اولین سایت نشانه شناسی شوهر آهو خانم

Microcosm and ~Macrocosm

Chapter 5: Part 2

Deciphering the annotations on this tablet, Weidner at last succeeded —in his own words —in finding “the solution of the riddle that the evidence itself suggests in any case.”* The term used there for the labyrinth figure is well known from Babylonian literature on the subject of the entrail mantic. Literally translated, it is the “ palace of the entrails,” by which is no doubt meant the entrails as a whole. Naturally, Weidner does not fail to point out that the designation “ palace” is “ not without its significance in connecting these drawings of entrails with the labyrinths of the AAgean culture.” In any case he claims to have produced the proof that in these spiral drawings —of which usually a whole row is found ornament-wise on a tablet —“‘we have before us representations of the entrails (intestines) of sacrificial animals from which prophecies were made.” But just as the suggestion evoked by the evidence failed to reveal the solution of the riddle to researchers before Weidner, so it took another learned treatise by E. Hommel — already known to us as a brilliant interpreter of the cosmic anatomy — to point out the obvious in establishing the womb-significance of these intestinal spirals (representing the body’s interior) beyond a doubt. In his work: Zur Geschichte des Labyrinths* there will be found abundant material for the widespread conception of the womb as an animal interior out of which the hero, by his own strength and mostly by the destruction of his perilous prison, finds the way back to life. Although we must defer to the chapter “ Myth and Metaphor ” the discussion of the creative aspect of these traditions, already mentioned (whale myths; Perseus type), we may just mention here the rebirth significance of this set of mythological ideas which culminates, not in a wish to return to the mother, but, on the contrary, in overcoming this mortal origin by assimilation to the sun’s course (see Frobenius: Im Zeitalter des Sonnengottes). In this sense, the “palace of the entrails” stands not only for the animalistic housing of the soul, but also for the macrocosmic world-structure on which the earthly palace was modelled.

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1F Weidner: “ Zur babylonischen Eingeweideschau. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des pier (Orientalistische Studien. Fritz Hommel zum 60. Geburtstag, Vol.

2 (Leipzig 1917). * Orientalist. Literaturzeitung, 22nd year, 1919.

The development of the soul-concept, therefore, as it has been determined by the collective ideology (including artistic creativity) of the nations, presents itself to us as the perpetual association and rivalry of two groups of ideas: the one is the notion of a life after death in the same form as that familiar to the living; the other, the idea of return in a new form, which varies with the cultural development. The first idea of a simple extension of life in another locality, but in the same form, is undoubtedly the earlier and more primitive conception, which sees death only as a migration to another region. Corresponding with this is the conception of the dead soul, generally regarded today as the most primitive of ideas on soul;* here the soul only appears with death; the living man has no “soul”— needs none, so to say —for the soul at this stage is only an expression for the altered life extended into the beyond, this being originally imagined as under the earth, in the grave. The grave thus becomes the house of the soul — that is, that of a human being who is living on elsewhere —and for this reason house and tomb are inseparably linked (as we shall show in the following chapter) and only intelligible through each other. We shall also have to show the connexion which leads from the idea of the grave as the house of the soul (as which the dead person now figures) to the conception of the human body itself as the “housing” of the soul, because this connexion is of extraordinary importance for an understanding, not only of architecture, but also of the whole development of art.

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1 See the following important new works in which recent ethnological material on the primitive races has been produced in rectification of Erwin Rohde's (Psyche) animistic conception: W. Otto: Die Manen oder von den Urformen des Totenglaubens (Berlin, 1923); Ernst Bickel: Homerischer Seelenglaube. Geschichtliche Grundzsge menschlicher Seelenvorstellungen (Berlin, 1925); and J. Bohme: Die Seele und das Ich im Homerischen Epos. Mit einem Anhang: Vergleich mit dem Glauben der Primitiven (Leipzig, 1929). The first, so far as I know, to uphold the pre-animistic materialism (which comes very close to our materialistic science) is Rudolf Kleinpaul (Die Lebendigen und die Toten in Volksglauben, Religion, und Sage; 1898) and the next, Hans Naumann (Primitive Gemeinschaftskultur; 1922).

For the moment it is sufficient to formulate this process on these lines: originally, man became soul at his death, while later, living man Aas a soul which only parts from the body at death. Now, while this side of the immortality-belief — with its idea of the continuation of man’s life as soul, in a locality other than the earthly — led to the development of the religious belief in the beyond, and so to a culmination in the idea of the immortal soul, it would seem that it was the belief in transformation that proved of greater importance for the development of art. This belief was, even at the lowest stage — for such we believe the Fanany myth to be—connected with the animal, which from materialistic totemism right into spiritual Christianity remained the connecting symbol of the return to earthly life. Only, the conception of the soul-worm (and crawling animals related to it) shows the transformation of man into the animal (in the sense of the later doctrine of the transmigration of the soul), while the idea of animal burial (animal casing) presupposes on the contrary the rebirth of man out of the animal (the mortal womb). In most religious customs and traditions, as well as in the corresponding artistic representations, we find the two immortality-ideologies side by side, as if man sought to ensure himself doubly against any doubt of the possibility of a continuation of existence. Still (as we have already observed) the varying attitude of man towards the animal at different culture-stages serves as one of our most enlightening fossil guides to the reconstruction of the history of man’s rise from creature to creator —which means, from religion to art. To give a broad idea of our meaning and by way of regaining touch with our original theme of the entrail-labyrinth, we would remind our readers of the development of the Classical age of religion and art as it lies before us, stretching from Egypt to Christendom. In Egypt we have, side by side with a quite materially understood life-extension of the dead (in his double, Ka), whose body was protected from decay by mummification, the idea of animal rebirth in the strict “ super-totemistic” animal cult, and, finally, the first dawning of a spiritual rebirth of man himself in the Osiris myths, with their incestuous immortality-symbolism.* Egypt therefore became, in art as well, the classical land of human-animal hybrids, such as we see in its animal-headed gods and its sphinx-pyramid, which represent a mixture of animal-belly and earth-belly. It was the Greeks who first succeeded in freeing the human being from the animalistic (as I have shown in my Trauma of Birth); either they caused the animal monsters to be slain by divine heroes (for example, CEdipus’ killing of the Sphinx) or—which comes to the same thing—they banished them to the underworld. This underworld then became the model for the Christian hell, with all its monsters and the beast-like ruler at their head — only, the Christian conception of hell became moralized beyond the Greek idea of the underworld, just as the Christian conception of the soul spiritualized the purely human soul of the Greeks and thus in a sense macrocosmized it afresh. For whereas originally the earth’s interior was regarded as equivalent to the human interior (abdomen), from which all life springs and to which it appears to return, in Christianity the earth itself became the underworld, while heaven became that upper world which, to the Greeks, was still an earthly life within this world. In this respect, as also in the reinstatement of the great mother of the gods, Christianity stands nearer to the ancient East, and particularly to Egypt, than to Greece.

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1 The brother-and-sister relation, indicated in the Osiris myth, is neither a feebler form of the mother-incest nor a disguise of union with a sister, but, as the traditions of primitive peoples teach us, a deliberate replacement of mother and wife by the sister —as one who has neither borne the brother himself nor bears him children. In the African burial rites it is often the sister who brings the dead king back to life, precisely because she had nothing to do with his birth or that of his children. With the introduction of the sister as awakener of others to life, mortal rebirth is eliminated and recourse is had to the creative power of the soul itself. In Egypt as in Peru, which is culturally akin, the king, considered as God, took his sister to wife and had as his successor the son of this marriage; but the motive for this was ritual and not sexual and is accordingly always symbolized macrocosmically (moon and sun). The king marries his sister because he, as God (star) wandering on earth, is immortal and may therefore not propagate himself in the children of a strange woman—any more than he is allowed to die a natural death. Cultural-historical and mythological material concerning this will be found in my book: Das Inzest-Motiv in Dichtung und Sage, second edition, 1926, chapters xii, xiii. For incest as a symbol of rebirth, see Jung: Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido (1912), and, for the spiritual significance of the same, my Seelenglaube und Psychologie (2930; pp. 127 et seq.).

Egypt was a land of the dead, not only ideologically (in its religion), but even in its earthly life, which was regarded as a preparation for life beyond in the underworld. The Greeks were the first, and perhaps the only, people to live really on earth and in the light of the sun— hence their sharp dividingline between the upper world and the under, in which the dead led a bloodless, soulless existence. But it was not in the vague Beyond that the Greek looked for the immortality that his earthly life, for all its charm, denied him, but in a spiritual and yet still human upper world wherein the Classical art and the Classical philosophy found an imperishable expression. While the Egyptian lived below the earth, and the Christian above it, the Greek, with all his spiritual requirements, stood firmly planted upon it; and yet for him the culture-forming link with the under and the upper world did not petrify into mere formalism. In the case of Rome, with its exclusively worldly orientation, it did so. Roman civilization sought immortality neither in other-worldly nor in intellectual ideologies, but, like the Jewish race, in a purely national ideology, which, however, did concretize into a world-dominion never before paralleled —to be transformed again in due course by the Church into a theocracy. This transference of the plane of human life which manifests itself in the changing ideology — religious, artistic, and political — found individual expression at the same time in the microcosmic development from lower (body) culture to the upper (head) culture. This came about by shifting the localization of the soul from the lower to the upper region — macrocosmically from the underworld to heaven, microcosmically from the lower part of the body to the head *— and the agent is the macrocosmic body-symbolism, of which we see the two poles in the entrail-liver auspices on the one hand and the stellar religion with its astrological application on the other.

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1 The story of the birth of Pallas Athene out of the head of Zeus seems to me to be the first Hellenic forerunner of the Christian Logos-ideology. E, Hommel (loc. cat., p. 249) interprets it as a cosmological outcome of Greek anatomy and physiology.He gives the following very ingenious account of this microcosmic origin of the Greek cosmology: From the head of Zeus, representing heaven (that is, the skull), there emerges through the hole in the back Pallas Athene (that is, the seven-storeyed neck, symbol of the plant heaven). The part of midwife is played by the old smithand heaven-god, who has to open the head and so receives his allotted place in anatomical symbolism as Atlas-Faland in close proximity to this opening. Further, there springs from this opening of the Zeus-heaven the Aion (Greek aldy, spinal marrow) and out of this again, according to the Classical physiology of humours, the seed from which the human race is formed (cf. Plato:Timaus).

The decisive turning-point in this development from the animalistic idea of rebirth to the spiritual principle of immortality we take to be the ancient Oriental world-outlook, which travelled, for many thousands of years and by the difficult and roundabout route of animal-worship and animal-cult, from Babylon through Egypt and Greece to cosmopolitan Christianity. But we saw also that it was the soul, or, rather, the varying conceptions and localizations of the soul, that formed the bridge from the lower animal world to the divine upper world. The decisive point in the religious process of elevation above the animal was, as we have seen, in Babylonia, where hieromancy was steadily evicted by the worship of the stars, while the animals out of which astronomy was to grow were gradually removed to places in heaven as constellations. The decisive point in the artistic development from the chthoniananimalistic principle to the spiritual-creative is to be found, we think, in the Cretan-Mycenzan culture, which formed the link beween Egypt, Greece, and the European culture-zone, and to which we shall now turn to investigate the labyrinth symbol. In this we start from the similarity between the Babylonian mantic of entrails and the labyrinths of the Aigean culturezone —a connexion supported additionally by Weidner’s epigraphic evidence. According to the Minotaur saga, localized in Crete, the bull-headed monster inhabits the labyrinthine palace. Here Theseus succeeds in overcoming him and ending the Athenian tribute of human sacrifices, but is himself only able to find his way out of the tortuous maze by the help of the thread given to him by Ariadne. This labyrinth was traditionally supposed to have been at Knossos, the royal seat of Minos, and had been built by Dedalus to serve as a dwelling-place for this monster, born of a union between Queen Pasiphaé and the Poseidon-bull. Thus in this traditional story we find already all the elements that we have just discussed, united in a mythical narrative which bears the mark of Greek mentality. It is clear that in making this bull-headed creature, the Minotaur, a monster the Cretans were expressing their detestation of the Egyptian animal-cult. This Grecizing of Egyptian influence is not only evident in the transformation of the typical Egyptian animal-god into a man-eating monster, but also in the literary tradition. Diodorus tells us that, according to some Egyptians, Dedalus had so much admired the age-old Egyptian labyrinth — a colossal imperial palace on Lake Meeris, ruins of which still exist, with twelve courts and three thousand rooms —that he built the Knossos labyrinth on the model of it, but that of the latter there remained no trace. And Pliny remarks that even if it were not a hundredth part as big, one should not imagine it a mere maze, like those winding paths of a mile or more constructed in children’s playgrounds. But most of our recent researchers are agreed that in reality the labyrinth at Knossos never existed, but was a fiction of the imagination. The Egyptian Meeris palace, described by both Herodotus and Strabo from their own sight of it, whose ground-plan (1,000 feet long and 800 wide) Flinders Petrie exposed in his excavations of 1877-88, was, according to Brugsch, called “ Jepire-hint” (erpe-ro-hunt) which means something like “ temple of the canal system.” Welcker and others think, on the contrary, that the numerous underground caves and grottoes in Crete were called “labyrinths,” which therefore meant practically the same as the galleries of a mine. Hock, in his work on Crete (Gottingen, 1823), supposes that there was a grottolike cult-centre to which was given the name labyrinth, but that this was only derived from dances which wound in and out like the planets in their courses among the stars in the firmament. Ernst Krause has treated the whole subject exhaustively in his book: Die Trojaburgen Nordeuropas (1893) (with the sub-titles: “ Their connexion with the Indo-Germanic Troy saga of the abducted captive Lady of the Sun, the Troy games, and the sword and labyrinth dances in celebration of the spring liberation”). We can only allude briefly to this interesting piece of research, which amounts to a history of the “ labyrinth idea,” in supplementing Krause’s macrocosmical interpretation by Weidner’s more recent revelation of the microcosmic significance of the labyrinth. It should be noted that Krause included the Nordic labyrinths in his sphere of investigation, thereby giving the problem a universal significance which —as we shall show —is of great importance to the history of art also. Certain labyrinthine passages described in Icelandic saga as animal-traps are called Troy towns or Troy castles in England and Scandinavia. “ The name Trojaburg (Scandinavian Trogin, Trojeborg, Troborg; English Troy-town or Walls of Troy; Welsh, Caer Droida) has been given in northern Europe since ancient times to mazes (labyrinths) whose winding paths are closed with small or large stones or are cut out of the turf” (op. cit., p. 2). These antiquities, which are described as prehistoric by most researchers and have often been regarded as children’s playgrounds, seem to have served for labyrinth dances similar to those reported from Crete and Delos. This labyrinth dance was called Troa and Troja, like the equestrian display dedicated to the goddess of spring. In the attempt to explain philologically the meaning of the Germanic word Troie, which should be read in extenso (pp. 10 et seq.; 37, 47), Krause arrives at some extremely suggestive conclusions, of which we adduce here only those bearing on our problem. From the general use of the word “ Trove” for castle, jerkin, and dance, he deduces a root idea of circumvallation, wrapping round, revolving. This is the root meaning that Klausen (Aineas und die Penaten, Il, pp. 827 et seq.) also gives to the Latin words: Troja (in ludus Troje), trua, and trulla (stirring spoon and stirring pan) ; and even to ¢roza in the sense of “sow ” (Italian ¢roja, French rue), referring in the last case to the animal’s circling round and round — that is, writhing in its birth-pangs. In Greek the kindred words beginning with “tro” are still more frequent, as for instance: trochos (circle, race-course, wheel, ring-wall, snake-ring) ; zrochmalos, the stone boundary mark of a field; troullos, the cupola; Trophonios, master of the circular buildings. Krause seems to assume “ that (as has been shown to be probable in Kuhn’s Journal, Vol. VI11) all these expressions (including Scandinavian zro, English ¢rue, German ¢reu, Old Prussian druwis, German Glaube, Lithuanian drutas, German stark, and others) go back to an ancient Sanskrit word still in existence: dhruwa (from dhar, to hold), which means firm, reliable, trustworthy, and generally something permanent ” (op. cit., p. 12). Now, as the root ¢ro, roi, tru has taken on the meaning of turning, dallying, revolving, dancing, in Germanic, Celtic, Latin, and Greek, and Troi and Troyer also mean “dance” in Old Germanic, it is easy to imagine, in view of the ground-plan and use of the Troy-towns, that the EnglishScandinavian expression Troy castle and Téjeborg, might be translated as round castle or dance-castle, even perhaps as crazy castle, since the conception of turning (Old German drajan, Gothic ¢raian, Celtic troian, Middle English throwen — cf. modern English zhroe, German kreisen) melts easily into that of distorting, entangling, leading astray, and even bewitching (p. 12). Then, too, the Roman priests of Mars (the Salii) seem to have called the labyrinthine sword-dance which they executed in spring (March) Troa or Troja after the old folk-songs to which they were sung. This forms an interesting parallel to the Geranos dance in Crete and Delos which commemorated the obscure windings of the labyrinth — and does not Homer tell of the dancing-place made by Dedalus and the choral dance of Knossos (Iliad, XVIII, 590 et seq.) ?* Putting aside for the present any discussion of the dance problem, we will return to the Nordic Troy-towns to look for the link which binds them to ancient tradition and artistic development. Krause mentions a Welsh tradition told by the shepherds, who stated that “ they cut out a figure in the form of a labyrinth in the glass which they call Caer Droia, the walls or the citadel of Troy.”

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1 Creuzer mentions in his Symbolik some ancient traditions of religious dances, the so-called ‘‘planet-dances’’ which were supposed to imitate the courses of the stars. The Cretan labyrinth dance itself was similarly described as an astronomical dance, which again links the entrail cult to the heaven-ideology. Krause thinks that possibly the epic: Les Murs de Troie ou L'origine du burlesque (by the celebrated writer of fairytales Perrault, in 1650, but never printed in full) contained allusions to Troy games and Troy dances in contemporary France. Much earlier still, ‘‘la tresque’’ —the Italian tresca, a round dance with twisting, twining figures (from intrezzata, intricate) was danced in France.

“If there were a tradition anywhere referring to the labyrinthine form of the walls of Troy, the name would appear to be an invention of pure Cymric origin, suggested by the similarity of the designations Caer Droia (Troy Town) and Caer’ y troian, city of windings or turnings.” An interesting perspective for art-history is here opened up by the fact that these field labyrinths are found in mosaic in the naves of numerous Italian and French churches.* These show us, like the socalled Salzburg Mosaic of the struggle with the Minotaur, the later meander development of the labyrinth spiral, whose original significance we now propose to seek. If, then, we follow the development of the Babylonian entraillabyrinths through the Cretan Minotaur-saga to the Greek story, we find a progressive overcoming of the animal-chthonian element by an artistic principle of form, which we shall now follow up in some selected historical examples. In Crete we find, simultaneously with the throwing-off of the Egyptian animal-cult, an ornamental estheticizing of the labyrinth motive, as had already been foreshadowed in Egypt.

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1 Here the penances of the monks who hurry coughing along the windings of the crooked paths seem to have become separated from the ritual dance originally associated with it,

On the other hand the “palace of the entrails,” which in Babylon represented a macrocosmization of the protecting womb and was perhaps actually realized in the Egyptian Meeris palace, is made here into a fictitious, mythological tradition; at the same period we find the smelting-irons adorned with labyrinth spirals, while they themselves represent labyrinths or circular dwellings, whose macrocosmic enlargement we recognize again in the subterranean vaulted tombs of Mycene. How far it was a direct current of influence that flowed over Babylonia, Egypt, Crete, Mycenz, Troy, seems to us less important than the possibility that it represents a genuine upspringing of a generically human ideology in different places.* But also where an influence is probable or can even be really proved, the use of the same motive in different cultures remains a more interesting problem. In Babylonia it is the relation to astrology, in Egypt to architecture, in the #gean culture-zone to art (ornament), and in Asia Minor to national problems (Trojan War), which emerges from the overthrow of the chthoniananimalistic world-view.

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1 We will not discuss here the possibility of a Northern influence on southern Europe, such as Krause upholds, because, for the moment, it seems more important to trace the general human outline. Suffice it to say, therefore, that the Nordic Troytowns go back to the bronze age, according to the researchers (see particularly Aspelius in the Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, Vol. IX, 1877) and that there are also found in the North similar funeral urns in the form of Old Germanic houses, the so-called houseurns. Scheltema has proved the spirals, which correspond to the labyrinth, to be the essential ornament of the bronze age and has shown that their origin is probably in the circle.

Even as late as in Homer’s story of the Trojan Wars (which probably have a historical nucleus in the colonization of the shores of Asia Minor by wandering Greek emigrant tribes) we have, woven into the military history, myth-fragments, which not only embellish the historical events, but are also of high importance for an understanding of the artistic tradition. For we find, beside the relationship of the labyrinthine palace-cage of the beast-man Minotaur with the impenetrable “labyrinthine” citadel of Troy, yet another relation between Crete and the Mycenzan culture of Troy as described by Homer. A vase made after a Greek model on Italian soil in the sixth or seventh century B.c. — the curious Tragliatella vase — gives us the possibility of uniting the Cretan Minotaur saga with the famous fable of the Wooden Horse. In the principal drawing on this vase, to which Ernst Krause has devoted a monograph,’ the warriors, among them two mounted horsemen, are seen coming out of a labyrinth spiral which on the one hand must represent labrinthine Troy itself, but on the other hand, as I believe, may be an allusion to the interior of the horse, out of which the Greek heroes came after they had smuggled themselves into the impregnable fortress. Then, too, this carved wooden artifice of a horse— which (like Pasiphaé’s bull also) was the symbol of Poseidon —was an idealized representation of the actual interior of the body, of the entrails, from which the heroes, as if rescued from the underworld, once more emerged. It only remains to add that the mythological interpretation of the Homeric tradition conceived of labyrinthine Troy itself as the underworld, and the release of Helen as that of the imprisoned moon-goddess, and we have before us, in the fable of the Wooden Horse, the mythic counterpart to the historic fortress of Troy.

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1 Die nordische Herkunft der Trojasage bexeugt durch den Krug von Tragliatella, eine aritthalbtausendjabrige Urkunde (with twelve illustrations; Glogau, 1893).

That is to say, the Wooden Horse with the heroes hidden in its belly represents microcosmically the same myth of the underworld as that which the Helen saga expresses macrocosmically. I must leave for another occasion * the extraction of the historic kernel of the Troy saga from its mythological overgrowth and confine myself here to estimating the art-historical significance of the linkages which have been thus revealed. In these I believe myself to have discovered a principle of form which should prove to be of basic importance, especially in the development of constrained religious art into free creative art — as we see it taking its course from the old Oriental to the Greek culture. This principle is that of an estheticizing extroversion. In the place of the inner entrail-spirals which were still the dominant ornament in the Cretan culture-zone, there appears not only the stylized animal body itself (the horse), but also the human being as he works himself gradually loose from his animal base, emerging eventually as the idealized figure of the Olympian who has triumphed over the chthonian-animalistic principle. This idealization-process we are able to follow step by step in the general development of Greek art, as I have indicated in the artistic portion of my Trauma of Birth.

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1See my preliminary studies in the Psychology of the Folk-epic in Imago, Vol. V (1917).

Compare first of all the animal figures of Greece (in particular the Sphinx and the Centaur) with their Oriental forerunners; the animal head of the Egyptian gods changes into the human upper body of the Sphinx- and Centaur-figures, whose lower parts (back portions), on the other hand, have become animal; and this is quite in keeping with the development we have described from the culture of the belly to that of the head.* Thus the victory of the artistic (esthetic) over the Dionysiac-animalistic (goat), and its advance to the divine-Apollonian, which Nietzsche so brilliantly depicts in his earliest work: The Birth of Tragedy, stands as the imperishable cultural achievement of the Greeks. And simultaneously with this they abstracted from their predecessors’ materialistic and totemistic conception of rebirth that purely human conception of the soul, which not only was worked out in thought for the first time by their philosophers (Plato), but also lives on immortally in their works of art. Next, the Christian ideology raised this human idea of the soul — already far removed from the soul of the dead — into a purely spiritual sphere (though without at first endowing it with divinity), and at the same time it democratized the immortal soul, which before had been the prerogative of kings, heroes, or creative people (artists). This democratization of the soul-concept had a great share in the flowering of Christian art, which expanded over more than a thousand years, and this was because it had again become essential — as in the beginnings of abstract artistic creativity —to objectify the human substrate of this abstraction for the world at large, to concretize it in figures of Christ, Mary with the Child, and so on. Everything had to have happened really and truly as it was said to have done, and what Church art put forth, therefore, was the tangible figuration of a soul-ideology which was becoming more and more cosmopolized and whose human qualities would soon have disappeared but for the saving influence of Christian art. As it was, Christian art —which, in contrast to Christian dogmatics, remained the layman’s province — became permeated again by the human element, particularly in the mother-and-child relation, which was here represented spiritually by heavenly love, whereas in the beginning what had been symbolized was its animal underworld significance. Gradually this underworld was transferred to the Christian hell, which thereafter represented terror and the negation of all hope of rebirth. Yet even in the everlasting flames which condemn to incessant torment the sinner who clings to carnal rebirth we can recognize the yearning for immortality. In this sense hell not only is the symbol of animality, but becomes that of everything earthly and of a final forcible separation of this from the intellectual and spiritual. Those artists, however, who, like Dante or the Breughel type of hellpainters, chose to depict it in terms of an earthly life banished to the underworld were actually only giving us a copy of life on earth as this presented itself to Christianity — that is, as a preparation for the higher life in heaven.

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1In Rodin’s ‘‘ Female Centaur’’ the neck—the bearer of the head —struggling to free itself from the animal body, is drawn out almost into a line a sublimation which manifests itself eventually in Rodin’s spiritualized portrait busts that are completely severed from the trunk,