Egyptian Fundamental Concepts in Their Connection with Asiatic and Greek Religious Ideas and Symbols

§. 19.

Not337 only geographically did Egypt form the centre of the cultivated ancient world; not only historically did it become, as already indicated above, a great gathering place of the most various peoples from Alexander onward. Doctrinally too, in its earlier faith and worship, it joins the basic threads of thoughts that run through all the cultivated religions of antiquity. We will follow some of them briefly, and so at the same time prepare our main consideration of Hither Asian and Greek symbolism and mythology. For this reason we keep here, for the present, more to generalities; the special proofs will be supplied in the second part.

The Egyptian view of life in its influence on religious doctrines and philosophemes.

§. 20.

First, the national cult of the Egyptian, his realm of the dead, and the views of life 338 connected with it: what a fullness of concepts do they not contain! These are concepts which, even if they did not originally sprout in Egypt, were chiefly transplanted from there, and later cultivated there again, and they contain the seed of the most important religious and philosophical systems. Then the Egyptian priestly system, as sketched hypothetically above, with its metaphysical Athor at the head, and in its speculative development: does it not appear again in many priestly dogmas of Middle Asia, of now more, now less metaphysical character? And does it not shimmer through even in the popular worship of Syrian Sabaeism? There, to be sure, everything already coincides more with the Egyptian national worship, since the ancient Night has now been lowered to physical night and has put on the earthly garment of Isis.

One may, as Zoëga does (see above), have the great national god Osiris arise from Theban local worship, and rise only gradually from a hero to a perfected god. So much remains certain: in him is given the fundamental concept of a suffering and dying deity. On this thought hangs the whole Egyptian year, with its festival periods and with the greatest part of the general temple worship, as the oldest and the latest monuments show. That this fundamental concept is best explained from the Indian 339 doctrine of the wretchedness of existence, into which pure perfection has sunk down and in which it is wrapped and fettered, has already been remarked by a writer of genius²⁵.

This principle has the doctrine of the transmigration of souls as its immediate consequence; and with the proposition that everything is a sad sinking down from the perfect blessedness of the divine being is also joined the other proposition of a gradual return to God. It is not our purpose here to attempt an inquiry into the probable connection of that dogma with a colonial link between India and Egypt. The national shaping of that idea, already indicated above, must also be taken into account. By mummifying, the Egyptian clearly showed that he held the firmer parts of the body and its shape worthy of the longest possible preservation, and let that curse strike only the, as it were, more material belly. With these conceptions the cruder multitude joined a cruder delusion, that the firm body was properly the person, and the like.

We wish only to draw attention to this: that national idea of the suffering and dying deity, together with the doctrine of 340 metempsychosis, in the more cultivated form of the priestly system and joined with that higher view of life, became in the mysteries and schools of the Greeks the mother of dominant tenets that reached down into the latest times. If in this survey, up to §21, something must be remarked that we have touched on elsewhere in relation to the special myth of Dionysus, comparison will show that we have not only chosen a more general standpoint here, but have also sought to give new data from continued inquiry.

From Egypt the Orphics derived that chief proposition of their system, the wretchedness of this life: a proposition to which the Greek poets already alluded early, as Pindar in the well-known fragment where man is called a wretched, foolish child of a day, and then the greatest masters of the Attic stage, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides²⁶. To these a whole series of philosophers attaches, from Aristotle, who places that proposition in the remotest antiquity, down to the collector of philosophical sermons, Stobaeus.

341 We recall further the Egyptian realm of the dead, in which everyone recognizes the unmistakable model of the Greek. And the Greek language had preserved Egyptian fundamental concepts in memory in some names of this circle of ideas. Not only the boatman of Amenthes but Amenthes himself, as a separate personified being, was denoted by the name Charon. The Egyptian language may originally have meant by it the silent one, as Jablonski believes, or the dark wide space may have been the basic thought, with which the name Orcus too was connected. Nonetheless the Greek sought another root in his own language, to bring religious secret doctrines of death and the underworld into harmony with the usual designations of these concepts.

These were old memories of a quite different view of life from the one usual in the public judgment of the Greek. That king of the underworld who devours all and rules all was called by him Χάρων. He derived this name from χάρω (χαίρω, “to rejoice”), and called the god the joyful one. This name was only a designation of that old Egyptian tradition, inherited from Thracian cult, of the blessedness of death and the misery of this earthly life. It was a formula of Egyptian-Orphic secret doctrine, and through the root word χάω [“to gape”] it was also bound up with the other chief idea of the ever-open, 342 wide Amenthes.

Meanwhile, with the cheerful popular belief, and the prevailing conception of a sensuous splendour of that Olympian heaven of the gods, life had long since taken on another meaning for the Greek. Quite other than Egyptian elements had also flowed into the still soft mass of malleable Hellenism; and so gradually that name, the joyful god, was found incompatible with the concept of the devouring, cruel Orcus. Hence now that more far-fetched explanation of a euphemism lying in the name: “he is called the joyful one, as one who never rejoices, and rejoices in no one”²⁷. But language, more faithful than human wit, had not let those old conceptions perish, and myth too, so often in close alliance with it, kept some of these traces in abiding memory; not to mention that the mysteries for their part propagated the doctrine of death in the old sense, as we shall show below in treating the Orphic and Eleusinian institutions.

Here only a few pointers to the coincidence of the names of death and sleep in the collective concept of the 343 beatifying and the gladdening. A stadium’s distance from the tomb of Epaminondas, Zeus was venerated in a temple under the epithet Charmon. The god of the underworld bore just the same name²⁸. So too of Hermes, whose close relation to the realm of the dead derives from Egyptian religion, the epithet χαρμόφρων, the gladdening and glad, is recorded²⁹. It is further noteworthy in these circumstances that Heracles, precisely in that labour in which he fetches Cerberus up from Hades, is called χάροψ, even if we grant that in other relations this word and the related χαροπός may sometimes denote a definite colour; in this connection Riemer’s remark on Schneider’s dictionary deserves examination.

And are there perhaps also allusions to those ideas in the Homeric poem³⁰ which marries one of the Charites to 344 Hephaestus, the possessor of certain telluric powers, and the other to the god of sleep, Hypnos? Homer could join the gladdening goddesses to Sleep and to the telluric fire-god without connecting any but a historical sense with it himself; but a myth handed down to him could have a more significant trace as its basis, without its further interesting the singer of the Iliad.

But we need not dwell on the doubtful. Quite beyond doubt, the god of sleep bears epithets that mark him as a benefactor. In the temple of Aesculapius at Sicyon one saw a statue of Hypnos which bore the surname ἐπιδότης [“the bountiful”]. This more general name, which also belonged to another genius and even to Zeus, is explained by the narrator³¹ from the blessings that these beings give to men. We need not even recall the predicate σωτὴρ ψυχῆς [“saviour of the soul”] given to Sleep in some Orphic hymns³², where he is also called the blessed, because these poems already betray more definite Platonic features, if these in 345 turn do not themselves rest, as is very probable, on older modes of conception.

But the deities of death here and there among the Greeks bear a name that seems taken from sleep. Polypnos and Πολύυπνος is the name, in a ἱερὸς λόγος [“sacred story”], of the genius who led the god of joyful life down to the underworld³³.

Above all, what matters here is the conception, running through a main branch of Greek religion, that the gods of death are also the good gods. This conception seems to have taken deep root, with myth, in the language of the Greeks, and even reaches over to Latium, as the Roman ideas connected with the Dii Manes show. But these modes of conception prevail especially in the poems gathered under the name of the Orphic poems, as could be shown from many features. To whatever 346 age most of them may belong, they were opposed to the Greek popular cult, and Egyptian priestly dogmas in particular prevailed in them. If, then, in them, beside other names and marks grounded in the Egyptian view of life, Hades, or the Greek Amenthes, is also expressly called εὐβουλεύς, the beneficently counselling one³⁴, we may not doubt that we find here the expression of an Egyptian dogma.

§. 21.

Those symbols and concepts of the suffering and dying god, which already occur on the oldest monuments of Egypt: how many forms had they not passed through before, through the tradition of the Orphics and Platonists in Alexandria, they were wedded to Christian conceptions! Even in ancient Egypt the death of Osiris may have been understood very differently at different times and according to differences of cultivation. Yet the fundamental thought of this god, as giver of the year’s blessing and as judging and pardoning ruler of the dead, always remained in li347ving memory. Osiris, the god who had gone down to death, later called Serapis, together with Anubis and Hermes who conducted him, were as gods of the underworld at the same time the friendly, the good gods.

The chief concept of the blessing owed to them was naturally that of the giving of water through the yearly Nile flood. This feature too lasted on with the lasting need; and the longer it had been preserved, the more it was regarded as an essential thought. Hence not only did Hermes Psychopompus carry that water urn (see above), but the pious Egyptian still prayed for every dead person to his great god of blessing: May Osiris give thee cool water³⁵.

We will only recall here, in a word, the most probable origin of the Greek idea of drinking from the river Lethe, by which earthly life sank down into the background of night and forgetting: a conception that Greek poetry knew how to develop so charmingly. 348 May we wonder, then, if the idea of the happiness of the dead under the very image of refreshing water, once it had been nationalized among the Greeks, received a kind of general sanction that is still noticeable on many monuments³⁶? This image propagated itself into the Christian centuries; and that old view of death, developed in the schools of Neoplatonism, which was cultivated especially in Egypt, became a chief root of Christian dogmas. And in this time of rising Christianity the water jug, that old attribute of the pardoning judge of the dead, is very often named as a characteristic implement of the anchorite of the Libyan and Theban desert, dead to the world³⁷. These glimpses may suffice as an example of the long-lasting dominion of the Egyptian way of thinking.

Propagation of Egyptian and Asiatic myths and symbols.

§. 22.

349 Isis seeks her lost husband in Byblos. Whether she sought and found him in the papyrus plant (ἐν βύβλῳ)³⁸, we do not ask. Enough that the Phoenicians and Syrians appropriated the Egyptian god. Legend knew how to tell of the papyrus head that every year, at the festival of Adonis, swam from Egypt over the sea to them; and that Phoenician city immortalized Isis on its coins³⁹. In other words, these peoples of Middle and Hither Asia had worship and deities that were like the Egyptian ones named, in chief concepts and chief images, so that they were led to identify what belonged to the neighbouring people with their native deities.

This leads us to the question: which are these ideas, and which fundamental concepts of these religions of Middle and Hither Asia are 350 so akin to the Egyptian that they could be joined with them without constraint? Or, in other words, how do the highest Egyptian beings, Athor, Neith, Isis, and Osiris, relate to Astaroth, Mylitta, Alitta, Baal and Baltis, and whatever the names of those Syrian-Phoenician and Arabian deities may be?

First, in these religions a dualism of the sexes comes forward in the beings venerated, with all the determinations belonging to it. There is a sun god as active principle, as heavenly ruler, as mighty, strong fertilizer. Beside him stands the moon goddess as female principle, as receiver; hence she is also sometimes conceived as the fertilized earth.

Secondly, that dualism of the sexes is not seldom placed in these cults in one person, who thereby becomes a man-woman (ἀρσενόθηλυς) or a woman-man, according as one sex or the other prevails. To this belongs the old Ἀφρόδιτος⁴⁰, originating in Assyria and Syria and venerated on Cyprus; to this also the Ἀδαγόους⁴¹ venerated by the Phrygians.

351 Thirdly: just as that double sex often appears united in one person, so conversely, where there are two persons, one of them sometimes disappears in popular worship. It steps back into the background, and often only the female principle is celebrated, though often with brighter or darker references to a male one. How such cults, introduced into the series of the Greek theogony, had to let themselves be changed more and more, and in doing so often lost their old significance entirely, will be discussed in the second part, under these individual deities themselves.

§. 23.

Here we look back to Egypt and ask how these Asiatic fundamental concepts and combinations relate to the great deities of that land named above. Let us first attend to the names. If we run through their series, Moloch, Adon, Bel (Baal), Baltis, Belsamen (Οὐρανία), Astarte (Astaroth), Mylitta, Alitta, Lilith, Ma, Ammar, Mitra⁴², and whatever else they may all be called, 352 this offers us the first point of comparison.

We will not dwell here on the fact that several of these names coincide with the names of sacred beings of Upper Asia⁴³. Nor will we repeat here what a linguistically learned inquirer has lately remarked: that several of these names may have been propagated from Phoenician tradition, through Celtiberian colonies, even into the north of Europe 353⁴⁴. Our purpose here is only to draw attention to the chief concepts in these Asiatic names of gods that admit of comparison with the Egyptian.

Three ideas chiefly come forward: that of night, and of what coincides with it in lasting usage, even still among Greek poets, the moon; the idea of dominion; and that of the mother and bearer. All these relations are found again in the priestly and national deities of Egypt. How often Osiris, and later Serapis, are pointed to as the great ruler and king, and Isis as the royal mistress, needs no special remark; and this concept is moreover to be counted among the general ones found in most national cults. But that, as remarked above, the supreme being of the Egyptian priestly theology, Athor, most probably means night, deserves attention just as much as that the fundamental concept of fullness was found in the name Isis, and that in the Egyptian name of the planet Mars, Ἑρτωσι, the meaning of fertilizer was found.

Especially noteworthy, however, is the report of Plutarch⁴⁵ that 354 Isis bore among the Egyptians a definite name which coincides in root and meaning with that third point. She was called Μούθ, the mother; and with this is to be joined the other remark of the same writer, that among the same people the moon too bore the name mother of the world. Here surely no detailed deduction is needed to point out the parallels that offer themselves of their own accord. Everyone will think at once of the Phrygian Μᾶ, by which name she was designated as the great mother, as the good mother of the mountain; of those Mylitta and Alitta, of that Lilith and γενέτειρα [“she who gives birth”], of the magna mater [“great mother”]; in short, of all those beings of Middle and Hither Asia in which the concept of the mother prevails. This concept was then propagated through the Greek religions 355 as far as Latium, and as far as that Natio of the Ardeates.

§. 24.

Now we must consider the fundamental concepts and their combinations. We remarked above how, according to the testimony of the oldest monuments, Isis first comes forward as great goddess in the Egyptian national worship while Osiris still stands as a human benefactor in the background of that old temple cult; and how then the hero received among the gods shares more and more the highest honour with the female divine being in the public cult. Thus: a dualism forming gradually in separate persons, and the female principle at first predominant.

Then too the Egyptian festival observance in the public worship knows that dualism which is found in all these cults of Middle and Hither Asia. Just as the Syrian and Phoenician at his feast of Thammuz, and the Phrygian at the festival of Cybele, has two essential parts, a period of lament with all the signs of mourning for the lost god, and days of joy after the god is found again, so that losing and refinding, and their expression, mourning and joy, are the basis of the public festival of Osiris.

But that special relation too which places in the female being, beside the passive powers, 356 active, male ones as well, was known to the Egyptian religion. According to Plutarch⁴⁶, Osiris united with the moon in spring and fertilized it, and the moon then spread fertility through the air and fertilized the generative seeds, which set the whole of vegetation in activity. The Persians too had the same conception, at least according to the Zendavesta. According to it, the moon is the receiver and keeper of the fertility communicated to it by the bull (by the sun). To this refer prayers such as the following: “I praise and call upon the exalted Bull, the Bull that makes the grass grow in abundance,” and so on; “I praise the divine Mithra, exalted above the pure worlds, and the moon, the keeper of the seed of the Bull”⁴⁷. Here, then, as in the Egyptian Isis, the moon appears in a double relation: a passive one to the fertilizing bull or impregnating sun, and an active one to the receiving and impregnated earth⁴⁸.

That in 357 this double nexus the germ of a threefold symbolism was given, we will remark provisionally only in a word. If the concept of the male was brought forward, a Deus mas [“male god”] was given, as ruling god of nature; in the opposite case, a mother of all, a mistress and closer of nature. The union of both qualities in one being produced androgynous representations and attributes.

But each of these relations admitted a gradation, which can be shown in the Egyptian religion as well as in the others. So, for example, to look back first to the Egyptian: the chief feature coming forward in the festival of Osiris, that of the god’s member of generation sunk by Typhon in the Nile⁴⁹, could carry the merely physical and local sense that during the Nile flood covering the land the workings of vegetation were checked and held back. On the other hand, one could find in it an image of more general periods of the earth, and people at least sought it there: namely the 358 proposition that the refinding of the limbs of the mutilated Osiris, except the member of generation, had no other meaning than this: that the earth had indeed kept the power to bring forth the forms and kinds of animal species already known, but was no longer able to produce new kinds.

Still more stages of this kind could be shown, if the comparison of Osiris with the Eswara of the Indian religion⁵⁰ that several have made were first properly proved. But the Egyptian priestly system, in its speculative character, at least as it appears in Eusebius, points to a still higher meaning of those fundamental concepts. To that deity Athor, or the ancient Night, wholly metaphysical determinations are given, such as only the Parabrahma of the Indians can have. In the same way the double-sexed is to be regarded in Pthas as man-woman, and in Neith as woman-man, to which then the subordinate hermaphrodite Phanes first attaches; and here again parallels could be drawn with those metaphysical predicates of the Indian Trimurti and other ideas of the systems there. But we will rather recall here, provisionally, that to those higher theolo359gumena of all-sufficiency and so on laid down in the Hermaphroditus, which are found again in the Chaldaean and other Asiatic cosmogonies, the popular worship of Middle and Hither Asia gave the lower meaning of a union of the active and passive generative power, taken physically.

§. 25.

This leads us to the symbols of those fundamental concepts of Asiatic religion in relation to the Egyptian. Here too we will first look chiefly backward, and add from the Egyptian some things that we have deliberately saved until now.

This symbolism embraces the whole circle of the concepts set out above: sun, moon, fertilizer and bearer, generation and generative power; and it interweaves itself with all the relations of these reciprocal concepts. First, the checked and lost generative power was denoted either crudely by phallic attributes, as we have seen above, or plants had to serve to render it sensible: for example, in the Cybelean circle of images, the pine and the fruits of this and similar kinds of trees⁵¹; in the Ado360nis worship, the lettuce, because of its harmful effect on male potency⁵². These few examples may suffice for now.

On the other hand, the relation of the male principle to the female, their mutual union, or often their fusion in one person, was made vivid in the most manifold ways. First, by names. In §12 of this book we have already drawn attention to the universality of this custom.

Here we remark, with regard to the Asiatic deities, that the male and female were often indicated in the most natural way by one and the same word, by means of an appended inflection. So, for example, the Phoenicians created from Baal or Bel a female deity as well: Baa361leth, Baltis, Beltis⁵³. Or, in Greek, according as one wished to denote the male or the female being, only the article was changed⁵⁴. For that the Greek language too followed that custom in its Ἀφρόδιτος and other designations from this circle is well known.

But here too symbolism spoke not only to the ear, but also to the eye; and in this it was inexhaustible. As for the Egyptian, the ancients tell us that a relation of the moon to the sun was indicated by the Cynocephalus, and so Isis appears, presumably with the head of this animal, on the Bembine Table⁵⁵. The union of the male and female powers in one being the 362 Asiatic cult denoted still more plainly by an actual sexual union in a single pictorial body, as we partly remarked above and shall partly have occasion to remark in what follows.

Whether Egypt too presented the androgynous to the eye in its public works of art, I do not venture for the present to determine, even though by analogy it is probable. The allusions in the Orphic poems still extant do not suffice to answer this definite question about plastic symbols. There the moon, with clear allusion to Egyptian conceptions such as we reported above from Plutarch, is called man-woman⁵⁶; and still more definitely, in another hymn, “the queen rich in mysteries, Mise (Μίση), who leads the dance with the mourning Isis by the Nile,” is designated with this epithet⁵⁷.

But attention to the temple worship, as the most faithful keeper of old ideas and symbols, may lead us somewhat further. And here a late writer⁵⁸ gives us a very 363 welcome help, which is the less to be overlooked since he cites a learned inquirer of an older time as witness: “Pollentemque Deum Venerem,” so run the words, “non Deam. Signum etiam hujus est Cypri barbatum corpore, sed veste muliebri, cum sceptro ac statura viri. Et putant eandem marem ac foeminam esse. Aristophanes eam ἀφρόδιτον apellat. Levinus etiam sic ait: Venerem igitur almum adorans, sive foemina sive mas est, ita uti alma noctiluca est. Philochorus quoque in Atthide eandem affirmat esse lunam. Nam et ei sacrificium facere viros cum veste muliebri, mulieres cum virili, quod eadem et mas existimatur et foemina” [“‘And the powerful god Venus, not goddess.’ There is also an image of her on Cyprus, bearded in body but in woman’s dress, with the sceptre and stature of a man; and they think she is at once male and female. Aristophanes calls her Aphroditos. Laevius too says: ‘Worshipping, then, nurturing Venus, whether female or male, as the nurturing night-shiner is.’ Philochorus too, in his Atthis, affirms that she is the moon; for men sacrifice to her in women’s dress and women in men’s, because she is held to be both male and female”].

Of this festive women’s dress worn by men, traces are said by some commentators to be found in the biblical documents, especially in the fifth book of Moses⁵⁹. Without entering into this discussion, we remark, first, that a writer on Attic antiquity speaks here, and how Egyptian the oldest Athens was is well known. Aristophanes still alludes 364 to it. Secondly, that the idea of the moon given by Philochorus is expressly called Egyptian by other ancients, as we recalled just before. Thirdly, that the exchange of clothing at the festival is expressly given as a symbol of the androgynous nature of the being celebrated.

Whether that double-formed Saïte Cecrops, with whom the Attic myth, after its manner, played so freely and poetically⁶⁰, is to be explained from this circle of ideas; and whether here too the conception returns that so often forces itself on us, that the first teacher of religion is formed after the likeness of his god, and that here, accordingly, Cecrops as first planter is like that great Egyptian fertilizer: all this we would rather ask than answer.

From another writer we learn of the same festival apparatus in honour of a god under whom, as was remarked above, the Egyptian conceived the sun in a certain sign and at a definite season, though others would have the sun 365 understood by him in every relation. “At the mysteries of Heracles the men put on women’s clothes,” runs the report of this writer, who in the same place, with reference to an older testimony, recalls Heracles as the sun⁶¹.

Traces of this seem to have been preserved on Egyptian-Roman coins, since this kind of ancient monument so often propagated the anciently religious in its images. On an Egyptian coin of the Emperor Hadrian⁶² we see a female figure with the veil over her head, on which a modius stands. The right hand lies on the lip; in the left she carries a club. Before her stands an altar, on which three apples especially are visible. Eckhel had recognized the Roman deity Angerona in this figure, but for cogent reasons later withdrew the idea himself. Zoëga⁶³, on the other hand, saw the Orphic Μίση in this female figure; but neither the club, nor especially the observation, fitted this: that on an 366 other Egyptian coin of Marcus Aurelius the same female figure has the inscription Harpocrates beside her⁶⁴.

Through this inscription the significant mime peculiar to Harpocrates gets its definite reference, just as he, like Heracles, also carries the club (see above). That the two beings also fused together already in the significant old name Σεμφουκράτης, that is, Hercules-Harpocrates, and that the two qualities of the sun, its weakness and its growing strength, or rather the passage from weakness into strength, were thereby indicated, appears likewise from the above. The three apples refer to the three seasons of the Egyptian calendar: spring, summer, and winter⁶⁵. Hence also the three apples in the hand of Heracles on old monuments, and hence his epithets Μήλων and Εὔμηλος⁶⁶.

367 Whether an initiate is represented here, who in women’s dress and with the festival attribute of the club celebrates the mysteries of his Semphukrates at the altar; or whether it is this double god himself who receives his sacred gift on the mystic altar (the veil, moreover, is a well-known symbol of the secret worship); or whether other androgynous solar attributes are to be thought of: this we would rather leave others to decide. For now we recall only provisionally that the Samothracian cult, and the worship on the island of Thasos and in Boeotia, knew this Egyptian Heracles well, with the attribute of the apples too⁶⁷; and that in that εὔμηλος lies one of the keys to the gardens of the Hesperides, just as in the female festival dress lies a key to the palace of the Lydi368an Omphale, or to Heracles in servitude and in the state of his humiliation.

§. 26.

Just as large is the circle of symbols for the idea of the definitely male and female in their manifestations. Here too the old religion sought above all to be truly expressive. Hence those Φαλλικά, which we also found in Egypt, which passed over from Upper Asia, in the worship of the lingam, as far as Greece, and held on longest in the gardens of Lampsacus, at the old statue of the βαθυαιδοῖος⁶⁸.

In this series of ideas the bull came forward especially; and because those concepts return in almost all the chief myths, there is also no circle of fables that does not show this animal image, turned now this way, now that. We have given some pointers above, and for the reason noted must return to it in what follows as well. Our present purpose is only to recall, in this relation too, a calendar image 369 which, even if it did not arise in Egypt, was demonstrably very old there. A coin gives us occasion for this too.

That the bull occurs very often in the numismatics of the cities of Magna Graecia is well known. On the coins of old Sybaris in Lucania it stands upright and looks back. As is well known, the same city⁶⁹, after its destruction by the Crotoniates, was newly settled by an Attic colony and was now called Θούριον. From then on the bull almost always appears on its coins bent toward the earth in a threatening posture. Of this kind of Thurian coins many examples are still found⁷⁰.

In that pos370ture of the bull on this class of coins Beger believes he finds an allusion to the name Θούριον, since we see here a bull ready for battle (θούριος). And Eckhel too, that so considered inquirer, let himself be deceived by the apparent ease of this explanation. The coins of Massilia, of Magnesia in Ionia, of Amphipolis in Macedonia, of Aradus in Phoenicia, of Posidonia in Lucania, and even of Syracuse, not to name more cities of quite different lands, could by themselves prove its improbability. For however frequent name-allegory is in ancient myth and on coins, the noted universality of this image must here raise doubts against this explanation, and the bull ready for battle needs another explanation, one that fits all coins with this image.

We must think, namely, of the bull in the sky, of that well-known image in the zodiac, of which this definite posture in particular is shown to be characteristic. This is shown by the following passage of Hyginus⁷¹: “Taurus ad ortum signorum dimidia parte conlocatus, ut incipere (perhaps inlidere) genu ac defigere ad terram videtur, 371 caput eodem habens adtentum” [“The Bull, placed with half its body toward the rising of the signs, so that it seems to begin (perhaps: to strike) with its knee and to fix itself to the earth, holding its head bent the same way”]. By this so general character, then, the sun in the sign of the Bull was indicated, an image long known to the Greeks; whether from Egyptian tradition we will leave others to inquire. So much is certain: on the zodiacs of Egypt a bull occurs in this definite posture, on the one from Tentyra as well as on several others, and so also on Egyptian coins⁷².

So the bull on the coins of Thurium, in this definite posture, finds its general solution as a symbol well known to the Greeks, perhaps borrowed from Egyptian zodiacal images, of the coins of several Greek cities. But rightly one is not satisfied with a general explanation; for one wants the circumstance explained why the colonists in Thurium changed the old bull image on the coins of this city. And then one says: they did so because, through the bos cornupeta [“butting ox”] or θούριος, they wanted to allude to the new name of the city, Θούριον. 372 But we can give the particular reasons without this, why the Thurians bore this image on their coins.

Their city was already highly famous in earlier times for its extraordinary fertility. With the sun in the sign of the Bull, however, was joined the concept of the thriving spring rain, of fruitful weather, and of fertility itself. Now the colonists who had come from lean Attica wished, it seems, to make the fertility of the land they had won recognizable through the zodiacal bull, as its traditional symbol. This is made probable also by the circumstance that other cities which bear it on their coins were distinguished by fertility: for example Syracuse, and, to recall the nearest, the city of Paestum or Posidonia in the same region of Lucania (where that name-allegory cannot hold). The fish lying under the combative bull has its local sense too. The city, lying between the rivers Sybaris and Crathis on the Gulf of Tarentum, enjoyed all the advantages that such a position on the sea and on rivers gives, and to this the fish, or the dolphin sometimes visible on these coins, may allude.

Finally, a satisfying explanation also offers itself for the other question: how Athena is joined with that bull image on one and the same coin. According to Plu373tarch⁷³, Theseus already had a bull stamped on the coins of Athens, either because of Minos’s general, or because of the Marathonian bull, or because he wished to encourage his fellow citizens to agriculture. So already in antiquity the definite ground of this emblem was not known. Hence we may well not wonder that it no longer appears on the surviving silver coins of Athens itself.

But whichever of those causes may have prevailed, we are always referred to Crete, to the origin of agriculture, and to the solar symbols connected with it. That Marathonian bull was no other than the Cretan one which Poseidon had sent up from the bottom of the sea, and which Heracles, after a fight with it, was permitted to take⁷⁴. Theseus afterwards caught it at Marathon and brought it to sacrifice in Athens⁷⁵. These were old Attic 374 memories of older sun worship and sun idols, and of the concept of agrarian culture bound up with them, which the Athenians believed they had received from Egypt. They were also memories of the religious institutions and symbols of Crete, which had the same source, and from which the inhabitants of Attica had also received part of their religious and civil institutions; historical traces, to be sure, that were somewhat modified in the Theseids.

On this view of the matter, the combative bull (as taurus Marathonius) could just as well as Minerva have migrated from the mother city into the Attic colony of Thurium, and we have no need to take refuge in a name-allegory. So too the mythic birth of the Marathonian bull from the sea explains that fish or dolphin set beside it. In a word: in that image of the Thurian coins, old legends of sun and fertilization, which the 375 heroic myth of Heracles had turned into poetry, coincided perhaps with new local features that people wished to denote. And even if, which we will not dispute, at the name of Thurium many afterwards thought of the θούριος, this was surely not the first ground for the choice of this symbol.

§. 27.

From the body of the decaying bull the wonder-loving Egyptian, by a physical metamorphosis, drew forth bees, which are therefore called bull-born, as the elegist Philetas names them. Another Egyptian poet, Archelaus, had named them still more definitely — — — — “the winged children of the decaying cow”⁷⁶. From this legend, to keep to the image, a whole swarm of winged myths went forth, as the swarm of bees from the body of the bull.

Especially in the temple symbolism of the great Artemis of Ephesus 376 the images of bull and bee⁷⁷ were joined in the most manifold ways in the fundamental idea of moon and night. To these were then attached priestly traditions of the first nourishment, of advanced culture, of the softening of manners, of the existence of a purer, more innocent race in the primeval age, of bloodless sacrifices, of a consecration to the higher life, of royal dignity and wisdom, of priesthood and more intimate intercourse with the deity. And so mystic ideas attached themselves, which, in a mythic personification of priestesses and nymphs called Melissae (Μέλισσαι, “Bees”), arose from Egyptian-Cretan cult. Interwoven with the worship of female nature-beings, Artemis, Demeter, and Persephone, they found their resolution in the ἱερὸς λόγος [“sacred story”] of the Eleusinia. Propagated even through the Middle Ages, they were renewed in the seventeenth century by the bull’s head and the golden bees 377 in the opened tomb of the Frankish king Childeric the First, and so have in part been preserved in their symbolic meaning down to this day. We shall therefore find occasion enough in what follows to return to this circle of images.

But what changes did these images of the Egyptian Apis and the Persian Abudad suffer on their long way from the distant East to the European peoples! This reflection forces itself on us still more with other symbols of those female fundamental beings of the Asiatic cosmogonies. That old tenet of water as the fundamental element, to render which sensible the lotus served in Egypt and India: how differently was it already stamped among the dwellers by the Syrian lakes and on the Phoenician coast of the Mediterranean! First, grotesque fish-women, as objects of an old worship and of most ancient image-making, like that Syrian Derceto; with which then, after Greek wit had pressed in, the strangest fables of Atergatis and the like were joined. The people wanted, after all, to know the ground of those fish shapes and of the prohibitions of fish, which among the Syrian peoples held on so long as national ordinance and, with restrictions, still kept their meaning in the Eleusinia as a priestly diet 378 during the festival⁷⁸.

There, then, the cosmogonic memories of the moist element prevailed in the symbolism, and that very uncouthly and garishly. They already stepped more into the background in the originally Asiatic worship of Artemis at Ephesus, where the crab is nonetheless still very significant. The shell, the tortoise, and the dolphin, as attributes of Aphrodite, probably had originally the same mythic birthplace, the sea, from whose depths the goddess had risen; and we saw above the dolphin, as representative of the sea, joined to an image of Isis, the mistress of the elements.

But the Greek did not stop at this general relation. The myths of the most various deities vied, as it were, with one another to make that sea creature a wonderfully charming magic image of poetry itself. For the 379 god of poetry it had once had to serve as disguise; it had carried the old masters of poetry on its back; and so it remained continuously one of the favourite images of the poets, even through the romantic period, in the works of Dante and Calderón, down to our own time, when the artful translator of the latter has glorified this fabulous creature in a beautiful romance of his own.^a We shall therefore have to return to this circle of images too, among the Greek deities⁷⁹.

Here only the great contrast was to be indicated in which the Egyptian and Asiatic symbolism appears with the purely Greek; and of this the image too supplies a truly speaking example. The fight of the dolphin with the crocodile, noted by old naturalists, becomes for us thereby itself a symbol of the struggle of Greek poetry with the strictly symbolic spirit of Egypt, of which land the crocodile is the natural image. The Greek secret doctrine, as the sequel will show, may have developed that Urania further in the older cosmogonic sense, and, as into the concept 380 of Harmonia, have put a deeper philosophical meaning into it. But in the cheerful image-making of the public cult that mystic being sank into forgetfulness, and only faint traces were preserved in names and attributes: for example, in the predicate of the Cnidian Aphrodite, Euploea [“she of fair voyaging”], in the dolphin of the Medici Venus, and in the tortoise of other statues of Venus⁸⁰.

§. 28.

What the Greeks touched, then, became at once another being; and the old symbol, once it had passed through the myth, the art, and the 381 poetry of this people, in the end no longer recognized itself. Hence it is so necessary to keep this proposition constantly present in each of these three domains. Its neglect inevitably brings error and confusion.

A corollary of it is this: in Greek mythology and the theory of art we should indeed always remember the whole, so as to note the gradual progress of the one out of the other; but above all it matters to distinguish the kinds and classes of symbols and myths. For even if no myth wholly denies the old, often crude stamp, not every circle of symbols and myths has remained so true to the antique as, for example, the Bacchic and the Aphroditic, which have kept a very great deal of old images of an androgynous and similar kind. The classes of monuments too must be distinguished. We have already drawn attention above to the coins, because of the antique significance of many of their images. The same holds of the old Greek vases of Italy, which supply so many mystic, and in particular hermaphroditic, representations of this character⁸¹. In other 382 works, that formative drive innate exclusively to the Greek asserted its peculiar rights more freely.

Whoever, therefore, wishes to explain these works successfully must become at home on Greek soil, and through sustained study of the Greek monuments of the speaking and the plastic arts make himself familiar with the course of development of Hellenic thought and with the play of Greek fancy. So, to keep here too to our subject, the Greek did indeed long keep old memories of that Asiatic Aphroditos, as of the conical and square images of Venus, which still held their place on the coins of the cities⁸². But once the 383 image of a Cytherea or of the Cnidian Venus and similar representations of the gods had been sanctioned in public worship, and in the artistic perfection of Aphrodite that Charis or grace, as soul of nature, ruled and animated the forms of Greek sculpture, then the Greek sculptor and gem-cutter often followed quite other impulses. What had originally been religious-symbolic he formed according to quite other, often very free, sensuous, or at least merely artistic grounds of determination. Of this too the Aphroditic circle just touched on supplies the most convincing proofs, particularly in the androgynous figures on Greek gems and other monuments⁸³.

The same holds, with due qualifications, of the Greek myths. Once the poetic had become predo384minant in them, they often developed according to quite other laws than the old theomythy and priestly symbolism had acknowledged. The Muse Polyhymnia, though originally descended from Thrace, that fatherland of the Greek mysteries, now began to meditate other songs. But of this predominance of myth, and of its further relation to the symbol, the sequel will give us occasion to treat more in detail.

End of the First Part.