Historical Survey of the Periods of Older and Newer Symbolism and Mythology

§. 60.

It is not our intention in this survey to take in the religions of the East 204 and to show the development of symbol and myth in them too. That alone would furnish material for a rich investigation of its own. One need only recall the periods of Indian literature, each of them rich in theological and philosophical writings, while one or another brings forth many-membered cosmogonies, like the eighteen Puranas, or great epic poems, like the Ramayana³⁰⁰. Then there are the religious systems of the Persians and other Asiatic peoples, and especially the priestly doctrine of the Chaldeans. What a great field they open to the reflecting mind! And how much mythic and symbolic material the sculptures on the monuments of Persepolis alone provide, not to speak of other remains of the Oriental primeval world.

We start from the reports and monuments of the Greeks and Romans. Afterwards, in the outline of symbolism and mythology, we shall have to take up the Egyptian and the Western Asiatic because of their close connection with the 205 Greek. Here, however, we take the standpoint of the classical documents.

From this standpoint we see only Western Asia in a clearer light; what lies further off vanishes into grey twilight. The religions of these peoples, whom the Greeks later called barbarians, give news of their nature only through mute customs, through fragmentary single legends, and through resting statues. The oldest Greek poet we know listens to this news with only half an ear. He has turned his gaze westward. From there come the hosts whose battles occupy him.

And so that bright world-mirror, Homeric poetry, shows us a choice and splendid humanity in its doing and living, and a world of gods that is only the nobler archetype of that humanity. We see the battles and sufferings of the heroes, and the sympathy and help of gods who act and feel humanly. But the stage on which these deeds took place is precisely the great dividing point between East and West, just as that poetry sets the most decided boundary between the dark indeterminacy of Western Asiatic worship and the bright, many-shaped host of mythic gods.

Fate had laid in the Greek spirit a wonderful formative drive. According to laws quite different from those known even to a great part of the polytheistic primeval world, 206 it formed gods out of the One that is called the divine: in a higher human measure, but each grounded in itself as a person for clear intuition, and set forth in decided doing and suffering.

Hellas, with its generations of gods that lose themselves through heroines and heroes into humanity, with its battles of gods and heroes, is and remains the mother of myths (μυθοτόκος Ἑλλάς). And Homer is the son most like this mother, and the most fruitful. The Greek peoples now obeyed his spirit. His songs became the rule of their belief, their poetry, and their image-making. His light darkened the priestly dignity of the Asiatic past.

What Western Asia had taught and practised as holy, in half-veiled significance, was forgotten by the Greek in the full clarity of his Olympus. The orgiastic songs still sounded on the Phrygian and Thracian mountains, but the Hellene no longer understood their wonderful content. In Greek cities the sacred worship of Syria and Phoenicia was practised, but its meaning was scarcely divined any longer.

A Daedalus had wakened Egypt’s old images from their long repose. Striving, like the Greek who knelt before them, they stride forward. Out of a half-closed veil the emblem wrests itself free, winged into myth. Around the old holy house of the great goddess at Ephesus a talkative crowd of Ionians swarms in the adjoining lesches. And the goddess herself, 207 taken out of the Asiatic veil and its wonderful, image-rich wrapping, goes as a light huntress over the mountains.

In place of the old repose and Asiatic contemplation, the deed, humanly felt and thought, had now become the centre of religion, and legend took possession of a devotion that had become outward. The insatiability of the oldest symbolism of the gods is fitted under Greek measure. Beautiful sensuousness and plastic roundness drive out the misshapen, and with it the weighty content of the older significance.

And while this Homeric law takes possession of the Greek spirit for centuries, and binds the religion of the Greeks by its power, the old royal houses gradually die out in Hellas, or are pushed aside by citizens. As lawgivers, by founding free constitutions, these citizens lead every freeborn Greek onto a great stage of public activity. The self-feeling nourished in every individual by public institutions, most of them religious, founds the most closed personality and the most decided character alongside the most beautiful form.

The community, so changed, acts back upon the spirit of religion. The works of devotion coincide with the demands of the state, and the staging of sacred choral dances and dramatic performances is at the same time the fulfilment of civic duty. Hence even tragedy and comedy, which originally arose 208 out of old nature-worship³⁰¹, betray this public spirit. Tragedy turns the legends of gods and heroes to the glory of the city before which it is performed. Comedy shows the freedom of its form in the freedom of its judgments on public persons. So in Greece the religion of the people, together with its poetry and art, had become plastic and political.

§. 61.

In Western Asia, however, the eternal spirit of nature soon worked in quite a different way. The great school of experienced civic life, first in those Ionian cities and then in the motherland itself, bore other fruits. Life had become richer in relations and more earnest. The youthful playfulness of the heroic age, ever newly stirred and delighted by an ever-growing abundance of myths, now had to give way to a more meaningful striving, at least among the cultivated.

Enlightened men, uneasy at the unhappy multiplicity into which the One and divine had been splintered, voice salutary doubts. They complain of the 209 measureless number and the absurdity of the myths, and, distinguished by an honest spirit of inquiry, they step honourably out of the crowd. These were the masters of the old Ionian philosophy. They saw the harm that the omnipotence of Homeric poetry did to religion and philosophy through the established dominion of myth. They tried to lead the excitable Greek spirit from that mythic restlessness to rest, and from distraction by the many to contemplation of the One and the whole.

They restore to its old rights the symbol, which garrulous legend had displaced. The symbol was originally a child of image-making, and even when it is embodied in speech, it is far better suited than legend to indicate the One and the ineffable in religion, through its significant brevity and the totality and compressed exuberance of its essence. Pherecydes of Syros, the oldest of the Ionian sages, and Pythagoras, the founder of the Italian school, recall by the very form of their teachings not a Hellenic fatherland but the East and Egypt.

But why do I speak of the East? Was this form a new phenomenon in Greece, then? Was it not rather older than that mythic form which, after a great artist in it, we call the Homeric? Certainly. Before the aoidoi led the enchanted 210 Greek people captive with ever new songs and legends, a race of priestly singers had taken the Greeks of the motherland under the salutary guardianship of religion.

Ancient Thrace, later an image of crudeness, shows earlier in its interior a prosperity nourished by the natural wealth of the land, and cultivated constitutions under a monarchical form. Beside these kings, and as it seems even above them, stands a venerable priestly estate. As in Egypt, from which the most credible history derives its origin, it administered a teaching office over the peoples, supported by the power of music and poetry. In this education through religion a well-considered gradation seems to have obtained, here as there.

Through credible witnesses, among whom even the soberest of inquirers, Aristotle, belongs, fate has granted us several dogmas of this Orphic religion in symbolic and mythic form. They show as great a kinship with the propositions of Oriental doctrine as with the dogmas of the old Ionian school, namely those of Pherecydes, and with those of the Pythagoreans too. To these the newer Ionian philosophers attach themselves. Several of their main doctrines, such as those “of the soul which, ruling in the universe, binds all things through all things,” “of the double harmony that reaches through the All,” and “of the identity of life and death,” agree 211 most exactly with the content of demonstrably Orphic priestly doctrine.

§. 62.

Yet this more venerable spirit of religion was recognized only by the wise. The poetry that gathered the people around the rhapsode’s seat and in the theatre was little disturbed in its dominion over minds by more earnest inquiry and more significant philosophy. The popular cult, hallowed by lawgivers and constitution, demanded and needed an abundance of legends, for the people had to know the history of those before whom they knelt; and the administrators of public worship watched jealously over its inviolability. The purer doctrine of the mature therefore withdrew into the darkness of the Samothracian, Attic, and other Mysteries, as into the bounds of esoteric philosophy.

This also determines the relation of the philosophers to mythology and to the state religion. Either they entered on a dangerous struggle and chastised seductive poetry and the myth allied with it, cherished and beautified by it. They dared to accuse the god of the people, Homer, and reported, in order to be intelligible to the people, the torments that struck the corrupter of religion in the underworld. Or they censured 212 more softly. The saying of the Egyptian priest is conceived in this spirit: “You Greeks, Solon, are always children!”³⁰²

The heads of the Mysteries, especially the Attic ones, worked in harmony with the efforts of many philosophers. They knew the power that poetry exercised over the Greek spirit, and they came forth with poems in which, only under another veil, the natural unity of the old religion was pointed to. That the form of these poems was a product of later cultivation would be beyond doubt even if such weighty authorities as Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle did not speak for it; some of them, and this holds especially of the Orphic Hymns, may belong to the flowering of the Athenian state. But the fragments of the old Ionian philosophy attest too definitely for any uncertainty to remain that many old-Orphic symbols and doctrines underlie them, and that many tones of ancient song echo in them.

§. 63.

213 With Alexander’s campaigns the East is newly opened to the Greek spirit. It now embraces the Orient in a wider sense than before. For the Orient was ruled by the Hellene, and after this great mingling of peoples the Hellene was either born there or spent a great part of his life there. The same sky surrounded him that surrounded the imaginative Oriental, and the poetry of ancient Asia touched his mind.

He saw the royal palace of Persepolis, a wonderful symbolic architecture; the fabulous beasts of the far East; the animal-plants on the carpets of the Babylonians. Beside these came the impressions of outward nature itself: this foreign and more luxuriant vegetation, these more powerful phenomena of animal life, and finally the immeasurable numbers and the significance in the astrology and cosmogony of the Chaldeans. So the excitable Greek imagination was now stirred and nourished in many ways.

Still more, however, Alexandria in Egypt, that world-colony, received the Greek thinker too in the great stream of peoples. The climate of this land, anomalous in every respect, had always attuned the mind to melancholy and earnestness, and the Greek too felt this influence. The frequent sight of the gigantic monuments of a meaningful, vanished priestly 214 world must have achieved in him too the purpose that lay in them: to withdraw the reflecting mind from outward life.

The fall of Greek freedom worked no less to this end. The commonwealth was entirely overturned. In its old constitution it had given the mind a constant summons to action and kept it alive in that activity. In place of the sensuous splendour of ancient civic life there came, as consolation in a sad fate, a learned leisure granted by the favour of cultivated kings.

At this greatest boundary between the ages, other things too had great influence. There was the accumulation of literary treasures in that world-city, and the traffic in ideas that it lent wings to. There was the acquaintance now made with the religious doctrines of the East, with the theories of the old Magism, and with the transformations of the gods in the system of the Indians. And finally there was the influence of the monotheism of the Hebrews, who were so numerous in Alexandria.

Shortly before this period, moreover, Plato had stood at the full noonday height of all cultivation, and had victoriously mastered and made his own all the light of the East and all the knowledge of Western philosophy. His view of nature and spirit now became determining, for a long time to come, for numerous schools of philosophers.

§. 64.

215 From all this the following phenomena in religion and philosophy are now explained:

1. The extraordinary enlargement of both among the Greek people, spiritually enriched by all those influences.
2. The pragmatic treatment of myth. The learned thinker now seeks, more than ever, to win fruits from it for knowledge and for life. The youthfully poetic view of the old realm of fable appears subordinated to the more earnest, scientific purpose.
3. The return and reinstatement of mysticism and symbolism in mythology, and the continuing dominion of both on the whole. The human spirit, stirred in a thousand ways, enriched and striving, is directed back upon itself, and contemplation returns inward.

First, that enlargement and that pragmatism are evident in the system of Ephorus. This famous pupil of Aristotle placed at the head of his universal history, covering the events of Greeks and barbarians from the return of the Heraclids down to Philip of Macedon, a discussion of myth in which all its elements were traced back to the history of the primeval world. A leaning toward this 216 method is already found in fragments of Ionian logography, notably in Dionysius of Miletus. But only the example of that learned inquirer had a significant effect, and it still exercises its dominion in the Historical Library of Diodorus.

Earlier, however, this method had found favour even among philosophers. So shortly afterwards Euhemerus made his striking attempt, later combated by Plutarch, to prove by a complete induction, on learned journeys of his own, the proposition he afterwards set down in his ἱερὰ ἀναγραφή [Sacred Record]: that all the gods had been only men, but had been deified by grateful peoples for their benefits in founding states and giving laws³⁰³.

217 Chrysippus, that great teacher of the Stoa, took another way. In the first part of his book περὶ θεῶν φύσεως [On the Nature of the Gods] he had set out his mythology and speculative theology positively. In the second he now ventured the exegetical attempt to reconcile the poets of the nation with the purer doctrine of God, by reinterpreting allegorically the anthropomorphic poems of Homer, Hesiod, and others and laying a worthy sense beneath them. Here too faint beginnings lay in earlier attempts. But only the weight of this great master won the method numerous adherents from every school, and most of all from the Stoic.

It is true that the advancing human spirit could find no satisfaction in the many-coloured shimmer of Greek popular myth. Nor can it be denied that even in the legend Homer sang, remnants of old symbolic priestly doctrine have survived here and there, turned into history. But the now prevailing misunderstanding of the sensuousness of the Homeric epic, which is not significant at all, of its bright outwardness and compact plasticity, was not at all in the spirit of classical antiquity. It was a base contempt of all the laws of sound interpretation.

The learned and judicious critics in Alexandria defended the rights of the epic manfully, and not without success. Their own genius and constant practice had given them so fine a sense for the tone 218 of every kind of art, and they had proved their sound taste so ably, that they were bound to have a decisive voice on the spirit of the Homeric myth too.

But in general and in the long run little was changed by this. For partly later scholars did not follow this right path, and partly the fate of religions themselves commanded otherwise; and no resistance can hold back the mighty stream of time. Already in the first period of Alexandria it had been the prevailing tone, in inquiry and in exposition, to work toward the significant. In this spirit, among the old myths of the Greek world of fable, only the mystical ones were picked out, or the purely epic ones were reinterpreted mystically. People lingered in reflection over the silent symbol, and turned in inquiry to the hieroglyphics of Egypt, which was now their native land.

§. 65.

With new power, however, in the Roman period, after the spread of Christianity, the long-suppressed primal element of the old religion broke forth in the cultivated minds of paganism. In the imperial age the all-too-sober content of the national polytheism could no longer satisfy even the ordinary Roman. The strange, wonder-loving Hadrian heaped up in the city and on his villa the colossal, 219 riddling monuments of Egypt, and celebrated foreign rites in secret.

This general striving now stirred more nobly in nobler minds. The philosophers and thinkers, of whom this age had many, now for their part enriched the inner world for which alone they lived, and mightily enlarged the domain of the spirit. In mythology in particular they now gathered more carefully what the Hellenic religion had saved of old, significant symbols. Above all, however, they attended to the doctrines of the East, and lost themselves in contemplation of the less troubled ray of light of an ancient revelation. No less did they seek to point out, bring forward, and rescue the branches and ground-threads of a purer religion in Greek myth, and to raise the divine in it to the religious dignity claimed for it in the Orphic past.

For now that Christianity was taking possession of the world, every mystery had to become manifest if the religion of the heathen was to survive this struggle. The time was past when a myth-rich anthropomorphism held the better conviction among the Hellenes fettered, or pressed it back into darkness. Rather, the Homeric heaven of the gods, and that sensuously perfected, plastic limitation, now stepped into the background. The prevailing mythology sought to surpass Christian doctrine in mystical depth, in inwardness, and in 220 transcendence.

In this spirit, among others, Plotinus, the pupil of Ammonius Saccas, and Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and others regarded the mythology of the Greeks, of which numerous proofs are found in the writings of these Neoplatonists. In this spirit too one must read the frequent interpretations of Hellenic myths in the writings of Julian. In this conviction that great emperor sought to show, in opposition to Christian doctrine, that paganism too had its mystery, and so satisfied the highest needs of the human spirit.

§. 66.

Before we indicate the periods that now follow, let us cast a brief glance at the furthering and cultivation of symbolism as a science in the ages considered so far. Something has already been remarked on the various treatments that mythology received in the writings of the learned, and the necessary literary references have been given for the rest.

The short sketch of the religious institutions of antiquity can already show us how many occasions and objects of learned inquiry the Greek and Roman found in the religion of their fathers. And how many other opportunities the ancients had for emblematic 221 and allegorical representations! There is no need to elaborate this. The mere recollection of the shields of the Greek heroes before Thebes, as Aeschylus describes them, and of the shield of the Trojan War in Homer, followed by Diodorus and many others down to Nonnus, can illustrate what we mean. To these come so many other occasions in the public and private life of the Greeks and Romans, for example the extremely characteristic marriage customs of the latter. In a word, it may be said without exaggeration that the love of the symbolic remained a dominant trait of these peoples even at a far-advanced stage of abstraction, and embraced every branch of their doing and living.

The Greek early inquired into the religious belief and worship of Hellenes and barbarians. In Ionia history had indeed proceeded chiefly from the temples, as the fragments of the first attempts at it, and every page of the work of the Father of History, prove. Charon of Lampsacus, for example, had given special attention to the votive offerings in the temples, and Hellanicus of Lesbos had written a work on the priestesses of Hera at Samos. Especially important may have been the latter’s Egyptian Memorabilia (Αἰγυπτιακά), which contained much that was symbolic and mythic 222³⁰⁴. And even if the work of Hecataeus on the philosophy of the Egyptians should have the later scholar of that name as its author³⁰⁵, the lively spirit of inquiry of the active Ionians was still, as other traces show, directed in many ways to the religion and wisdom of the foreign and the native past. The historical work of Herodotus, whose centre is formed by the temples and oracles, lies before us, as noted, as a convincing monument of those efforts.

§. 67.

But with the store of historical material growing daily, and growing beyond measure especially in the time of Alexander the Great, the domains of learning had to be separated more sharply, and so increasingly up to the period at which we closed above. In particular, the history of states and rulers proper had to be separated from such scholarly and artistic inquiries.

Not every subject, to be sure, admitted this 223 strict separation. Under the second Ptolemy, for example, Manetho in his history of the Egyptian dynasties³⁰⁶ still had to touch on much old priestly doctrine and emblem-making. But from Aristotle onward many separate writings on these and similar subjects are already named. From these many we shall now cite a few as examples, arranged by class.

First, the fundamental drive at work in man, which produced all religious institutions, had become an object of special reflection. Religiosity, that pious sense which expressed itself in attachment to the religion of the fathers and in similar signs, and which among the Hellenes was most proper to the Athenians, was made the subject of special works by learned writers. The famous Theophrastus had produced a work of this content³⁰⁷. And even if his equally famous contemporary Theopompus did not treat the subject separately, in his histories the religions and symbolic doctrines of the past were given 224 particular attention³⁰⁸. A work περὶ εὐσεβείας [On Piety] is also ascribed to the wife of Pythagoras, the elder Theano, from which Stobaeus, Cod. CLXII, has preserved a fragment.

Several had written on the highest objects of veneration, and among them some of the first men of Greece. First Theophrastus himself, to whom both commentaries on 225 divine things and three books On the Gods are ascribed. The learned Athenian Apollodorus, the same whose mythological Library we still possess, had composed a work of similar content and title. In these books On the Gods he had covered the origin of worship, the festivals and sanctuaries, the names and formulas proper to the religious cult, the most various forms of religion among Greeks and barbarians, the deities and sacred customs, and finally the secret doctrines, and he had attempted etymological and other interpretations of all of these³⁰⁹.

But it would take us too far from our purpose to list all the writings of this and related content that are ascribed to the learned inquirers among the ancients, and especially 226 to Aristotle³¹⁰ and several of the numerous class of his pupils and successors.

The individual religious practices and institutions had also occasioned many special inquiries. So there were larger works on the festivals, both the Panhellenic and those of single tribes and places. Already the old Hellanicus, for example, had treated a Dorian festival of Apollo Carneius and the victors in its games³¹¹. Aristotle had written on the victors at the Dionysia. He had also treated the hymns at the Dionysia and the Lenaea, and his Didascaliae are often cited by the ancients. These and related subjects many others had explained, 227 and especially several Peripatetics, such as Theophrastus, Hieronymus, Aristoxenus, and Dicaearchus. Of the last alone books on the Dionysia, the Panathenaea, and the festival at Olympia are cited³¹².

§. 68.

Another religious subject that early excited the attention of inquirers was the votive offerings in temples and at other sacred places. On these too there were general and particular writings. A work of one Menetor περὶ ἀναθημάτων [On Votive Offerings] is cited, for example³¹³. Similar works are ascribed to the well-known polymath Polemon: one on the Acropolis at Athens, another on the inscriptions found in Greek cities, and a third on the votive offerings at Lacedaemon³¹⁴. That there were also 228 special writings on the temples and other sanctuaries of Greece needs no particular remark.

Above all, the oracles at home and abroad were described in larger and smaller works. The work of one Philemon of Athens on the various oracles is named, for example. But the oracle at Dodona, and especially the Delphic, had drawn the gaze of historians before all others, as we see partly from Herodotus and partly from the citations of the grammarians. In connection with the Dodonaean oracle, for example, a historian Andron and one Alexander of Pleuron are named, together with Thrasybulus and Acestodorus; and Cornelius Labeo had written on the oracle of the Clarian Apollo³¹⁵.

Here we must lament the loss of a work of Porphyry that must have contained noteworthy reports and reflections, especially on the principles of the priestly institutions and the content of the old oracular wisdom. This is his work 229 On the Philosophy from Oracles, which the ancients cite fairly often³¹⁶. Another philosopher, Oenomaus, had written on the worthlessness of the oracles.

Mantic art too, in general as in particular, had found its expositors. It is known that the Stoics set great store by these means of putting oneself in touch with the deity, and many writings of the kind may therefore have appeared in that school. A book on mantic art is cited even from the famous Panaetius. At least it is certain that he touched on this inquiry, and indeed sceptically, not at all in the spirit of the Stoic system³¹⁷. A work of Chrysippus περὶ χρησμῶν [On Oracles] is also mentioned³¹⁸, just as 230 the adherents of this sect had written much on the interpretation of dreams and other kinds of mantic art.

The subject had been exhausted by writers down to the most particular. We still possess, for example, the book of one Melampus, addressed to King Ptolemy Philadelphus, on divination from twitchings³¹⁹; the dream-book of Artemidorus; the astrological poem of the later Manetho; and similar writings.

§. 69.

Given such widespread inquiry, it need not be expressly remarked that the images of the gods were also explained in separate writings in every respect: historical, artistic, and religious. The last way of considering them was especially favoured by the Neoplatonists, and Porphyry won great fame with his work περὶ ἀγαλμάτων [On Images]. Even a Christian scholar says of it that “from this book one could come to know the mysteries of Egyptian and Hellenic theology”³²⁰.

The more eager such 231 praise makes us for its contents, the more welcome is the account of it that this learned teacher of the Church gives us. He has supplied fairly extensive excerpts, and from them we see that Porphyry had considered the images of the gods, with their variations and attributes, in the order hallowed in Hellenic cult, and so one after another beginning with Zeus. On this occasion he had made extensive inquiries into the nature, form, and attributes of the Greek deities, and into the connection of the sacred symbols of the Greeks with the Egyptian. Here a wide field of theologumena and philosophemes was opened, and how this learned philosopher had cultivated it we can infer both from the epitomes named and from the excerpts in Stobaeus³²¹.

Iamblichus had already taken a narrower, more polemical standpoint, in a work that bears the same title. 232 It seems that his concern was not so much to follow the path of his teacher as to combat Christianity, which was becoming dangerous to image-worship. The reports of Photius on this work, together with other hints among the ancients, lead us to this judgment³²². We have already given above³²³ a sample from this work, together with a remark of Proclus on the same subject, which allows us to infer the spirit of such works.

If on the one hand they supplied important data for the oldest history of religion and for symbolism, and drew back into the light many a proposition of old doctrine that had been put in shadow, it cannot be denied on the other hand that their authors’ striving to outbid the dignity and significance of Christianity with pagan religious tenets makes critical caution necessary in the use of their reports.

§. 70.

Various writings bearing the specific title On Symbols are also cited. 233 We give a few examples. According to the statement of an ancient writer³²⁴, two works of this kind must have attained great authority. Their authors were called Melampus and Polles. That the former is one and the same person as the Melampus named above, we see from the dedication of the work cited there to King Ptolemy, where he says expressly that he had also written on symbols. The second was a native of Aegae in Asia Minor, and had likewise written in Greek two books of Symbolica, in alphabetical order. The more famous two old Greek seers of this and a related name were, the more easily these writers could be confused with them, and so we do in fact find the younger Melampus confused with the old soothsayer of that name, and Polles with the seer Polyidus³²⁵.

How widespread this kind of learned inquiry was too, and how far it also went into particulars, we can infer from several traces among the ancients. In particular, the sound industry of the Alexandrians, and of the inquirers who followed in their 234 footsteps, seems to have taken hold of this branch of the study of antiquity as well. So we find noteworthy passages of the grammarian Didymus cited here and there, and of Dionysius, surnamed the Thracian, a whole separate work on the symbolic explanation of the wheel is cited³²⁶.

We have already remarked above that the old religious institutions, priestly teachings, and monuments of Egypt had always occupied the curiosity of the Greeks, and especially since the founding of that society of scholars at Alexandria. The more mysterious and fragmentary the remains of the old Egyptian religion then still extant, the more material was given to reflection. How greatly did the hieroglyphic writing alone stir the spirit of inquiry! And several Hieroglyphica are named, for example that of Chaeremon in Nero’s time, one by a certain Palaephatus, and others³²⁷; and under 235 the name of Horapollo we still have a small work of this title and content. Other religious phenomena of this remarkable people had also found their interpreters. A certain Nicomachus, for example, had written a work in several books on the festivals of the Egyptians, from which the ancients have preserved noteworthy passages for us³²⁸. Others, it seems, had set themselves a wider plan in this. An Alexandrian philosopher Asclepiades, for example, had not merely composed hymns to the Egyptian gods but had also explained the connection of all religions³²⁹.

§. 71.

Attention was now turned also to the older mode of teaching of the Greeks, in which one noticed an adherence to the Egyptian manner, and especially to that of the Pythagoreans. On the Symbola of this school the most learned men had written works of their own: Aristotle himself, then Androcydes, Alexander Polyhistor, and 236 a younger Anaximander³³⁰. Likewise Pythagorean apophthegms were ascribed to Theano and to Aristoxenus, who in other writings had narrated at length the life of Pythagoras and the fortunes of his society³³¹.

In the same way the esoteric tenets of some other great teachers of philosophy were also discussed in writings of their own. The secret doctrines of Plato, for example, Numenius had examined in a special work³³². Earlier, Pythagoras of Zacynthus had already treated the same theme on a more comprehensive plan, and had written on the secret doctrines 237 of philosophy³³³. Later the learned Porphyry explained the same subject in a similar work³³⁴.

How much theological content the Platonic writings by themselves supplied to the spirit of inquiry is shown by the surviving works of the Neoplatonic school. I recall here only the various orders of gods which, according to their account, Plato had assumed³³⁵. In particular, the myths woven into the writings of this philosopher also gave material for inquiries; and the relative worth of the whole Hellenic store of myths was determined according to philosophical principles, as one believed it more or less compatible with the spirit of speculation, or more or less rich in theological meaning. We content ourselves here with pointing to a few characteristic passages of this kind. Iamblichus, for example, explains himself on several features of the history of the gods and on the relation of their form to their inner meaning; and Proclus, who speaks several times in his writings of the myths of the gods, makes a 238 definite distinction between the myths of the wise and the common legends³³⁶.

These indications make no claim to the name of a literary history of ancient symbolism. They were meant only as reminders of the great extent that this science too attained among the Greeks. For that reason we have also deliberately pointed more to what has been lost in this field than to what we still possess. For the beginning of this work has already shown, and its sequel will show still more, what help the surviving writers of the ancients give us, from the older poets, from Herodotus and the older logographers, down to the later inquirers, among whom the writings of Apollodorus, Diodorus, Pausanias, and Plutarch alone supply a great store of reports.

§. 72.

The Christian centuries that now follow lie properly outside our path. 239 We therefore restrict ourselves here even more than hitherto, and give only some principal data toward a fuller treatment not intended here.

First, it is well known that the Christian religion took over a great deal from paganism, early, and also continuously after it had become dominant. This has already been recalled above (§23), and the sequel will bring us back to it once more. The more violent the struggle with paganism had been until then, the more manifold the mixture with it now often became. How far did that strange fusion often extend, of Christian faith with pagan myth, and of pagan symbols with the holy persons and signs of Christianity! Yet the characters of the patriarchs and the apostles, and especially Christ himself and Mary, with the whole Holy Family, were developed early into a distinct circle of symbolic artistic representation. The various periods of this Christian sculpture and painting, down to their consummation in modern Italy³³⁷, have, as is well known, already occasioned various inquiries, and have recently been considered more closely, especially in their 240 origin, on the basis of surviving monuments. The efforts of German painting in representing Christian religious ideals can be better appreciated in future, now that the attention of connoisseurs has once been drawn to the remains of this kind from the period before Dürer.

The allegorical character that Gothic architecture had assumed and developed, especially in churches, has already been recalled above. It would also lead us too far from our goal if we sought to point out all the encouragement that the religious institutions of the Middle Ages gave to art, and especially to architecture and painting, although sculpture too found its support, partly in connection with architecture and partly on its own. In churches and cemeteries a great field was opened for works of sculpture³³⁸.

Seal rings, too, still gave much occasion for the emblematic and allegorical. How widespread this use was in antiquity is well known, and we need only 241 recall the legends of the seal rings of Minos, Helen, Odysseus, and Polycrates (on the last of which Lessing³³⁹ spent so much learning and acuteness), and the reports of those of Xerxes, Sulla, Julius Caesar, the Emperor Augustus, and many others, to mark out this wide circle of allegory. The Christians now paid homage to this custom too, though often, to be sure, with neglect of the old pure forms, and usually more intent on the significant than on the beautiful. Often, too, they may have wanted merely a sign, for mutual recognition or for comfort in distress. To this class perhaps belong the pisciculi Christianorum [“little fishes of the Christians”] mentioned by Tertullian, which occur on gravestones and seal rings³⁴⁰. Such 242 allegories are closely related to those abbreviations and sigla that the collectors of inscriptions, Gruter, Reinesius, and others, have taken from pagan and Christian monuments. To recall here only the Christian ones, there belong to them, for example, that Θκ for Θεοτόκος [“Mother of God”], Χω for Χριστῷ [“to Christ”], Φιλοχυ for Φιλοχρίστου [“of a lover of Christ”], and many others, together with the monogram of Christ himself, which occurs so frequently³⁴¹.

To this period of later symbolism also belong those representations that are commonly called Panthei, because the figure of a single deity was made the bearer of the most significant features belonging to all the rest, the attributes of many other deities being given to one alone. Of these too the art collections contain many examples. Here the so-called Abraxas must also be mentioned in a word. They were long taken for ancient Egyptian works, until better-grounded research discovered that they are inventions of the Gnostics and Basilidians, by which the members of these sects made themselves known to one another. This class of allegories is, as is well known, very large. 243 Montfaucon has given a whole series of illustrations³⁴².

§. 73.

Thus religion was continuously, and in every respect, favourable to symbolism and allegory. But in civil life too both continued to flourish. First chivalry, in the service of religion and otherwise as well: how many occasions did it not supply for emblematic representations! The choice of armorial ornament, after all, almost always had such a meaning.

The pilgrimages, and the Crusades occasioned in part by them, were extraordinarily fruitful in inventions of this kind. This is not the place to consider the manifold use made of the chief sign of Christianity, the cross, especially from the time of Constantine the Great into the later period 244³⁴³. The pilgrim’s shirt marked with the cross, the pilgrim’s scarf, the pilgrim’s wallet, and the staff were so many speaking signs of the purpose and spirit of those frequent journeys to the holy places; and the palm branch, set up by a priest’s hand on the altar of the church at home, was the sign of their happy completion³⁴⁴. The expeditions to the Holy Land, often undertaken with pomp by kings and princes, were naturally still more productive for emblem-making, just as a great number of legends arose from them.

To this belong also the origin and use of allegorical signs in all the chivalric institutions of the Middle Ages, the influence of the tournaments on them, feudalism with its forms, and the introduction and importance of the imperial insignia. Of the value often set on such signs in the Middle Ages, many examples can be gathered from the historians of this period³⁴⁵. Later too 245 people remained devoted to this love of the allegorical; indeed, with the sixteenth century it seemed to revive anew. The greatest princes of this time often chose such speaking signs for themselves, beside the customary insignia of their rank, and usually with significant inscriptions. So, for example³⁴⁶, Charles the Fifth had the two Pillars of Hercules with the inscription Ulterius;^a Queen Margaret of Navarre the sunflower; Catherine de’ Medici the rainbow; and the famous Lorenzo de’ Medici three feathers, white, green, and red, alluding to fidelity, hope, and love. Though only a few of these emblems may deserve praise for their invention, they were still often characteristic signs of their owners’ way of thinking. It was not yet customary then to consult in such cases the surest guides, the ancients; at least their works of art were not yet regarded with this purpose.

In the same period allegory took a more ethical direction among the Germans, in keeping with the earnestness of their national character. With the progress of the Reformation the symbolic, as the expression of religious mysteries, had to disappear more and more; 246 and if about the same time Raphael reached the highest stage of art-symbolism in representing holy persons and events, and Albrecht Dürer in his paintings and other works suggested the religious through meaningful allegory, as the recently published Christian-mythological drawings of this master prove among other things,^b the mind of the Germans, especially of those who favoured the Reformation, was nonetheless directed toward the improvement of state and morals. The old love of the vivid therefore expressed itself in emblematic representations of a moral and political kind. Indeed, allegory now often had to render sensible even the newly recognized truth itself.

A great writer of our nation, who with his comprehensive mind finds even this expression of German power not childish and immature but worthy and deserving of consideration, takes occasion from the general prevalence of this mode of representation at the time to call that age of the Reformation the emblematic age, and gives hints on it well worth taking to heart³⁴⁷. In fact the greatest men, who in clear reflection and pure spirituality of thought have scarcely their equal, have also gladly paid homage to this 247 naive custom of antiquity. Even Leibniz belongs to this class. We have before us one of his treatises, on whose title page he sought to make its difficult content vivid and to explain it by means of a so-called emblem.

Sign-allegory proper has gradually disappeared more and more, on coins as well as on seal rings. In the case of seals, the introduction of coats of arms may have had a large share in this, since so-called canting arms counted for less than the others³⁴⁸. On the other hand, there has also been a return toward antiquity, especially since Caylus in France, and among the Germans Winckelmann and Lessing, drew attention in their writings to the value of ancient forms and to the simplicity and purity of the thoughts that animate them. The good fortune of the Herculaneum discoveries, the finding of so many vases, and the multiplication of reproductions of every kind have at the same time supplied a fine store of images, which could not but contribute to the purification of the symbolic.

§. 74.

248 Under the circumstances noted, one will expect that writers since the restoration of learning also sought, for their part, to work up allegory in books of their own. But in most work of this kind the will is more to be praised than the execution. Just as in choosing allegorical representations people preferred to follow their own ideas rather than look to the remains of antiquity and to the descriptions of them among the ancients themselves, so in theory too they followed least of all the simple principles of the Greeks.

A truly striking example is supplied here by the attempts, in part highly ludicrous, made partly earlier and partly still at the end of the eighteenth century, to explain the figurative representations on the two well-known golden horns found in Jutland. Of these attempts the newest learned interpreter of the horns, Müller, gives a critical account in his richly informative antiquarian inquiry, p. 6 ff. of the German translation.^c

Most often it was still the Latin poets who were consulted. There were naturally individual exceptions here too, and one or another took in a wider circle of Greek writers. But on the whole, what Winckelmann remarks in the first chapter of his Versuch einer Allegorie [Essay on Allegory] holds in the fullest sense. The same scholar has there passed 249 a severe judgment on the three most-read writers of this kind, Pierius Valerianus, Caesar Ripa, and Boudard, especially on the last two. And after closer inspection of these works ourselves, we must acknowledge that judgment as wholly just. Ripa, just as if there were no ancient writer in the world, had taken his material from the moderns, in whom the age immediately following the restoration of learning was very rich.

Among these moderns the Italian humanist Alciatus, of great merit in epigraphy, distinguished himself. He was more familiar with the ancients than most of the rest, recalled them more often, and did not go wrong so frequently as others; and the many editions of his Emblemata, several of which we have before us ourselves, show that his age was receptive to such instruction. Others now followed this path with unequal calling and success. A great number of writings would have to be named, if completeness of bibliography could be our aim here, even by writers more or less distinguished by other merits: such as Hadrianus Junius, Emblemata et Aenigmata (Leiden 1585); Sambucus, Emblemata (Leiden 1584); Laurentius Pignorius, Symbolicae Epistolae (Padua 1629); Nicolaus Caussinus, Electorum Symbolorum et Parabolarum Syntagma (Paris 1618), and his Polyhistor Symbolicus (Cologne 1631); likewise Heraeus, Inscriptiones et Symbola (Nuremberg 250 1721); and the Emblemes nouveaux (Frankfurt 1617). To these are added in more recent times the five dissertations of the meritorious Purmann, de Symbolorum studio [On the Study of Symbols] (Frankfurt am Main 1771–73). In them a beginning has already been made in using the discoveries and writings of the day in the field of ancient art, even if in the theory itself the principles of the moderns are followed more than those of the ancients.

Besides these there is a considerable number of writings whose purpose is practical instruction for artists, such as the Sinnbild-Kunst [Art of Emblems] and the Sinnbilder-Cabinet [Cabinet of Emblems] (Nuremberg 1733), and the Ikonologisches Wörterbuch [Iconological Dictionary] (Gotha 1759). The false standpoint from which these guides mostly proceeded produced in Johann Winckelmann, as is well known, the resolve to make these so often misleading guides dispensable by a practical work of his own. How much the great man achieved in his Versuch einer Allegorie is likewise known, even if on the other hand this work might take the lowest place among his writings. He hurried on too quickly to the examples, without recalling the general concepts that were already connected with symbolism in classical antiquity, especially in the religious sense. But even here the merit remains his of being the first among the Germans to recall the models of antiquity again, effectively and without prejudice, and of having turned 251 the steps of artists from false paths³⁴⁹.

So much in general. If we wished to touch on particulars too, this would give material for a lengthy discussion. That age of reawakened letters deserved the name of the emblematic precisely because in state and household, as in the affairs of the church, it took in allegorically everything that seemed in any way capable of such representation. Hence also those collections, to recall only a few, such as that of Julius Wilhelm Zincgref (of Heidelberg), Emblemata ethico-politica (Heidelberg 1666). Of the same author we also have the work worth reading, Der Teutschen scharpfsinnige kluge Sprüch, Apophthegmata genannt [The Sharp-Witted, Wise Sayings of the Germans, Called Apophthegms] (Strasbourg 1628, and often reprinted). There are also Vaenius’s Emblemata amoris divini (Antwerp 1650) and his Emblemata Horatiana (Antwerp 1607).

A good presumption of no common reading in the Greek and Roman writers is also raised by the work of Johann Heinrich Ursinus of Speyer entitled Sylva Theologiae Symbolicae [A Forest of Symbolic Theology] (Nuremberg 252 1765 [sic]),^d in which two hundred sayings of the Bible are explained by emblems drawn from the whole circle of antiquity. Even if the idea of such a union of the pagan with the Christian has become more foreign to us, the book still delights through many a fine thought and through intimate acquaintance with the best of the ancient classical world.

This ingenuity in the representations of that time is sometimes met with even where invention and art do not recall the ancients at all. We have particular examples of this in view, of a kind that may still now and then charm anyone. Compare, among others, only von Eckhart’s Erklärung eines alten Kleinodienkästleins aus dem Ebnerischen Cabinete zu Nürnberg [Explanation of an Old Jewel Casket from the Ebner Cabinet at Nuremberg] (Nuremberg 1725). But, as remarked, an immeasurable field opens here for the lover of the antiquities of the fatherland.

§. 75.

We must still say a few words about mythic lore, both as to its material and as to its treatment, since the great Migration of Peoples. Since that event and since the dominion of Christianity in the West, the store of myths had been changed extraordinarily. A great part of the old pagan legends vanished from memory, the more the study of the ancient writers was neglected. In return, much was preserved in the memory of the people. 253 Part of it had earlier penetrated, by paths not wholly known to us, into the ancestral seats of the nations that conquered the Roman Empire. Part of it had been kept in memory here, in their new dwellings, by the southern and western peoples, from the Greek and Roman past.

This is a rich subject for inquiries of its own. Much would have to be discussed here. First, the relation of the Germanic religion to Norse mythology as it appears in the Younger and Elder Edda, and whatever else may come into consideration here. Then the migrations of the Norse and Germanic peoples, their transplanting into the Roman Empire, and the influence of Christianity. Likewise the mixtures and relations of the most various mythic elements, and in particular the separation of legend from tradition, so far as this may still be possible, given the loss of so many sources and the early, intimate fusion of the most various components.

Various inquirers have already given this subject their attention, and they cannot be cited here. I recall only one of the newest and richest treatises³⁵⁰, and especially 254 its mythological part. There, among other things, attention is drawn to the likeness between the inner course of development of Norse mythic lore and that of the Greek; to that wonderful shimmering-through of Asiatic and Greek legends in the myths of the North and in the German heroic poems of the Middle Ages; and to other noteworthy points. For in this newer world too the wild-grown heroic poem maintains its old mythic character, and supplies the richest material of old legends and traditions. Several poems of this kind also bear witness to the influence of the Crusades on the traditions and opinions of the western peoples, on which occasion many an invention of the Orient again wandered over to us.

The field becomes immeasurable if everything is also to be weighed here that, as doctrine and opinion, determined the way of thinking of the nations and in living transmission gained a thousandfold shape. Who could touch, even in survey, all the branches into which the spiritual life of the newer peoples spread from the fall of the Roman Empire through the middle centuries? There is that treasure of truths and experiences which now 255 is stamped in a simple, vigorous maxim; now goes from mouth to mouth as legend or fairy tale; now comes before the eye in natural images and in the characters of animals, and is made a rule of conduct by a German Aesop as a German ainos; and now, as in Reineke the Fox, is developed by a poet into a meaningful epic, in which all the estates behold, as in a mirror, their instructive and warning image. Then there are the dramas and festival plays of that time down to the period of the Reformation and later; the chronicles and lives of heroes and other distinguished persons, down to the Weisskunig and later works; the speeches and sermons, and the other writings of that age. What a mine of older legend and doctrine for the connoisseur!

Here too, to touch only on something from German literature, various preliminary works can give the mythologist occasion for further reflection. A small but richly informative work, Die Teutschen Volksbücher [The German Chapbooks] by J. Görres (Heidelberg 1807), widens our view over the great domain of popular belief. And the Grundriß einer Geschichte der Sprache und Literatur der Deutschen [Outline of a History of the Language and Literature of the Germans] by Erduin Julius Koch (Berlin 1795) shows the great wealth of our nation in mythic poems, as in other works of the mind.

§. 76.

256 Finally, the view and treatment of ancient mythology since the restoration of learning, so various as it has been, must be mentioned. If the thousandfold shaping of the old religion and legend gave occasion here to the most various modes of conception, then on the other hand certain fundamental forms and features that ancient myth displays had to invite the scientific spirit to ever new attempts to bind the whole into a systematic unity and to explain it from one principle. How much has not been attempted and rejected in this respect, from that revival of the classical world of myth to the present day!

Scarcely had Giovanni Boccaccio, in the fourteenth century, made the attempt in his Genealogia Deorum to set out the mythology of classical paganism in its connection, when already in the fifteenth century the study of Plato and Aristotle, the institutions connected with it, and the quarrels of the Platonists and Aristotelians exerted their influence on the study of mythology too. In this period the merit remains Marsilio Ficino’s of having greatly widened the view, in his eighteen books de theologia Platonica as in his other writings. He also directed it to those myths that belong rather to the philosophical ones and lay outside the circle of most of the classical 257 poets.

If the character of these older inquirers always remains venerable, for the innocence and grandeur of their endeavours, they nonetheless lacked much that only advanced criticism and better-grounded interpretation could supply, as the necessary groundwork for mythological research. Later, philological learning has had to serve as the prop of the most various systems. At first the chief endeavour was to bring the myths of pagan antiquity into agreement with Judaism and Christianity. That system, which has lately found adherents again, according to which all polytheistic religions were regarded as a degeneration from Hebrew monotheism, was already put forward earlier with an outlay of wide learning. We cannot leave unmentioned here the most comprehensive and still very important work of the famous Gerhard Vossius, de Theologia gentili et Physiologia Christiana, sive de origine ac Progressu Idololatriae, Libri IX [On Gentile Theology and Christian Physiology, or On the Origin and Progress of Idolatry, in Nine Books] (Amsterdam 1642, and often since, also in his Works).

Gradually the most various attempts were made to reduce the multiplicity of the store of myths to a systematic unity. What had already been undertaken by the scholars of antiquity was now renewed. Now, as there with Euhemerus, the historical principle prevailed, turned 258 now this way, now that, from Bochart down to Banier and Hüllmann. Now ethics or politics was set at the head of the inquiry, as in the famous Francis Bacon’s book de sapientia veterum [On the Wisdom of the Ancients] (Amsterdam 1688), not to mention other works of this kind.

In particular, the expansion of natural science in modern times exerted a great influence. Earlier people had believed they could find in the symbols and myths of antiquity a key to alchemy, and in turn explain the myths from alchemy. Now the whole body of myths was traced back, now to astronomy, now to chemistry and physics. The astronomical mode of explanation has been attempted by no one with more comprehensive knowledge and more acuteness than by Dupuis in his Origine de tous les cultes (Paris 1754 [sic] ff.).^e Since ancient reckoning and celebration of the year, as well as ancient knowledge of the stars, without any doubt form a main element of the whole of mythology, one need not wonder that so eloquent and insightful a defender of the astronomical system has so far found numerous adherents, most of whom, however, use him more often than they name him.

In no field, too, has so extensive and often so free a use been made of etymology as in this one, from Bochart down to the most recent time: now in defence of the historical system, as by Bryant, now of the others. All the resources of etymology and the study of language, 259 together with a great store of astronomical propositions, have lately been brought to bear by the bold and original Kanne in his calendrical-mythological system. Even one who is far from giving himself up to the whole of this system will still be surprised and delighted by many a happy thought.

These artificial edifices³⁵¹ were raised partly before the time when the learned critics of the Dutch and German schools corrected the documents of mythology and grounded their interpretation on proper rules, and partly during it. Through more exact study of the oldest writers of the Greeks, especially the poets, extraordinarily much light has been given. And if, according to the principles of sound criticism and interpretation, the more neglected sources of myth, the writings of the historians and philosophers, are now also deemed worthy of due attention, there is hope that 260 gradually, if not a systematic unity (which can hardly be expected here), then at least a freer and higher view over the whole field of ancient cult will be won. This holds especially if help should also come from another side, through more critical inquiries into the religions of the Orient.