بخش ۶: ساختمان و معماری قسمت دوم
House building and Architecture
Part2
In confirmation of the suggested linkage between housebuilding and tomb-building we do actually find that most prehistory researchers assume that men’s earliest dwellings were natural caves in rock caverns or underground caves, and that it was only gradually that they rose to a place on the earth, to attain in the end, to the mountain tops.’ These dwellings were purely protective in character, and the instinct which impelled them to seek them out was one allied to nest-building — the urge to re-establish the lost home in the womb. At that stage, however, man for a time remained passive, and the first house — in the true sense of the word —to which the cave-dweller aspired was the tree. This, too, had still the protective character, but the fact of its elevation from the ground was already a step towards the inventiveness which presently found creative expression in the most primitive artificial house, the piledwelling. For this form, according to various archzologists, came into existence, not by the waterside, but on land, as an “imitation ” of the protective tree-top, and whether this be the explanation or not, the pile-dwelling is undeniably found on dry land and is the first shelter which differs from the maternal cavity, in being an invention and creation of man. It seems to me that it was only later that the tree came to be worshipped as a symbol of maternity — that is, after and not before it had become a protective house. But in the tree-like, raised piledwelling there is— at any rate potentially — the whole of man himself and no longer merely the protective maternal cavity. It is, as it were, a raised, enlarged human being standing on stilts, who is already seeking protection from the dangers of the earth.The original roof of leaves, which ensures protection from above (rain), is later strengthened artificially, as though it stood for the roof of the old subterranean cave brought above ground. This inversion or overturning has been retained in the German name Dachboden (roof-floor) as applied to the upper part of a house, and Fuhrmann’s brilliant discernment has discovered in the steep roof-form an inverted boat, which not only affords the best shelter against rain (an ark), but has apotropaic significance as a symbol of the underworld. For, according to the old ideas, the sun rides on the water by night in the underworld ship, and thus, in the boat-shaped roof (particularly of the Oriental type), we seem to have a bit of protective underworld set up as the first umbrella (Der Sinn im Gegenstand, p. 8). In the year 1906 the traveller and investigator Paul Sarasin, who with his brother Fritz explored the island of Celebes, brought out his much-discussed hypothesis on the development of the Greek temple from the pile-dwelling (“Uber die Entwicklung des griechischen Tempels aus dem Pfahlhause”). But, striking as are the resemblances between these two structures when we set them together, there is no explanation of the ideological hypothesis which led the one to develop on the lines of a dwelling-house, and the other to take the form of a temple to the gods. What is basically common to the two is the element of self-creative elevation above the animalchthonian, which in the pile-dwelling resulted in a house rearing itself up high above the ground, and in the Greek temple in a god’s house aspiring to heaven and situated usually on an airy hilltop. But what we know by tradition of the Greek cult of the gods allows us to follow them quite distinctly in their translation from their earth and rock caverns to the heights of Olympus. And only the overcoming of these earthy beginnings enabled the idea of the temple to develop in its purest form. For the true temple was still unknown to the Cretan-Mycenzan culture, which had no god’s house, but, instead, colossal kings’ palaces and monster tombs similar to those of the ancient East. But the Greek culture, just as it made a sharp dividing line between those living on earth and those in the underworld, so also gradually banished the gods to the mountain heights and thus itself became the centre where culture was humanized. The Greek — whose embodiment we recognize in his heroes — thus led a purely earthly life which strove more and more to free itself from the influence of the gods and also from the power of the dead — that is, of death. In this sense the Greek temple is more like a noble tomb for the gods which has been brought from the earth’s interior to its highest pinnacles, and indeed tomb-building in Greece plays no part at all in comparison with the towering architecture of the temple. There is a tradition, equally important from the cultural and from the art-historical point of view, which bears not only on the development from pile-dwelling to Greek temple, but also on the broader development from cave-burial to sacral monument. As Muchau has pointed out, the oldest temple of the Greeks had as its most important constituent part an adytum reaching down below the ground (op. cit., p. 86). At Delphi it was on the age-old spot sacred to the earth-spirit Python — who, as a snake, was housed deep in a crevice underground —that the new cult of his heavenly conqueror, Apollo, was set up. But the Delphic sanctuary in which the earth-goddess Gza had of old pronounced oracles was really a tomb: namely, the stone called “ Omphalos” or “ Navel of the earth,” under which the dragon Python was supposed to be buried. The Delphic tradition, therefore, really gives us a picture of the vanquishing of the chthonian goddess of death, who in the form of a serpent delivers prophecies, by the heavenly god of light, for whom a mountain temple arose out of the tomb in the cave. The cultural and art-historical meaning of the Omphalos — which became of basic importance in respect of temple- and town-building and even of the ordering of the lands and the world — will be discussed at the end of this chapter. Our concern here is with the actual architecture of the Greek temple, which, corresponding to the Hellenic ideology as set forth above, remains an unsurpassed ideal of beauty in its proportions and its structure. As Burckhardt has pointed out, the Greek temple was the prototype of the whole of Hellenic architecture, and it can only be understood through the collective ideology of Greek culture, which was in essence human and microcosmic in contrast to the macrocosmic ideology of the East. Just as the Greeks developed the purely human soul-concept by banishing the dead to below the earth, and the gods to above it, so also did they create the first geocentric world-picture, which may have been physically incorrect but was culturally an immense advance. The proverbial saying that Socrates had fetched down philosophy from heaven so that he could philosophize from the standpoint of humanity applied equally to the whole Greek culture, which, according to another saying, made man the measure of all things. The great architectural buildings, for instance, were no longer, as in the East, macrocosmic reflections of heavenly designs, but extended microcosms: that is, not only enlarged, but elevated, human beings. But with this ideological principle there is bound up a second, of zsthetic significance, which becomes intelligible only through the investiture of man with his earthly rights. That is, inasmuch as man himself becomes a macrocosm, a standard for all things, each part of him must necessarily be a separate and complete microcosm: an idea of which the liver mantic had been a concrete, and the idea of the human soul was an abstract, expression. And so it comes about that one of the most important art-principles of the Classical style of beauty is to reproduce the whole by a miniature of its essence so that each individual part really continues, ideologically, to express the whole. In the Oriental — macrocosmic — style of architecture, on the contrary, the building is indivisible and purports to reproduce in reduced, earthly, proportions a much greater heavenly conception. The finest example of this is found in the column, the development of which from a mere stilting pole to a purely decorative support goes hand in hand with an idealizing humanization. In the Greek temple, which gives us the transition from the domestic pile-dwelling to the sacred building, the upper portion resting on its columns — the roof, with its decorative frieze of gods — had become more important than the interior, which thereafter appears to become a mere consequence of the external proportions. Here, too, the function of the columns is to raise the upper part, which represents heaven, the divine overworld, separated from things of earth by the human being who straightens himself out into a pillar. Every individual column in the Greek sacred building has, like the structure as a whole, become once more a complete human being, whose lower body is dissolved in an zsthetic line, while the richly decorated and individualized head crowns the whole as its “capital.” The primitive precursor of this head-gathered pillar-man of Greece may be found in the wooden house-pillar of art in the South Seas," its artistic prototype (which, however, does not come within the conception of the Classical ideal of beauty), and the caryatids * who with their human upper body and head support the actual templum or roof of heaven — at this stage still a burden weighing men down, whereas the Classical column seems to swing it aloft with ease and grace. We insert here a later tradition as to the origin of the Greek column. Although it may appear to us today as anecdotal, a workshop yarn, it yet conveys —as its chronicler may himself have thought —something of the Classical spirit. Vitruvius (30 B.c.) in his famous work: De architectura (Lib. IV, cap. i, 6) tells the following story:
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1 In Emil Stephan’s important work Swdseekunst (Berlin, 1907) these simple housepillars are illustrated and explained. The oldest man in the village named the essential parts of the pillar after the parts of the body, and the head played an inferior réle in comparison with neck, trunk, or limbs.
2 The caryatid bearers were regarded even in Classical tradition as a primitive remnant of barbarous customs, and only a single example of this kind is in fact known to us in Classical Greek architecture. P. Sarasin’s idea that it was originally a question of “a pictorial presentation of the men sacrificed during the building of a house or temple"’ will be discussed at the end of this chapter (the “* building-sacrifice’’).
“ When Ion had founded thirteen colonies in Caria — among them Ephesus and Miletus — the immigrants began to build to the immortals temples such as they had seen in Achaia, and first of all to the Apollo Panionic. When they were about to set up the columns in this temple, they could no longer recall the measurements. While they were considering how to make the columns at once trustworthy and graceful, it occurred to them to measure a man’s foot and compare it with his height. Finding that the foot measured a sixth part of a man’s height, they applied this to the column by laying off its lowest diameter six times along the length of the column (inclusive of the capital). Thus did the Doric column begin to represent the proportions and the compressed beauty of the male body in buildings.” Similarly, as Vitruvius goes on to explain, female slenderness was taken as a model for the pillars of Diana’s temple, the diameter of which represented one eighth of their length. “ At the bottom they laid a foot, like a sole; into the capital they introduced snails, which hung down right and left like artificially curled locks; on the forehead they put rolls and bunches of fruit for hair, and down the whole shaft they made grooves to resemble the folds in female attire. Thus, in the two styles of column that they invented, the one was copied from the naked, unadorned figure of a man, the other from the dainty figure of an adorned woman. Those who came later, with a more critical and finer taste, preferred less massiveness and accordingly fixed the height of the Doric column at seven and of the Ionic at nine times the diameter.” * This pretty story, even if we do not regard it as authentic, but only as a late interpretation of Classical traditions, evokes nevertheless two comments of cardinal importance for the theory of artistic creation. The one concerns the question of sexual significance in artistic creation, which the “female” column again brings to the fore; the other, the sister problem of the “imitation of nature,” on which Vitruvius bases his whole interpretation. It is a fact that our conception of creative dynamism in the individual leaves no room to doubt that the two problems are closely associated or that the sexual theory of artistic creation stands and falls by the conception of art as an imitation of nature.
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1 According to Vitruvius, the third, so-called Corinthian column imitates the slenderness of a virgin. Whether these reputedly purely esthetic measurements were not in reality determined, or largely so, by the significance that the spiritual culture of Greece always attached to the numbers seven and nine we shall consider later. Recently there appeared an English translation of Vitruvius’s work on architecture by Frank Granger (Loeb Classical Series; New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons).
For the sexual impulse as such could not, even in its “ sublimated ” form, bring forth anything but simply nature, while the urge to create, as we have tried to show, aspires from the first to be independent of nature and to reach out beyond its premisses. In this sense we need hardly look for the proof of our view, beyond the single fact that, so far, in all our material we have come across no purely sexual motive.’ Indeed, one positively has the impression that the representation of the purely sexual (the act as well as the organs) is avoided in art. Stephan, too, finds it “ most puzzling that woman herself and everything that could remind one of her sex are completely absent from art, in all the widely dispersed regions of the Bismarck Archipelago” (op. cit., p- 121; author’s italics *). The fact is that —as I have already indicated in my account of the soul-belief and have since demonstrated at length — mortal origin through the woman is repudiated in favour of one or another immortalityideology, and these lead ultimately to the self-creative shaping of man that is manifest in art as in other ways.
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1°In view of this fact,’’ says Stephan, ‘‘W6rmann’s saying, that ‘woman stands at the beginning of art,’ will not hold water as a general proposition. But even the masculine sexual organs are only twice represented in the Bismarck Archipelago—on a house-pillar taken from a bachelor’s house at Lambon, and the member itself as the knob of a stick on the island of Durour. On the pillar the organs are in no wise prominent, though one might attribute a phallus-like character to the stick"’ (op. cit.).
2 In his work on Architecture, Vitruvius, in accordance with the whole of Classical opinion, describes the navel as the central point of the human body. The argument that the genital organ, and not the navel, forms that centre I have met only once, and that in a fairly late author and in a somewhat corrupt part of his text. But Varro, the author in question, appears to use this interpretation (i, 1, 7, 17) for political reasons: namely, by way of protest against the notion that the Delphic Omphalos is the centre of the earth (see Roscher, I, p. 11, note 19). Similarly, in the whole of the literature I have found only one single interpretation (quoted by R. Eisler, op. cit., p. 411) of the Great Goddess’s meteoric stone as a vulva or pytpa (see Philologus, Ixviii, pp. 135 et seq.). With this belongs also the later identification of the so-called “‘finger”’ of the liver as the phallus of the indwelling earth-god, since in fact he himself is a secondary development from the original earth-goddess (Mother) (see Carl Thulin: Die Gotter des Martinus Capella und die Bronzeleber von Piacenza; Diessen, 1906). Moreover, in all the luxuriant traditions of body-symbolism — with its offshoot, magical anatomy — it is only here and there that we come across isolated instances of sexual indications, and many of these, again, seem to have been introduced by the interpretative skill of later traditions—the frequently coarse sexual symbolism of the Gnostics, for instance, can only be properly understood in an esoteric sense (cf. The Trauma of Birth).
Wherever we find unequivocal sexual representations in any considerable, or even excessive, quantity, we are dealing with late cultures of what I call the “age of sexuality,” which is characterized by recognition of the patriarchal principle and in consequence embraces the phallus cult. In this connexion we have the worship of the Lingam in the Late Indian civilization, and the overemphasis of the phallus in the Etruscan decadence, which through the tradition of the hearth-phallus that appeared to the mythical kings Jarchetus and Servius Tullius, passed on to Rome. The Romans, in fact, used this masculine symbol as a means of ousting the deep-rooted matriarchal principle and establishing the father-rule which promoted the development of the state. Again, the myths in which the origin of fire is attributed to the sexual act, which seem to have been handed down to us from India and Africa, should be only interpreted in the sense of a first creative transmutation of that which is given into that which is generated. By general agreement it was only a question originally of preserving (or, at most, controlling) fire, which had appeared in a natural way, no doubt as lightning from heaven; there is certainly no question whatever of its being generated as the result of the observation and artificial imitation of the friction-heat engendered in coition. If nevertheless the generating of fire came in fact to be connected, mythically and linguistically, with the sexual act, the notion could only arise from a comparison of the two acts of generation, which in turn supposes that the sexual act was already exalted from a natural function to a symbol of the male creative strength. One is almost tempted to say that the sexual act was made “ creative ” by comparison with the generation of fire, and not that the generation of fire needed to be sexualized.¹
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1 The apparent sexualization was much more a masculinization, seeing that heat and fire have originally a maternal character (the heat in the whale’s belly singes the hero's hair). Frobenius thinks that it is merely from modesty that the African refrains from calling his two fire-sticks ‘‘man'’ and “woman,"’ but the words “‘ generator”’ and “maker"’ that he uses for them sufficiently indicate the creative transformation of sexuality (see Erythraa, p. 194).
This brings us back to the second problem presented by Vitruvius, that of nature-imitation, the myth of fire-generation just discussed being a case in point. According to the myth, man is supposed to have invented fire by imitating nature — that is, to have discovered the natural generation of fire in coition; whereas in reality he received it from nature, but had nevertheless to produce it self-creatively.. In many traditions, of which the Greek Prometheus saga is the best known, man is said to steal fire from heaven. This means that he arrogantly assumed the power of generating it, just as he finally ceased to accept sexuality as a gift of nature and took upon himself the réle of a god who creates men. We shall return to the problem of how much denial of man’s own nature was involved in this human urge to create — in any case it produced its highest achievements before man began to feel doubts about it and to be driven, by a sense of guilt at his own presumption, to return to nature and imitation of nature. So it was exactly with the Greek hybris, which soared to supreme creative power only to experience, through tragic downfall, the profound dependence of the heroic individuality. And this probably explains the contradiction that we find between the Classical tradition of the proportions of the Greek column and Vitruvius’ interpretation of it. For whereas he tells the story in order to use it as proof that the principle of natureimitation was operative in the ripest creations of the Greek spirit, our own discussion seems to justify the opposite view. We were able to see the column as, not an imitation, but actually an abstraction, of the human body; and even to detect a tendency to embody the essence of it in the head as the symbol of intellectuality. In no way does the imitation of nature appear to have played an essential part in forming the Greek column, otherwise Vitruvius’ delightful interpretation would certainly have been superfluous.
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1In Africa all fires were extinguished on the death of the king, and the first act of the new king was the fresh kindling of fire, the point of this being to show his ability to do so. According to the medizval legend of Virgil the sorcerer, the new fire was—very archaically —obtained from the genital of the woman (without the man's aid).
Even if the Greek stone-masons had taken their measurements for the column from the human body,’ we should still be faced with the problem — far wider than that of nature-imitation — of explaining where they got the idea of the temple that these pillars were to support. But to this larger question we have already supplied the answer and at the same time shown that the column itself is only a partial expression of the collective ideology which led to the establishment on earth of the heavenly and the divine —in other words, to sacral temple-building. But this collective ideology also explains the curious notion of taking the human foot, which touches earth, as a measure and applying it in a definite proportion (the significant one in seven) vertically up and away from the ground. It is the microcosmization of the cosmic and the earthly which is at the root of it, the conception first formulated by the Ionian philosophers in the psychological principle that man is the measure of all things. This does not mean a mere imitation of his proportions and forms in art, but is to be, and can only be, understood as a bold revaluation of the old Oriental world-picture, in which the sky, with its stars and the gods representing them, had stood for the measure of all terrestrial and human things. In Classical art, as we have particularly observed in connexion with Greek temple-building, man holds a harmonious intermediate position. He has arrived at creating his own microcosmic world and also the earthly heaven — the temple — in his own image! But he still has to support the heaven above him.
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1 The earliest length measurements were, in fact (as we shall prove by linguistic examples), taken from the human body and are to a great extent still in use (ell, foot, and so on). It is important to note, however, that there was in the East, besides the natural ell length of the fore-arm to the tip of the outstretched middle finger), an artificial ell, slightly longer, which was used exclusively for buildings and was known as the “‘royal’’ ell (see Lepsius: Die Langenmasse der Alten; Berlin, 1884). I imagine this royal ell must have represented the macrocosmic architecture-ideology at a time when the king was regarded as God's representative on earth.
He is an Atlas, beginning to groan under the weight of this macrocosmic burden, as the Greek hero suffered through his godlikeness, and at the summit of his creative elevation — the Greek hybris — his consciousness of guilt throws him back into the inferior human réle. This explains the trend towards imitation which later students of zsthetic have thought to detect in the Greek art-ideology; it betokens something like a rueful return to nature after too arrogantly rising above her, a self-imposed limitation on the individual presumption of creator. The imitation theory is, therefore (like every other zsthetic, for that matter), in itself an ideology arising out of the cultural situation, and not an explanation of the artistic style. Such a conception of nature-imitation as is represented by the Classical esthetic is, to me, the expression of an abnegation of man’s own creative force, caused by a sense of guilt in creation which forces man’s return to the recognition of a higher creative force of which he himself is simply a creature, and even a mere tool of reproduction. This dualism of creature and creator Christianity subsequently drove to extremes in both its aspects: on the one hand, by the completeness with which its deity “ became man,” and, on the other, by its sublimely spiritual conception of God.*
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1 For the detailed application of body-symbolism in medieval church-building, both in the column and in the whole field of architecture, see Karl Borinski’s welldocumented work: Die Antike in Poctik und Kunsttheorie (Leipzig, 1924; pp. 55-70). ‘* Augustine, with his constant reference to the profound and ordered agreement of this microcosm with the macrocosm, to those matters of proportion and relation which demand investigation (and even, as to inward structure, anatomy), and to the significance of these matters for the artist, forms the bridge between the Classical art-theory and its reawakening in the fifteenth century’’ (op. cit., p. 69). But Borinski also sharply defines the difference between the ideologies: "‘For the Classical artist-builder the temple obeys the laws of the outline and proportions of the human figure; to the Christian, on the contrary, the body is a temple’’ (op. cit., p. 9). This Christian conception afterwards became humanized in the Renaissance and metaphorized by the Baroque (see Maria Brzoska: Anthropomorphische Auffassung des Gebdudes und seiner Tetle. Sprachlich untersucht an Quellen aus der Zeit von 1525-1750 (published at Jena, 1931, after my book was written). In this whole medieval anthropomorphization of the building, man is driven back to nature (and to himself as the centre thereof), while the original artistic creativity rises above it.
For just as the Greek temple stands for the humanization of an originally cosmic sacral structure, so the church represents its spiritualization. We cannot therefore agree with psychoanalysis in its symbolic interpretation — on biological lines — of the church as nothing but a sheltering cavity which replaces the mother’s womb. Not only does church architecture rise above this primitive protective character of tomb-building: it rises also from the self-creative shaping of the human body in domestic building to be the essential symbol of the spiritual in religious architecture. In this sense Fuhrmann is undoubtedly right when he interprets the church door in detail as the mouth (with teeth, gorge, and so on) * and no longer as an abdominal entrance to the underworld (Grabdau, p. 53). For the cathedral represents precisely the highest architectural expression of the transformation (already discussed) of the animal conception of an underworld into a spiritual soul-concept localized in the head. If, then, the church represents rather the head of a man, with its mouth, jaws, and throat, than the whole person, Fuhrmann’s ingenious idea of the bell as a “ brazen mouth” should not be taken merely as a metaphor. For this mouth (Mund) is also mundus, the whole world — according to a further linguistic indication of the same author —and it is precisely in Christianity that this has come to be a purely spiritual one (the Head), in which the Logos has replaced the Prewma, although both originally come from the mouth. True, the church has retained much of its pre-animistic body-symbolism; but in cathedral architecture this seems to have been reworked, or at any rate reinterpreted, in terms of the super-world. Yet we must not on this account take the chthonian motifs that continue to recur in the highest achievements of architecture as a proof of an unconquered primitiveness. True, man never gets away from his animal nature — neither desires nor should desire to do so — but the starting-point of all the problems, whether religious, artistic, or scientific, lies beyond this self-evident statement Siae begins with the question: what is the attitude taken by the culture of the day or the individual vessel thereof towards this prime phenomenon of humanness?
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1 ‘He refers here to corresponding examples among the natives of New Guinea, where ‘‘the entrances of these ceremonial- or spirit-houses were themselves thought of as faces. The gateway corresponded to the mouth and above the entrance the nose and eyes are seen"’ (Neu-Guinea, Pp: 23).
But if the church portal, through which the worshipper enters into a higher world of supernatural existence, represents the mouth, the old chthonian idea of the underworld’s jaws, expressed in symbols of terrifying and dangerous animals (stylized devils’ grimaces and dragons’ maws), comes out as mere ornamentation of the facade or, it may be, the interior (choir-stalls) and is robbed of its alarming character by the artistic form given to it. And, in general, in the architecture of the sacred buildings plastic art becomes the servant of the collective ideology of the age and robs the house of God of its ancient chthonian cave-character by a decorative ornament of spiritualized symbols. We can trace the process quite distinctly in the development from tomb-building to sacred architecture by way of house-building. The so-called atrium graves, which are found in abundance in the field of the Mediterranean culture, correspond in their lay-out (of which we give two examples) * to the middle part of the church and its attached side-chapels.
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1 After Carl Schuchhardt: Alteuropa (pp. 77 et seq. and 116 et seq.). In the same work reference is made to the original circular form of the ‘‘con atrio’’ type of tomb, which corresponds to the original circular dwelling-place (dwelling-house); see von Sydow: Primitive Kunst und Psychoanalyse, pp. 48 et seq.
The latter are, of course, used to this day for burials, and, indeed, the main building itself can be looked upon as the tomb of Christ. Obviously, the same basic idea is to be found here as in the ancient Oriental tombs of kings, where the lateral and exterior.chambers were sought after as burial-places by ordinary mortals who wished to share the immortality of the great departed. Nevertheless, the church of today, for all those far-reaching concordances as to its having been originally a burial-place,* has also become the symbol of eternal life, the spiritual rebirth of which the believer can experience afresh every day by entering and leaving the house of God. Here again we find the same creative re-formation and transformation of animal mortality into spiritual immortality operative in the genetic development of a single art-form — from the tomb as the dwelling of the body to the sacral structure (house of God) as the dwelling of the soul. During the process the biological abdomen-ideology becomes microcosmically transformed into the spiritual head-ideology, and correspondingly the reshaping of the religious underworld symbolism manifests itself macrocosmically in the artificial super-world symbolism. This development, which found its highest expression in the Gothic cathedral, seems to have been already beginning in an unimaginably remote past and to have worked up through various stages, of which we should like here to give a brief outline, at any rate so far as concerns their artistic significance.
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1 While this work was in progress, a book appeared, entitled The Circle and. the Cross, by A. H. Allctoft (London: Macmillan) in which ample material was produced to prove that the church was originally a round burying-place; the word ‘‘circus,"’ with its connotation of roundness, is linguistically akin to ‘‘church,"’ ‘'Kégche.””
The first shadowy sign of a dualism which led later to the soul-concept and to the ideologies arising from it seems already to be discernible in the traces of a skull-cult of the later stone age; in the Upper Palzolithic Culture (particularly in South Europe) we have the so-called head burial side by side with the whole-body burial, and the discoveries in question leave no doubt that the head was severed from the trunk by force: that is, that there was intentional conservation of the }head.* Opinions differ as to the meaning of this custom, but all are on the whole agreed that it was a cultural and not a practical measure (such as space-saving). Here, again, the divergence of opinion shows the inherent dualism attaching to the problem itself, for the severing of the head betokens both a tendency to conserve the essential portion of a personality and the opposed tendency to destroy the dead and render him harmless.’ In any case, comparison with the head-cult, as it still exists among primitive races today, suggests the conclusion that the magical significance of the head as the seat of personal power may be regarded as the beginning of a belief in the soul.* The same high cultural estimation of the human head is seen in the equally ancient use of head-cups, which were originally parts of the brain-case, but are still with us as symbols in the form of artistic vases. Even in the development of vase forms the same dualism, with its creative overcoming, is to be traced. Although we have no vessels of any sort from the palzolithic age, there are various reasons for supposing that they did already exist (see, for instance, Schuchhardt, op. cit., p. 41), but it seems equally improbable that the Upper Palzolithic skull drinking-cups were used as profane objects in everyday life. The oldest known vessels, such as those which come from the Campignian, from the Litorina age of the Baltic, certainly show no head-shape.* If we are to seek an ideological model for such a shape, the form of the female breast at once suggests itself, and this would in any case have priority as the first natural source of nourishment.
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1See R. Schmidt: Die diluviale Vorzeit Deutschlands (1912).
2 See Dr. Joachim von Trauwitz-Hellwig's comprehensive theory in Urmensch und Totenglaube (Munich, 1929), where even the burning of corpses is shown to have its dualism: on the one hand, the most complete annihilation of the dead that is possible, and, on the other, the desire to restore the (vital) heat that he has lost, with the ultimate object of releasing his soul.
3M. Ebert: ‘‘Die Anfange des europdischen Totenkultes’’ (Prabist. Zeitschrift, XIIIXIV, 1922) and Anckermann: “‘Totenkult und Seelenglaube bei Afrikanischen Volkern"’ (Zeitschrift far Etknologie, 1918). Both of these authors assume the belief in the soul to have been preceded by a cult of the dead. Ebert holds, from the various kinds of burial, that the palzolithic age had no belief in the soul, and that this only came into existence with neolithic man.
4 Occasionally there was found, besides the ‘‘breast’’-form (see below), a hemispherical bowl which may very well correspond to the head-cup, although it also resembles a schematized model of the breast.
This breast-shape is later found as “ ornament” in the older Lausitz pottery (bronze age) —as admitted even by Schuchhardt (op. cit., p. 191), who in general is opposed to such interpretations — although it can only be explained by regarding the whole vase as standing for a female body, which naturally possesses breasts because it serves as a drinkingvessel. We shall not enter here into the whole development and significance of the vase (which will be dealt with under “ Ornamentation”), but in pursuance of our train of thought I may just refer to an opinion of Fuhrmann’s, already quoted in support of my own views in The Trauma of Birth (p. 150). In Der Sinn im Gegenstand (p. 2) Fuhrmann distinguishes two types of vase: those that are copied from the udders of animals or, it may be, the breasts of a woman,’ and those which are shaped like the guts of animals, out of which the oldest roll or tube technique of ceramics developed. “The belly-pot, therefore, gives a true-to-nature presentment of the human abdomen: that is, an endless line of spirally arranged entrails which are covered with a skin and enclose the stomach in their midst — in other words, are made to hold the store of nourishment.” Thus in the domain of ceramic art, which is of such great practical importance, there would appear to be a similar development-process from the body- to the head-ideology that we have in others. The head-cup, as used for cultural purposes, symbolizes accordingly spiritual nourishment, and it is a fact that the primitive, when he drinks from the enemy’s skull, is less concerned to quench his own thirst than to appropriate his enemy’s secret powers. But at the same time, the Upper Paleolithic skull-cups show how early the human craving for independence from transient nature and natural sustenance ' was awakened, to develop eventually into the belief in the soul and the immortality-ideology.
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1The very ancient custom of preserving liquids in leather bottles is, according to Fuhrmann (op. cit.), bound up linguistically with the same basic conception (French outre = uterus; Bocksbeutel, Beutel = French bowteille, English bottle), so that each bottle is an udder standing on its base, with the nipple uppermost.
Another path from the primitive head-cult to that spiritual cult of the head which we observed in the building of churches was of more importance to art than the way of ceramics, which belongs more to craft-art; this is the evolution of the tombmemorial from the primitive ancestral pole to the portrait of the dead, in the course of which the head, as the characteristic expression of the individual and personal, plays an increasingly important role. Whether, during this evolution from the sacred pole (replacing the sacred tree) to the plastic ancestral figure representing the dead, the skull-pole did or did not play the great part attributed to it by Frobenius, we undoubtedly seem to have before us, in the basic form of the pole, the plastic prototype of sculpture." The vexed question as to whether the use of the actual skulls of the dead—the earliest portraits, so to say—was as general as Frobenius seems inclined to assume, is of less importance here than the general problem.’ The pole (which on another line of development becomes the supporting column of the temple) is a substitute for the tree that renews itself yearly after dying down, and thus becomes the symbol of vegetable rebirth as the worm and the snake symbolize that of the animal world. In and with the ancestral pole the man accordingly becomes transformed into the tree, and the world-wide belief in the tree-origin of humanity is a natural consequence of his thus entering into the self-renewing tree.* The roughly carved pole, then, represents the humanized tree, which takes on more and more the likeness of a man and culture has produced in material values lies between the microcosm and the macrocosm, but was only enabled to come to fruition through ideological relationship between the two. How this influence may have operated we cannot therefore discover by way of ethnological or sociological study of the man-created reality, but only through the spirit which brought them forth, which is manifested most purely in religious traditions and objectified in artistic creation. It is of the specific quality of art that, even here, it adopts a middle course, or, rather, an intermediary rdle, in that it not only works out the prevailing ideology, but formally objectifies this development-process itself. The paradox of the art-problem lies, therefore, in the fact that the nature of a particular prevailing art-style can only be detected from the other cultural achievements parallel with it and in connexion with their ideological traditions; while these, again, can only be derived from an understanding of the nature of art.
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1 According to Meringer, the original meaning of the German word “Bild” (picture) was possibly the hewn pole (Indogermanische Forschungen).
2 ‘*Skull-sculpture’’—that is, the modelling of a skeleton skull into 2 head—is found in New Guinea as well as in the New Hebrides, and in New Mecklenburg skulls thus modelled are used as heads on figures. See Vatter (Religéose Plastik der Naturvilker, p. 62), who accounts for the strikingly exaggerated size of the head in primitive plastic as the deliberate accentuation of the “' seat of the forces,”’ in contrast to the palzolithic sculpture of the Aurignacien, where the emphasis is on the body.
3 This like (and at bottom equivalent) spiritual importance of tree and snake (worm) — both of which appear to be endowed with chthonian powers —has led, as Kister rightly points out, to a combination of the two in the hero-cult and the
This apparently insoluble dilemma we are here endeavouring, by simultaneous and alternating treatment of all effective factors, to solve as nearly as is possible in the case of so complicated a problem as human creativity. Before we make our brief survey of the conception of the navel as earth-centre, in its cultural function and, more especially, as regards Greece, we may point out that there is also a negative proof of our view of artistic creativity as a macrocosmized self-elevation. This proof is the Jewish race, which in contrast to other culturally gifted Semites of the ancient East has produced no art and, for that matter, not even a material culture, but has exhausted itself in the forming of ethical religions. Taken in a cultural-historical sense, this fact may throw just such a light on the understanding of the creative activity of other nations as the neurotic, thwarted in production, provided for that of the psychology of the productive artist. What is lacking to the Jews, besides art, seems at the first glance to be that cultural correlation of the macrocosm and the microcosm which, in its various relations and ideologies, can be traced as a culturally operative influence from the ancient East, through the Classical age, till far into the Christian Middle Ages. In the Jewish “state of God” there is no room for an earthly representative of God, such as was symbolized microcosmically by Oriental rulers, let alone for an artificial symbol of him; for, as everyone knows, no representation of him was allowed. Apart from the temple, the Jews took over from the Oriental culture nothing of its earthly representation of cosmic splendour — and the temple was no house of God, but only the place in which his word could be heard by his children, assembled in synagogue for the purpose. Yet the Old Testament reads like an epitome of the whole spiritual culture of the ancient East,* although made over and interpreted in the sense of the specific Jewish mentality. Its ideology is a moral one which interprets “ psychologically” all happenings as the outflowing of good and bad instincts in man; these can therefore be adequately expressed in terms of law and prohibition and the corresponding conceptions of reward and punishment.” Asa typical example of the Jewish attitude to the mythic worldoutlook native to the ancient Eastern macrocosmos, we may select the story of the Tower of Babel, which also will take us back to our more immediate theme. This familiar story (which, by the very choice of locality, points to the cultural centre of the East, Babylon) displays an obvious defeatist attitude towards human creative power, the presumption of which is morally condemned,’ whereas the Greek culture reacted to its “hybris” tragically. According to the biblical tradition, the whole human race, with a single common language, is raised to a potential which presents a challenge to the gods and finds a symbol of this condition in the building of a city (Genesis xi,4) with a tower whose top may “reach unto heaven.”
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1 See especially Alfred Jeremias: Das Alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients. 2 From a religious standpoint this attitude is foreshadowed in the Egyptian Judges of the Dead, while the Zoroastrian doctrine — which also influenced Christianity — raised the dualism of good and evil to a spiritual principle of world-creation. 3 Another example—that of the moral ‘‘ making over’ of the Babylonian-Sumerian account of the Flood into the biblical one—I have dealt with in Seelenglaube und Psychologie (pp. 110-18). Here again the Bible shows human presumption to be punished and the new creation to come from the hand of God, whereas the original account —as, for that matter, of the Tower story too—indicates a human creation, which it practically sets up in comparison with the divine.
This grandiose plan, which placed man as the cultural creator beside God as creator of the cosmos, was, as we know, brought to naught by Jehovah, who “confounded” the language of the people and “scattered them abroad upon the face of all the earth.” We shall deal with this motif of “separation of language” later. Here we are concerned with the micro-, macro-cosmic symbolism of the building of the tower, which in the Bible story is ideologically rejected. Roscher (op. cit., III, p. 9) is convinced that in the biblical account Babylon, with its massive seven-storeyed tower, is only comprehensible as the centre of the “ orbis terrarum” and original home of all humanity. In support of his theory he refers to a book by I. Hehn on the number seven,’ in which the Babylonian staged towers are interpreted as symbols of the cosmos, the sovereignty over which lies with the god enthroned on the summit. Roscher adds a query as to whether the throne is possibly intended as the world’s centre and thinks that the names of the towers would be in keeping with this (“House of the Seven Universes,” etc.). But, as we have already seen, the seven-staged tower, an important form in ancient architecture, has been traced back by E. Hommel to the seven-tiered structure of the neck-vertebra, with the head as dome crowning it. Now, Roscher’s conception of this building as the sign of the central point of the earth or the world seems to present the Macrocosmic counterpart to this. At the same time, these cosmic symbols of the spiritual elevation of man —the worldtowers — were erected on precisely those spots which were regarded as the earth’s navel, its centre, under the microcosmic interpretation. If the elevation of man above nature was to be justified, the architectural sign of this elevation had to be erected over the chthonian-animal symbol—as which the earth’s navel originally appears.
Here, again, Greece — as the turning-point in the process of humanizing (microcosmizing) the macrocosm — passed in the development of its cult-centres (Delphi in particular) through all stages of development of man from chthonian dependence to spiritual independence. The Delphic Omphalos (navelstone), which we have already encountered as the gravestone of the dragon Python, belongs, in the opinion of E. Maass,” to the oldest symbols and sanctuaries of Mother Earth, for its domed shape and the opening with which it is provided suggest the womb (uterus). And although other authors’ deny this connexion of the Omphalos with the earth-mother (Ge), its grave-like form, to which attention has already been drawn by Rohde (Psyche, I, 132), remains to be explained; for the significance (presently to be demonstrated) of the earth-navel idea cannot be disguised with this author’s remark that this miniature Tholos had only come to be called the navel— that is, the centre — of the earth as a result of misunderstanding and fables. If we abide by tradition, we find that the old sacred treasure of the earth-goddess, the “navel”-stone (Omphalos), was situated in the Temple of Apollo, where the god, after vanquishing the earth-spirit (dragon) Python, had established his seat above the grave of the deposed demon-oracle; another example, in short, of a building to the glory of an intellectual god of light (god of prophecy) set on the centre of the earth (the navel) that has the form of a grave and symbolizes the uterus of the earth-mother. From this formulation alone it is clear that, on the basis of what has been demonstrated, we can explain the contradictions that are found side by side in traditional accounts as part of the same development which leads from the triumph over chthonian dependence to spiritual independence. But this development shows also why it was precisely the conception of an earth-navel that attained such importance among the ancient culture-nations.
The answer to this question is found in considering the fact that of all the primitive biological symbols of a connexion between individual and cosmos — microcosm and macrocosm — the navel alone has that individual symbolic significance which (as we have seen) could, in its spiritualized form as a self-creative force, ultimately bring forth a human world-system. For the uterus, the mother-body, even the navel-cord, are all parts having continuous existence outside the ego and are, so to say, symbols of dependence; while the navel itself remains part of the individual himself as the sole mark of this the original connexion.’ Symbolically interpreted, therefore, the navel stands for the visible sign of the animal origin of man, but at the same time of his selfness and independence, while, conformably to its symbolical meaning as the lost link with the universe, it is at this point that man begins to construct his world-system so as to reunite himself with, not to say to magnify himself into, the cosmos. And when further we have taken into account the fact, demonstrable by ethnological evidence (see Roscher), that the navel was equally regarded as the seat of the soul (life-force) by reason of its nearness to vitally important organs (liver, diaphragm), we have discovered also that the driving motive of the navel cult lies in the transference of the soul’s immortal powers from the mother’s womb (grave) to the individual. Only through this humanization of the creative process, as it completed itself ideologically in Greece, can we understand the practical importance attaching to the idea of the earth’s navel in the development of the Classical culture. If the early Eastern world-picture was oriented towards the “celestial geography,” * which served as model for the terrestrial, here the earth becomes humanized by the aid of the Omphalos idea; that is to say, this heavenly geography was followed by a human geography, and it was through the latter that our earthly geography for the first time became possible. For the earth’s navel counted at first only as the centre of a particular country and we need not, therefore, assume the existence of a geographical knowledge such as no primitive culture could possibly have possessed. Only at a later date, and among civilized races that had achieved power, did the country’s navel become the earth’s navel, and on this navel was erected the building that symbolized their cosmic ambitions; for it represented man himself built up “self-creatively” from the navel. In the “Omphalos” the navel of the individual born from the womb of the mother (Earth) grows out, as it were, in the form of a building which symbolizes his own body and no longer that of the mother. In temple form it could still be regarded as a human tribute to the higher power of a creator; but as a “skyscraper,” crowning the earthly city, it was an expression of that human pride of which the biblical account of the fiasco of Babel is the moral condemnation. The confounding of tongues, which rendered the work vain, warns us that we must regard it as a symbol —if not indeed a source —of the ideology of a nation or state that races should imagine themselves to be situated at the earth’s centre (China as the “Empire of the Middle,” for example). There were in fact many violent disputes as to which city could pride itself on being the real centre of the empire and therefore of the world.
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1Rudolf Meringer alludes to the linguistic relation between Nabel (navel) and Narbe (scar) in his essay: ‘Omphalos, Nabel, Nebel’ (Worter und Sachen, V; 1913).
2 See Eberhard Schrader: Die Keilschriften und das Alte Testament, third edition, revised by Zimmern and Winckler (Berlin, 1902-3), p. 158: ‘‘Each god had, as we see, his reuévos, his templum, his piece of heaven; and it was therefore essential that he should have the same on earth. This piece is his country, the domain belonging to his temple. . . . From this view of the earth asa mirror of heaven (or, in reality, vice versa) there ensued a partition of countries, such as is met with again and again in the East, and of which the object was to represent each country as a self-contained whole. Man is a microcosm in himself, and the land-unit must likewise be so. Like the earth itself, this particular bit of it must reflect the separate divisions of heaven. And just as the gods rule up above, so do they rule in their respective sections of country, and their doings and the ruling of the country’s destiny may be observed in their celestial movements as may their workings within the smallest of microcosms— man. Hence the horoscope.”
Thus it was, too, with Delphi and Branchidz in ancient Greece,"¹ and with Jerusalem and Shechem in old Judea; and thus it is today with the various capitals of our monster states.² For the further geographical-political ideologizing of the individual earth-navel, it is important that it should have a particular localization. This Roscher calls the . peak-site ” (Hochstlage). Although the (very widespread) idea of the localization of the Omphalos at the highest point in the land may seem only an intermediate link in the development we have just traced, a knowledge of it is essential if we are to understand what follows. For, with respect to Delphi, Roscher has arrived at the conclusion provisionally that it is not the so-called Omphalos (centre) stones that are to be regarded as the real navel, but the earth-fissure whence there flowed the spring-water endowed with mantic power that the prophetess drank. The conical stone set up beside it would in that case only serve to guide temple visitors to the sacred spot.
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1 Possibly the famous competition among the seven Greek cities for the honour of being Homer's birthplace is a case of this sort of rivalry between small nationalities — so also, according to the Iliad, it brought about the disaster of the Trojan war (consider its mythic prelude in the strife over the apple of Paris).
2As an interesting example let us take the central importance enjoyed by Paris in the French empire for many centuries past. This is to be attributed to a shifting of the ancient Celtic earth-navel from the region of the Carnutes, somewhat farther north, to Paris and Saint-Denis, which took place in the Christian Middle Ages (see L. Olschki: Der ideale Mittelpunkt Frankreichs im Mittelalter in Wirklichkeit und Dichtung ; Heidelberg, 1913. Also, J. Loth: L'Omphalos chex les Celtes,’’ Revue des Etudes anciennes, Vol. XVII, 1915).
Without entering upon the cultural and archzological problem of Omphalos research, it will suffice for the purpose of our discussion to remember that the idea of the earth’s navel was originally a purely chthonian one, whether it was a fissure or a grave that was in question and that, therefore, the very use of the Omphalos stone to mark the spot signifies an ideological elevation above the navel as a natural depression — which is as much as to say, an “ artistic” representation of it. The displacement of this conically designed navel* to the highest point of the landscape is but another expression of the same elevation-tendency which manifested itself architectonically in the temple erected over the fissure or grave.” If we examine the material collected by Roscher from these points of view, it emerges at once that the idea of the peaksite for the earth-navel, which prevailed also among the Semites, is connected with the erection of sacral buildings, while the more fundamental idea of the sunk earth-navel was the basis of earthly town- (and road-) planning. The bestknown example of the first is — after Greece — Palestine. Its Jewish capital, Jerusalem, transcends even Delphi in its Omphalos significance. Delphi was for about a millennium generally acknowledged by the inhabitants of the Mediterranean countries to be the sacred navel of the earth, but the existence of the Omphalos of Jerusalem can be proved, according to Roscher, at least two centuries earlier, and it has been effective right through the Middle Ages and down to the Zionism of the present day.
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1 The effort to bring the domed shape of the Omphalos stone into harmony with its significance as the navel has led, on the medical side, to the suggestion that the navel of the new-born babe is actually slightly conical in form at the very first (P. Nacke: Arch. fir Krim. Anthrop.; 1912; p. 350). But this ‘‘realistic’’ explanation of such a work of art will not hold water in view of the complicated traditions pointing to the ideological interpretation. For, after all, we are dealing with a symbiotic representation of uterus, grave, navel-cord, and navel, while at the same time taking into consideration the elevation-tendency which gives the navel a conical form and sets it up erect. What appear to be representations of the navel-cord are in fact to be seen on many Omphalos stones; and if these might equally well be interpreted as snakes, the same significance of rebirth is involved (see Figs.). 2 Whether the subterranean adyton of the temple should be taken, in accordance with Classical tradition, for a natural grotto, or, as modern archzologists think, is an artificial cellar (of the eighth-seventh centuries) is irrelevant to its symbolic importance as the chthonian basis of the building above ground.
For no fewer than three of the most important world-religions — the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic — Jerusalem has ever been a holy place of the highest order. The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel praise Jerusalem’s position in the midst of the nations, and the temple of Jehovah as the highest of the peaks. With this peaksite there is linked also the idea that Jerusalem and all Palestine escaped being involved in the Flood, and consequently not only is the rebirth of humanity after the Flood, but also the actual birth of the first man transferred to this highplaced navel, which finally becomes identified with Paradise (see Roscher’s dissertation on the Omphalos in the Adam legend). In contrast to this macrocosmic-attuned lay-out of the peaknavel, which led to the erection of religious sacral buildings on mountain tops, we have the rite — practised especially by the Romance races of the Mediterranean (Etruria, Latium) in town-building. According to this rite, the town was built round a centre previously marked out, the so-called mundus. This centre is a circular pit, forming the geometrical centre of the city-to-be, into which the firstlings of all fruits and other gifts of consecration were poured. After this the limits of the new city were set by a circular boundary line drawn round the mundus as centre in a ritual ploughing. The pit itself (fossa), the lower part of which was sacred “ Dis Manibus” (to the spirits of the dead and gods of the underworld), was then filled in and closed with a round stone, the so-called lapis manalis. Now, Roscher regards the mundus as a particular form of earth-navel, which was here represented as a round pit to which the town walls and their ditches, in principle circular, conformed. He thinks it possible even to connect —as the ancients themselves did — the expressions mundus and urbs; for according to the earlier conception the world as well as the “ orbis terrarum” and the horizon (heaven) is round, and the underworld, the lower mundus, must, to be in keeping, have the same form. This interpretation of the mundus, which the ritual of Italian town-building discloses, completely confirms our own idea that town-building, like house-building, is based on the abdomen-symbolism (low navel) as symbolized in the earth, while the temple, symbolizing heavenly spiritualism, was erected on the high navel. Only the house, seen from this angle, retains more of the basic character of maternal protection than the temple, which strains away from earth to the representative of the upper, higher self. On the other hand, even in the architecture of the house, though its foundation and underground cellarage reach down into the earth,’ the creative self-elevation of the whole ego already finds expression.
Similarly the town as such, representing, as it does, a combination of houses, has retained some definitely maternal features, even though here, too, the other factors of selfexpansion and national rivalry gradually transform this picture into accord with the practical tendencies of commerce and communications. Perhaps the tower represents the earliest symbol of this turnover, for there we have no longer the house of God, but the insolent sky-scraper as the aim and centre of town-planning. Yet it retains a connexion — one might say, a navel-cord — with the older macrocosmic conception in that even this human city and its token the tower are erected on the navel of the earth. This humanization of the earth explains, too, the further development of the Omphaloi into the milestones that Athens and Rome have handed on to us. The altar of the twelve gods, erected by the Peisistratids towards the end of the sixth century, which stood roughly in the middle of the city, served not only as the religious centre but above all as the central milestone for the whole street and road system of Athens and Attica. Similarly, in Rome there stood in the city’s midst, on the Forum Romanum, Constantine’s “Umbilicus urbis Rome” and the “ Milliarium aureum” built by Augustus in 28 p.c. The first of these monuments counted as the centre of the city and the empire, the second as the basic milestone of the whole Roman road system.
These traditions of laying out town and country radially from the centre of the city once more reflect a cultural development of the earth on the microcosmic, human basis. It struck me, in the course of my first mythological work: Mythus von der Geburt des Helden (1909), that most of the heroes whose mythic birth-legends I was using as material were also reputed to be founders of cities. The connexion between this fact and our present theme seems to be something of this sort: the heroic city-founder is a foundling who has been turned adrift and is usually suckled by an animal fostermother (like the Roman she-wolf); thus, on the one hand he has lost the maternal protection at too tender an age and finds compensation in the city which he founds, while on the other he is destined by these circumstances to a creative self-development. The oldest literary tradition of this order is preserved for us by King Sargon, the Semitic conqueror of the Sumerian culture (about 2800 B.c.), who, in an inscription, asserts himself to be the virginal son of the Sumerian mother of the gods and therefore the legitimate saviour of the Sumerian people. The same waif-legend attaches to Moses, the Jewish national leader, who is similarly a compound product of two cultures, and the most famous case of all is the founding of Rome by the castaway twins Romulus and Remus. The more abundant tradition connected with the founding of Rome, which is said to have been established in 753 B.c. as a frontier post against the Etruscans, enables us to reconstruct the ideas governing the founding of cities — the ideas that came to be concretized by the Roman nation in its earthly worldrulership. Legends of the founding of the capital of the Roman empire seem to be dominated by the number seven, a number which, as we have shown, belongs to and predicates both a projection of the higher self and its creative representation. Thus Rome’s seven hills may, as E. Hommel suggests, rest on the conception of seven heavens, each with its own name (Palatium, Celius, and so on), and the suggestion derives support from the concordance of the Romulus saga in this respect with the seven first patriarchs of the Bible. Romulus is the first of seven kings. Like Cain, he founds a city, calls it by his name, slays his brother (again like Cain), and like Enoch (after whom the first city was named) is taken up into heaven. This parallel, which can be still further developed, is significant as showing that the first architect and town-founder built under an urge to compensate the loss of a mother* and yet did so in the heavenly manner; that is, psychologically speaking, with a cosmological conception of his act of spiritually newly-creating himself, and naming the creation accordingly by his own name. From this point of view the idea of the god of heaven as architect of the universe becomes intelligible: he builds the cosmos as man builds the city. Enoch the city-builder is, according to Alexander Polyhistor (c. 80 B.c.), the inventor also of astrology and identical with Atlas—the uppermost, seventh, and last of a series of identically formed joints (neck-vertebrz) ; for (Genesis v, 21-4) he is also “the seventh from Adam” and as such brings the first world-week to a close.” The Hanukkah festival, in which the seven-branched candlestick figures, is possibly, according to Hommel, the anniversary of Enoch’s initiation into the heavenly mysteries and his translation to the heavenly city. But it was at about this season that the Romans celebrated in their city of the seven hills and the seven kings the feast of the seventh planet deity, the Saturnalia, and seven days previously the feast of the Septimontium — the seven hills, which correspond to the seven heavens — took place.
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1The mother animal plays a part not only in the founding of Rome, but also, for instance, in the familiar story of the foundation of a new Troy by A&neas in Latium, on the spot indicated to him by the “Troy-sow."’ Similarly, in Epirus, when Hellenus built the city of Byopator (home of cattle) on the left bank of the brook Xanthos, the legend says that it was a cow that guided him by lying down on the spot (Krause; Trojaburgen, p. 282). *
2Just as Enoch personifies the seventh of the neck-vertebrz, so is the first biblical father of men, Adam, localized in the neck by the popular designation of the larynx as “Adam's apple.’’ But the uppermost of the seven neck-vertebrae corresponds cosmically to the highest of the planets, after which, later, the Jewish seventh day of the week was named (Sabbath, Saturni dies, Saturday).
Side by side with these macrocosmic linkages, which affected even the daily life of the individual citizen, the city-founding saga also contains a human motive which proves to be of basic importance to our theory of self-creative eternalization in the work of art. The city-founders Romulus and Cain are shown to be burdened with the curse of fratricide, and it is easy to see in this an echo of the most ancient and widespread custom of a building-sacrifice.* This age-old custom, still practised by many primitive peoples, may be traced right into our own architectural ornamentation: it consisted in immuring living human beings — new-born children for choice — under the foundationwalls of new buildings. No clue is found to the origin of this custom in any traditions. Rudolf Kleinpaul refuses to regard these built-in persons as “ sacrifices” in the true sense, on the ground that there would not at that stage be any protecting demons and gods in the new building who would require victims; the intention, he holds, was to create spirits, to make a beginning. In the deeper sense of creative force these “ house-spirits ” may reasonably be called victims, however, as they embody the idea that every created thing, if it is to be capable of life, owes its existence to some life destroyed. Whichever way one looks at it, the building-sacrifice affirms once more the dualistic nature of the problem of architecture, and, in principle, of all other artcreation. Above all, it throws a flood of light on the house as mother-symbol, but also as a burial-place in which the child is bedded so that it may rise to new life within the building itself. But the custom further reveals the fact that the building is not intended as a mere copy (imitation) of natural processes, but represents a spiritual re-creation, and this is made possible by the death of the walled-in person, which sets free his spirit to animate the building. As was only to be expected, the building-sacrifice itself has likewise undergone a process of creative spiritualization, and the traces of this are to be seen to this day in architectural ornament.
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1 There is no doubt that the sacrifice of the first-fruits that were enclosed in the mundus also represents such a sacrifice to the building. With the primitives —in Hawaii, for instance —a man is buried near the stump of a tree which has supplied the wood for a god-image, and the mask of the Kalebue (Eastern Congo) acquires its extraordinary magical powers (in the cult of the dead) only through the sacrifice of a slave (Vatter, Pp. 41).
From walling up an adult or child whole in the new building, it became the custom later in many places to use only the head, as in the head-burial of the Upper Paleolithic. We even have the account of one historically important case of the kind in the old Roman legend which tells of the finding in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus of a human head (caput tolt) in the foundations of the Temple of Jupiter in the Capitol (head of the city). As Kleinpaul observes, this head was probably placed there intentionally, and was not a casual fragment. This conception is confirmed by the animal and human headornament which is preserved on sacred and profane buildings not only on the Mediterranean, but also in the Nordic culture. We have already mentioned the artistic forerunners of these, the caryatids, which are interpreted even by Vitruvius as models of slaves who, instead of being killed, were exposed in their shame to the public gaze. P. Sarasin has quite definitely described them as echoes of the building-sacrifice, on the evidence of an old “ pile-dwelling in the Minahassa in caryatid pillar form.” Almost simultaneously Otto Schell interpreted * a number of ornaments such as are still to be recognized in the buildings of Germanic houses as reminiscences of the buildingsacrifice. According to him, these human and animal heads (horses, owls, bats) also serve as charms to ward off the evil spirits which threaten the inhabitants. In the opinion of Muchau,’ these animal skulls were attached to the structure, with a warding-off intention, as early as the pile-dwellings of the bronze age. He says, further: “ Greek architecture has in numerous cases affixed to the metopes of the temple figures of the frontal portion of the ox-skull with its pair of horns. Although these have the appearance of forming part of the decoration, they obviously represent the practice of some ancient custom.
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1 The whole of the material here discussed has been collected by Muchau in the above-mentioned Pfahlhaus und Griechentempel (1909; particularly Pp- 256 et seq., 290 et seq., and 296).
2 Abwehrzauber am Bergischen Hause,"' Globus, 6 June 1907, p. 335. The whole subject has recently been treated by Fr. Kohlbrugge in Tier- und Menschen-Antlitz im Glauben und Abwehrzauber der Welt (Bonn, 1924). (The special problem of the Evil Eye has been treated by Seligmann.)
It may be that skulls of oxen which had really been sacrificed were stuck up in this manner, or that the sacrifice of the animal’s head, as the superior part, was considered as good as the whole, or, finally, that the intention was to ward off demons, as with the Germanic people.” This warding-off significance of the building-sacrifice seems to me, however, to be a later trait which probably arose from the feeling of guilt evoked by the sacrifice of real life for the creation of the building. Thus, paradoxically, the victim himself is used as protection against the vengeful spirits of the evil conscience which torments the inhabitants because of this very sacrifice. Here the deep dualism of death again emerges: on the one hand the dead is to be completely put out of the way; on the other, he is to be allowed to live on spiritually — that is, creatively. And so, in the end, under the pressure of an increasing sense of guilt, this secondary protective spirit has become transformed into the familiar ghostly terror which haunts our castles, palaces, and monasteries to this day. But this is bound up with another peculiarity of house-building, which throws more light still on the building-sacrifice. In the development of the house-idea from the chthonian labyrinthconception (palace of the entrails), the difficulty of finding the way out of the winding maze is always the problem, whereas in the labyrinthine citadels (Troy) the difficulty naturally lies in getting in. Now, since these labyrinth-buildings have the significance not only of the womb, but of the grave also (as we have assumed for the house and particularly for the temple), it is clear that a special symbolic meaning attaches to these difficulties — a meaning which is linked with the belief in immortality and has been preserved to the present day in innumerable popular superstitions relating to the entering and leaving of a house. For if the house, under which, originally, bodies were actually buried, still retained a tomb significance after its two functions had been separated,’ the building-sacrifice appears to represent the dead who actually lives on in the house for ever and enables the living to leave it without risk.
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1 The persistence of this grave-house parallel is proved by the so-called “ houseurns,’ used to preserve the ashes. These are small models of the real houses inhabited by the dead in their lifetime. These house-urns are found both in the Villanovan culture and in North Germany (see Muchau, op. cit., pp. 241 et seq., and Schuchhardt, PP- 257 et seq.).
But here, once more, the idea of sacrifice appears in its deepest sense: it is the dead, the decaying, that assures to the living the possibility of existence and creative fruition. And if today we speak only metaphorically of the spirit or soul that lives in a work of art, the artist is often only too well aware that in fact a life has to be sacrificed so that it may live on immortally in the work. Only, in the beginning, in the course of natural processes, this was another’s life — our actual building-sacrifice — whereas the modern artist can as a rule only produce durable work at the cost of his own life. In this sense, however, the fratricide of Romulus —as that of Cain — is also to be understood as a building-sacrifice which the founder of a city was bound to offer in order to ensure to it life and (as the ideology of Rome proves) everlasting life." That mythical tradition turns this building’s victim into a brother — as does the biblical legend of the city-founder Cain — may be regarded as one of the doublings typical of myth-formation, and the characterization of the brothers as twins in both stories places this beyond conjecture. The idea is no doubt that the mortal “double ” must be sacrificed if the immortal ego is to live on in the work. Seen in this light, Cain’s fratricide, as described in the Bible, appears as the condemnation of human presumption which uses for self-glorification the life given by God.
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1 In the abundant literature on the Romulus legend, only a single work—and that a recent one, by Kretschmer (Glotta, I, pp. 288 et seq.) — explains the death of Remus as a building-sacrifice. According to the legend (see Roscher’s Lexikon), the twins resolved to found a city in the neighbourhood of the spot where their lives were saved. They then fell into a quarrel which ends with the slaying of Remus by the city-founder Romulus. According to the local tradition (as preserved in Livy), Remus was struck dead by his brother for having jumped over the half-finished walls.
And therefore, in founding the city —which as its building-sacrifice claimed Abel in the pride of his youth — Cain does not name it after himself, but after his son Enoch, in accordance with the tribal ideology of the Jewish race.* Thus we find ourselves again in touch with the primary principle, already formulated, underlying all artistic creativity, and manifested ideologically in the old Oriental culture, zsthetically in Greece, and religiously in Christianity: the creation, namely, of material and spiritual values — the values of culture, art, and religion — not as an imitation of nature, but as a macrocosmization of man, pointing him towards a new spiritual reality that is created out of himself and exists only through him. The essential in this process is the roundabout path that mortal man must tread through the imperishable cosmos (the constellations) in order to create out of himself on the humanized earth immortal cultural values which survive him. To this end, however, he must sacrifice part of his actual life, his possibilities of earthly happiness, creating a spiritual cosmos analogous to the heavenly one; and thus he becomes himself a maker of worlds, but, at the same time, his own world-stuff out of which and by which he creates. This, as we shall show in the next chapter, is the meaning of all mythology —that it melts human (earthly) and heavenly (cosmic) motives into an indissoluble unity. But this betokens no more and no less than that man starts from heaven to conquer the earth — a conquest that found its most perfect expression in the Greek cultural ideology with its humanized myths. Thus, man must first be the mythic creator of the cosmos, after which he becomes the creator of everything earthly —and therefore of the human culture that finds its objective expression in art.
