On the Kinds and Stages of Symbols and Allegories

§. 43.

A detailed classification according to the natural objects that symbol and allegory make use of would be long-winded and pointless, since the evidence for it will emerge of itself in the special part of this work. Here we have to attend to the difference of essence, to the two main domains, that of beautiful form and that of merely religious significance, and to the gradation up to a perfected symbolism of art.

First, we distinguish two main kinds. There is phonetic symbolism and 124 allegory, in so far as tones and speech are the means of their expression; and there is aphonic symbolism, in so far as other organs of expression are chosen¹⁴⁵.

To the former circle^a belongs, first of all, music and song itself, since both, as is well known, were used with symbolic and allegorical intent, above all in the secret worship of the ancients. But here we must name especially the gnomic wisdom of antiquity, so rich in forms, and above all that of the East. To it belong also most oracular sayings and the so-called symbola of the Pythagoreans.

The ancients supply examples of this oracular language in abundance. From Herodotus alone one could gather instances of every form of figurative expression in this genre. The older the oracles are, the more closely they keep to the Oriental manner, both in the boldness of their images and in their firm consistency and sensuous life. When, for example, the Persian king Cyrus is called a mule by the oracle¹⁴⁶, or the fate of a threatened city is made sensible through fishing and 125 the net¹⁴⁷, we are reminded of the language of the Hebrew prophets and of the sculptures of the ancient East.

The epic verse, which in its oldest form showed essentially the same vividness, was even said, according to one legend, to have arisen originally out of the oracles¹⁴⁸. In the darkness they so often sought¹⁴⁹, too, the oracles followed the older Oriental mode of teaching, which, as we noted, loved the riddle and the riddling extraordinarily.

Among the Pythagorean symbols, likewise, many are marked by sensuous life and a firm stamp, and suggest a relatively high antiquity, even if not all may come from the first master of that society. We shall give a few of them as speaking proofs of symbolic speech¹⁵⁰. According to 126 Porphyry’s explanation, they all have a simple sense: they are short ethical precepts, and in part religious commandments. According to another interpretation, however, a deeper meaning underlies them, which we shall not examine further here.

We would recall only this one point. Under the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric that prevailed in antiquity, one and the same proposition could very well enclose a double sense, the higher of which was accessible only to the instructed. So most writers who tell of the well-known prohibition of beans¹⁵¹ give only a dietary reason for it, while others claim to find in it a symbolic cause descending from an age-old sacred tradition¹⁵².

127 The writer just cited gives the following symbola as Pythagorean, with their interpretations:

• “Do not step over the balance”: that is, do not depart from the measure.
• “Do not stir the fire with the sword”: that is, do not provoke the hot-tempered and angry with sharp words.
• “Do not tear the garland”: that is, do not touch the laws, for they are the garlands of cities.
• “Do not gnaw the heart”¹⁵³: that is, do not give yourself up to gnawing grief.
• “Do not sit on the bushel”: that is, do not live idly¹⁵⁴.
• “Do not turn back on a journey”: that is, in dying, do not cling to life 128¹⁵⁵.
• “Do not walk on the highways”: that is, do not conform to the opinions of the crowd, but follow the few who are reasonable.
• “Do not take swallows into your house”: that is, do not make garrulous people of unbridled tongue your housemates¹⁵⁶.
• “Help the bearer to take up his load, but do not help him to throw it off”: that is, assist no one in idleness, but further him in his efforts.
• “Do not wear images of the gods on a ring”: that is, do not make divine knowledge and speech common, and do not share it with the great crowd¹⁵⁷.
• “Offer libations to the gods by the ear of the vessel”: that is, honour and praise the gods through the sound of music, for music enters by the ear.

So far Porphyry.

Not only what was meant to take practical hold on life, however, but also the theoretical discoveries of its philosophy, that school laid down in old symbolic forms. 129 One need only recall the predicates given to the Pythagorean Monad, or unity. As the highest, self-positing principle it is called now Hermaphroditus (to represent, in the Oriental manner, the all-sufficient), now Styx, now Prometheus, now the throne and stronghold of Zeus¹⁵⁸.

These philosophers also spoke to the eye through symbols, which were suited to the esoteric designation of certain doctrines and at the same time served as marks of recognition for the members of the society. To these belonged the triple triangle, interlaced with itself, which formed five other triangles, a pentagon¹⁵⁹.

This leads us to the whole genus of symbols that speak to the eye, the parasemic symbols. This is a picture gallery as wide and as rich in forms as the other. And just as no one could fix all the tones of figurative gnomic wisdom, so it is impossible here to describe all the images.

§. 44.

130 This genus divides first into two subspecies: the simple and the compound symbol.

The symbol is simple, again, in a double respect: with regard to its content, and with regard to the form chosen. The simple sometimes coincides in image and content, of which the old coins of Greek cities in particular furnish numerous examples. So the image of the bull, or of the barley-corn, on coins of Posidonia carries the thought of fertility. Swans on a silver vessel from Herculaneum signify song, as the wasps on the tomb of Archilochus signified the wounding iambus.

Some addition, or some particular circumstance, can give a simple image a wider range of relations, and we shall give examples below from the ear of grain on coins. In the same way, an image simple in itself often has a very many-sided meaning. The butterfly supplies a proof, and sometimes even the butterfly’s wing.

The sight of this fleeting creature, and then the kinship in sense between its Greek name and the soul¹⁶⁰, early led men to join with it the idea of the incorporeal and immaterial. 131 And since, on an old way of thinking, sleep was a periodic liberation from the bonds of matter and a saviour of the spiritual in man¹⁶¹, the butterfly became the image of that benefit of sleep.

On the other hand, as soul, the same creature indicated many other things we are accustomed to think of in connection with the soul, especially those that move it most inwardly and stir and agitate its whole being, such as love. Finally, the butterfly was the liberated soul. First a caterpillar, it had wrested itself free of the hard shell of the chrysalis. In this way it quite naturally recalled the transformation that awaits man in death, and the liberation of his better self that he hopes for in death.

So the simplest image contains a whole series of the most fruitful thoughts. Conversely, a compound image can contain a single, simple idea. For example, to stay with the image already chosen: wings joined to a male head say no more than the butterfly alone. They designate Somnus [Sleep].

On the other hand, it is far more frequent for a compound image to designate a plurality of thoughts, sometimes a whole series of ideas. 132 Who does not know, to recall again what lies nearest, the representation of a philosopher reading in a book and sunk in meditation, beside whom a butterfly is shown on a human skull? Here each single element stirs a thought of its own in us. First, through the skull, the image of transience, the reminder of death; then, through the butterfly, the immateriality of the soul and its more spiritual continuance; and through the earnest thinker, the admonition to make the gravity of this contemplation the object of our thought. So the same hint meets us here in an image that two sayings of the Pythagoreans gave us, on the higher interpretation¹⁶².

§. 45.

Among compound representations, again, different forms are to be distinguished. Sometimes the merely kyriological image appears joined with the allegorical or with the symbolic; sometimes the symbolic with the allegorical; sometimes the symbolic forms a unity with itself, to which the symbolic 133 groups in particular belong.

For the first case the example just given may serve as evidence, since skull, book, and the man in the philosopher’s mantle are only natural depictions of the thing itself, to which the butterfly is added as a symbolic being.

But numismatics in particular, especially the class of Roman coins, often supplies examples of symbolism joined with a merely kyriological depiction. We choose one of many¹⁶³: the coin of the gens Cassia commemorating the important and famous law that secured the Roman citizen his freedom of vote through voting by tablets. Here appears, as an actual depiction, the urn used in the comitia, and, as symbol of freedom, the goddess Libertas with her well-known attributes. But since the well-known explanatory initials A. C. are added on the same coins, this figure must rather be counted already in the merely emblematic class.

For the joining of the symbolic with the 134 allegorical, the gems furnish the most beautiful examples. Here symbolic beings that the faith of antiquity had hallowed and public opinion had long acknowledged appear furnished with attributes, or performing actions, or placed in situations, that relate to some important or deep truth. How rich in this genre is the erotic circle alone! Here Amor appears now with the spoils of Heracles¹⁶⁴, now carrying the globe of the world¹⁶⁵. Or, not to mention more recent successful allegories of this kind, Amor rides with Psyche in a boat driven by swelling sails, as on a gem of which Münter has given us an impression. And so on, in the most manifold representations that arise from the profound fiction of Amor and Psyche.

Antiquity was also rich in works that joined two symbols, especially symbols of the gods, without any properly allegorical relation. They were set either side by side in a quiet pose, or joined with one another in action, or brought closer together in space, 135 and even combined in a single body. We need only recall the Hermathena and the Hermeracles. By the latter combination the union of the highest strength with the highest inventiveness was sometimes meant to be designated, and a part of the manifold old hermaphroditic figures may also belong in this genre.

Here too the straightforward sense of the ancients was most successful. The moderns have more often gone astray. Well known is the error of Annibale Carracci, who imagined that by setting side by side two symbolic beings, Amor and Pan, he had allegorically indicated the proposition of the universal dominion of love.^b

In general, the most manifold relations occur in this genre of compound images. We have been able to touch only briefly on the most striking. And so, finally, we shall mention in a single word the kind that might be called symbols and allegories of double purpose and meaning.

That one and the same image had different meanings is evident from definite testimonies of the ancients. This would already be the case with the Pythagorean symbols, for example, if it could be proved that their inventors originally intended not only the nearest ethical sense, but the philosophical and religious one as well. Very often, on the other hand, the double meaning may originate merely in a difference of 136 interpretation. This must have occurred all the more often, the darker, and so the more ambiguous, such old ordinances and gnomes were¹⁶⁶.

If we listen to the various voices of the ancients, the old Athenian custom of wearing golden cicadas in the hair also had more than one meaning. On the one hand this ornament was supposed to signify the musical talent of the Athenians; on the other, people found in it an allusion to the legend that the inhabitants of Attica were autochthonous¹⁶⁷. According to another testimony, that creature signified one initiated into the Mysteries¹⁶⁸. Whether here too we should assume only a difference of interpretation, given perhaps to an obsolete emblem, or whether something different originally lay in the emblem itself, will appear below, where we shall return to this subject for another purpose.

With the following image, on the other hand, the original difference of sense, and the antiquity of a double use, an ordinary and a higher one, can hardly be doubted. Among the 137 ancients a branch was, first, the image of a piece of land. The Romans broke off a branch when they wished to take possession of such land, or to seize again a property they had lost. This custom passed also into old German law, where conveyance by the branch is often mentioned¹⁶⁹. In Greek secret worship the branch also had a meaning. But however opinions differ about its true sense, this much is certain: it was meant to designate something entirely different, something connected with religious convictions¹⁷⁰.

And so this example might also prove the following. In the domain of art, decidedness of sense is rightly made one of the first requirements of every pictorial representation, and above all it is demanded that its purpose not remain riddling, or be made out only by laborious puzzling. Yet time, place, circumstances, and above all the manner in which a symbol is used (for example, whether 138 one breaks a branch, as in the first case, or hands it round, as in the second) usually produce an essential and unobjectionable difference of meaning.

But this already belongs to the symbolic action, as a higher stage of emblem-making. And with this we pass on to the gradation of symbolic expression in general.

§. 46.

In artistic evaluation, the lowest stage of figurative designation is occupied by allegorical allusions to names. And yet how great their number was in antiquity!

In the domain of art they are objectionable, because they are chosen on account of the accidental likeness of the name that two objects happen to have in some particular language. Here, then, the understanding can find the sense of the allegory only by a kind of lucky chance, or at least by long guessing. They therefore break the first law of art, which commands that the riddling be avoided. They also occur most often in a class of monuments that lies outside the domain of art proper.

On coins, especially the coins of cities, they appear as distinguishing marks and 139 tokens of the place¹⁷¹, and they bear every trace of an accidental origin, arising from individual choice. Many representations on coins must therefore be counted as picture-language rather than art¹⁷². This lowest genre in particular recalls a telling expression of the ancients, who, because of the obscurity of the pictorial signs, used to call coins riddles, or even metal riddles¹⁷³.

Winckelmann¹⁷⁴ has given examples of these name-allegories in abundance. We shall recall only one or two of them, and then pick out a few that he passed over. They will give us occasion for some remarks on the significance of names, so frequent in antiquity.

140 The island of Melos bore melons on its coins, as a mere allusion to the island’s name. The city of Side in Pamphylia chose the pomegranate for no other reason than that side meant this fruit in some Greek dialects. The bent arm, with the legend Ἀγκών, on coins of Ancona rested on a quite similar likeness of names, as does the rose, so often found on the coins of Rhodes.

One could, as I said, recall more that Winckelmann passed over. For example, some small islands near Cyprus, because they are called Cleides¹⁷⁵, or Key Islands, were designated on coins by a key. That is, if it were worth piling up examples where one speaks for many.

It cannot be denied, however, that numismatists have often stretched this class beyond its natural extent through misunderstanding and false interpretation. The butting bull on the coins of Thurii, for example, is not a name-allegory, as Beger and Eckhel believe, referring to the Greek θούριος, “ready for battle.” Rather, 141 as we shall show below, it has an entirely different meaning.

Nevertheless, this circle of pictorial allegory still remains large enough, and it also extends over the domain of the oldest language and name-giving. It is to be derived from several sources.

First, from necessity; and since necessity knows no law, the character of that picture-language was naturally seldom lawful. An age that did not yet know the use of writing might wish to hand down to posterity a memorable deed or event, or the memory of an outstanding person. Its first means of helping memory was the choice of a speaking name. Examples are found in abundance, among the ancients as well as among modern writers who report to us on ruder nations. This one from Homer¹⁷⁶ may suffice here:

“Hector called his son Scamandrius, but the others
Called him Astyanax, for Hector alone protected Ilios.”

Sometimes the name invented with such an intent gave occasion 142 for one of those images that old coins show in such numbers. Here too, one example in place of many. The Heraclid Caranus, according to a legend, sought a dwelling-place in Macedonia with an Argive colony. He took possession of the city of Edessa there when, in a thick fog, a herd of goats was let in at its gates. Now in possession of the city, he remembered the oracle that had told him he would find a kingdom through goats. He changed the name of the place, as a lasting memorial, to Aegae, and the city thereafter bore the goat on its coins¹⁷⁷.

Yet it often remains doubtful whether it was more necessity, from lack of writing, or more the mode of thought, that produced such names and name-allegories. This much is certain: even after writing had spread, antiquity still used them very often, out of fondness for figurative expression and attachment to traditional sacred custom. It is also known that peoples who had progressed far in culture in high antiquity, in language and writing in particular, still liked to put a meaning into their names. According to the remark of a recent 143 scholar¹⁷⁸, this is definitely the case with all names in the Sanskrit language.

Finally, such speaking names and allusions to them are also chosen by the busy imagination, especially of Oriental peoples, who so love to paint in lively colours, and above all by passion, which wants to speak very strongly to the senses. The sayings of the Hebrew prophets not seldom dwell in this circle.

We choose an example that shows us an emblem, a pregnant saying, and an allusion to a significant name all descending from one root. King Croesus threatens the inhabitants of Lampsacus that, if they do not release a prisoner, he will destroy their city like a pine¹⁷⁹. It was an allusion to the city’s old name, which was taken from this tree. But the pine also counted later as an emblem of flight and destruction¹⁸⁰, and the threat 144 of a mighty king became the occasion of a saying: to destroy root and branch was “to root out like a pine.”

§. 48.^c

Next to this, sign-allegory might follow. This is a very extensive genre, reaching from the simplest natural relations up to the border of the riddling. Everything here depends on how far nature or convention predominates. Convention too has its wide gradation, according to whether the conventional stands nearer to the natural or further from it, and whether it rests on more or less well-known relations.

From this circle of pictorial representation, too, Greek antiquity above all furnishes examples of happy choice and invention. Pausanias remarks¹⁸¹ that in a temple image of the Graces, which showed the first with the rose, the middle one with the die, and the third with a myrtle branch, the relation of these signs was very easy to find. For rose 145 and myrtle recall blooming life and the goddess of beauty; the die recalls the games of cheerful youth.

Greek art, as I said, was extraordinarily rich in such natural and successful inventions, and there is no need to pile up examples. In cases like the one noted, the naturalness of such signs was also helped by general agreement and by what was customary. The myrtle, for example, was a universally known attribute of Aphrodite, and the sense of the rose lay just as near to hand.

However much that twilit quality belongs to the essence of the symbol, then, the symbol still likes, indeed all the more, to attach itself to the known, by which the riddling is avoided. A belief hallowed from of old, or a generally prevailing idea, helps us to discover the sense of a given sign. Time, place, and circumstances are the other aids that a wise artist uses. Through the setting in which he places his symbol, and through the place he chooses, he sees to it that the soul is led first to divination, and then gradually further on to interpretation of the sense.

Setting and circumstances together form the context, out of which the symbol, being by its nature a dark part of speech,^d now steps forth more clearly. This holds, that is, if the viewer brings with him the same capacities required of every interpreter of 146 connected speech: a natural, sound judgment, a clear and open sense, and a cultivated and practised eye. The hermeneutics of picture-language shares the same basic laws as that of every human language.

Every ordered discourse, as the fruit of riper cultivation, differs from the helpless stammering of the child, natural as that stammering must also be called. In the same way, the signs of barbarous peoples, natural but extremely crude, must be called a kind of stammering in picture-language. They are works of necessity, and so they are often lawless and riddling.

Recent travel writers have not let us want for examples of this kind, and everyone will recall one or two. I keep to the emblematic gift the Scythians made to Darius¹⁸². Given the necessity and difficulty of making themselves understood, the choice of signs there, the bird, the mouse, the frog, and the five arrows, was certainly happy and natural enough. But general convention was lacking, and the signs were taken first of all from the narrow circle of that crude people’s perception. 147 So it was understandable that both the sense itself and its particular reference remained doubtful for some time. Speaking mimicry or other explanatory circumstances would have unlocked the sense more quickly.

Yet, in the older way of thinking, this kind of emblematic designation was sometimes used even when one declared one’s will and intention in words as well. The sensuous man loves to speak to eye and ear at once, especially where he aims at a forceful effect. The two Frankish princes Childebert and Clothar wished to deprive the children of their brother Chlodomer of the throne. With this aim they sent to their mother, who was raising those children, a messenger with a pair of shears and a naked sword, and had her told that the children must lose either their hair or their lives¹⁸³. The traditional custom of this Frankish dynasty, of seeing in long hair a sign of royal dignity, made the sign of the shears intelligible even without explanation. The messenger, however, had to add the explanation as a further confirmation.

148 The more natural and close the relation in which the chosen image stands to the object to be designated, the less obscurity and ambiguity are to be feared, especially if that relation is generally known, or may at least be presupposed as known among the cultivated.

The crocodile, for example, at once reminds anyone with some instruction of Egypt, and especially of the Nile, whose inhabitant that animal is. So if a river-god appears with this animal as his attribute, who would doubt for a moment that he sees a Nilus? The same holds of the Nile with the sphinx. These are symbols that still speak intelligibly to everyone today.

This is less the case with those whose relations were more familiar to the ancients. Here we would count the female figure so frequent on coins, especially those of the Emperor Hadrian, holding a scorpion, or wearing an elephant’s skin as a head-covering: an image of Africa well known to the Romans.

Sometimes, in the emblematic signs of the ancients, the general familiarity of a natural relation and of a historical circumstance coincided most happily, and in this way could never miss its aim. Every Greek who saw a coin with the head of Jupiter Ammon and the laserpitium plant knew, without looking at the inscription, that he had a coin of Cyrene in his hands. 149 The Ammonium there was world-famous, and it was generally known that this plant was native to Cyrenaica¹⁸⁴. The palm tree, on the other hand, also not unusual on the coins of that Greek-African state, already needed a definite inscription, because it occurred on coins as the sign of Phoenicia, Arabia, and other lands that grew it.

Just as clarity decreases step by step here with the widening of the circle of relations, so too narrow a circle of the figurative can lead to the riddling. We speak here of emblems to which only a few people, forming a guild or society of their own, can find the key within that society; or of those that rest on an individual 150 view, or on the wilful choice of a single person. Here what is represented is withdrawn from the general sphere of human knowledge and thought, and picture-language finally degenerates, as a spirited writer says strongly but truly¹⁸⁵, into something like a thieves’ cant.

If particular estates or individual circumstances are to be indicated clearly and pleasingly, it must be done by signs that, as generally intelligible, may be called human signs. We borrow from the writer named an example of this good kind. It is the emblem of the anchor and the sheaves on the seal of an unknown person, by which hope and fruit, effort and gain, are aptly made sensible.

§. 49.

Several writers assure us that the ancients also gave an allegorical meaning to the material of their images. According to Pausanias¹⁸⁶, for example, a carved image of Aphrodite at Temnos, whose erection was ascribed to Pelops, was made from a female myrtle tree. 151 On the island of Naxos there was an image of Bacchus made from the wood of the vine. Other examples need not be mentioned, since the intention of such an allusion is more doubtful in them.

Even the attested cases of this kind seem to belong either to old, still crude art, or to an age that had come again to love the obscurity of figurative allusion. The inner nature of the material will also be regarded the less, the more the merit of the form occupies the beholder’s mind.

In architecture, which works through greater masses, the allegorical choice of material might perhaps have greater influence. More certainly and more often, however, the architecture of ancients and moderns allegorized through form. It is known that this genre was especially favoured in ancient Egypt. If one attends to Herodotus’s description of the inner arrangement of the Egyptian Labyrinth, one will perhaps still find the most probable opinion to be that it was an architectural representation of the zodiac. The oldest Greece too had its labyrinths, just as allegorical architecture remained no stranger to it afterwards. The octagonal Tower of the Winds at Athens is counted in this class, its eight sides facing exactly toward the directions of the winds. Even the Roman Pantheon is placed here.

That Gothic architecture especially loved 152 symbolic expression has been set out by several writers, and recently with particular acuteness (*). It did so both in the whole of its buildings, in the cruciform plan, the vaults, and the heaven-striving towers of Christian churches, and in the individual architectural ornaments.

What use the ancients made of colour in symbolism can now only be conjectured, since their paintings have perished almost entirely. Yet one may expect in advance that their symbolic mode of thought, especially under the influence of artistic wisdom, will not have disdained this means either. The Greeks, nearer to nature than we are and living under a friendly sky, surely observed exactly what effect the various tones of light and the manifold play of colours in nature produce on the heart. Several descriptions of paintings in Philostratus leave us in no doubt that they too used light and colour with deep meaning and significant reference.

If we may ourselves use an allegorical expression, 153 light, as something embodied, must be especially akin to the symbol, as the embodied idea, and serve it for manifold and delicate expression.

To give examples from this genre too, we shall add some supplements and remarks to the observations of Winckelmann and his insightful editor in the sixth chapter of the Essay on Allegory. We begin with paintings. In Philostratus, and in a Herculanean painting¹⁸⁷, Bacchus has a red garment, which an inscription also assigns to him. Winckelmann refers this to the colour of wine. But perhaps attention to the moment represented in the first painting, and the memory of other images of the god, may lead us to another interpretation.

In Philostratus, Dionysus is just arriving at Ariadne. It is the victorious Bacchus in the full glory of his victory. Might this splendour of triumph be indicated by the full, burning colouring of purple? Several things speak for it.

First, there is the old custom of painting red the carved images of this god. Nor of this god alone, but of others too, especially the gods of nature, Pan, Priapus, the satyrs, and indeed, according to Plutarch, the 154 images of all the gods¹⁸⁸. By this crude, glaring colouring people presumably meant to make visible the full life of nature. And if the custom really was as general as Plutarch assures us, perhaps they sometimes meant to make the glorious and splendid Olympians plainly recognizable.

The contrast points the same way. The subterranean Osiris, whom Herodotus expressly calls Dionysus, and whom the Egyptian early worshipped under the name of Serapis, was painted black, as king of the realm of the dead¹⁸⁹.

But whatever relation those painters may have had in mind, ancient sculpture, by express testimony, sometimes chose the colour of the stone with allegorical intent. The images of Memnon, according to Philostratus¹⁹⁰, were worked in black stone, in which some claimed to find an allusion to the Ethiopian. This recalls a passage of Pausanias, where that 155 much-travelled man expressly assures us that the ancients generally made river-gods of white marble; only for statues of the Nile was black stone chosen, in memory of its Ethiopian origin¹⁹¹. The observation has recently been applied to a bust of the Nile in black marble in the Musée Napoléon.

The Indians use dark blue with reference to water, the fundamental element in their cosmogony. They therefore gave this colour to Narayan, as the first mover of the primal waters. In the great cistern at Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, there is a large, well-proportioned image of blue marble in a reclining posture, representing the creating Narayan floating on the water¹⁹².

Modern painting has often used the choice of colours very meaningfully. A critic has remarked that the circle within which the fully allegorical effect of colours can be applied is narrow. Yet a few good artists have grasped even this little with pure sense and used it wisely. 156 The white lily growing out of the earth between Mary and Joseph signifies by its very colour the purity of their relationship, if this poet’s idea has really been used by an artist. That Mary, as Queen of Heaven, wears the blue garment seems to have become an unalterable convention of meaningful painting.

In this respect too, the old German paintings¹⁹³ of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which owe their preservation and first appreciation to the care of some insightful friends of art, give us a pleasing reminder. In the colours of the garments of holy persons, especially of the apostles who appear so often, traces of allegorical meaning show themselves. The natural sense of these old German artists knew how to achieve this as unforcedly as surely.

§. 50.

The skilful use of colour often yields happy allegories, because colour speaks to the eye in a way that is generally intelligible. This must hold in a still higher degree of the allegorical use of actions. Among the ancients this field was of 157 extraordinary extent. A great part of their religious practice rested on it. But elsewhere too, in public as in private life, antiquity often used this kind of expression. Here, therefore, still more than with the other kinds, a manifold gradation occurs.

Aesthetic theory, true to its own laws, naturally gives first rank to those symbolic and allegorical actions that need no help from conventional signs but speak through themselves, and so appear purest and most self-sufficient. Yet we shall also note some preliminary stages here, since they are very characteristic signs of the old mode of thought, and then single out some things that prove especially pure on the monuments.

First, in the East allegorical action was often the helper or the substitute of public speech, especially at important junctures where a quick and forceful effect was needed. Examples are found in the Hebrew prophets. So Jeremiah, at Jehovah’s command, breaks an earthen vessel before the whole people of Israel, to signify the fate awaiting Jerusalem. The yoke laid on the prophet’s neck belongs here too.

Among the ancient Romans, the pater patratus, in declaring war, threw a spear across the border into enemy territory. And to make a rule of statecraft quite vivid, Thrasybulus once plucked out the ears of grain that stood above the rest 158¹⁹⁴.

Here also belongs the emblematic admonition by which Heraclitus, from the speaker’s platform, sought to bring his fellow citizens to concord. He filled a cup with water, mixed barley-meal and pennyroyal into it, and drank it off before the assembly without another word. The assembly, from old custom, knew the meaning of this mixed drink and the ethical and political sense of drinking it¹⁹⁵.

Throughout antiquity, man’s highest presentiments and most important memories were made sensible through symbolic and allegorical actions. The oldest festivals, what were they but the epochs of the year turned into action, together with the remembrance of the great benefits of agriculture and culture? It was a sacred year, embodied in a circle of allegorical actions. Sometimes, for want of writing, these may have taken the place of written annals.

Yet among peoples who wrote, too (one need only recall the festival of lamps at Sais), and after the later introduction of writing, attachment to the old kept up the custom of fixing 159 the most important moments of belief and knowledge through actions. Here, however, cultic mimicry was supported by a more or less rich temple apparatus. The high priest usually represented the deity of the place in person. Among the Pheneates, for example, at the yearly festival of Demeter, the priest covered his face with the goddess’s mask, which lay all year beneath a sacred stone¹⁹⁶. Such masked processions were an essential part of old Greek secret worship. The Campanian or Nolan vases, and those of several other cities of Magna Graecia, still show us in their paintings the spectacle of such masked temple figures. From their mimicry the ancient drama grew.

§. 51.

These festive actions belong to the allegories of mixed form. Signs and attributes of many kinds supported 160 the cultic mimicry, which masks and costume gave a still more definite reference. Besides this, everything else usually found its satisfying solution through the writing and instruction imparted to the initiates. In this way religion provided for man’s highest needs.

Art, to which such purposes are foreign, demands above all that every allegory, and so also the allegorical action, speak through itself, and learn more and more to do without auxiliary signs. Greek art furnishes numerous proofs of this more or less. We choose a few, briefly, by way of illustration.

The Nemesis worshipped at Smyrna, for example, had wings¹⁹⁷, alluding to the swiftness with which this goddess overtakes the arrogant; the Nemesis of Rhamnus had no wings. Nemesis often had the wheel, as the sign of the turn by which she brings the measureless fortune of the proud back into balance; so too the sphinx with the wheel signified the hidden working of Nemesis, who furthers moral harmony. She also had the measure or ruler, for example on coins of the Smyrnaeans¹⁹⁸. 161 She further had as attributes the bridle, because she reins in unbridled desires, and the sling, because she reaches even from afar.

But even without all these attributes, merely through a meaningfully chosen gesture, Greek art knew how to make the lofty goddess of moral measure recognizable. The marble statue of Nemesis¹⁹⁹ that Winckelmann explained has had to be restored, and so does not allow a decisive judgment whether this was the case with her. Yet she appears there without any of the attributes named. By a speaking gesture she makes herself known as the goddess of measure. With her left hand she lifts her garment toward her breast, and thereby forms with her arm the measure the Greeks called the ell.^e This trait, and the inclination of her head that is elsewhere ascribed to her, in which some see self-examination and modesty and others the gaze into what is hidden and earnest reflection, together let us recognize 162 the essential qualities of that deity without any further signs. They tell us in an image what the poet²⁰⁰ says in these two verses:

“And ever you measure out the life of mortals by the measure,
And look down into your bosom with ever earnest gaze.”

By countless traits of this kind one could prove how well the Greek knew how to lay great meaning into an allegorical action. We recall a few more. Helios, as sun-god, is recognizable enough sometimes by his four-horse chariot, sometimes by other attributes. The definite idea rising sun is reached through the action in which art places the sun-god. So he appears on a fine coin of Marcus Aurelius from Nicaea in Bithynia: naked, driving his quadriga up through the clouds, with the zodiac above and Tellus below, holding a cornucopia and a bunch of ears of grain²⁰¹.

That the Greeks also knew how to indicate finer relations and more delicate qualities of mind and heart through speaking 163 gesture or action is proved by a whole series of monuments, together with numerous reports of the ancients. Even abstract concepts were sometimes embodied through action. So the Horae, and Aidos, who together with Fama had altars among the Athenians²⁰², stepped vividly before the eye. The dances of the Horae are well known. The last-named being too was made sensible in art by a quite simple gesture.

Since this example shows at the same time how happily the clear eye of the Greeks observed nature, and how surely the artists of this nation hit their mark, I will give the reporter’s account²⁰³:

“The statue of Aidos (Modesty) stands about thirty stades from the city (Therapne). It is said to have been set up by Icarius, and made on the following occasion. When Icarius gave Penelope to Odysseus as his wife, he tried to persuade him to settle in Lacedaemon. When he could not obtain this, he begged his daughter earnestly to remain there. But when she nevertheless set out on the journey to Ithaca, he followed her in a chariot and kept on entreating. Odysseus bore it for a while. At last he told Penelope 164 that she must either follow him willingly or else go back with her father to Lacedaemon. She is said to have spoken not a word to this, but in answer to the question to have veiled her face with her veil. Icarius saw well that she wished to go with Odysseus, and let her go. He then dedicated the statue of Aidos, for it was on that spot, they say, that Penelope veiled herself.”

So far Pausanias. How that image was conceived and executed needs no further question. The coins of antiquity still show us this Aidos as a youthful figure drawing a veil before her face.

Such simple means did Greek art choose to signify the stirrings of the heart. And from this point of symbolic and allegorical action, it has only one step more to take to reach the highest.

§. 52.

This is the stage at which the human form appears as the expression of the highest concepts. We shall indicate the chief conditions under which this perfection could be reached.

First, we would name action itself, in the widest sense in which we have just taken the word. A glance at its opposite will make this clear. The deities 165 of the Indians and other inhabitants of Upper Asia are mostly depicted sitting or lying, in that repose which the mode of thought of these peoples regarded as something blissful. The climatic occasion for this lies near at hand. But it admits just as little doubt that the artistic expression of deities needs other ideas and customs if it is to reach the highest.

Another obstacle that stood in those peoples’ way was the veiling of the deities: that pomp of costly garments, that overloading with crowns, head-bands, earrings, bracelets, and foot-coverings, glittering with numerous precious stones. The Greeks were kept from this love of splendour by their slighter means, if nothing else. In the oldest times they themselves covered much; the loincloth disappeared from the competitors at Olympia only later²⁰⁴. But afterwards they made their judgment on the admissibility of the nude a decisive mark by which they set themselves apart from the barbarians.

These and other traces, and an express passage of Plato²⁰⁵, leave us no doubt that the older custom of the Greeks agreed in this with the Asiatic. But Herodotus, 166 when he tells a story founded on that barbarian judgment, already found it necessary to add by way of explanation that among non-Greeks even a man may not be seen naked²⁰⁶. The incident had taken place at the Lydian court. And Philostratus, on the occasion of a painting of the Lydian Pelops, makes the general remark that the Lydians and all the barbarians of Upper Asia hide beauty in costly clothing, and seek to distinguish themselves in their garments instead of in the representation of nature²⁰⁷.

167 This marks the dividing wall that separated those nations forever from the highest beauty in art.

Another obstacle lay in the immoderate. The image of a god was supposed to be the epitome of every possible relation that might be thought in its concept. It was to express everything that a theology rich in content said of the divine being. In the symbols of the great gods especially, the universe in its elements and principal parts was to be indicated bodily.

From this, first of all, many-limbed deities had to arise, since a special significance was sought in multiplying the most important parts of the body. To this class belong the many-headed and many-armed god-images of India; the Diana of Ephesus with her many breasts; the Janus of the peoples of central Italy, formed with four faces, or more often two; and similar images in old Greek temples. One example is the three-eyed Zeus Patroos at Larissa, whom the Greeks were said to have brought from Troy, and whose three eyes were interpreted as his oversight of heaven, earth, and sea²⁰⁸.

No less was significance sought in the heaping of attributes. Winckelmann²⁰⁹ 168 already disputed Gori’s assertion that the oldest god-images had no attributes. It is so improbable that one rather recognizes in the fondness for these signs one of the characteristic traits of higher antiquity. Indeed, in some cases the sign existed before the deity it designates, as we have shown elsewhere in the case of the sacred jars and the jar-gods that arose from them.

Here too barbarian temple symbolism offers numerous examples. I recall in particular the description that Bardesanes, and after him Porphyry²¹⁰, give of an image of Brahma. This world-creator was represented not only as a hermaphrodite, but with an overloading of attributes as well. On his right side one saw the sun, on his left the moon. On his two arms, stretched out crosswise, were a great number of angels (stars, plants) and the parts of the world: heaven, the mountains, 169 the sea, the river (the Ganges), the ocean, plants, animals, and the whole of nature.

This character of insatiability in representations of the divine is more or less proper to many other peoples. Roughly the same may be said of several beings of the Near Eastern cults, such as the Ephesian Artemis already named, Cybele, and others. Such images are found most often among peoples who regard temple images rather as reminders of the infinite, whose essence itself can only be the object of pure thought. The fullness of the deity, and the unfathomable depth that the understanding discovers more and more the longer it reflects, is here to be indicated by a fullness of signs. The sight of them is only meant to remind the believer that, however many images one heaps up, the full content of the infinite being can never be exhausted.

This multiplicity in the figurative, or, as the Greek more happily calls it, this πολυσήμαντον [“many-signifying”], is found in those invocations of the deity among Indians and Greeks that try to indicate the infinite. In the Orphic hymns, where the divine unity appears as a bodily whole, we see the same striving to designate through speech what the overloaded temple idol was meant to designate there. Hence that heaping-up of names, by which the soul filled with the divine strives in vain to 170 speak the ineffable. In these songs there is a conflict between content and form that can never be reconciled. The thought has risen to the boundless, and yet the word would bound it in a figurative shape.

In general the secret doctrine needed many signs, and they were the more welcome the darker and more significant they were. We would have clearer ideas of the symbols of the Greeks’ secret worship if their vow had not shut the mouths of precisely the best-informed writers. From Pausanias, for example, we learn only that the image of Τελετή (Initiation) stood beside the statue of Orpheus, but not what it looked like²¹¹.

Yet we know this much from descriptions of the mystic processions and customs: what was sought was solely what was rich in relations and significant, with complete disregard of the beautiful. It is enough here to recall the phallus. It is a sign that stepped outside the circle of the properly symbolic altogether, and belonged rather to a crude kyriology. And yet how general its religious use was, and how holy its meaning! Even in Attica the Eleusinian cult of Ceres, though certainly the most cultivated of its kind, kept a great deal that, with the utmost crudeness of form, 171 sought its merit only in the full content of its essence, that is, in allegorical reminder of the mysteries of faith.

§. 53.

There, people held to the old on purpose, while the public image-making of the Greeks had opened an entirely new domain. Here they had set themselves the beautiful as their goal, and at last reached it by stages.

Some circumstances already indicated above led the Greek onto this path, along with many other causes: climate, education, gymnastics, a free constitution, and the national games, and also the great authority of Homer, who had most happily represented in human likeness the gods, the forces of nature personified after the Greek manner of thought. Others, and Winckelmann above all, have already set out these causes acutely.

Yet only gradually could the Greek advance along this path. The first attempts resembled the foreign more closely: not, as noted, in barbarian splendour, but in their hardness and lack of grace. What was told of the Palladium, that its feet were joined together²¹², 172 was remarked in the same or a similar way of some old images in Greek temples, such as the Minerva at Priene and the Attic Ilithyia²¹³. In garments and folds too, the straight and the angular still prevailed then, as even old remnants of sculpture still show.

Pausanias reports that all Greeks in the oldest times had worshipped unworked stones instead of gods; at Pharae in Achaea thirty such stones were shown²¹⁴. This makes it very understandable that the oldest deities were very like one another, and that the added attributes were their only marks of distinction.

With further progress, expression was achieved first, though the strange and the fearful were not yet avoided²¹⁵. Further effort in the expressive gradually taught art to do without the multiplicity of attributes, and to produce the pleasing by softening. The human form was treated as the 173 essential. And as art separated from this noblest in the series of bodies everything accidental and individual, it at last reached the point of letting the divine appear in it.

We shall designate this highest purification of the human form in Winckelmann’s words:

“These ideal figures (of the Greek gods) are like an ethereal spirit purified by fire, cleansed of all human weakness, so that neither muscles nor veins are perceived in them. The highest idea of these artists aimed at creating beings endowed with an abstract metaphysical self-sufficiency, whose outward form was to serve as body to an ethereal being, bounded at its outermost points and clothed in a human shape, yet without sharing either in the matter of which humanity is composed or in its needs. A being so formed illustrates Epicurus’s opinion of the shape of the gods, to whom he gives a body, but as it were a body, and blood, but as it were blood.”²¹⁶

These, then, were no longer reminders, no longer allegories. They were the highest beings of veneration themselves. They were the highest ideas, which art had commanded to appear to the senses, to 174 step into space and take on shape²¹⁷. They were symbols of the gods.

Formerly Zeus needed the ram’s horn, or the eagle, or some other attribute in order to be recognized as Zeus, and Bacchus needed the bull’s horn, the cup, or the thyrsus. Religious tradition usually kept these signs, but they were now at least no longer necessary. That brow, those locks, those shoulders made the highest god sufficiently recognizable. In the same way every other deity, by a well-considered convention among artists, now had its characteristic marks in the form of its limbs and in the whole habit of its body.

So art, by making the human the object of its endeavour, had come to be significant and beautiful at once in the pure human form. And with the twelve great deities, together with the lesser ones, the symbolic circle was closed.

To make what has been treated easier to survey, and as a guide for the lectures, we add a table that may be compared with the one above. That one was meant to show how some Greek writers conceived this iconic series. This one gives indications of the whole figurative circle as recent antiquaries and theorists of art see it as well.

The Folding Table

facing page 174 of the edition of 1810

ICONISM

I. The symbolic, allegorical, and mythic circle

A. Aphonic symbolism and allegory

• Symbol. Emblem (Sinnbild). Emblem.
  • Name-allegory
  • Sign-allegory
  • Allegory through material
  • — through architecture (form)
  • — through colour
  • Allegorical action
• Hieroglyph: symbolic, enigmatic. Symbolic figures of the Pythagoreans.
  • Name- and word-hieroglyph
• Allegorical and symbolic treatment of the human form
  • Symbols of the gods
  • → The Necessary

B. Phonetic symbolism and allegory

• Image, metaphor (simile, comparison)
• (Metonymy, synecdoche)
• Allegory (in the narrower sense)
• Pregnant saying. Maxim. Proverb.
• Riddle (griphos, aenigma)
• Ainos, parable, example
• → The Possible

C. Mythics

• Legend: old event | Tradition: old doctrine (theomythy)
• Combination of the two mythic branches:
  • old fact altered by old doctrine
  • old doctrine altered by old fact
• Mythic twigs; combination of the mythic twigs
• Προσμυθευόμενα [“mythic additions”]
• → The Actual (factual form)

Running beneath A, B, and C: Simple and compound symbols and allegories, in different senses. Combinations both of the main branches and of the individual twigs.

II. Kyriology

• Kyriologika
• Kyriologumena
• (Branches of hieroglyphics)

At the foot of the plate: “To the bookbinder: These six cancels are to be bound in place of the leaves cut out.”^f

[End of Chapter Four.]