THE ROOTS OF THOUGHT
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The Migration of Symbols. By Donald A. -Mackenzie. (Kagan Paul, 12s. ad. net.)
THERE are some anthropologists who -argue that the crosses and spirals and swastikas so frequently found in ancient' drawings and carvings are completely meaningless. Someone, they suggest, hit upon such a form by accident ; and it made• so strong an appeal to his sense of decoration that he went. about repeating it wherever he had a chance: Others caught his enthusiasm, and the form spread throughout the world because of the great love of art for its own sake that primitive peoples are known to bear.
This is hardly a travesty of the theory. Dr. H. R. Hall thinks that the spiral came into being when an early Minoan goldsmith, playing with a piece of wire, found that he could twist it round and was struck by the ornamental effect of the pattern he had made. From Crete the pattern spread ta Troy, Greece, Egypt, Central Europe, Scotland . . . ; how it reached New Zealand is left unconsidered. It is a strange thing that the belief which explains least and takes most foi granted should often pass for scientific scepticism. Dr. Hall, when he animadverts upon another scientist's views of the diffusion of symbols, expresses the utmost confidence in the integrity of his own lack of belief.
" We have no beliefs on these subjects whatever wo consider beliefs about anything relating to the early history of man and the origins and diffusion of culture to be totally unjustified and un- scientific."
But when he himself puts forward implicitly the theory that culture is meaningless and diffusion automatic, he shows the full modern aptitude for believing because it is incredible, or, if you prefer, believing because it explains nothing. For take this theory as true, and we are still left with all the most awful problems unsolved. Why did primitive man think the spiral decorative ? Why had he a sense of decora- tion at all ? To what part of him, with what impetus, did patterns appeal, and how did the appeal of one pattern differ from that of another ? He carved a spiral on the hardest stone, he hid it in a tomb where no one could admire its beauty, he drew spirals most indecoratively upon odd parts of a ' design. Why did so ' Many tithe!' People; of • such widely separated races, think the same patteni beautiful ?
• Arid, more extraordinary that' this; why did Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria never take to the swastika as a motif, when almost every other nation of the`World has used it, and these countries were in 'close''contiet with Men' who used it habitually To put it shortly; what did these Meaningless things mean ? There is no escape 'from the question.
In his rambling and rather inconsequent book, Mr. D. A. Mackentie- has made a valuable collection of pasiages to show what 'different races actually did mean bYtheir symbols. It turns out, from their own words, that their 'choice- of 'symbols was by no means casual, and that they regarded them with wonder and awe. • But if we are to understand in any way the actual feeling with which ancient peoples contemplated their symbols; it is necessary to dd more even than read their own accounts of what they felt. It is necessary to strip ourselves of our own' inheritance of learning and place ourselVes imagi- natively in another age.
As far as we can travel in recorded history, we find men very much the same a:s. ourselves ;' no less intelligent; no' less cap- able of invention and thought. We find that twenty thouSand years ago (which is long' before history, properly so called, begins for us) there were men alive who had a greater brain- capacity than the average man to-day. We can assume that men were in nature as clear-sighted and adaptable as we are. But there is one very notable difference : they had not yet found as perfect a mechanism for passing on their experiences to future 'generations. If we can picture ourselves without books, without complicated and self-running institutions, without all the tools we have gathered together on which we depend so completely, we can begin to see what life was like in 'the first stages of civilization. And, if we cast back still further, to the time when man was a comparative newcomer upon earth, when every experience was strange to him and everything around him was a. chaos of the unexpected- and unclassified, we shall understand what a world of significances could be made stable and open to use by the simplest of symbols.
One of the most ancient signs, for example, is the cross. By that sign the movement of sun and stars came to be regular and accountable. Man found out by it the law of all anti- theses, left and right, up and doivii, life and death, day and night. He became accustomed to his own body, and to the directions of all the things he lived amongst. • It may be called man's first. geography. But it would be wrong to confine the cross to any of. its uses, or, indeed, to. the aggregate of all possible uses. It was rather a form given to his thought, by the light of which the universe took shape ; the, first network thrown into the stream of events. And, 'of course, progress and deterioration go hand in hand ; _ as man saw more by reason, he had less need of instinct. :• It .would be best to see in the cross the foundation of all logic, Aristotle said; in another Context " It would seem that anyone is capable of carrying on and articulating what has once been well outlined, and that time is a good discoverer or partner in such a work." We have not yet :finished articulating that primitive sign.
With the,spiral we come to. a further realm of interpretations, The cross is the compendium of forms : the spiral is the para:t digm of life. It was the whorled sea-shell, the tendril of the ivy, the living fOrce in whirlpool and- whirlwind and water- spout. It was the coiled spring and the slow-breathing serpent, Even more clearly than the cross it showed growth and expan- sion from a centre, from nothing... It was the picture of the motion of a sling, from rest to the highest speed ; and, as it turned back upon itself,- and the white space came again to the starting point, it was a picture, too, of the passage from Motion to rest. With the :Indians it was the symbol of the germination of worlds and their return to peace ; and, seen statically, it was the symbol of sleeping force,, potentiality for all life. The skyItself4aS 'often- conceived as a".great and Bing (Vortex, turning around the • Pole -Star. -
And, though we no longer see the power of these symbols, and the control of nature which they gave to man, yet they are still embedded' in our thought and it is only the multiplicity of their uses which blin-di us to their importance. The four winds of heaven still set the bearings- for- alithe winds that bloW ; Slid we still see 'the origin of worldi hi- the -spirally moving nebula. Perhaps a more thorough study than Mr. Mackenzie's will be written ; fof we 'heed to learn also the psychological effects af symbols, and of these we hear nothing from his volume. 'The title 'is not really descriptive ; for Mr. Mackenzie has little to tell us of how symbols spread through the ancient world ; he notes their appearance in widely sepa- rated regions, but only rarely does he suggest the path of diffusion. Besides the swastika (which is a more complex cross) and the spiral, he deals with tree symbols. His illus- trations are not well co-ordinated, but they are profuse and varied.
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