An unexpected story of wandering attaches to the figure or symbol of the double-headed eagle. Like many other elements of civilization, this goes back to an Egyptian beginning. One of the great gods of Egypt was the sun. The hawk and vulture were also divine animals. A combination was made showing the disk of the sun with a long narrow wing on each side. Or the bird itself was depicted with outstretched wings but its body consisting of the sun disk. These were striking figures of considerable æsthetic and imaginative appeal. From Egypt the design was carried in the second millenium B.C. to the Assyrians of Mesopotamia and to the Hittites of Asia Minor. A second head was added, perhaps to complete the symmetry of the figure. Just as a wing and a foot went out from each side of the body or disk, so now there was a head facing each way. This double-headed bird symbol was carved on cliffs in Asia Minor. Here the pictures remained, no doubt wondered at but uncopied, for two thousand years. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries after Christ, the Turkish princes, feeling the symbol to be a fit emblem of sovereignty, began stamping it on their coins. The later Crusaders brought these coins, or the idea of the pattern, back with them to Europe, where the mediæval art of heraldry was flourishing. The double-headed eagle was a welcome addition to the lions and griffins with which artists were emblazoning the coats of arms of the feudal nobility. The meaning of sovereignty remaining attached to the figure, the device before long became indicative of the imperial idea. This is the origin of its use as a symbol in the late empires of Austro-Hungary and Russia.
Four hundred years ago Charles V was king of Spain and Austria and Holy Roman emperor of Germany. It was in his reign that Cortez and Pizarro conquered Mexico and Peru. Thus the symbol of the double-headed eagle was carried into the New World and the Indians became conversant with it. Even some of the wilder tribes learned the figure, although they were perhaps more impressed with it as a decorative motive than as an emblem. At any rate, they introduced it into their textiles and embroideries. The Huichol in the remote mountains of Mexico, who use the design thus, seem to believe that their ancestors had always been conversant with the figure. But such a belief of course proves no more than did the ignorance of European heraldists of the fact that their double-headed eagle came to them from Asia Minor and ultimately from Egypt. No pre-Columbian representation of the two-headed eagle is known from Mexico. The conclusion can therefore hardly be escaped that this apparently indigenous textile pattern of the modern Huichol is also to be derived from its far source in ancient Egypt of whose existence they have never heard.
95. The Zodiac
The foregoing example should not establish the impression that the main source of all culture is to be sought in Egypt. Many other ancient and modern countries have made their contribution. It is to the Chinese, for instance, that we owe silk, porcelain, and gun powder. The ancient Sumerians and Babylonians, on the lower course of the Tigris and Euphrates, moved toward definite cultural progress about as early as the Egyptians, and have perhaps contributed as many elements to the civilization of to-day.
One of these is the zodiac. This is the concept of dividing the path of the sun, moon, and planets around the heavens into twelve equal parts, each named after a constellation. The series runs: ram, bull, twins, crab, lion, virgin, scales, scorpion, archer, goat, water-carrier, fishes. Constellations, indeed, had begun to be named at a very early time, as is clear from the practice being common to all mankind. But the specific arrangement of these twelve constellations as a measure of the movement of the heavenly bodies seems to have made its first appearance among the Chaldæan Babylonians about a thousand years before Christ. From them the Persians, and then the Greeks, learned the zodiac; and with its introduction to the Roman Empire it became part of the fund of knowledge common to the whole of western civilization. It does not appear to have been accepted by the Egyptians until Roman imperial times. Knowledge of the zodiac also spread eastward to India. It seems to have been carried as far as China by Buddhist missionaries, but failed to be seriously adopted in that country until its reintroduction by Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth century.
The Chinese long before had invented a series of twelve signs which has sometimes been called a zodiac, and gradually transmitted it to the adjacent natives of Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Turkistan, and Tibet. This seems to be of independent origin from the western or Babylonian zodiac. It appears to have been devised to designate the hours, then applied to other periods of time, and finally to the heavens. Its path through the sky is the reverse of the western zodiac; and its signs are specifically different: rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, monkey, hen, dog, and pig. At most, therefore, it would seem that there might have penetrated to China from the west the idea of dividing time or space into twelve units and assigning to each of these the name of an animal. The working out and utilization of the idea were native Chinese.
Already in ancient times the pictures of the twelve constellations of the western zodiac began to be abbreviated and reduced to symbols. These gradually become more and more conventional, although evidences of their origin are still visible. The sign of the ram, for instance, as we employ it in almanacs, shows the downward curling horns of this animal; that for the ox, his rising horns; for the archer, his arrow, and so on. These cursive symbols, once they became fixed, underwent some travels of their own which carried them to unexpected places. The Negroes of the west coast of Africa make gold finger rings ornamented with the twelve zodiacal symbols in their proper sequence. They seem ignorant of the meaning, in fact do not possess sufficient astronomical knowledge to be able to understand the use of the signs. It also remains uncertain whether they learned the set of symbols from European navigators or from the Arabs that have penetrated the northern half of Africa. Nevertheless it is the true zodiac which they portray, even though only as a decorative pattern.
There has been some assertion that the zodiac was known to the more advanced Middle American Indians between Arizona and Peru, but the claim has also been denied. There does appear to have been at least one series of animal signs used by the Mayas of Yucatan in an astronomical connection. It is not known that this series served the true zodiacal function of noting the positions of the heavenly bodies. Further, the Maya series consists of thirteen instead of twelve symbols, and the figures present only distant resemblances to the Old World zodiac. There is only one that is the same as in the Old World zodiac: the scorpion. The relationship of the Maya and Old World series is therefore unproved, and probably fictitious. The case however possesses theoretical interest in that it illustrates the criteria of the determination of culture relationships.
The Mexican zodiac would unquestionably be interpreted as a derivative from the Asiatic one, even though its symbols departed somewhat from those of the latter, provided that the similar symbols came in the same order. The Asiatic ram might well be replaced by a Mexican deer, the lion by a wildcat, and the virgin by a maize goddess. And if the deer, the wildcat, and the maize goddess came in first, fifth, and sixth place, it would be almost compulsory to look upon them as superficially altered equivalents of the Old World ram, lion, and virgin. It is conceivable enough that similar individual symbols might independently come into use in remote parts of the world. But it is practically impossible that a series of symbols should be put into the same arbitrary sequence independently. As a mere matter of mathematical probability there would be no more than an infinitesimal chance of such a complex coincidence. If therefore the sequential identity of the American series and the Old World zodiac should ever be proved,[14] it would be necessary to believe that this culture element was somehow carried into the Middle American regions from Asia, either across northern America or across the Pacific.
Identity of sequence failing, there might still remain an instance of partial convergence. It is within the range of possibility that the Mayas, who were painstaking astronomers and calculators, and who like ourselves named the stars and constellations after animals, arranged a series of these as a mnemonic or figurative aid in their calendrical reckoning. This, however, would be a case of only incomplete parallelism. The general concept would in that event have been developed independently, its specific working out remaining distinctive.