اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Chapter Five: part 1

MICROCOSM AND MACROCOSM

This Atman (human being) that I have in my heart is smaller than a grain of rice, smaller than an oat, smaller than a mustard-seed.... This Atman that I have in my heart is greater than the globe, greater than the expanse of the air, greater than the heavens, greater than all spaces of the universes. In it are all deeds, all scents, all tastes contained; it embraces all, it speaks not and cares for naught. This Atman that I have in my heart, it is this Brahman. With it I become One when I depart this life. He who has attained to this knowledge, for him verily there is no more doubt.

Upanishads

The art-work, then, as we have seen from our inquiry into the nature of zsthetic pleasure, presents a unity, alike in its effect and in its creation, and this implies a spiritual unity between the artist and the recipient. Although certainly temporary and symbolic only, this produces a satisfaction which suggests that it is more than a matter of the passing identification of two individuals, that it is the potential restoration of a union with the Cosmos, which once existed and was then lost. The individual psychological root of this sense of unity I discovered (at the time of writing The Trauma of Birth, 1924) in the prenatal condition, which the individual in his yearning for immortality strives to restore. Already, in that earliest stage of individualization, the child is not only factually one with the mother but, beyond all that, one with the world, with a Cosmos floating in mystic vapours in which present, past, and future are dissolved. The individual urge to restore this lost unity is (as I have formerly pointed out) an essential factor in the production of human cultural values. In discussing its effects on cultural, religious, and artistic creations I could naturally, even then, scarcely help drawing attention to the collective and indeed cosmic aspects of this problem, especially as I had been interested in the theme “Microcosm and Macrocosm” since 1907 (see Trauma of Birth, pp. 73, 167). In connexion with our present study of art it now becomes necessary to examine this human striving towards a superindividual unity and its spiritual premisses from the standpoint of those collective world-outlooks in which it has found more or less definite expression. It is in the world-picture of the ancient East that the clearest expression — systematic, even if not strictly scientific— of this fundamental unity of the individual with the universe is found. But this must only be taken in the sense that the Eastern culture-peoples systematized in their micro-macro-cosmic structure a general human feeling which we find in a more primitive form in all nature-peoples. And although there is no sign with the primitives of a developed system of human-astral relations, corresponding to that of culture-peoples, the world-outlook of the uncivilized is founded on the same identity with the universe, which goes beyond even the specifically astral parallelism of the heavenly picture and the earthly life. It will become still clearer in the course of our investigations that the old Oriental world-picture does merely represent an ideological formulation of the primitive identity-with-the-universe on a cultural plane which we can best describe as intellectual (or pre-scientific) ; it was only a question of a particular ordering principle of life, founded on astronomical observation. The primitives’ working-out of the principle was rather terrestrial, whereas the progress of culture seems to be characterized by a “ celestializing ” of pure human egocentricity. And as the world-picture of the ancient East, with its pre-scientific ideology, lies somehow nearer to us than does the magic world-unity of the primitives, we prefer to start from the developed macro-micro-cosmic system of the Babylonians, as revealed to us by the antiquarian research of the last quarter-century. The rise of this world-system, in which all earthly being, becoming, and perishing are to be read in the heavens, has been placed by Hugo Winckler, the rediscoverer of the ancient Oriental world-picture,* in the fifth to sixth millennia B.c.’ Its home is Babylonia, whence this astral worlddoctrine and astrological religion is said to have travelled over the whole earth. Although we are not able here to go into the vexed technical questions of the origin, age, and spread of this doctrine, its indisputable importance may be summed up, for the moment, in Winckler’s popular description: “The whole universe is the great world, the macrocosm; its parts are small universes in themselves, microcosms. Such a microcosm is man, who is in himself an image of the universe and a perfect being. But the great universe is likewise a man, and as it is ‘God,’ God has human form. ‘In his own image,’ therefore, was man created. This was still the belief of medieval medicine, which we know to have had (chiefly for the purpose of bleeding) a method of dividing up the human body according to the twelve signs of the zodiac (head, ram; neck, bull; arms, twins; and so on). On this the ‘scientific’ treatment of a patient was based...23" Winckler immediately adds a remark which with one sweep lays bare the whole psychological problem —the problem, namely, of how this theory of parallelism arose and what, in the last resort, it signifies.

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1 See Hugo Winckler: Geschichte Israels, Part II (xg00), pp. 275 et seq. Also his Himmels- und Weltenbild der Babylonier als Grundlage der Weltanschauung und Mythologie aller Volker (Der alte Orient, III, 2, 3; Leipzig, 1901); Die babylonische Geisteskultur (Leipzig, 1907), the last-named a popular presentation. This conception of Winckler’s has definitely influenced the whole present-day study of Oriental mythology, as is seen in the astral-mythological school headed by E. Stucken (Astralmythen; Leipzig, 1907), and of ancient Oriental religions, the leader in which field, Alfred Jeremias, has recently sought to show that the non-Semitic Sumerians were the real inventors of the celestial system (Die Weltanschauung der Sumerer; Leipzig, 1929).

2Widespread discussion has arisen over the dating of the Babylonian astronomy, which, according to Winckler, forms the basis of the ancient Oriental world-picture. His chief opponent is F. X. Kugler, who, in a learned two-volume work (Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel; Minster, 1907-9), seeks to prove that it was only in the last seven centuries before Christ that a real astronomy developed. The far-reaching conclusions which he draws from this late dating of astronomical knowledge are given in his essay: ‘Auf den Trimmern des Panbabylonismus’’ (Anthropos, IV, 1909). Boll goes even further, for he describes the astral-mythological system as a modern fantasy (Neues Jahrbuch far das Klassische Altertum; 1908). On the other hand, A. Jeremias, in Das Alter der babylonischen Astronomie (Leipzig, 1908), places that age in the third millennium s.c. It suffices for our purpose, however, to know that there is, independently of scientific astronomic evidence, abundant proof of parallelism between celestial (macrocosmic) and terrestrial (microcosmic) phenomena in the ancient Eastern culture; and there is the affirmation of P. W. Schmidt, important for our later investigations, that the astronomical-mythological system is not found among the nature-races (‘‘Panbabylonische und ethnologische Elementargedanken,’' Mitteilungen der Anshropologischen Gesellschaft of Vienna, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 2, pp. 73 et seq.)

This is a question which received most unsatisfactory replies both from Winckler and from the religious and mythological experts of his school, who when they assume that the Oriental culture-peoples “read off” their cult myths from the heavens, are really getting little beyond the facts premissed in the world-outlook itself, and leaving the problem of how the myths got up there unsolved. But even the purely psychological explanation, according to which they would be projections of human observation and processes on to the heavens, indicates no more than the need to anthropomorphize, and leaves it an open question why it was the heavenly bodies and happenings in particular that became so humanized, on the one hand, and supposedly so able to influence men so decisively on the other. A clear example of this mixing of terrestrial and celestial factors is provided by the Babylonian time-reckoning, of which Winckler says—in continuation of the remarks quoted above—“In the Babylonian mathematical tables the number 12,960,000 is treated over and over again in all its parts and possible combinations in relation to the sexagesimal system. . . . The significance of this number has been explained to us by Plato, who took it over from the Pythagoreans. According to him, this number was the arithmetical expression for the law controlling the universe. ... The explanation given ... is based essentially on the fact that the number of days required to make a human being (in the womb) is 260... . The year, reckoned at 360 days, makes 12,960,000 days == 36,000 years, or one hundred times as many days as years. And this, according to Babylonian calculation, is the number of years in a world-age. Plato reckons the duration of a human life at one hundred years (= 36,000 days), so that one day of a man’s life corresponds to one year of the universal world-year. Thus the two numbers of man and the universe (and therewith the godhead) are brought into an inward relation: they are mirror-images of one another.” But we, too, do not get beyond this mirror-image explanation if we merely seize upon the obvious suggestion that these speculations started from human phenomena (birth, duration of pregnancy, etc.) and were subsequently brought into line with celestial time-measurement. For the real question concerns, not the starting-point — whether it was celestial or terrestrial — but the motive for bringing the two groups of phenomena into relation at all. And, though it may be that Plato’s explanation of the Babylonian estimate of a world-age was a matter of later, Pythagorean, arithmetic, there still remains the remarkable fact that the old Mexican theory of the worldages contains the same “subjective factors” of human periodicity — in particular, the relations of planetary time-reckoning to the duration of pregnancy. Thus Danzel thinks that “the 260-day period of the “’Tonal-anatl,” which plays a special part in the Mexican calendar, may have been based on the duration of pregnancy as well as on astronomical spaces of time.’ For a general explanation of the subjective factor in timereckoning and calendar-making— designed originally to fix good and bad days for certain undertakings and for the curing of sicknesses— Danzel refers us to the periodicity of certain human processes which has been established recently by Kammerer, Fliess, and Swoboda; in particular, the congruence of female menstruation with the phases of the moon, which no doubt was already familiar to ancient folk-lore, may be regarded, perhaps, as a substantiation of the micro-macrocosmic parallelism. “The calendar symbols,” says Danzel (Mexzko, I, p. 25), “which considered determination for a given period, are signs for demonic forces that in turn are regarded as the controlling factors of organs and parts of the body, and therefore as having originally a subjective co-significance.” This relating of microcosmic and macrocosmic positions forms the basis of what Danzel calls the “ magic anatomy ” intended for practical purposes and for augury.

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1T. W. Danzel: Mexiko, II, p. 25. Ernest Fuhrmann (Mexsko, II, p. 21) has added more weight to this supposition in that he bases the Mexican year on the prenatal age of man and refers the new chronology (which is not based on the sun’s course) to this embryo year.

The soothsayer, who was also, as a rule, a conjuror of illnesses and healer of the sick, found in the system which correlated parts of the body and signs of the day a means of ascertaining the demon-worked causes of sicknesses and determining the day which, as controlled by favourable demons, would prove suitable for a cure. Such ideas are not confined to Mexico, however. They are found as far away as New Zealand, India, and China and stretch from the description of “ metaphysical prime man ” in the cabbalistic books almost down to the present day. We shall easily see, however, in following up the development which a similar macrocosmizing of the people took in Babylon, that it is only when these purely subjective factors have been overcome, and their hold on men shaken off, that a higher cultural development became possible. For this reason our modern psychological explanation of the macrocosmic system as an anthropomorphous projection on to nature remains inadequate — quite apart from the fact that these collective cultural images do not appear to square with our individual-psychological postulates. And if I nevertheless begin by drawing attention to them, this is because, for one thing, these subjective factors are as a rule not taken into account or are even denied by the archzologists; and, for another, in order that their inadequacy for the explanation of these cultural-ideological phenomena shall be obvious. Thus Danzel himself refers us, for an explanation of the mythological projection on to natural objects—which are thereby made into gods — to the investigations of L. Staudenmaier, who was able to produce something similar when experimenting on himself.

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1 Abundant material for this interesting medicinal aspect of the ancient culturepicture will be found in a two-volume work by Hovorka and Kronfeld: Vergleichende Volksmedizin (Stuttgart, 1908). The chapter on “‘ Bleeding,”’ in particular, deals with the relation of the signs of the zodiac to the various parts of the body. There is an overwhelming mass of material also in Stephan Steinlein’s two volumes: Astrologie, Sexualkrankheiten und Aberglaube in ibrem innern Zusammenhange (Munich, 1915). Lastly there is A. Warburg's Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luther's Zeiten (Heidelberg, 1920).

According to him, there are special dispositions in the psyche for imaginative “ personifications” which stand in a definite relation to certain physical organs.” Herbert Silberer, although in reviewing Staudenmaier’s book (Imago, II, 1913) he finds in it no more than the material for a psycho-analysis of the author, has yet himself established the existence of the same phenomenon from another point of view — namely, the purely psychological — as Staudenmaier has not failed to point out (second edition, p. 81). Because for Silberer too it is a matter of what he calls “ auto-symbolic ” happenings, such as he himself observed when abstract ideas reached presentation under concrete pictorial forms; he has indeed used the psychological explanation of such auto-symbolic happenings — which on occasion may perfectly well be personifications — to reinforce his psycho-analytical explanation of dream-pictures.’ The pictorial symbolism of dreams was already recognized in ancient Greece through Artemidorus of Daldis,’ and the great physician Hippocrates, too, had adopted the point of view that in dreams there is a transformation of internal sensations into symbolical pictures. In Das Leben des Traumes (Berlin, 1861), R. A. Scherner has made the first attempt in modern times to demonstrate this idea scientifically. He puts forward a whole system of body-symbolism, which Volkelt then made the basis of his book: Die Traumphantasie (Stuttgart, 1875), and finally Freud thoroughly sexualized it in his Interpretation of Dreams (Vienna, 1900). Scherner demonstrated the part played by al/ parts of the body in the building-up of the symbolism and, at the same time, worked out more particularly the symbolism of the house —to which we shall come later. For Freud it was merely the sexual elements which were of interest in this, but (as Scherner and Volkelt have aptly remarked) the house is not the only sphere used for the symbolization of bodiliness in dreams; and then, again, as Freud rightly adds, this tendency to symbolize one’s own body is by no means peculiar to the dream, but belongs to the activity of the imagination generally —a fact already discovered by Volkelt, for that matter.

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1L, Staudenmaier: Die Magie als experimentelle Naturwissenschaft (Leipzig, 1912; second, augmented edition, 1922).

2H. Silberer’s work was published in the Jahrbuch fur psychoanalytische . . . Forschungen (1909-14) and the Zentralblatt fur Psychoanalyse (1911-14).

3 Symbolism of Dreams. Annotated translation by Friedrich S. Krauss (Vienna, 1881). The sexual portions were translated by Hans Licht for Krauss’s Anthropophyteia, Vol. 1X.

Thus this subjective “explanation” of mythical phenomena by psycho-biological happenings leads us out again to the very problem that it was fetched in to solve: namely, to that of the particular nature of that type of human thought and imagination which, in contrast to our logical process of thought, is called “unconscious” by Freud, “ autistic” by Bleuler, “ symbolic” by Jung, “ prelogical” by Lévy-Bruhl, and “ mythical ” by Cassierer. All these names, variously as they may be interpreted, are at bottom only modes of emphasizing, as against the older views, the fact that this “primitive” thought of ours — so opposed to our logical and scientific scheme of connecting and concluding—is not purely arbitrary, but obeys “a law of its own peculiar sort and cast.” * But whereas modern research, particularly after the lead given by Lévy-Bruhl, has endeavoured to determine the mode of alogical combination practised in this primitive thinking, I should like here to tackle the problem from another angle, with particular regard to Cassierer’s theories. It seems to me, in fact, that the linking-up of heterogeneous conceptions in the primitive world-picture, which seems to correspond to our mental process of causal association, rests primarily on a special articulation of the universe which alone renders these strange linkages intelligible. This articulation of the universe is done primarily from a purely egocentric point of view which classifies things of the outer world, psychologically speaking, into those belonging to the ego, and therefore forming a part of it, and those not belonging to the ego, which are therefore foreign or hostile to it. In this division of the world into good and bad, to which the ego and non-ego naively correspond, experience of useful and harmful things appear to play a part, if not a decisive one.

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1 Ernst Cassierer: Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken (Leipzig, 1922).

Otherwise it would be impossible to understand how the Australian or Indian, whose totemistic world-idea is based on some world-classification of this kind, regards a particular tree as belonging to his ego, and a certain other as hostile to it. Supposing, then, as I for my part believe, that to every good thing there must correspond some bad thing, we are brought back to the more important question, what does such a partitioning of the world mean at all? To my mind, it is the same necessity as that which has led us to the causal world-view: that is, the desire to reach the good and avoid the evil by predetermination. The extent to which our intellectual-scientific causality takes account of this necessity is clear enough. But in the primitive, experience, which for want of a scheme of causal connexions he cannot have, is replaced by a naive pre-classification which enables him to characterize one group of things as good and clean, and another as unclean, forbidden, or tabu. By avoiding all contact with this second group the primitive expects to avoid all evil, and should evil befall him nevertheless, he takes this as a proof that he has, consciously or unconsciously, violated the scheme of division. We cannot here describe in detail the experiences, or, better, spiritual ideas, on which this primitive division of the universe is based. All that concerns us at this point is to make clear the difference between the primitive and the civilized world-pictures. In the first the notion of dividing appears to me to be what lies at the root of the whole world-outlook; and in the second the principle of uniting. The latter is not, indeed, absent from the primitive world-picture, but it is only a result of the avoidance of certain things dangerous to the ego, while in the civilized world-picture causal linkage stands in the foreground, with avoidance as its result. In any case, since the appearance of Durkheim’s great work * we have no excuse for regarding the totemism of the primitives as a mere principle of the social structure, but must see in it a universal principle of world-partition. “

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1Emile Durkheim: Les Formes ¢lémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris, 1912). The game ‘universal totemism’’ has been shown to exist among the Marind-Anim in Dutch New Guinea. See P. Wirz: Die religiosen Vorstellungen und Mythen der MarindAnim und die Herausbildung der totemistisch-soxialen Gruppierungen (Hamburg, 1922).

Actually the differentiation of the various clans according to their totems is not confined to the narrow social circle that it primarily concerns, but extends more and more widely till it embraces finally every sphere of existence, natural and spiritual. Not only the members of the clan, but the whole universe, with all that it contains, is articulated, by the totemistic form of thought, in groups which either belong together or are separated from each other according to definite kin-relationships. All things, animate or inanimate, are eventually swept into this structure in some way or other” (E. Cassierer, op. cit., p. 17). Yet Cassierer himself remarks that Durkheim’s explanation of this division of the world according to the divisions of human society is unsatisfactory (op. cit. p. 24). The truth is, we cannot arbitrarily pick out any one section from this universal classification of the world for the purpose of explaining the rest by it until we have realized the significance of the system as such. Whether, like Durkheim, we select the social class-system as our starting-point and apply it to the universe, or, like Freud, take exogamy or animal tabu, we shall always come to insufficient or false conclusions with regard to the whole; in doing so we should be postulating the applicability of a scale of world-values that is not adequate for the primitive system and seems rather to be an importation into it from our own. If we take as our basis the broadest possible principle of division, which we find in the totemistic world-picture of the primitives — namely, that into objects hostile or friendly to the “1” —and if we take into consideration not only the practical experience of the primitive but his spiritual foundations also, we shall arrive at one fundamental difference between his thought and ours. This is the notion, arising from the naive immortality-belief that death can be avoided, provided that one knows and avoids the forces threatening the “I” and, at the same time, knows how to use the helpful and strengthening forces to one’s advantage. The essential means to this end is the individual will, which must either be strong enough to fight and control the evil that threatens in the world or good enough to evade or ward off the bad influences. This worldoutlook, which perhaps finds not only its finest but also its clearest expression in the Germanic Baldur myth,’ can best be described as “magic,” because it presupposes that natural happenings can be influenced by human forces of will and does not merely aspire thereto, as is the case in our practical-technical world-scheme. The magic world-classification would thus, at bottom, rest on a distinction (not experimental, but volitional) between death-bringing and life-furthering objects, with the consequent tendency to avoid the former and keep the latter favourably disposed. We shall have to show, later, how this anti-causalistic assumption in the primitivé world-picture was bound to regard certain facts, such as sexuality, as hostile to the “I” and therefore to life; on the other hand it could endow man, in situations which would seem to us excessively dangerous, with a blind confidence in his powers provided that he felt himself to be at one with the forces friendly to his ego. So much already seems clear, however—that the astral world-picture of the Babylonians, with its relation between the celestial and the terrestrial, aimed at seeing good or evil events in advance, with the intention of avoiding those which were destructive and death-bringing, and bringing about those which brought healing and happiness. So also with the pre-Babylonian Sumerians: they originally used astronomical observation, not for calendar-making, but for its bearing on their personal fate, seeking to foresee its peril so as to forestall it. This attitude, which even today dominates our scientific ideology and is the foundation of the primitive’s magic world-picture, manifested itself in the ancient Oriental civilization in a form which we are now in a position to regard as the transition from the magic to our scientific world-outlook.

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1 Baldur could not be slain by his brother, Hédur, because all things in nature were bound to him in friendship—one may say, were at one with him. Only the mistletoe had contrived to be excluded from the universal oath of unity, and thus became his undoing. As in all myths in which the hero is vulnerable in one spot only, death inevitably breaks through despite all precautions.

For it becomes ever clearer that the practical-technical aims attained by astronomy, physics, and chemistry as they grew out of astrology, metaphysics (cosmogonies), and alchemy, were not implicit in the original intention in man, but asserted themselves as gradual results of the increasing cognition and recognition of his dependent relation to nature. In the beginning, then, man did not observe the stars for the purpose of an objective chronology," but had greater problems and higher aims in mind. What interested him was life and death, life’s span and death’s dangers, and the origin which he hoped might disclose possibilities of rebirth to defeat his transience. What he finally found, however, was a measurement, as exact as possible, of the primary clock presented by the rotation of the heavenly bodies. What he sought was a means of influencing the duration of time in the sense of the desire for immortality, and he did not find it. Here we recognize a driving motive for the projection — or, better, the relating —of human and heavenly (cosmic) phenomena: the individual is thereby lifted out of his uncertain everyday life and above his mere primitive identity with the All and becomes identified with the regularly recurring and consequently imperishable stars. Amongst these stars, as we now know for certain, it was the moon that played the chief, or at least the original, rdle—and naturally, since this heavenly body is differentiated from all the rest by its gradual waxing and waning, which positively invite comparison with organic growth and decay. Here, then, was another mode of ensuring rebirth after extinction, to assimilate one’s life on earth to the moon’s phases (which we know to have been laid down in the oldest chronologies and calendars) and so by magic identification to make oneself like her.

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1See also Ernst Zinner: Die Geschichte der Sternkunde von den ersten Anfangen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1930); also Franz Boll: Die Lebensalter (Leipzig, 1913), and the same author's comprehensive exposition: Sternglaube und Sterndeutung (Leipzig, second edition, 1919). More generally, see: Franz Strunz: Astrologie, Alchemie, Mystik. Ein Betrag ur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften (Munich, 1928).

According to the scanty remains of this primitive moon-cult — which at a later stage of development was driven out almost everywhere by the sun cult, which belonged to a different ideology — it seems certain that it was originally of female nature and that the moon-god only appeared as a supplementary counterpart to the moongoddess, as her son or brother (later: son, brother, and husband). These mythological traditions of all civilized and most primitive races have their sociological counterpart in the fact that the remains of the moon-cult also point to primitive conceptions of society, in which the woman still played a greater part than that which we find allotted to her in the patriarchal organization of high cultures with their sun-cult.’ The reconstruction of the old Oriental world-picture, though it has made our present outlook on human cultural development much broader by compelling us to recognize the spiritual as well as the material factors, has in particular cases rendered it difficult to decide where the starting-point for this relating of earthly and heavenly is to be placed. The only certainty seems to be that cultural development has advanced by way of the cosmic, and that in particular the artistic working-out of a culture remains inexplicable unless we posit a macrocosmization of the earthly. In any case, we should beware of naively projecting our own practical-technical mentality into the so-called primitive culture, which was in a sense more spiritual than the present civilization. Whatever may have been projected into heaven from earth, it is more important for the understanding of a culture that (as has now been proved) certain celestial processes had to be imitated in cult-form on earth in order that man’s cosmic identity, and with it his immortality, might be assured. For choicecult, which belonged to a different ideology — it seems certain that it was originally of female nature and that the moon-god only appeared as a supplementary counterpart to the moongoddess, as her son or brother (later: son, brother, and husband). These mythological traditions of all civilized and most primitive races have their sociological counterpart in the fact that the remains of the moon-cult also point to primitive conceptions of society, in which the woman still played a greater part than that which we find allotted to her in the patriarchal organization of high cultures with their sun-cult.’ The reconstruction of the old Oriental world-picture, though it has made our present outlook on human cultural development much broader by compelling us to recognize the spiritual as well as the material factors, has in particular cases rendered it difficult to decide where the starting-point for this relating of earthly and heavenly is to be placed. The only certainty seems to be that cultural development has advanced by way of the cosmic, and that in particular the artistic working-out of a culture remains inexplicable unless we posit a macrocosmization of the earthly. In any case, we should beware of naively projecting our own practical-technical mentality into the so-called primitive culture, which was in a sense more spiritual than the present civilization. Whatever may have been projected into heaven from earth, it is more important for the understanding of a culture that (as has now been proved) certain celestial processes had to be imitated in cult-form on earth in order that man’s cosmic identity, and with it his immortality, might be assured.

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1 Bachofen was the first to point out this connexion in the ancient primitive cultures in his Mutterrecht (1861), but it has since received widespread corroboration from later researchers, in particular Frobenius, who discovered traces of a matriarchal culture in prehistoric Africa (Das unbekannte Afrika, Munich, 1923). Whether the duration of the female period and pregnancy (which in any case varies as between individuals) should not be regarded as the attempt at a macrocosmic assimilation of woman to the moon may be left an open question. Certainly we find no allusion to this astonishing parallel in the oldest traditions, whereas even now we can observe any day how easily these biological processes may be influenced, and their timing altered, by psychic factors.

For choice, the actors in these celestial dramas were the king and his family. The original kingship — traces of which are preserved even in the few surviving and constitutional monarchies of today — was a divine kingship: that is, the ruler’s whole mode of life was prescribed, down to the smallest details, by the cosmic laws which it was the very business of the astral doctrine of the time to establish. This order of things clearly survived in the Incas of Peru, in the mikado of Japan, and in many other instances of which traces are seen in the pre-Aryan Dravidian culture of India, the pre-Babylonian Sumerian empire, and the related South African culture.* Without the knowledge of this “cosmic” idea of the state, which obliged the king to be a living proof of the immortality-principle for his subjects, we should still be unable to comprehend how and why the original exercise of art was, in these “celestial” cultures, devoted almost exclusively to the religious service of myth-cults connected with the disposal of the dead. It would appear, from the discoveries of archeology, that only the king, as vessel of the immortality-principle, was buried according to a prescribed cult-ritual; even so, the assistance of art would be still more necessary on that occasion to produce the desired cosmic identity than for his service during his “ artificial” life-course. Enough has been said, without entering at present into the detail of tomb-art, to show once again the fundamental meaning of artistic creativity —the art, that is, of rendering concrete by pictorial representation that which is thought and is spiritually real—in fact, to prove its existence. This pictorial representation of something thought, whatever its objective content or its style, must necessarily be in the nature of creation, because in it man is macrocosmizing himself and thereby rising above his nature.

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1 For India, see Frazer: The Golden Bough; for Sumeria, Woolley’s works on Ur; and for Africa, L. Frobenius: Erythréa (Berlin, 1930).

And if there is, in artistic creativity as such, a tendency towards cosmic perpetuation (which has only become individualized in modern art), we may go a step further and regard the belief in the soul which led to artistic creation as man’s first creative achievement. For the original idea of immortality, before it had anything spiritual about it, was a primitive transformation-belief — though no doubt the germ of the later belief in the soul was latent in it —a belief in certain individuals that they possessed an active power of returning to life, of (in a way) reproducing themselves by selfcreation. In the earliest cu/ture-stratum to which we have had access, only the king, whose life-course, even so early, had to be “cosmic,” was believed to have this immortality of the “soul”; and it may well be, as Woolley suggests, that the human sacrifices buried with the royal corpse were selected from those who were found worthy to share the king’s immortality, to which as ordinary “ mortals” they would have no claim. This cosmic réle of the king as vessel of immortality seems to me to explain also the strange institution of the ritual murder of kings, traces of which were found by Frobenius in Eritrea after Frazer had produced abundant material (from southern India in particular), and Zimmern had found further traces in Babylon. The sacrifice of the king is —like the human sacrifices in Mexico —his privilege. As representing the immortality-idea he may not die a natural death; on the other hand this very fact made his death by violence a necessity, and accordingly he was slain by his successors, who were assisted by the youngest of the royal wives (Frobenius). The sacrifice of the king is thus only the logical conclusion of his whole supernatural existence, the passing ordained for him because of his réle in this earliest human drama. The supernatural, divine character with which the myths of later historical times invested his birth? attaches in older times to his death. From this fate he was spared later, in certain cultures, by the substitution of a criminal or a slave.” But this mitigation only means that the original double meaning of the king’s murder — the bestowing of immortality as his privilege, and the taking away of it— was distributed between two persons.

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1 As early as c. 2800 s.c. the first Semitic ruler of the Sumerians, Sargon of Akkad, describes himself as the virgin son of the Mother of the Gods, and so proclaims himself the saviour of the Sumerian people.

2H. Zimmern describes a Babylonian New Year's festival which bears a close resemblance to the Christ myth —belonging, indeed, to the same range of ideas, since Christ, as carrier of the immortality-idea, would not be capable of dying a natural death.

And, for that matter, the funeral rites, in spite of the extreme contradictions in the traditions (Frobenius), leave us no doubt that it was sought to make the murdered king’s return easier and at the same time impossible.’ Much light is thrown on the most primitive idea of the soul by a custom observed at the burial of chiefs throughout Oceania and also in Africa and South America. It is founded on the belief that the soul — that is, the power of rebirth — resides in the liquid portions of the human body. These, of course, are the first to decompose. Not only are the corruptible parts scrupulously collected, therefore, but the putrefying liquid is pressed out of the corpse itself until it is left quite dry and withered. Such, at any rate, is said to be the underlying idea, for it has not been really established, in spite of the abundant material collected (by Frobenius in particular). To me the reason for this custom seems to lie in the ambiguity already alluded to: namely, hesitation between facilitating the return and preventing it. For sometimes the products of decay, so carefully gathered into a vessel, are preserved until new life shows itself in them, while at other times they are thrown into the bush. Whether this is done with the intention of doing away with them or of incorporating them with the general cycle of nature remains an open question. In any case the dried (as it were, mummified) body is walled up in the rocks, ostensibly because it is “definitively” dead; yet in practice this skin-and-bone skeleton is preserved in many graves to this day. Instead of seeking a uniform solution, therefore, we propose to assume an inherent double significance in funerary custom?

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1 Certain African traditions (Frobenius: Erythraa) lead to the assumption that the emphasizing of one or another of the inherent tendencies of the ritual was influenced by the character of the slain king, who in one case may have been feared and in another wanted back again.

2A similar ambiguity exists with regard to prehistoric ‘* crouching” gtaves, with their bound corpses, which, on the one hand, were designed to prevent the dreaded return of the dead and, on the other, to facilitate the return of the released soul to the deserted body (possibly aided by the resemblance of the corpse's attitude to the embryonic position). Compare the discussion on these two theories, which again appear only to reflect the double significance of the custom, in H. Klaatsch’s Die Anfang: von Kunst und Religion in der Urmenschheit Leipzig, 1913; pp. 39 ¢t seq.).

(which no doubt reflects the justifiable doubt in immortality) and to examine only the one side of this belief that seems to have led to the development of the soul-idea. We allude to the conception of the “soul-worm,” which is known to the tribes of Madagascar as the Fanany myth. This is obviously founded on observation of the worms appearing on a corpse, which do undeniably denote new life. From this purely corporal notion of a transformation a path leads to the first conception of the soul by way of substituting for the worm some other animal, also at first small and creeping, such as a snake, a lizard, or other live creature living in the ground, the rocks, or the water." The Fanany myth, mentioned below, of the Betsileo in Madagascar shows already a certain progress from the primitive worm to the soul-animal.’* The Betsileo squeeze the putrefying liquid out of the bodies of the dead at the feet and catch it in a small jar. After two or three months a worm appears in it and is regarded as the spirit of the dead. This jar is then placed in the grave, where the corpse is laid only after the appearance of the Fanany. A bamboo rod connects the jar with the fresh air (corresponding to the “ soulholes” of Northern stone graves). After six to eight months (corresponding possibly to the embryonic period) the Fanany (so the Betsileo believe) then appears in daylight in the form of a lizard. The relatives of the dead receive it with great celebrations and then push it back down the rod in the hope that this ancestral ghost will prosper exceedingly down below and become the powerful protector of the family and, for that matter, the whole village.

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1 “Once we admit the worm to be the vessel of the soul, the transition to the snake in general is a natural consequence, as the latter appears to a naive intelligence as merely an enlarged edition of the former” (Erich Kister, in his learned work: Die Schlange in der griechischen Kunst und Religion; Giessen, 1913; p. 64, foot-note 1). 2 From Sibree’s Madagascar, pp. 309 et seq., quoted by Frobenius in Der Seclenwurm (1895) and reprinted in Erlebte Erdteile, 1 (Frankfurt, 1925), a treatise which deals principally with the ‘‘vase-cult’’ arising out of the storing of decayed remains in jars (see our later remarks on the vase in general).

In this valuable tradition not only do we clearly perceive the transition from the primitive worm-transformation to the idea of certain soul-animals that have nothing actually to do with the decomposing-process itself, but also the transition to totemism. For the soul-animal, unlike the soul-worm, is addressed as a collective spirit, by which the whole community benefits, and the sending-back of the lizard to its underground residence is not carried out in the interest of the particular dead person and his revitalization, but in the interest of the community, which, indeed, may sacrifice the individual (see the “building-sacrifice” later) in order to thrive the better as a whole. Later totemism— the idea of descent from a definite animal species *— seems to emerge only from a secondary interpretation of the soul-worm idea or the soul-animal idea in accordance with a “ law of inversion ” (Frobenius) peculiar to mythical thought; just as the myth of the Creation as the projection backwards in time of the myth of the end of the world is in itself only a formal expression of the principle of rebirth. This adaption of the soul-worm idea to the totemistic derivation of man from the maggot is set forth clearly in the creationsagas of the Samoans and Tonga Islanders, especially in those collected by Schirren (Die Wanderziige der Neu-Seelinder und der Naui-Mythus; Riga, 1856). Tangaroa sent down his daughter Tuli in the guise of a snipe to people the naked rocks. A creeper, thus brought into being, withered. Out of the leaves and stems of the rotting plant there arose worms. Tuli chipped them with her beak and made men out of them.

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1The idea that it was originally a question of small animals has recently been proved by a valuable piece of research on Indian myths by Ida Lublinski: ** Eine weitere mythische Urschicht vor dem Mythus,"’ Zeitschrift fir Volkerpsychologie, VI (1930). In explanation of the preference for small animals as beaters in mythical action, the author refers us, if not expressly, yet I think unmistakably, to the observation of the phenomena of decay in the dead body. On the significance of small animals, see also what is said in The Trauma of Birth (1924; pp. 16-19), and further in Seelenglaube und Psychologie (1930; p. 25).

Another widespread idea is also here: namely, that of the soul-bird,* which, on the analogy of the worms, may be assumed to have originated from the carrion-eating birds. Here too, therefore, the creature figures in the beginning as the representative (abductor) of the soul and only later became its “ bringer.” But the significance for art of these early ideas of the soul is not only one of the history of motives as this is set forth by Frobenius, Weicker, and Kuster—to name only the most important writers—who have shown us respectively the “Kawok ”- (lizard-) jars, and the representations of birds and of snakes which are found right on into the Classical age. These soul-concepts convey to us also the immense part played by the animal in general in the history of religion and art of all times and peoples. (A comprehensive work on this subject has recently been written by Fuhrmann: Das Tier in der Religion; Munich, 1922.) Light has also been thrown by African traditicn on the transference of the soul-concept from the original small creeping creatures to certain species of larger mammals. According to Lublinski, the conviction still exists among a great many African tribes that dead chiefs transform themselves from the worm-stage into snakes, leopards, or other animals.’ The Barundi, for instance, believe that the dead king becomes a snake. “ He is sewed up in skins and slowly roasted before a fire. The first worm that creeps out of the corpse is placed in a pot with milk and is fed until, one night, it leaves the pot. It seems to be assumed, therefore, that the snake develops out of this worm.

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1See the reference to the veneration of the vulture which devours human carcasses in my Don Juan-Gestalt (1922); also H. Klaatsch, op. cit., pp. 36, 42. The whole subject is comprehensively treated by Georg Weicker in Der Seelenvogel in der alten Literatur und Kunst (Leipzig, 1902).

2 According to Ratzel (Valkerkunde, second edition, I, p. 284), the northern Madagascans believe that the spirits of the chiefs go into crocodiles, and certain rajahs in Timor pride themselves on their descent from the crocodile. The South African tribes recently studied by Frobenius (Erythréa) imagine the souls of their dead kings to be lions (Mondoro) and fear them accordingly.

Other tribes often believe that this worm grows into a leopard” (op. cit., p. 53). I am inclined to think, however, that this substitution of large animals, particularly beasts of prey, for the worm does not point merely to the honouring and glorification of the chief, but that more complicated emotions find expression therein. Above all, the character of a beast of prey assigned to the chief’s soul displays it once more in its dangerous aspect; we may also take into consideration another motive, which I have already emphasized in The Trauma of Birth, when contrasting the small and large animals, and this motive has quite a special significance in the development of art, inasmuch as it concerns religious art in the sense of grave- and tomb-decoration. The motive in question is that of being swallowed by a large animal, which, in contrast to the gradual and partial devouring by worms, suited the symbolic representation of rebirth through the mother (the conception of the womb as an animal). The traditions relating to this stretch through the whole of Classical culture to far on into the Christian symbolism of rebirth and can therefore receive only brief mention here, although they play a great part as motives in artistic representation. Certainly the idea of the womb as an animal has been widespread among different races of all ages, and it furnishes an explanation of (for instance) the second burial custom discovered by Frobenius along with the Fanany burial in South Africa. This consisted in placing the dead king’s body in an artificially emptied bull’s skin in such a manner that the appearance of life was achieved. This bull-rite was undoubtedly connected with the moon-cult (compare our “mooncalf,” even today) and belongs therefore to the above-mentioned maternal culture-stage, at which the rebirth idea also made use of maternal animalsymbols, the larger mammals being chosen.” Yet we must not overlook the fact that this “ mother’s womb symbolism” denotes more than the mere repetition of a person’s own birth: it stands for the overcoming of human mortality by assimilation to the moon’s immortality.

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1 Frobenius suggests—and the suggestion is supported by other cultural evidence—that cattle at this stage of culture were kept for ritual purposes only and not for breeding. The cultic origin of farming and breeding was first brought out by Eduard Hehn: Die Entstehung der Pflugkultur (Heidelberg, 1909).

This sewing-up of the dead in the animal skin has its mythical counterpart in the swallowing of the living by a dangerous animal, out of which he escapes by a miracle. Following an ancient microcosmic symbolism, Anaximander compared the mother’s womb with the shark. This conception we meet later in its religious form as the Jonah myth, and it also appears in a cosmological adaptation in the whale myths collected in Oceania by Frobenius.’ Hence, also, the frequent suggestion that the seat of the soul after death (macrocosmic underworld) is in the belly of an animal (fish, dragon). The fact that in these traditions the animals are always those dangerous to man indicates that the animal womb is regarded not only as the scene of a potential rebirth but also as that of a dreaded mortality, and it is this which led to all the cosmic assimilations to the immortal stars. Thus we perceive a development of the belief in the soul, ranging from the denial of maternal origin (as a symbol of mortality) to the assumption of divine descent from the imperishable stars, with the king (or chief) at first as earthly representative thereof. This development, which has left a precipitate in art-history also, goes, however, beyond the animal, and the final result of the whole process, in the early Oriental world-picture, is the transfer of the animal to heaven. But to understand the detail of this development, which eventuated in the curious signs of the zodiac, we must remind ourselves that the very earliest conception of this animal was that of the soul-worm and similar reptiles or amphibians, and that these, living, as they did, half underground and half in the water, stood nearer to the macrocosmic womb-symbolism than did the larger mammals or the birds of the air, venerated by a later cult.

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1L, Frobenius: Im Zeitalter des Sonnengottes (Berlin, 1904); on Classical tradition, Hans Schmidt: Jona. Eine Untersuchung zur vergl. Religionsgeschichte (1907). For a general survey, see the chapter: 'Myth and Metaphor”’ of this book.

Again, the idea of the soul-worm as emerging from the soft parts of the human body bears a close relationship to the idea of the animal’s interior (the mother’s womb) as the origin of life — later, as the seat of the soul — although even at the primitive worm-stage we can see a hint of parthenogenesis — in other words, a self-creative tendency of the soul-concept.’ This tendency becomes still clearer in the celestial assimilation of man, and of other large mammals living on the earth, to the stars, which constantly renew themselves; and in the end it finds the purest creative expression in the spiritual conception of the soul, released from all matter, which first began to take shape in Greece. What makes the evolution of the soul-concept, therefore, so important in an analysis of the art-problems is the fact that not only does it form the hypothesis and incentive for all creative work, but this evolution is seen to be in parallel with the origin and expression of the creative urge itself. Whereas in the beginning the soul-concept was concerned only with the keeping of something given —that is, with the conservation of life —the essence of creativity lies first in the ability to regenerate something lost and eventually in the triumph of newcreating something that had never existed. On the basis of this formulation it is easy to fix the point at which the sexual ideology became important to man, attaining a significance which it had never before possessed and was subsequently to lose. After all, it can neither be used to preserve man’s own life (being, on the contrary, regarded as hostile to the ego), nor can it make possible the new creation of that which never existed; its sole use lies in the re-generation of what has been lost; and therefore, at a particular stage of development that has not yet reached real creativity, it becomes a symbol of human — namely,- of reproductive — power. Those theories which have made out that artistic creativity is the expression of the sexual impulse have only made use of a transition phase of man as creature to secularize the conception of man as creator.

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1There is a biological parallel to this conception in the modern view of “epigenesis,’’ according to which new elements become effective in the new organism born from the bisexual parent cells which had no previous existence in those cells.

Indeed, this latter conception itself, as manifested in the idea of God, amounts to nothing less than an objectification of a creative urge that is no longer satisfied with selfreproduction, but must proceed to create an entire cosmos as the setting of that self. In man’s relation to the animal also, which has helped him out of his subterranean mortal origin into his heavenly immortality, we can trace the same transformation from man as creature to man as creator —in other words, from religion to art. In the ancient Oriental world-outlook, at its climax in the Babylonian culture, we find, side by side with the welldeveloped masrocosmos-system (with man on a level with the universe), a primitive technique of soothsaying which made use of the entrails of freshly killed sacrificial animals. From the number (and possibly the position) of the intestinal coils the priest deducted favourable or unfavourable portents of the fate of the land, particularly with regard to undertakings that the king had in contemplation. This hieromancy, also, rests on the belief in some spiritual power, originally localized in the lower body; man questions this spirit as to the future because, being no longer willing to wait and see what that future will be, nor able as yet to shape it creatively himself, he wants to know in advance. Here we have a reaching-out beyond even cosmic assimilation, which certainly promised immortality, but also fatalistic, preordained uniformity without the possibility of creative development. Now, although this reading of entrails (which is considered by scholars to be of high antiquity) may have survived as the echo of a primitive custom (perhaps the Fanany burial), the form and date of its appearance in the Babylonian culture show it definitely to be a reversion of macrocosmized man to his animalistic chthonian nature on which he still feels his earthly existence to depend.

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1 Whether we have here also the earliest beginning of a psychological outlook, a sort of introversion, such as the Greeks, in taking over from the ancient East, crystallized in a spiritual form, must for the present remain a pure speculation. It is at least a striking coincidence that the first attempts to systematize human gestures as the evidences of inward processes are found among the Babylonians. This commencement of a psychology of expression has been preserved for us in the neo-Babylonian “‘ twitching-books,’’ one of which has been published by B. Meissner in the Sitgungsbericht der Preussischen Akademie (1921).

In other words, in this mantic, man’s destiny was looked for again where it had lain of old — in his own interior, such as the Babylonians practised with their birth-omens, which must be regarded as the forerunners of our astrology.’ In any case, with the Babylonians primitive hieromancy very soon acquired a form which denotes the broad outlook of a high stage of culture: this was the inspection of the liver and was based above all on differentiated anatomical knowledge, but on a better-founded conception of the soul as well. For whereas the idea of the entrails as the seat of animal life still bears traces of its derivation from existence in the womb, the liver mantic transferred the seat of the soul to a vital organ of the individual himself, and for this reason the liver came to be regarded by the Greeks and Romans as the seat of thinkingpower and also of instincts and desires.” According to Jastrow, who has gone most closely into the subject,’ it is already mentioned on inscriptions of 2600 3.c.; and it is probably much older. He takes divination from the liver of the sacrificial animal (particularly the sheep) as primary, and its application to the prophetic reading of the heavens as secondary; Jeremias, however, regards the liver mantic as a reading of the heavens transferred to the slaughter-house. Here again is undoubtedly a case of the reciprocal play of earthly (human) and heavenly (cosmic) processes. As the liver mantic, like all others, was brought into use originally to discover the fate of the country (which depended upon the king), it was bound to have super-individual aspects, which readily took on macrocosmic forms.

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1Morris Jastrow: Babylonian-Assyrian Omens (1914); Dennefeld: BabylonischAssyrische Geburtsomina (Leipzig, 1914); Ungnad: ‘* Das Alter der Geburtsomina’’ (Orientalist. Literaturzeitung, 1917); see also Fischer in the Gyndkologische Runaschau, 1916.

2See the article: ‘‘Leber CLiver)’’ in M. Héfler'’s Die volksmedizinische Organotherapie und ihr Verbaltnis zum Kultopfer (Stuttgart, n.d.).

3M. Jastrow: Religion der Babylonier und Assyrier, I, pp. 213 et seq., and 273 et seq.; also: The Liver in Antiquity and the Beginnings of Anatomy (University of Pennsylvania, Medical Bulletin 20, No. 1, January 1908). The soul of the living is called in Babylonian: kabittu (= liver) or libby (= heart). The Babylonian soothsayer, called in Latin haruspex, is said to have taken his name from the Sumerian har (= liver) (see Boissier : Note sur un document babylonien; Geneva, 1901; and, by way of comparison, Jeremias: Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur, second edition, 1929, p. 261, foot-note 1).

A proof of this is its “artistic” imitation in clay, which, as shown by a discovery, may be traced back to 2000 B.c. (Jastrow). The liver as the seat of life counted as a small-scale cosmos— in other words, as a copy of the whole man — just as the soul was still his essence. This is why, in explanatory texts, certain parts of the liver which had been studied individually were given names such as fissure, mouth, finger. On the other hand, the mountain, street, palace, and gate of the liver are also spoken of, and this indicates a macrocosmic interpretation. (A certain part of the liver still carries on a trace of its cosmic significance in the modern anatomical nomenclature: processus pyramidalts.) The Etruscan bronze liver of Piacenza, discovered in 1877, which Jastrow calls “a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm,” shows this significance developed in detail,” but shows also that the Etruscans combined with the liver mantic, adopted presumably from the Babylonians, another cult of horrible human sacrifice that was quite foreign to the old Oriental cultural sphere. The macrocosmic interpretation of the liver as the image of the cosmos is, after all, only the counterpart of the microcosmization of heaven, into which all imaginable earthly things and, above all, animals were transported (signs of the zodiac). This microcosmization of the cosmos is seen in another symbol of the ancient world, which likewise found its most definite formulation in Babylon.

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1 The very division of the edge of the Etruscan bronze liver into sixteen regions, corresponding to the sixteen heavenly regions, gives it an external resemblance to the cosmos. The top side of the liver represents heaven, and the flat side the earth, and every separate part is linked with a particular activity of the god of the world. See Korte: ‘‘ Die Bronzeleber von Piacenza’? (Mitteilungen des Kais. Arch. Inst. Romische Abt., Vol. XX, p. 362). The whole subject has been comprehensively dealt with by W. Bartels in Die etruskische Bronzeleber von Piacenza (Berlin, 1910-12). The difficult work of deciphering the Etruscan inscriptions we owe to Albert Griinwedel (Tusca, Leipzig, 1912). His interpretation of the texts is, however, so full of expressions of his personal abhorrence of the Etruscan mentality that one more than distrusts the objectivity of interpretations which are in themselves sufficiently doubtful. According to Jeremias, the Etruscans took over from the Babylonians not only the liver mantic, but the art of town-planning, which was later adopted by the Romans, as was bird-augury (Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte, second edition, Munich, 1924, pp. 226 et seq.).

We allude to the conception of the earth’s navel (to which we shall return when dealing with the development of architecture) at this point because it 1s bound up in many traditions with those of the liver. This is obviously because, in both cases, it is the symbolization of something essential and central that is in question: in one case, in the interior of the body; in the other, on its exterior.’ This conception of the navel as the earth’s centre does not, as the PanBabylonians would have it, appear to have arisen in the East and from there to have travelled over the whole of the earth; for Roscher’s thoroughgoing research on the subject * has proved that it existed in many different places, mostly totally unconnected, among, for example, the Peruvians, the inhabitants of Celebes, the Arabians, Persians, Phcenicians in Cyprus, and others. Fuhrmann even claims to have found the temple ornament of the Delphic navel again in South Sea ornament.’ As the world-navel also counted as the entrance to the earth’s belly — the underworld — it was at the same time regarded as the starting-point of the world’s creation, in conformity with its microcosmic parallel. “The whole of antiquity seems to have thought that the organic life of the embryo developed from the navel as the centre of the body —an idea which must almost involuntarily have led to the notion that the navel of the earth was also the starting-point of the world’s creation” Roscher III, 16).

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1 For the combination of navel and liver, see F. Hommel: ‘* Ein neues Bindeglied awischen Etrurien und Kleinasien'' (Memnon, 1, 86). The so-called templum or navel of the world from Troy, as-depicted, for instance, by A. Jeremias in: Das alte Testament im Lichte des alten Orients (second edition, Leipzig, 1906; illustr. 21), resembles the liver used for divination purposes, by the Babylonians and the Etruscans.

2 W. Roscher: Omphalos. Archdologische volkskundliche Abhandlung uber die Vorstellungen der Griechen und anderer Volker vom ‘‘ Nabel der Erde’’ (Leipzig, 1913); also: Neue Omphalosstudien. Ein archdologischer Beitrag zur vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft (Leipzig, 1915); and: Der Omphalosgedanke bei verschiedenen Volkern, besonders bei den Semitischen (Leipzig, 1918) (quoted as **Roscher I, II, or III"’ respectively).

3 The further application of this idea to the dome-shaped tomb and church cupola generally is shown by Fuhrmann in his Grabbau (Munich, 1923). ‘Starting from the beautiful navel-symbol of Delphi, we may safely assume that all ornamentation which consists in the tying up of separate balloon-shapes stands for the exceedingly important mother- or woman-symbol that signifies rebirth in the flesh’’ (p. 57).

We shall show, in our next chapter, how the navel attained to such importance, and here we need only point out that the basic idea of chthonian creation, in that it is based on an animal analogy, is older than the supernatural, heavenly creation. In conformity with this development of man from biological creature to creative and self-creative spirit, the earth’s interior (corresponding to the female abdomen) was looked upon as the centre of creation and consequently was conceived of as the belly of an animal. Later the whole body came to be the (earthly) underworld, and the head (consciousness, will, spirit) became heaven, which eventually became identified with man, just as the earth had been with woman (mother).* This development, which we infer on psychological grounds, receives definite confirmation from an interesting study by Eberhard Hommel,” who, in continuation of Fritz Hommel’s (his father’s) “Symbolism of the Parts of the Body” in the astronomical alphabet, points out that in various languages — Greek, Slavonic, Syrian, Arabian — the palate, which arches itself over the throat like a vault of heaven within the mouthcavity, bears the designation “heaven.” The study in question is devoted mainly to proving in detail that the double meaning, heaven-palate, still existed in Latin (palatum) and Etruscan (faladum), so that this symbolism is preserved not only in the “magic” anatomy of medizval astrologists, but partially to this very day in medical nomenclature. And this macrocosmization has quite possibly influenced the formation of language itself as well as the nomenclature; for (quite apart from these investigations, apparently) Ernst Fuhrmann has “demonstrated for the first time in Schwedische Felsbilder (1923) how the valuation of these (Nordic) consonants came about in the most natural way: namely, by the identification of events in the sun’s course with the positions of the mouth in which consonants were produced” (quoted from Afrika, p. 7).

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1See A, Dieterich: Mutter Erde. Ein Versuch siber Volksreligion (Leipzig, 1905).

2“Etruscan fala(n)dum— Latin palatum, and an old name for the god of heaven”’ (Orientalistische Studien, Fritz Hommel zum 60. Geburtstag, Vol. 1, Leipzig, 1917; pp. 233 et seq.).

But Hommel’s excellent work discloses yet another relation of arthistorical importance between the upper portion of the human body (head) and the upper part of the world (heaven). The part in question is the neck, or, rather, the vertebre of the neck, which form the connexion between the rest of the body (lower body) with the head. The seven vertebre with their step- or tower-formation became the pattern of the seven steps leading to heaven and even of the “seven heavens.” “ Atlas,” the topmost vertebra of the neck, bears the heavenly vault on his shoulders according to ancient belief, and Hommel notes that: “Seven-tiered towers were indeed frequent in ancient architecture as cosmic symbols of the seven planet spheres. And highest of all there was the vaulted sphere of the skull, which corresponded to the upper heaven of the fixed stars.” The relation to the art of building —that is, architecture as distinguished from simple domestic building —which now confronts us is of fundamental importance to the whole problem of artistic development. For whereas house-building is generally agreed to have been in the first instance a matter of the protective cave,” which is clearly recognizable as the chthonian womb-symbol, architecture begins, like all “higher” development, with elevation above the ground, but also with the remaking of the house from a mere covering (the mother’s body) into the symbol of the whole man himself — and, what is more, of the creative ego and no longer of the protective mother.

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1Tt is noteworthy that while E. Hommel claims to trace the old Etruscan god of heaven to pre-Hellenic Greece, Krause, on the other hand, traces it to the German north (Die Trojaburgen Nordeuropas; Glogau, 1893.

2 Fuhrmann believes that building was still thought of as essentially subtérranean, even when the structure rose high above the ground as in mausoleum or cathedral architecture (Der Grabbau). For the whole subject see also H. Muchau in Pfahlhausbau und Griechentempel (Jena, 1909). It is worth noting that psycho-analysis has done more towards elucidating the genesis of building (though not of architecture) than it has towards helping me to explain art, particularly since I traced the so-called ““womb-symbolism"’ to the urge to restore the actual womb-situation in my Trauma of Birth (1924). For later literature, see: Sterba: ‘* Zur Analyse der Gotik"’ in Imago, X (2924); Kuhnen: ‘‘ Psychoanalyse und Baukunst’’ (ibid.); Sydow: Primitive Kunst und eae (2927); Léwitsch: ‘‘ Raumempfinden und moderne Baukunst,"’ in Imago, XIV 1928).

We see, then, at work in the development of a single branch of art (which assuredly belongs to man’s earliest creations) the selfsame principle that psychologically we have had to take as the basis of every artistic creation: namely, the creative self-representation by means of which the individual frees himself from his dependence on a biological mortality in order to immortalize himself in durable material. Now, if the macrocosmization of man, which reached its summit in the ancient Oriental culture, leads to religion and particularly to star-worship, it is, on the contrary, the microcosmization of the cosmos, which finds its highest expression in the Greek style, that underlies art and artistic creation. Before we are able to demonstrate this by the development of Classical architecture, we must, after describing the cosmic system, trace this process of microcosmizing the universe, which probably has its roots in the Babylonian world-picture, even though it first flowered in the Cretan culture and only reached maturity in Classical Greece. If, as I think, we have in Babylonia the critical point of transition of this developmentprocess which converts the animalistic-chthonian world-picture into the spiritual, heavenly one, it becomes extremely important to be able to refer to some tradition in which a fragment of the link between these two worlds appears to have been preserved. It was Peiser who (in a lecture delivered at the general meeting of the Vorderasiatische Gesellschaft in 1912) first drew attention to Babylonian representations of the labyrinth, which has so marked a resemblance to the famous Cretan labyrinths and the Nordic labyrinth spirals, the so-called “ Trojaburgen.” The meaning and aim of these drawings remained quite unsolved, however, until a new archzological find came to light. Koldewey made a photographic copy of a tablet discovered during the excavations of the Deutsche Orient Gesellschaft i in Babylon and dating, as far as can be told, from 1000 B.C.

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1 Robert Koldewey: Das wiedererstehende Babylon, p. 239