[189] The importance of astronomical lore in the cults of ancient civilisations is being more forcibly brought home to us as the remains of antiquity are being more critically and sympathetically investigated. Professor D’Arcy W. Thompson, Junr., has recently published a suggestive paper (“On Bird and Beast in Ancient Symbolism,” Trans. Roy. Soc., Edin., xxxviii., Pt. 1, 1895, p. 179) in which he suggests that many of the Greek representations of animals on monument or coin indicate not the creatures themselves but their stellar namesakes. M. J. Svoronos (“Sur la signification des types monétaires des anciens,” Bull. Correspondance Hellénique, 1894) had simultaneously and independently arrived at a similar conclusion, but D’Arcy Thompson carries the argument a step further, and attempts to show that the associated emblems correspond to the positions relative to one another of the heavenly bodies, in some cases to the configuration of the sky at critical periods of the year, or at the festival seasons of the cities to which the coins belong.
“The stellar symbolism that I here advocate is, I maintain, a different thing from the sun-myths, dawn-myths, and so forth, which are now to a large extent deservedly repudiated. We cannot ascribe to the civilised nations of antiquity the puerile conceptions of nature that are congruent with a stage of awakening intelligence and with the crude results of untrained observation. Rather are we dealing with the elaborated gain of ages of scientific knowledge, with the thoughts of a people whose very temples were oriented to particular stars, or to critical points in the journey of the sun; whose representations of Art, on frieze and pediment, in tragedy and epic, were governed by what would at first appear to be a tyrannical convention, which convention, however, so far from hampering their genius, seems, under the influence of a wholesome restraint, to have moulded their art into more beautiful, more poetic, and more sanctified forms.... The dominant priesthood, whose domain was knowledge, holding the keys of treasured learning opened the lock with chary hand, and veiled plain speech in fantastic allegory. In such allegory Egyptian priests spoke to Greek travellers, who came to them as Dervish-pilgrims or Wandelnde Studenten.... At Olympia, in the beginning of each Leap-year cycle, the noblest youth of Greece raced, round the symbolic pillars, their horses emblematic of the Horses of the Sun; thereby glorifying a God whom they thus ignorantly worshipped. Even so, we read in the Second Book of Kings [xvii. 16; xxi. 3, 5; xxiii. 5] how their Phœnician cousins worshipped with like ceremony the same God. And all the while, in the evening and the morning, priests and πρόσπολοι watched, measured, and compared the rising and setting of sun and stars, in temples that were astronomical observatories, to the glory of a religion whose mystery was astronomic science.”
[190] P. Gardner, “Ares as a Sun-god,” Numismatic Chronicle, xx., N.S., 1880, p. 59.
[191] The Grammar of the Lotus, p. 352.
[192] “On the Pottery of Cyprus,” Appendix to General L. P. di Cesnola’s Cyprus, 1877, p. 410.
[193] The Industrial Arts of India, 1880, i. p. 107.
[194] Loc. cit., p. 353.
[195] G. Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient, 1886, p. 241, quoted by Count G. d’Alviella.
[196] Guillaume Ferrero, Les Lois Psychologiques du Symbolisme, 1895. (Translated from the Italian.) I am indebted to my friend Havelock Ellis for the reference to and loan of this book.
[197] See note on next page.