Nor is the wide adoption and preservation of symbols alone due to an easily noticed similarity between certain objects and the earliest conceptions of the supernatural, or to the preservative power of religious veneration.
I have previously referred to the associations of ideas arising from ancestral reversions of memory, and from the principles of minimum muscular action and harmonic excitation. Such laws make themselves felt unconsciously from the commencement of life, with greater or less power, dependent on the susceptibility of the nervous system. They go far toward explaining the recurrence and permanence of symbols, whether of sight or sound. Thus I attribute the prevalence of the serpentine curve in early religious art largely to its approach to the “line of beauty,” which is none other than that line which the eye, owing to the arrangement of its muscles, can follow with the minimum expenditure of nervous energy. The satisfaction of the mind in viewing symmetrical figures or harmonious coloring, as also that of the ear, in hearing accordant sounds, is, as I have remarked, based on the principle of maximum action with minimum waste. The mind gets the most at the least cost.
The equilateral triangle, which is the simplest geometrical figure which can enclose a space, thus satisfying the mind the easiest of any, is nigh universal in symbolism. It is seen in the Egyptian pyramids, whose sides are equilateral triangles with a common apex, in the mediæval cathedrals, whose designs are combinations of such triangles, in the sign for the trinity, the pentalpha, etc.
The classification of some symbols of less extensive prevalence must be made from their phonetic values. One class was formed as were the “canting arms” in heraldry, that is, by a rebus. This is in its simpler form, direct, as when Quetzalcoatl, the mystical hero-god of Atzlan, is represented by a bird on a serpent, quetzal signifying a bird, coatl a serpent; or composite, two or more of such rebus symbols being blended by synecdoche, like the “marshalling” of arms in heraldry, as when the same god is portrayed by a feathered serpent; or the rebus may occur with paronymy, especially when the literal meaning of a name of the god is lost, as when the Algonkins forgot the sense of the word wabish, white or bright, as applied to their chief divinity, and confounding it with wabos, a rabbit, wove various myths about their ancestor, the Great Hare, and chose the hare or rabbit as a totemic badge.[212-1]
It is almost needless to add further that the ideas most frequently associated with the unknown object of religion are those, which, struggling after material expression, were most fecund in symbols. We have but to turn to the Orphic hymns, or those of the Vedas or the Hebrew Psalms, to see how inexhaustible was the poetic fancy, stirred by religious awe, in the discovery of similitudes, any of which, under favoring circumstances, might become a symbol.
Before leaving this branch of my subject, I may illustrate some of the preceding comments by applying them to one or two well known subjects of religious art.
A pleasing symbol, which has played a conspicuous part in many religions, is the Egyptian lotus, or “lily of the Nile.” It is an aquatic plant, with white, roseate or blue flowers, which float upon the water, and send up from their centre long stamens. In Egypt it grows with the rising of the Nile, and as its appearance was coincident with that important event, it came to take prominence in the worship of Isis and Osiris as the symbol of fertility. Their mystical marriage took place in its blossom. In the technical language of the priests, however, it bore a profounder meaning, that of the supremacy of reason above matter, the contrast being between the beautiful flower and the muddy water which bears it.[214-1] In India the lotus bears other and manifold meanings. It is a symbol of the sacred river Ganges, and of the morally pure. No prayer in the world has ever been more frequently repeated than this: “Om! the jewel in the lotus. Amen” (om mani padme hum). Many millions of times, every hour, for centuries, has this been iterated by the Buddhists of Thibet and the countries north of it. What it means, they can only explain by fantastic and mystical guesses. Probably it refers to the legendary birth of their chief saint, Avalokitesvara, who is said to have been born of a lotus flower. But some say it is a piece of symbolism not strange to its meaning in Egypt,[214-2] and borrowed by Buddhism from the Siva worship. In the symbolic language of this sect the lotus is the symbol of the vagina, while the phallus is called “the jewel.” With this interpretation the Buddhist prayer would refer to the reproductive act; but it is illustrative of the necessity of attributing wholly diverse meanings to the same symbol, that the Buddhists neither now nor at any past time attached any such signification to the expression, and it would be most discrepant with their doctrines to do so.[214-3]
Another symbol has frequently been open to this duplicate interpretation, that is, the upright pillar. The Egyptian obelisk, the pillars of “Irmin” or of “Roland,” set up now of wood, now of stone by the ancient Germans, the “red-painted great warpole” of the American Indians, the May-pole of Old England, the spire of sacred edifices, the staff planted on the grave, the terminus of the Roman landholders, all these objects have been interpreted to be symbols of life, or the life-force. As they were often of wood, the trunk of a tree for instance, they have often been called by titles equivalent to the “tree of life,” and are thus connected with the nigh innumerable myths which relate to some mystic tree as the source of life. The ash Ygdrasyl of the Edda, the oak of Dordona and of the Druid, the modern Christmas tree, the sacred banyan, the holy groves, illustrate but faintly the prevalence of tree worship. Even so late as the time of Canute, it had to be forbidden in England by royal edict.
Now, the general meaning of this symbol I take to be the same as that which led to the choice of hills and “high places,” as sites for altars and temples, and to the assigning of mountain tops as the abodes of the chief gods. It is seen in adjectives applied, I believe, in all languages, certainly all developed ones, to such deities themselves. These adjectives are related to adverbs of place, signifying above, up or over. We speak of the supernatural, or supernal powers, the Supreme Being, the Most High, He in Heaven, and such like. So do all Aryan and Semitic tongues. Beyond them, the Chinese name for the Supreme Deity, Tien, means up. I have elsewhere illustrated the same fact in native American tongues. The association of light and the sky above, the sun and the heaven, is why we raise our hands and eyes in confident prayer to divinity. That at times, however, a religion of sex-love did identify these erect symbols with the phallus as the life-giver, is very true, but this was a temporary and adventitious meaning assigned a symbol far more ancient than this form of religion.
In this review of the principles of religious symbolism, I have attempted mainly to exhibit the part it has sustained in the development of the religious sentiment. It has been generally unfavorable to the growth of higher thought. The symbol, in what it is above the emblem, assumes more than a similarity, a closer relation than analogy; to some degree it pretends to a hypostatic union or identity of the material with the divine, the known to sense with the unknown. Fully seen, this becomes object worship; partially so, personification.