquerors, in order to give form to their own religious conceptions, which the absence of a national art had left without any well-defined plastic representations. So, when the Christians began to reproduce on the walls of the Catacombs the scenes of the Old Testament and the parables of the New, they borrowed their primary models from classical and mythological art. Mercury Criophorus furnished the type of the Good Shepherd. Orpheus taming the wild beasts became a symbol of Christ and his preaching. The Christian holding to a cross to overcome temptation was represented by Ulysses tied to the mast of his ship, in order to resist the songs of the sirens. By an ingenious application of a myth which paganism has already spiritualized, Psyche offered the figure of a human soul to Love, whose place was taken by an angel. The religions of Gaul and India furnished examples of like assimilations from the time they came in contact with the symbolism of more advanced nations.--Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
II.
SYMBOLS may differ in aspect and yet be connected with one another by a more or less direct affiliation. This thought leads us to examine the causes which may change the forms of symbolical representations. There is first a tendency to reduce or simplify the figure, in order to confine it to a smaller space or to diminish the labor of the artist—especially when the figure is complicated and frequently used. In all the systems of writing in which the characters began as hieroglyphics, we have only to scratch the letter to find the hieroglyphic symbol. Thus our vowel A was originally the head of an ox, and that in its turn represented the whole animal, according to the popular rule that in symbols and sacrifices a part may stand for the whole. So, likewise, in the signs of the zodiac, the lion is simply represented by his tail. At other times, again, additions and embellishments are dictated by aesthetic considerations. That was the case with most of the symbols adopted by Greece, whose art, so strongly original, never adopted foreign types without impressing profound and felicitous modifications upon them.
The caduceus did not always present the classical form of two serpents symmetrically entwined around a winged rod. On the oldest monuments it is a stick the knotty head of which forks into two branches that curve round till they recross one another, then diverge and approach again, so as to form a figure 8 placed at the end of a rod and open at the top. The poems of Homer disclose to us an epoch still more remote, when a simple flowering rod with three leaves was attributed to Mercury. In seeking an explanation of these transformations, we suppose that the first in date was probably due to the influence of the Phoenicians, who left on their steles, especially in Libya, the representation of numerous caduceuses formed of a circle placed upon a stick and surmounted by a crescent. It is open to discussion whether the second modification—which was justified after the event by the legend of Mercury throwing down his rod between two fighting serpents—reveals a symbolic intent, or is due, as most of the learned think, to a fancy of Greek art. But, in either case, the innovation made it possible for the caduceus to be preserved in modern symbolism to represent the two ever-present attributes of Mercury—Industry and Commerce. In like manner it has been perpetuated in India, where it was introduced by the Greeks, till our time; and M. Guimet observed numerous examples of it among the votive offerings in some of the Vishnuite temples. Nothing is lost in symbolism that is worthy to live and can be transformed.
Symbols are also subject to the law of the struggle for existence. It was artistic perfection that secured the longevity of the thunderbolt—another figure which was long believed to be of Hellenic origin-Nearly all peoples have represented the fire from the sky by an arm, sometimes also by a bird of strong and rapid flight. It was symbolized among the Chaldeans by a trident. Cylinders going back to the most ancient ages of Chaldean art exhibit a water-jet gushing from a trident which is held by the god of the sky or of the storm. The Assyrian artist who first, on the bas-reliefs of Nimroud or Malthai, doubled the trident or transformed it into a trifid fascicle, docile to the refinements and elegancies of classic art, by that means secured for the ancient Mesopotamian symbol the advantage over all the other representations of thunder with which it could compete. The Greeks, like the other Indo-European nations, seem to have represented the storm-fire under the features of a bird of prey. When they received the Asiatic figure of the thunderbolt, they put it in the eagle's claws and made of it the scepter of Zeus, explaining the combination, after their habit, by the story of the eagle bringing thunder to Zeus when he was preparing for the war against the Titans. Latin Italy transmitted the thunderbolt to Gaul, where, in the last centuries of paganism, it alternated, on the Gallo-Roman monuments, with the two-headed hammer. It is also found on amulets of Germany, Scandinavia, and Brittany. In the East it penetrated to India, following Alexander, where it is found competing with other symbols having the same significance. Siva, who succeeded Zeus on the coins of the Indo-Scythian kings, after the light of Grecian civilization was extinguished in the Northeast and in India, holds in his hand sometimes the thunderbolt and sometimes the trident; and while the latter remains exclusively the arm of the god in the later imagery of the Hindoo sects, the thunderbolt found its way to the Buddhists, who carried it with their symbolism to China and Japan. It is still met under the form of the dordj, a little bronze instrument in the shape of a double fascicle of six or eight arrows, which, held between the thumb and forefinger, is used by the lamas and bonzes in blessing the faithful and exorcising demons.
By the side of the improvements due to the aspirations of artists must be placed the deformations produced by the ignorance or unskillfulness of copyists. Sometimes a new type springs from these deteriorations to succeed the old one in somewhat the same manner as in the dissolving views, where the outlines of two pictures succeeding one another are confounded into an indistinct image which is neither one nor the other. The ansate cross of the Egyptians seems thus to have engendered certain types of the Ephesian Diana, with veiled face, arms half opened, and body inclosed in a sheath; as also the sacred triangle of the Semites, frequently surmounted by a disk and two horizontal bars, inspired in the Greeks, according to Francois Lenormant, representations of Harmony or of Aphrodite under the form of a cone crowned with a tiara and supplied with two rudimentary arms. As a counterpart to these metamorphoses changing a linear symbol into a representation of the human figure, may be cited some images sculptured on the paddles of the New-Irelanders, which were exhibited at the meeting of the British Association in 1872. There was revealed in them a series of deformations gradually changing a human face into a crescent couchant on the point of an arrow. Except for the presence of the intermediate forms, no one would have inferred the relationship of the extreme terms.
When the symbol is composed of several images grouped together, there is no reason why it should not keep its physiognomy as a whole, although one or more of its constituent elements may be modified, the better to answer to the religious traditions, the national preferences, and the geographical peculiarities of a new medium. Thus the lily, as M. de Gubernatis remarks in his Mythologie des Plantes, has taken the place of the lotus in the symbolic combinations borrowed by the West from the East. One of the most characteristic examples of these local variations with persistence of the type is presented to us by the figured representations of the sacred trees, in which we believe we can recognize the tree of life which is mentioned in both the Semitic and the Aryan traditions. From the most remote antiquity, the Chaldeans gave it the appearance of the date-palm, sometimes attended by a vine or an asclepiad similar to the plant that yields the soma of the Hindoos. The Assyrians made of it a wholly conventional tree, in which palm-leaves were associated with a cone-fruit, and the horns of the wild goat formed a kind of capital to the trunk. The Phœnicians exaggerated the artificial character of the representation by grafting the flowers of the lotus upon it. The Greeks introduced it into their ornamentation under the abbreviated form of the palm-leaf or acanthus. The Persians adopted it with the conventional physiognomy which the Assyrians had impressed upon it, and it was thus carried to India, where the Buddhists substituted for it the sacred fig-tree of Buddha. On the other side, the Persians bequeathed it to the Arabs, who, stripping it of its religious signification, retained it as an ornament in the decoration of their jewels and cloths. Finally, reaching Europe in the middle ages, with cloths of Oriental origin, it was reproduced among the sculptures of some churches, where it represented sometimes the tree of the cross, sometimes, by a curious coincidence, the tree of life of the biblical traditions. In all these variations of the same theme, the plant constitutes only a part of the symbol. That is completed and characterized by the presence of two personages confronting one another—genii, demons, wild or fanciful animals, monsters half beast and half man, between which the sacred tree raises its stem or spreads its branches. Nothing more is needed to establish the affiliations of this complex image which brings into connection, through many thousand years, the Chaldean cylinders and the medallions of the Javanese pagodas, the Greek capitals of the Didymeon and the Christian tympans of Calvados and Gloucestershire.
A frequent cause of alteration, to which sufficient attention has not yet been given in the study of symbols, is the attraction which some figures exercise upon others. We can almost announce under the form of a law that when two symbols express the same idea or near ideas they manifest a tendency to combine so as to engender an intermediate type. For want of understanding that a symbol can thus be connected with several figures very different in origin and aspect, many archœologists have lost their time in disputing upon the origin of an image or of a sign which each of the parties had reason to connect with a distinct antecedent—like the knights in the legend who broke lances over the color of a shield of which one saw one side of one color and the other the reverse of another color.
Examples of such real symbolic transmutations are too numerous to be recited here. A simple and salient form of them is given in the wheel, which, possessing the double advantage of having a circular form and of implicating the idea of motion, is one of the most frequent symbols of the sun. When that star was likewise symbolized by an open flower, the effort was often made to fuse the two images. Thus, in the bas-reliefs of Buddhist India we find wheels the spokes of which are replaced by lotus-petals; while in the island of Cyprus there are coins bearing roses the leaves of which are encircled by twisted rays, or arranged in the form of a wheel. The special amulet of the Gauls, the solar rouelle, easily furnished, on the advent of Christianity, the chrisme or monogram of Christ (X and P interlaced) by the simple addition of a loop.[1] In a similar way the chrisme becomes the ansated cross or key of life, through a series of transformations which are found among the inscriptions of the island of Philæ.
It is not even necessary that the symbols thus combined shall originally have possessed the slightest analogy of forms. There are certainly not many traits common to the different images of the sun in the valley of the Nile, where it is represented, according to the districts, as a radiating disk, a hawk, a goat, etc. But the Egyptians not only succeeded in condensing all these figures into the winged globe of their pylons and their cornices, but they also contrived to give the strange amalgamation the features of another solar animal, the flying scarabæus. When the winged globe passed from Egypt into Asia, the Assyrians in turn inclosed in the Egyptian disk the figure of their god Assur, which they represented as a winged genius, and till then the ancient sacred bird of Chaldea, which, according to M. Menant, contributed with the Mesopotamians to form the definite type of their winged disk, was not. Some of the coins of Asia Minor help us to comprehend the different processes by the aid of which the two symbols could thus be combined, if not also the principal stages of the operation by which they produced a third. The sun was often symbolized in Asia Minor by a triscele—that is, a disk around which radiated three legs joined at the thigh; at other times it was represented there, as in Egypt, by animals like the lion, the boar, the eagle, the dragon, and the cock. A coin of Aspendus in Pamphylia shows the cock in the field, by the side of the triscele; other pieces of the same origin show the triscele placed over or joined to the body of the animal without its losing its natural appearance. Finally, in a Lycian coinage, in the British Museum, the two symbols, at first placed together, then joined, are literally fused into one another; the three legs of the triscele are metamorphosed into three cocks' heads, which are grouped in the same way around a center.
Most frequently the symbolical syncretism is conscious and premeditated, whether the matter be one of the union for greater efficacy of the attributes of several divinities into a single talisman, or one of affirming, by the fusion of symbols, the unity of the gods and the identity of cults. Of such character were the talismans called panthei, with which the Gnostics endeavored to condense the divine symbols supplied by the principal religions of their time. Of a higher order of ideas was the symbol adopted by the Brahmanists of the New-Dispensation—the BrahmoSomaj—who presumed to fuse all the existing sects of India into a new religion, founded exclusively on conscience and reason. The pediments of their temples bear a design in which the mystic syllable of the Brahmans, Aum, is interlaced with the Mussulman crescent, the Sivaite trident, and the Christian cross. It also frequently happens that this confusion of symbols is not at all systematic. By virtue of reproducing certain forms, the eye and the hand seem to be assimilated to them to such a degree that they are not able to rid themselves of the obsession when they attack new themes. There is a symbol of this kind, engraved on Phoenician gems or painted on Cypriote vases, which recalls the winged disk of Asia, the sacred tree of the Assyrians, and some of the Greek thunderbolts. One can not turn the leaves of the description of the Buddhist bas-reliefs of Boro Boudour, in the island of Java, published under the direction of the Dutch Government, without being struck, at almost every page of the Atlas, by the appearance of some curious figure which presents at once reminiscences of the Hindoo lotus, the Assyrian horns, the Greek thunderbolt, the Buddhist fig-tree, and the Egyptian globe with the Uræus. Such heteroclite mixtures have, moreover, been customary in Oriental symbolism. Sir George Birdwood, an author among the best versed in the industrial arts of modern India, has recently shown that in the Hindoo art, in which all the details have a symbolical bearing, certain decorative themes are combined and exchanged with the disorder of a dream, without regard to the distinction of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, or of the organic and inorganic worlds.
In most of the examples that I have cited it is easy to discover by what ways the symbol was transmitted from one people to another. Under this relation the migration of symbols rises directly from what may be named the history of commercial relations. Whatever may be the resemblance of form and signification between two symbolical figures, found among peoples of distinct origin, it is proper, before asserting relationship, to determine the probability, or at least the possibility, of international relations that may have served as a vehicle for them. This point fixed, it remains to be determined which has been the borrower and which the lender. Thus, why was it not the Hindoos who communicated the thunderbolt to Mesopotamia, the Phœnicians who received the caduceus from Greece? Here our advantages over preceding generations appear. There was a time when we might indistinctly place in India the origin of the gods, myths, and symbols that are scattered all over the world; another when it would have had a bad air not to give Greece credit for all intellectual and religious creations that had any moral or artistic value. But the investigations of the last half-century have given positive bases for the ancient history of the East; and that in turn permits us to restore to their true plane in the perspective of the ages the principal centers of artistic culture which have reacted upon one another since the beginning of civilization.
There may be differences of opinion as to whether the Ionic capital borrowed its volutes from the horns of the ibex or the half-opened petals of the lotus. There may be discussion as to whether Ionia received it directly from Golgos on the Phoœician vessels, or from Pteria with the caravans of Asia Minor. But no one who has observed its presence on the monuments of Khorsabad and Koyoundjik will refuse to locate in Mesopotamia the point of its departure toward the Ægean Sea. This is only an example of the types and motives the development to importance of which is doubtless due to the autonomous inspirations of Greek genius, but the origins of which are to be sought in Phrygia, Lycia, Phœnicia, and beyond, in the valleys of the Tigris and the Nile. In India, likewise, the most ancient works of sculpture and carving—wherever they do not attest a direct influence of Greek art—associate themselves with the monuments of Persia by the adoption of motives in some way classic in the Persepolitan architecture—like the capitals formed of animals sometimes affronted, sometimes backed; which are, as a plastic signature, in the former case of Assyria, in the second case of Egypt. In fact, when we depart from Greece or India, or even Libya, Etruria, or Gaul, we always come at the end, stage by stage, upon two grand centers of artistic diffusion, partially irreducible to one another—Egypt and Chaldea; but with this difference between them: that about the eighth century before our era, Mesopotamia went to school to the Egyptians, while Egypt never went to school to any one. Now, symbols have not only, as we have shown more than once in the course of this study, followed the same routes as purely decorative themes, but they have also been transmitted in the same fashion, at the same times, and, we might say, in the same proportion. I am far from disputing that there may have been independent and autonomous centers of creation among nearly all peoples. But, besides autochthonous types, we find everywhere the deposits of a strong current whose more or less remote origins lay in the symbolism of the shores of the Euphrates and the Nile. In short, the two orders of importations are so connected that in writing the history of art we write in great part the history of symbols, or at least of their migrations—as is exemplified in the studies of MM. Perrot and Chipiez in the history of ancient art.
A distinction, however, should be observed, in researches relative to symbols, that form is not all. It is the intention that makes the symbol, and by this symbolism is dependent upon psychology, at the same time that its history deserves a place by itself in the general picture of the development of human civilization. A word is to be said from this point of view concerning other migrations; those in which a symbol passes, no longer from one country to another, but, upon the same soil, from one religion to the one that succeeds it. In the most frequent case, it is popular pressure that introduces into the new civilization symbols consecrated by long veneration. Sometimes the innovators themselves use the advantages offered by symbolism to disguise the novelty of their doctrine under ancient forms, and, when necessary, to transform into allies emblems or traditions which they are not able to destroy by a direct attack.. Thus Constantino chose as his standard the Labarum, which could be claimed at once by the worship of Christ and by that of the sun. The same policy was attributed to the first king of Norway. According to an old song of the Shetland Islands, Hakon Adalsteinfostri, compelled to drink to Odin at an official banquet, drew the sign of the cross on his cup, and, when his guests reproached him for it, told them that it was the sign of the hammer of Thor. We know, in fact, that in German and Scandinavian countries the cross of Christ was more than once disguised under the form of a two-headed hammer, and that in more than one inscription in Egypt it put on the appearance of the key of life.
Such symbolical adaptations have been especially frequent in Buddhism, which has never been restrained from adopting the symbols and even the rites of anterior or neighboring religions. In some of its sanctuaries it has gone so far as to carve the ceremonies of the worship which natives of India gave to the sun, fire, and serpents, and connect such rites with its own traditions. The solar wheel thus became the wheel of the law; the sacred tree represented the tree of knowledge under which Sakya-Muni attained perfect illumination; the serpent Naza was transformed into a guardian of the footprints of Vishnu, which were afterward attributed to Buddha. Some years ago the remains of a Buddhist sanctuary were discovered at Bharut, in which the bas-reliefs represented emblems and religious scenes, accompanied by inscribed legends. The news gave great joy to the Anglo-Indian archaeologists. They expected to be given interpretations of Buddhist rites and symbols, formulated by the Buddhists themselves one or two centuries before the Christian era. But a closer examination showed that the shrine was only an ancient temple of the sun, which had been taken possession of by the Buddhists. They were satisfied to put over the pictures of solar worship inscriptions connecting them with their own faith.
It has been said that religions change, but worship continues the same. The assertion in this shape is too absolute; but it is certain that every religion preserves in its rites and symbols survivals from the whole series of previous religions. And this does it no harm. The important thing is, not the leather bottle, but the wine that is poured out of it; not the form, but the thought that animates it and goes beyond it. When Christians and Buddhists respectively concentrate upon their Master the principal attributes of the sun, beginning with the nimbus, the prototype of which goes back to the aureoles engraved upon the Chaldean monuments, they do not suppose themselves to be giving homage to the star of day. They only intend, in reality, to reflect upon the venerated face of their founder the symbol which has from time immemorial formed an image of the celestial glory, and which also, in contemporary cults, specially characterized the highest personification of divinity. We are reminded of the answer which a father in the Church gave to those who accused the Christians of celebrating the day of the sun: "We solemnize this day, not, like the infidels, on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun." Constantine went further when he composed a prayer for his legions to recite on Sunday that could satisfy at once, as M. V. Duruy remarks, the worshipers of Mithra, Serapis, the sun, and Christ. Symbolism may ally itself with the most mystic tendencies, but, like mysticism, it is a powerful auxiliary of the religious sentiment against the immobility of dogma and the tyranny of the letter. M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu has shown, pertinently to this point, how in Russia the conservative ritualism of the old believers has been able, by means of the symbolical interpretation of texts and ceremonies, to attain liberty of doctrines and, in certain cases, a complete rationalism, without breaking with the traditional forms of Christianity or of the Eastern Church.
There comes a time when religions which make an important factor of the supernatural find themselves in conflict with the progress of knowledge, and especially with a growing belief in a rational order of the universe. Symbolism then offers them a way of safety which they have more than once taken advantage of to keep pace with their times. If we take peoples in an inferior degree of religious development, we find them having fetiches—that is, beings and objects arbitrarily invested with superhuman faculties; then idols, or fetiches carved into resemblance of a man or an animal; but we rarely discover symbols among them, for they imply both the desire to represent the abstract by the concrete and the consciousness that there is no identity between the symbol and the reality for which it stands. When the mind opens to the notion of abstract or invisible gods, it can preserve its veneration for its ancient fetiches, which are thenceforth regarded as representative signs of the divinities. Finally, when we come to conceive a Supreme God, of whom the old divinities are simply ministers or hypostases, the ancient figurative representations may still have a place, provided they are put in relation with the qualities or attributes of the superior being into which the divine world resolves itself. This is an evolution of which traces are observed almost everywhere in ancient polytheism. Dogmas and sacraments can always, on their side, be brought by symbolism into an interpretation harmonious with the progress of knowledge and reason. Such is the task to which are devoted—after Schelling and Hegel in Germany, and Coleridge and Maurice in England—a notable fraction of Protestant theologians, with a success which would doubtless have been greater if the school had not broken with the laws of historical truth by persisting in projecting into the past interpretations inspired by the present.
A religious condition may be conceived in which all cults become purely symbolical. There will be nothing to hinder their preserving with a pious care the rites and traditions of their heritage; only they will make of them particularly symbols of the truths common to all religions, and will consequently be able to treat one another—as we see in the rites of certain churches—as local forms and equally legitimate in the universal religion.
Such a syncretism looks, at first sight, to be very far from us. It would imply that all religions have their share of the truth, but that none possesses it all. This is hardly the language of the larger contemporary churches, if we may judge by those that touch us most nearly. But it must be observed that, in practice, their adepts live among one another as if the divergence in doctrines were reduced to a diversity of symbols. At times we see their chiefs—a thing unheard of in former centuries—co-operating on a footing of equality in works of philanthropy or social peace, as if they recognized that charity and justice afford a common ground for religious activity. Lastly, the attribution of a relative value—or symbolic, which is the same thing—to all cults indistinguishably may serve hereafter as a basis for the normal relations of the state with the churches in the countries which are under the influence of modern law. Let this idea, already anchored in our laws and our customs, be accepted in our consciousness, and for the first time in history the world will be able to enjoy a religious peace, founded not on the unity of forms and formulas, but upon the admission of what, under variety of symbols, is true and fruitful in all religions.--Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
The caduceus did not always present the classical form of two serpents symmetrically entwined around a winged rod. On the oldest monuments it is a stick the knotty head of which forks into two branches that curve round till they recross one another, then diverge and approach again, so as to form a figure 8 placed at the end of a rod and open at the top. The poems of Homer disclose to us an epoch still more remote, when a simple flowering rod with three leaves was attributed to Mercury. In seeking an explanation of these transformations, we suppose that the first in date was probably due to the influence of the Phoenicians, who left on their steles, especially in Libya, the representation of numerous caduceuses formed of a circle placed upon a stick and surmounted by a crescent. It is open to discussion whether the second modification—which was justified after the event by the legend of Mercury throwing down his rod between two fighting serpents—reveals a symbolic intent, or is due, as most of the learned think, to a fancy of Greek art. But, in either case, the innovation made it possible for the caduceus to be preserved in modern symbolism to represent the two ever-present attributes of Mercury—Industry and Commerce. In like manner it has been perpetuated in India, where it was introduced by the Greeks, till our time; and M. Guimet observed numerous examples of it among the votive offerings in some of the Vishnuite temples. Nothing is lost in symbolism that is worthy to live and can be transformed.
Symbols are also subject to the law of the struggle for existence. It was artistic perfection that secured the longevity of the thunderbolt—another figure which was long believed to be of Hellenic origin-Nearly all peoples have represented the fire from the sky by an arm, sometimes also by a bird of strong and rapid flight. It was symbolized among the Chaldeans by a trident. Cylinders going back to the most ancient ages of Chaldean art exhibit a water-jet gushing from a trident which is held by the god of the sky or of the storm. The Assyrian artist who first, on the bas-reliefs of Nimroud or Malthai, doubled the trident or transformed it into a trifid fascicle, docile to the refinements and elegancies of classic art, by that means secured for the ancient Mesopotamian symbol the advantage over all the other representations of thunder with which it could compete. The Greeks, like the other Indo-European nations, seem to have represented the storm-fire under the features of a bird of prey. When they received the Asiatic figure of the thunderbolt, they put it in the eagle's claws and made of it the scepter of Zeus, explaining the combination, after their habit, by the story of the eagle bringing thunder to Zeus when he was preparing for the war against the Titans. Latin Italy transmitted the thunderbolt to Gaul, where, in the last centuries of paganism, it alternated, on the Gallo-Roman monuments, with the two-headed hammer. It is also found on amulets of Germany, Scandinavia, and Brittany. In the East it penetrated to India, following Alexander, where it is found competing with other symbols having the same significance. Siva, who succeeded Zeus on the coins of the Indo-Scythian kings, after the light of Grecian civilization was extinguished in the Northeast and in India, holds in his hand sometimes the thunderbolt and sometimes the trident; and while the latter remains exclusively the arm of the god in the later imagery of the Hindoo sects, the thunderbolt found its way to the Buddhists, who carried it with their symbolism to China and Japan. It is still met under the form of the dordj, a little bronze instrument in the shape of a double fascicle of six or eight arrows, which, held between the thumb and forefinger, is used by the lamas and bonzes in blessing the faithful and exorcising demons.
By the side of the improvements due to the aspirations of artists must be placed the deformations produced by the ignorance or unskillfulness of copyists. Sometimes a new type springs from these deteriorations to succeed the old one in somewhat the same manner as in the dissolving views, where the outlines of two pictures succeeding one another are confounded into an indistinct image which is neither one nor the other. The ansate cross of the Egyptians seems thus to have engendered certain types of the Ephesian Diana, with veiled face, arms half opened, and body inclosed in a sheath; as also the sacred triangle of the Semites, frequently surmounted by a disk and two horizontal bars, inspired in the Greeks, according to Francois Lenormant, representations of Harmony or of Aphrodite under the form of a cone crowned with a tiara and supplied with two rudimentary arms. As a counterpart to these metamorphoses changing a linear symbol into a representation of the human figure, may be cited some images sculptured on the paddles of the New-Irelanders, which were exhibited at the meeting of the British Association in 1872. There was revealed in them a series of deformations gradually changing a human face into a crescent couchant on the point of an arrow. Except for the presence of the intermediate forms, no one would have inferred the relationship of the extreme terms.
When the symbol is composed of several images grouped together, there is no reason why it should not keep its physiognomy as a whole, although one or more of its constituent elements may be modified, the better to answer to the religious traditions, the national preferences, and the geographical peculiarities of a new medium. Thus the lily, as M. de Gubernatis remarks in his Mythologie des Plantes, has taken the place of the lotus in the symbolic combinations borrowed by the West from the East. One of the most characteristic examples of these local variations with persistence of the type is presented to us by the figured representations of the sacred trees, in which we believe we can recognize the tree of life which is mentioned in both the Semitic and the Aryan traditions. From the most remote antiquity, the Chaldeans gave it the appearance of the date-palm, sometimes attended by a vine or an asclepiad similar to the plant that yields the soma of the Hindoos. The Assyrians made of it a wholly conventional tree, in which palm-leaves were associated with a cone-fruit, and the horns of the wild goat formed a kind of capital to the trunk. The Phœnicians exaggerated the artificial character of the representation by grafting the flowers of the lotus upon it. The Greeks introduced it into their ornamentation under the abbreviated form of the palm-leaf or acanthus. The Persians adopted it with the conventional physiognomy which the Assyrians had impressed upon it, and it was thus carried to India, where the Buddhists substituted for it the sacred fig-tree of Buddha. On the other side, the Persians bequeathed it to the Arabs, who, stripping it of its religious signification, retained it as an ornament in the decoration of their jewels and cloths. Finally, reaching Europe in the middle ages, with cloths of Oriental origin, it was reproduced among the sculptures of some churches, where it represented sometimes the tree of the cross, sometimes, by a curious coincidence, the tree of life of the biblical traditions. In all these variations of the same theme, the plant constitutes only a part of the symbol. That is completed and characterized by the presence of two personages confronting one another—genii, demons, wild or fanciful animals, monsters half beast and half man, between which the sacred tree raises its stem or spreads its branches. Nothing more is needed to establish the affiliations of this complex image which brings into connection, through many thousand years, the Chaldean cylinders and the medallions of the Javanese pagodas, the Greek capitals of the Didymeon and the Christian tympans of Calvados and Gloucestershire.
A frequent cause of alteration, to which sufficient attention has not yet been given in the study of symbols, is the attraction which some figures exercise upon others. We can almost announce under the form of a law that when two symbols express the same idea or near ideas they manifest a tendency to combine so as to engender an intermediate type. For want of understanding that a symbol can thus be connected with several figures very different in origin and aspect, many archœologists have lost their time in disputing upon the origin of an image or of a sign which each of the parties had reason to connect with a distinct antecedent—like the knights in the legend who broke lances over the color of a shield of which one saw one side of one color and the other the reverse of another color.
Examples of such real symbolic transmutations are too numerous to be recited here. A simple and salient form of them is given in the wheel, which, possessing the double advantage of having a circular form and of implicating the idea of motion, is one of the most frequent symbols of the sun. When that star was likewise symbolized by an open flower, the effort was often made to fuse the two images. Thus, in the bas-reliefs of Buddhist India we find wheels the spokes of which are replaced by lotus-petals; while in the island of Cyprus there are coins bearing roses the leaves of which are encircled by twisted rays, or arranged in the form of a wheel. The special amulet of the Gauls, the solar rouelle, easily furnished, on the advent of Christianity, the chrisme or monogram of Christ (X and P interlaced) by the simple addition of a loop.[1] In a similar way the chrisme becomes the ansated cross or key of life, through a series of transformations which are found among the inscriptions of the island of Philæ.
It is not even necessary that the symbols thus combined shall originally have possessed the slightest analogy of forms. There are certainly not many traits common to the different images of the sun in the valley of the Nile, where it is represented, according to the districts, as a radiating disk, a hawk, a goat, etc. But the Egyptians not only succeeded in condensing all these figures into the winged globe of their pylons and their cornices, but they also contrived to give the strange amalgamation the features of another solar animal, the flying scarabæus. When the winged globe passed from Egypt into Asia, the Assyrians in turn inclosed in the Egyptian disk the figure of their god Assur, which they represented as a winged genius, and till then the ancient sacred bird of Chaldea, which, according to M. Menant, contributed with the Mesopotamians to form the definite type of their winged disk, was not. Some of the coins of Asia Minor help us to comprehend the different processes by the aid of which the two symbols could thus be combined, if not also the principal stages of the operation by which they produced a third. The sun was often symbolized in Asia Minor by a triscele—that is, a disk around which radiated three legs joined at the thigh; at other times it was represented there, as in Egypt, by animals like the lion, the boar, the eagle, the dragon, and the cock. A coin of Aspendus in Pamphylia shows the cock in the field, by the side of the triscele; other pieces of the same origin show the triscele placed over or joined to the body of the animal without its losing its natural appearance. Finally, in a Lycian coinage, in the British Museum, the two symbols, at first placed together, then joined, are literally fused into one another; the three legs of the triscele are metamorphosed into three cocks' heads, which are grouped in the same way around a center.
Most frequently the symbolical syncretism is conscious and premeditated, whether the matter be one of the union for greater efficacy of the attributes of several divinities into a single talisman, or one of affirming, by the fusion of symbols, the unity of the gods and the identity of cults. Of such character were the talismans called panthei, with which the Gnostics endeavored to condense the divine symbols supplied by the principal religions of their time. Of a higher order of ideas was the symbol adopted by the Brahmanists of the New-Dispensation—the BrahmoSomaj—who presumed to fuse all the existing sects of India into a new religion, founded exclusively on conscience and reason. The pediments of their temples bear a design in which the mystic syllable of the Brahmans, Aum, is interlaced with the Mussulman crescent, the Sivaite trident, and the Christian cross. It also frequently happens that this confusion of symbols is not at all systematic. By virtue of reproducing certain forms, the eye and the hand seem to be assimilated to them to such a degree that they are not able to rid themselves of the obsession when they attack new themes. There is a symbol of this kind, engraved on Phoenician gems or painted on Cypriote vases, which recalls the winged disk of Asia, the sacred tree of the Assyrians, and some of the Greek thunderbolts. One can not turn the leaves of the description of the Buddhist bas-reliefs of Boro Boudour, in the island of Java, published under the direction of the Dutch Government, without being struck, at almost every page of the Atlas, by the appearance of some curious figure which presents at once reminiscences of the Hindoo lotus, the Assyrian horns, the Greek thunderbolt, the Buddhist fig-tree, and the Egyptian globe with the Uræus. Such heteroclite mixtures have, moreover, been customary in Oriental symbolism. Sir George Birdwood, an author among the best versed in the industrial arts of modern India, has recently shown that in the Hindoo art, in which all the details have a symbolical bearing, certain decorative themes are combined and exchanged with the disorder of a dream, without regard to the distinction of the animal and vegetable kingdoms, or of the organic and inorganic worlds.
In most of the examples that I have cited it is easy to discover by what ways the symbol was transmitted from one people to another. Under this relation the migration of symbols rises directly from what may be named the history of commercial relations. Whatever may be the resemblance of form and signification between two symbolical figures, found among peoples of distinct origin, it is proper, before asserting relationship, to determine the probability, or at least the possibility, of international relations that may have served as a vehicle for them. This point fixed, it remains to be determined which has been the borrower and which the lender. Thus, why was it not the Hindoos who communicated the thunderbolt to Mesopotamia, the Phœnicians who received the caduceus from Greece? Here our advantages over preceding generations appear. There was a time when we might indistinctly place in India the origin of the gods, myths, and symbols that are scattered all over the world; another when it would have had a bad air not to give Greece credit for all intellectual and religious creations that had any moral or artistic value. But the investigations of the last half-century have given positive bases for the ancient history of the East; and that in turn permits us to restore to their true plane in the perspective of the ages the principal centers of artistic culture which have reacted upon one another since the beginning of civilization.
There may be differences of opinion as to whether the Ionic capital borrowed its volutes from the horns of the ibex or the half-opened petals of the lotus. There may be discussion as to whether Ionia received it directly from Golgos on the Phoœician vessels, or from Pteria with the caravans of Asia Minor. But no one who has observed its presence on the monuments of Khorsabad and Koyoundjik will refuse to locate in Mesopotamia the point of its departure toward the Ægean Sea. This is only an example of the types and motives the development to importance of which is doubtless due to the autonomous inspirations of Greek genius, but the origins of which are to be sought in Phrygia, Lycia, Phœnicia, and beyond, in the valleys of the Tigris and the Nile. In India, likewise, the most ancient works of sculpture and carving—wherever they do not attest a direct influence of Greek art—associate themselves with the monuments of Persia by the adoption of motives in some way classic in the Persepolitan architecture—like the capitals formed of animals sometimes affronted, sometimes backed; which are, as a plastic signature, in the former case of Assyria, in the second case of Egypt. In fact, when we depart from Greece or India, or even Libya, Etruria, or Gaul, we always come at the end, stage by stage, upon two grand centers of artistic diffusion, partially irreducible to one another—Egypt and Chaldea; but with this difference between them: that about the eighth century before our era, Mesopotamia went to school to the Egyptians, while Egypt never went to school to any one. Now, symbols have not only, as we have shown more than once in the course of this study, followed the same routes as purely decorative themes, but they have also been transmitted in the same fashion, at the same times, and, we might say, in the same proportion. I am far from disputing that there may have been independent and autonomous centers of creation among nearly all peoples. But, besides autochthonous types, we find everywhere the deposits of a strong current whose more or less remote origins lay in the symbolism of the shores of the Euphrates and the Nile. In short, the two orders of importations are so connected that in writing the history of art we write in great part the history of symbols, or at least of their migrations—as is exemplified in the studies of MM. Perrot and Chipiez in the history of ancient art.
A distinction, however, should be observed, in researches relative to symbols, that form is not all. It is the intention that makes the symbol, and by this symbolism is dependent upon psychology, at the same time that its history deserves a place by itself in the general picture of the development of human civilization. A word is to be said from this point of view concerning other migrations; those in which a symbol passes, no longer from one country to another, but, upon the same soil, from one religion to the one that succeeds it. In the most frequent case, it is popular pressure that introduces into the new civilization symbols consecrated by long veneration. Sometimes the innovators themselves use the advantages offered by symbolism to disguise the novelty of their doctrine under ancient forms, and, when necessary, to transform into allies emblems or traditions which they are not able to destroy by a direct attack.. Thus Constantino chose as his standard the Labarum, which could be claimed at once by the worship of Christ and by that of the sun. The same policy was attributed to the first king of Norway. According to an old song of the Shetland Islands, Hakon Adalsteinfostri, compelled to drink to Odin at an official banquet, drew the sign of the cross on his cup, and, when his guests reproached him for it, told them that it was the sign of the hammer of Thor. We know, in fact, that in German and Scandinavian countries the cross of Christ was more than once disguised under the form of a two-headed hammer, and that in more than one inscription in Egypt it put on the appearance of the key of life.
Such symbolical adaptations have been especially frequent in Buddhism, which has never been restrained from adopting the symbols and even the rites of anterior or neighboring religions. In some of its sanctuaries it has gone so far as to carve the ceremonies of the worship which natives of India gave to the sun, fire, and serpents, and connect such rites with its own traditions. The solar wheel thus became the wheel of the law; the sacred tree represented the tree of knowledge under which Sakya-Muni attained perfect illumination; the serpent Naza was transformed into a guardian of the footprints of Vishnu, which were afterward attributed to Buddha. Some years ago the remains of a Buddhist sanctuary were discovered at Bharut, in which the bas-reliefs represented emblems and religious scenes, accompanied by inscribed legends. The news gave great joy to the Anglo-Indian archaeologists. They expected to be given interpretations of Buddhist rites and symbols, formulated by the Buddhists themselves one or two centuries before the Christian era. But a closer examination showed that the shrine was only an ancient temple of the sun, which had been taken possession of by the Buddhists. They were satisfied to put over the pictures of solar worship inscriptions connecting them with their own faith.
It has been said that religions change, but worship continues the same. The assertion in this shape is too absolute; but it is certain that every religion preserves in its rites and symbols survivals from the whole series of previous religions. And this does it no harm. The important thing is, not the leather bottle, but the wine that is poured out of it; not the form, but the thought that animates it and goes beyond it. When Christians and Buddhists respectively concentrate upon their Master the principal attributes of the sun, beginning with the nimbus, the prototype of which goes back to the aureoles engraved upon the Chaldean monuments, they do not suppose themselves to be giving homage to the star of day. They only intend, in reality, to reflect upon the venerated face of their founder the symbol which has from time immemorial formed an image of the celestial glory, and which also, in contemporary cults, specially characterized the highest personification of divinity. We are reminded of the answer which a father in the Church gave to those who accused the Christians of celebrating the day of the sun: "We solemnize this day, not, like the infidels, on account of the sun, but on account of him who made the sun." Constantine went further when he composed a prayer for his legions to recite on Sunday that could satisfy at once, as M. V. Duruy remarks, the worshipers of Mithra, Serapis, the sun, and Christ. Symbolism may ally itself with the most mystic tendencies, but, like mysticism, it is a powerful auxiliary of the religious sentiment against the immobility of dogma and the tyranny of the letter. M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu has shown, pertinently to this point, how in Russia the conservative ritualism of the old believers has been able, by means of the symbolical interpretation of texts and ceremonies, to attain liberty of doctrines and, in certain cases, a complete rationalism, without breaking with the traditional forms of Christianity or of the Eastern Church.
There comes a time when religions which make an important factor of the supernatural find themselves in conflict with the progress of knowledge, and especially with a growing belief in a rational order of the universe. Symbolism then offers them a way of safety which they have more than once taken advantage of to keep pace with their times. If we take peoples in an inferior degree of religious development, we find them having fetiches—that is, beings and objects arbitrarily invested with superhuman faculties; then idols, or fetiches carved into resemblance of a man or an animal; but we rarely discover symbols among them, for they imply both the desire to represent the abstract by the concrete and the consciousness that there is no identity between the symbol and the reality for which it stands. When the mind opens to the notion of abstract or invisible gods, it can preserve its veneration for its ancient fetiches, which are thenceforth regarded as representative signs of the divinities. Finally, when we come to conceive a Supreme God, of whom the old divinities are simply ministers or hypostases, the ancient figurative representations may still have a place, provided they are put in relation with the qualities or attributes of the superior being into which the divine world resolves itself. This is an evolution of which traces are observed almost everywhere in ancient polytheism. Dogmas and sacraments can always, on their side, be brought by symbolism into an interpretation harmonious with the progress of knowledge and reason. Such is the task to which are devoted—after Schelling and Hegel in Germany, and Coleridge and Maurice in England—a notable fraction of Protestant theologians, with a success which would doubtless have been greater if the school had not broken with the laws of historical truth by persisting in projecting into the past interpretations inspired by the present.
A religious condition may be conceived in which all cults become purely symbolical. There will be nothing to hinder their preserving with a pious care the rites and traditions of their heritage; only they will make of them particularly symbols of the truths common to all religions, and will consequently be able to treat one another—as we see in the rites of certain churches—as local forms and equally legitimate in the universal religion.
Such a syncretism looks, at first sight, to be very far from us. It would imply that all religions have their share of the truth, but that none possesses it all. This is hardly the language of the larger contemporary churches, if we may judge by those that touch us most nearly. But it must be observed that, in practice, their adepts live among one another as if the divergence in doctrines were reduced to a diversity of symbols. At times we see their chiefs—a thing unheard of in former centuries—co-operating on a footing of equality in works of philanthropy or social peace, as if they recognized that charity and justice afford a common ground for religious activity. Lastly, the attribution of a relative value—or symbolic, which is the same thing—to all cults indistinguishably may serve hereafter as a basis for the normal relations of the state with the churches in the countries which are under the influence of modern law. Let this idea, already anchored in our laws and our customs, be accepted in our consciousness, and for the first time in history the world will be able to enjoy a religious peace, founded not on the unity of forms and formulas, but upon the admission of what, under variety of symbols, is true and fruitful in all religions.--Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
- M. Gaidoz, in his book on the Gallic God of the Sun and the Symbolism of the Wheel (Le Dieu Gaulois du Soleil et la Symbolisme de la Roue), defines the chrisme as "a wheel with six rays without the circumference, and with a loop on the top of the staff in the middle." It should be added that even in the catacombs the chrisme is sometimes drawn within a circle.
Source: The Count Goblet D'Alviella, "The Migration of Symbols," Popular Science Monthly (September and October 1890), pp. 671-679, 778-787.
