ABSTRACT 053NF TR GREAVES, ed.
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The Migration of Symbols, Count Goblet d’Alviella, 1956: New
York, University Books
277pp, illustrated, indexed. Published originally at Westminster, 1894.
In this classic work of nineteenth century scholarship, the Count Goblet d’Alviella at-tempts to trace out the peregrinations of a goodly number of symbols, more or less well known. Most are of a religious or mythological (is there a difference?) nature and in-clude the Footprints of the Buddha, the Winged Globe, the Caduceus, Triskelion, World Tree, Trident, etc. The Count was bolder than most of our contemporary anthropologists and historians in that he did not hesitate to adopt a Diffusion hypothesis when it seemed justified, be the distances ever so great. Likely cases of interhemispheric diffusion in an-cient times are duly noted (the Swastika being a good example). Summing up d’Alviel-la’s position one might say that 1) symbols are not invented everyday, but 2) once inven-ted tend to remain unaltered (or at least, recognizable) for centuries, and 3) to have rarely been left behind my migrating peoples. They also tend to radiate outward from fixed centers (as if self-propelled). In the Count’s own words: “The variety of symbols seems at first to be as boundless as the
combinations of the human imagination. It is not uncom-mon, however, to discover the same symbolical figures amongst races the furthest apart. These coincidences can hardly be explained by chance, like the combinations of the ka-leidoscope.” D’Alviella accepts the possibility that similar symbols may arise through some “law of the human mind”, out of Jung’s “collective unconscious” presumably. This is an example of using one mystery to explain another, an undesirable modus operandi.
By far the most prosaic, the most pedestrian, explanation for such correspondence is people talking with, intermarrying with, trading with, other people. Cultural diffusion of this sort occurs daily and always has.
KEYWORDS
Iconography/Egyptian symbols/flower
symbolism/Chaldaean symbols/birds as sym- bols/Christian symbolism/Buddhist symbolism/coins/Hittite symbols/Hindu symbols/
Medieval art/Phoenician symbolism/Greek symbols/Persian symbols/Phallic emblems/
Phrygian symbols