The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking 9781138907201, 9780429282478

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The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2: Mythical Thinking “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is one of the landmarks of twentieth century philosophy. Drawing from the influential work of Wilhelm Dilthey, it transformed neo-Kantianism into a new robust philosophy of culture. The second volume, on Mythical Thinking, analyzes the fundamental layers of perception and expression as well as the articulations with religion and the dialectic with other forms, essentially language and art. The intellectual breadth of the volume is remarkable. It initiated the debate with Martin Heidegger and prompted a long-lasting meditation by Hans Blumenberg. We are only beginning to recognize its importance for our understanding of the power of images in the construction of aesthetics, the self, and the socio-political world. It initiated a discussion within French sociology (Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss) that ultimately resurfaced in Pierre Bourdieu, while today it is considered as a resourceful path for cultural and critical theory (Drucilla Cornell and Kenneth M. Panfilio). Finally, this volume also offers solid grounds for a political critique of Nazism – specifically: Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the 20th Century and Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf – as well as the new emerging totalitarian ideologies.” Fabien Capeilleres, Professor of Philosophy, editor of the French edition of Cassirer’s Works This new translation makes Cassirer’s seminal work available to a new generation of scholars. Each volume includes a translator’s introduction by Steve G. Lofts, a foreword by Peter E. Gordon, a glossary of key terms, and an index. Ernst Cassirer was born in Germany 1874 in the city of Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). He taught at Hamburg University from 1919 to 1933, and then at All Souls College, Oxford, before emigrating to Sweden and then to the United States. Through its creative interpretation of Kant’s philosophy combined with a deep knowledge of the role of language and culture, Cassirer’s work is regarded as indispensable to understanding the relationship between the two major traditions in twentieth-century philosophy, the “analytic” and the “continental”. Cassirer’s philosophy is unique, as it sought a common

ground between the scientific and humanistic worldviews which frequently divided these two traditions, exemplified in his famous debate with Martin Heidegger at Davos in 1929. His work resulted in the monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as well as several books on the philosophy of humanism and the Enlightenment. He taught at the universities of Yale and Columbia in the early 1940s and died in New York in 1945. Steve G. Lofts is Professor of Philosophy at King’s University College, Canada. He is the translator of Cassirer’s The Logic of the Cultural Sciences and The Warburg Years (1919–1933): Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology.

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume 2 Mythical Thinking

Ernst Cassirer Translated by Steve G. Lofts

This edition first published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business English Translation © 2021, Routledge Foreword © 2021, Peter E. Gordon Translator’s front matter, Preface, and Introduction © 2021, Steve G. Lofts The right of Steve G. Lofts and Peter E. Gordon to be identified as the authors of their work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. First published in German as Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Das mythische Denken Auflage by Bruno Cassirer, Berlin, 1925 British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-­1-­138-­90720-­1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-­0-­429-­28247-­8 (ebk) Typeset in Joanna by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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Foreword by Peter E. Gordonvii Translator’s Preface by Steve G. Loftsxv Translator’s Introduction: A Transcendental Critique of Mythical-Religious Consciousness: Identity-Thinking, the Natural Attitude, and an Immanence in the Sacred Sense of Life by Steve G. Loftsxviii Translator’s Acknowledgments by Steve G. Loftsxxvi Prefacexxviii Introduction: The Problem of a “Philosophy of Mythology” PART ONE: MYTH AS THOUGHT-FORM I

The Character and Basic Tendency of Mythical Object Consciousness

II The Individual Categories of Mythical Thinking

1 35 37 76

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PART TWO: MYTH AS FORM OF INTUITION:  THE CONSTRUCTION AND ORGANIZATION OF THE SPATIOTEMPORAL WORLD IN MYTHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

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I

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The Basic Opposition

II The Basic Features of a Morphology of Myth: Space, Time, and Number 1. The Organization of Space in Mythical Consciousness 2. Space and Light: The Problem of “Orientation” 3. The Mythical Concept of Time 4. The Configuration of Time in Mythical and Religious Consciousness 5. Mythical Number and the System of “Sacred Numbers”

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PART THREE: MYTH AS LIFE-FORM: THE DISCOVERY AND DETERMINATION OF SUBJECTIVE REALITY IN MYTHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

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I

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The I and the Soul

105 105 116 128 143

II The Forming Emergence of the Feeling of Self from the Mythical Feeling of Unity and Life 1. The Community of the Living and Mythical Class Formation: Totemism 2. The Concept of Personality and the Personal Gods: The Phases of the Mythical Concept of the I

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III Cult and Sacrifice

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214 214

PART FOUR: THE DIALECTIC OF MYTHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS285 Glossary of German Terms 318 Index327

Foreword

Peter E. Gordon Some works of philosophy reflect the time in which they were written, others recall an earlier age, and still others seem to anticipate a time yet to come. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms has suffered the peculiar fate of a work that seemed unzeitgemäß, or out of tune with its time. First published in the 1920s during the brief and troubled era of the Weimar Republic, it was intended for a cultured readership that was either rapidly disappearing or had not yet appeared, an intellectual world in which the memory of German Idealism could still inspire and the last embers of European humanism had not ceased to glow. Its author, Ernst Cassirer, belonged to that distinctive stratum of the German-­Jewish bourgeoisie, a small fragment of the Central European educated classes or Bildungsbür­ gertum for whom culture had become a kind of ersatz religion and who held fast to the values of Universalism and the Enlightenment even as the surrounding culture succumbed to nationalism and intolerance. Cassirer was among the hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and artists whose careers in Germany came to an end by the brutal fiat of National Socialist legislation in 1933. He fled with his wife into exile, and after two years in Oxford and a longer stay in Göteborg, Sweden, he spent his final years in the United States. Since his death in 1945, his philosophical legacy has survived in the uncertain twilight of a culture that can no longer identify with his ideals. But no work of philosophy should suffer the ignominy of being turned into a mere monument of the past. The crucial question is whether we can still read it today and, if so, how.

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“The human mind,” wrote Goethe, “will not be confined to any limits.” Cassirer was Goethe’s spiritual stepchild. His masterpiece, The Philos­ ophy of Symbolic Forms, was a belated contribution to a philosophical genre that Goethe would have admired, especially for its readiness to break with academic convention by exploring all domains of human expression, from language to myth, from religion to science. Cassirer came from an accomplished family of artists and scientists: among his cousins were Richard, an esteemed neurologist, and Paul, a gallery owner and art collector who played a major role in promoting the works of the Berlin Secession and Postimpressionists such as Van Gogh and Cézanne. In his philosophy, these seemingly disparate domains are understood as stemming from a common source, the expressive capacity or formative principle that belongs to the human being as an animal symbolicum. For Cassirer, the mind is not a passive faculty that merely receives impressions from the external world but rather an active faculty that constitutes those impressions by investing them with order and meaning. The symbolic is the very principle of intelligibility whose powers leave nothing untouched. As it presses outward into all domains of experience, the mind comes to recognize itself in its own symbolic achievements. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is nothing less than the philosophical record of these efforts. Cassirer came to this task well equipped with conceptual instruments that he had already honed to precision after years of philosophical research. His earlier works reflect a rigorous training in the philosophical methods associated with Hermann Cohen and the so-­called Marburg School of neo-­Kantianism, which first emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a philosophical reaction against the preceding age of metaphysical extravagance. The neo-­Kantians were a diverse group but united in the conviction that philosophy could only move forward only if it went “back to Kant,” and this meant reconceiving philosophy as a rigorous inquiry into the transcendental conditions for objective knowledge. Thanks to the reawakening of Kant’s philosophy at Marburg, Cassirer first turned his attention to the philosophical foundations of the natural sciences. He was especially keen to understand the epistemological principles of classical and modern physics, in which obsolete and metaphysical concepts of “substance” had been gradually supplanted by modern concepts of pure “function.” In Einstein’s theory of relativity,

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for example, our basic concepts cannot be construed as mere “copies” of immediate material data; they are instead “represented as constructed projects” of our own thinking. The concept of being is replaced by the concept of order. This insight into the epistemological revolution in modern physics first permitted Cassirer to realize the unique importance of the symbolic. In the early 1920s, Cassirer also made the acquaintance of Aby Warburg, whose unusual library at Hamburg became a kind of spiritual home and the place where he came to appreciate the richness and diversity of world culture and mythological belief. In fact, it would not be misleading to describe The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as an attempt to provide the Warburg Library with a transcendental foundation. Here Cassirer presented his famous address, “The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences” (his inaugural publication for the Warburg Library), in which he laid out his definition of a symbolic form as “every energy of spirit by which the content of spiritual signification is linked to a concrete and intrinsically appropriate sensuous sign.”1 Symbolic forms serve as the common intellectual framework for all systems of human meaning – in myth, religion, language, and ­science – all of which bear witness to the idea that “our consciousness does not content itself with receiving impressions from the outside, rather it links and penetrates every impression with a free activity of expression.”2 When they are understood as the fruit of human symbolization, even the most “primitive” or “irrational” moments in human culture are revealed as belonging to a shared world of “self-­created signs and images.” In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, this general principle serves as the point of departure for a transcendental inquiry into the most diverse forms of symbolic expression. However, we must not mistake this project for a mindless celebration of cultural diversity that would blur all essential distinctions between science and myth, reason and unreason. Cassirer is committed to a deeper and more expansive kind of ­rationalism – a humanism without limits. But he organizes his philosophical inquiry in a developmentalist narrative that charts the self-­education of the human species. We can think of the book as an attempt to historicize the Kantian theory of form: myth can play a crucial role in the structuring of experience only until it yields dialectically to the more sophisticated symbolic

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forms of monotheistic religion, and in the very same way religion must yield to the consciously self-­created forms of modern science. In this narrative of symbolization, each stage is assigned a suitable role, though none of them can compromise the underlying narrative of human enlightenment. Unsurprisingly, the third volume of Cassirer’s project is called The Phenomenology of Cognition, an implicit homage to the Hegelian idea of a phenomenology as a story of the mind’s progressive efforts to achieve the fullest and most rational form of self-­realization. For Cassirer, as for his German idealist antecedents, this narrative of self-­realization is not only epistemological but also cultural and political: the human being comes to know itself only if it also comes to recognize itself as the author of its own fate. Cassirer’s work thus implies a strong commitment to modern democracy. Nearly a century has passed since the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms appeared in 1923, and over this broad timespan, certain features of Cassirer’s work have grown antiquated and unpersuasive. For those who can no longer accept Enlightenment-­inspired appeals to progress in a modern world that made Auschwitz a possibility, the evolutionist principle that underwrites Cassirer’s philosophy may seem altogether intolerable. But we should not hasten to dismiss him too quickly as a thinker from a more optimistic age. At the end of his life, in his last and posthumously published study, The Myth of the State (1945), he acknowledged the contemporary power of modern political myths, such as those that had become official ideology in the Third Reich. He specifically warns that these myths are not organic products of the human mind; although ancient myths served proto-­rational aims, the modern myths are artificial things that can be manufactured at will. It is an insight that he shared with the philosophers of the Frankfurt School, who compressed the dialectic of regression into an aphorism: “myth is already enlightenment, but Enlightenment reverts to myth.” Nor should we neglect the striking affinities that connect Cassirer’s philosophy of language and myth to later themes in French structuralism. A neglected line of argument runs from Cassirer’s analysis of the symbolic forms of mythical thinking to the unconscious rules of totemism and myth examined by Claude Lévi-­Strauss in his structuralist anthropology. Cassirer’s philosophy also anticipates a methodological perspective that we now associate with Michel Foucault. The suggestion is not as

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surprising as it may seem. Foucault was quite familiar with Cassirer’s work, and in 1966 he even wrote a review of Cassirer’s study of the Enlightenment. That same year, he also published Les mots et les choses (known in English as The Order of Things), and readers of the book may note its resemblance with The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Both are attempts to excavate the a priori structures that manifest themselves in all spheres of human culture and knowledge. Moreover, both insist that these a priori structures or symbolic forms are not historically invariant but instead susceptible to radical changes over time. In documenting these tectonic shifts, Cassirer not infrequently characterizes them in Aristotelian terms as a “μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος,” or a transition into an entirely different genus. What Foucault called an “archaeology of knowledge” involves a similar emphasis on the discontinuity between one episteme and another. Notwithstanding this remarkable similarity, however, there is at least one crucial difference: Foucault sees these a priori structures as anonymous. They appear all at once, as if from nowhere, and he has little interest in offering a metaphysical explanation for their point of origin. Unlike Cassirer, he refuses to see them as manifestations of the formative power of human consciousness, since he regards all such appeals to transcendental humanism with the deepest skepticism. The expressive model of human consciousness that serves as the grounds of Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is, from Foucault’s perspective, merely a surface phenomenon of a uniquely modern episteme that may soon disappear. This places Foucault in a difficult position of affirming structures of meaning while disavowing human consciousness as their source. With this paradoxical doctrine, Foucault takes his place in a long tradition of modern critiques of transcendental humanism that extend back at least as far as Heidegger. But we might ask ourselves whether it is plausible to speak of meaning if one does not offer some account of meaning’s genesis. Adopting an attitude of knowing condescension toward seemingly obsolete doctrines of transcendental humanism is easier than supplying a worthy alternative. This was a major bone of contention in the famous 1929 confrontation between Cassirer and Heidegger in Davos, Switzerland. If Heidegger appeared to many eyewitnesses as the victor in this dispute, this was because he was willing to abandon the doctrine of transcendental humanism that had remained a dominant fixture in modern academic

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philosophy at least since Kant. Cassirer, by contrast, had little interest in surrendering this doctrine, since his entire philosophy was premised on the notion that symbolic forms are the manifestation of the “pure activity of spirit.” Without this notion, he feared that the ideal of objectivity in both scientific knowledge and ethics would collapse. Unlike Heidegger, he emphasized mental spontaneity, the mind’s uninhibited freedom in the constitution of its world. Cassirer accused Heidegger of turning his back on objectivity and retreating into a kind of pragmatic relativism where space and time were reduced to merely “existential” categories without objective form. History has not been kind to Cassirer, but we should ask ourselves if his criticism was so wide of the mark. It was Cassirer, after all, who grasped the philosophical implications of the natural sciences and especially modern mathematics and physics, whereas Heidegger betrayed the superficiality of his thinking on all such matters when he declared that “science does not think.” Today when so many of our contemporary problems confront us with the need to move beyond the unfortunate divide between the natural sciences and the humanities, Cassirer’s philosophy may offer greater promise. All the same, Heidegger may have been right to suggest that the old dogma of transcendental humanism could not be sustained without a covert appeal to metaphysics. Cassirer occasionally reads as if he meant to give up on metaphysics to develop a kind of phenomenology without foundationalism. But most of these gestures are only half-­convincing. The urgent point of dispute at Davos remained unsolved: can there be objectivity without metaphysics? One solution was developed by philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, who delivered a lecture in Hamburg in 1995 on the dual occasion of the rededication of the Warburg Library and the fiftieth anniversary of Cassirer’s death. Habermas expressed in his lecture great admiration for Cassirer and extoled him as a champion of democracy and Enlightenment at a moment in German history when such champions were all too few. But he also suggested that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms did not succeed in liberating itself from the conventional paradigm of a “philosophy of consciousness.” For Habermas, the philosophy of consciousness is the name for any philosophical doctrine that describes meaning from the isolated perspective of a transcendental subject who

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comes to know the world primarily through representations. Over the course of the twentieth century, many philosophers have come to see this paradigm as antiquated and indefensible, chiefly because it relies on a crypto-­metaphysical conception of a transcendental subject who stands beyond its own field of operation. It serves as the grounds of meaning but can give no account of its own genesis. Habermas tries to resolve this dilemma without following the path of metaphysical skeptics such as Heidegger and Foucault. Instead, he understands objective meaning as the shared creation of an irreducible plurality of subjects who build up the world through intersubjective communication and praxis. This solution helps to secure the objectivity of our language and our moral-­political commitments even though it is an objectivity that has dispensed with the need for metaphysical grounds. This ideal of an intersubjectively validated objectivity derives originally from the German idealists, but one can glimpse in Cassirer’s thinking a certain anticipation of Habermas’ solution. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is an ambivalent work that sits at the boundary between two epochs in the history of philosophy. It points in the direction of a post-­metaphysical theory of the symbolic without wholly liberating itself from the older paradigm of the philosophy of consciousness. We can occasionally glimpse its author as he struggles to overcome his own philosophical inheritance, even if its authority remains too strong. This may help to explain the strange feeling of untimeliness that seems to emanate from the pages of this unusual work. Cassirer himself was a man between epochs, a contemporary of Einstein who could effortlessly call to mind lines of poetry from Schiller and Goethe. Though unashamed of his origins, he was indifferent to the claims of nation and tribe; he saw in Judaism only one source for the rational universalism that was the common inheritance of all cultures. A humanist philosopher in an age of extremes, he was in many ways the supreme representative of a world in eclipse. Although he was fortunate enough to escape the European catastrophe, he did not live long enough to see the new world that would emerge from the ruins. Whether he could have felt at home in this new age of specialization is doubtful. Erudition today is a rare commodity, and it has become just one commodity among others. For good or for ill, philosophers these days no longer have the habit of quoting Goethe. But if we look past

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these marks of old-­world erudition, we may yet find that The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms can come alive with new insights that even its author may never have anticipated. No genuine work of philosophy belongs only to the past.

ENDNOTES 1 Cf. Cassirer, “The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Human Sciences,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. Steve Lofts with Antonio Calcagno, 76. 2 Ibid., 76.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Samantha Matherne (Philosophy, Harvard University) for her comments and insights on this Forward.

T r a n s l at o r ’ s P r e f a c e

Steve G. Lofts The following translation has been made from both the original Bruno Cassirer editions and volumes 11, 12, and 13 of the Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, edited by Birgit Recki and with text and notes prepared by Claus Rosenkranz and Julia Clemens. The translation of “ ‘Geist’ und ‘Leben’ in der Philosophie der Gegenwart” (“ ‘Spirit’ and ‘Life’ in Contemporary Philosophy”) that appears in the Appendix to Volume 3 of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms has been made from volume 17 of the Gesammelte Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe. This paper is mentioned by Cassirer in the Preface to Volume 3 and has been included to provide the reader new to Cassirer with an idea of the problematic that would come to preoccupy him. The original pagination of the Hamburg edition is found in the margins of the translation. All the footnotes that appear within brackets are translator’s notes. As the Hamburg edition is a critical edition, its editorial apparatus is extensive and as such contains a great deal of detailed information. Only the footnotes that seem most appropriate for this translation have been included. Unless a reference to an official English translation appears, all translations of the material quoted in German or French by Cassirer are my own. Official translations have often been amended so that the language of technical terms is consistent. Substantial changes to the translation have been noted. English translations for

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the Greek and Latin are included in parentheses where the translation was not given by Cassirer himself. An attempt has been made to produce a translation that is close and faithful to the original German and to preserve the original feel of Cassirer’s voice and style while providing a readable text in contemporary English. Cassirer writes in a clear, elegant, and poetic German. As with any translation, decisions have been made as to when it was more important to remain faithful to the letter of the text and when it was necessary to side with the spirit of the text. Beyond the typical challenges encountered in any translation, the translator of Cassirer is confronted with a particular problem. Other than “symbolic form” and “symbolic pregnance,” Cassirer does not coin a new technical language; rather, he employs the language of German Idealism and the technical language of scientific research, bringing a number of thinkers and scientific disciplines into dialogue. He often, however, provides these terms with a new sense. Where possible, the standard translations of these technical terms have been adopted. In some cases, however, there are differences in translation traditions. For example, Erkenntnisse is rendered as “knowledge” or “cognition” by different translators. It has, therefore, often been necessary to choose, from among the alternatives, standard translations on the basis of what was the best overall fit in the context of Cassirer’s thought. At times it has been necessary to deviate from standard translations of certain German terms to capture subtle distinctions that would appear to be synonyms and thus would normally be translated by the same English term. Because it is not always possible to translate a German term by using only one English term, in some cases more than one translation has been adopted. Like most philosophers, Cassirer has a tendency to select terms that allow him to make allusions or connect terms through the structure or morphology of the word, such as Gestalt (gestalt, figure, or shape), gestalten (to configure), and Gestaltung (configuration): Bild (image), bilden (forming), Bildung (formation), etc. Where it was thought important to the understanding or simply to the appreciation of the nuances of the text, the German has been included in parentheses. While a translation should not attempt to remove an author’s gender-­ based language, by the same token it should not introduce gender-­based language where it does not exist. There are three genders in German: the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter. The problem occurs when



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we translate terms like der Mensch (the human or the human being) or das Einzelne (the individual). For if we employ the pronoun “he” in these cases, we are in fact introducing gender-­based language that does not exist in Cassirer’s text. The concern here is not one of political but of philosophical correctness. When we speak of “the human,” we are speaking not of individual human beings but of what it means to be human qua human. When speaking of the “individual,” the problem is compounded by the fact that Cassirer is at times speaking of the individual qua individual and at times he is speaking of an individual as a unique person. Whereas the individual qua individual is neither he nor she, an individual as a unique person is always he or she. As a basic principle, this translation endeavors not to introduce gender-­specific language where it did not already exist. A number of strategies have been employed toward this goal. “Der Mensch” is translated as “the human” or “the human being” – the term “man” appears only when it is in an English text quoted by Cassirer or in one of his English works. In some cases, a simple restructuring of the sentence was needed to remove the pronoun or permit a repetition of the noun “the human.” Generally, “the human” and “the subject” have received the pronoun “it” and the possessive pronoun “its.” In a handful of cases, where it was clear that the subject of the sentence was singular, the word “they,” “their,” or “themself” has been used as a singular pronoun to refer to the subject or individual of an unspecified gender. This praxis dates back to the sixteenth century and is currently widely employed in informal language usage and more and more in formal contexts. Finally, in a handful of cases where Cassirer was clearly speaking of a concrete individual, both pronouns have been employed since the assumption is that the point being made would be true for women and for men. The goal of a translation should not be to interpret for the reader but rather to facilitate the reader in undertaking their own interpretation. This said, there is always a degree of interpretation that cannot be avoided. Here is not the place to go through all the reasons for translating a term one way as opposed to another. Other translations are possible, and some choices cannot be made except on the bases of an interpretation of Cassirer’s philosophy as a whole, and in some instances, the German has been included in parentheses so that the reader is free to interpret the text differently.

T r a n s l at o r ’ s I n t r o d u cti o n A Transcendental Critique of Mythical-­Religious Consciousness: Identity-­Thinking, the Natural Attitude, and an Immanence in the Sacred Sense of Life

Steve G. Lofts Whereas in the treatment of language, Cassirer was able to begin from a long history of philosophical thought and in particular was able to build on the work of Humboldt, in the case of myth, Cassirer’s work is pioneering, and he openly acknowledges that it is “at most a beginning.” Following Schelling, myth is to be recognized as a formative force of spirit, as a creative principle of world formation and thus examined on its own terms and not as a proto-­science, as a weakness of spirit, or as a dark shadow of language: thus, myth possesses its own distinctive logic of sense and its unique function within the construction of the objective and subjective worlds. As Cassirer points out, however, a transcendental critique of mythical consciousness is a paradoxical undertaking as transcendental philosophy begins with a given factum and inquiries into its condition of possibility. However, by its very nature, mythical consciousness cannot be “given” as a factum, without losing the lived immediacy that defines it. The transcendental analysis necessarily takes place, therefore, from a position that has always already transcended concrete lived mythical consciousness



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itself. Mythical-­religious consciousness would thus seem to constitute a complex of problems that is fundamentally inaccessible to the exact sciences as well as transcendental philosophy, but without it, whole domains of human experience would be closed off. Heidegger is confronted with a similar paradox in Being and Time when he begins his project of fundamental ontology by way of an analysis of the natural attitude of “average everydayness” that forms the ontic immediacy in which Dasein “lives.” Heidegger’s analysis of everydayness can take place only from a place beyond the immediate absorption of Dasein in the referential totality of significance that forms the environmental world (Umwelt). Heidegger himself connects his analysis of average everydayness with Cassirer’s analysis of myth. In section 11 of Being and Time, “The Existential Analytic and the Interpretation of Primitive Dasein,” Heidegger affirms that average everydayness is “the repetition and the ontologically more transparent purification of what is ontically discovered” in Cassirer’s analysis of myth (BT, 50/51). And in his 1925 seminar, Heidegger states that although the task of conceiving Dasein in its everydayness does not mean describing Dasein at a primitive stage of its being . . . often the consideration of primitive forms of Dasein can more readily provide directions in seeing and verifying certain phenomena of Dasein, in-­as-­much-­as here the danger of concealment through the self-­interpretation through theory . . . is not yet so powerful. . . . In fact, the analysis we have given of the structure of the environing world could be explained in terms of this particular epistemology of the Marburg School. . . . To be sure, the contrast between the concepts of substance and function, to which the epistemology of the Marburg School attaches particular importance, has without question permitted us to see something significant. (HCT, 200/208)

The laborious work of reconstructive analysis must therefore proceed indirectly, through an analysis of the products of mythical consciousness that are given as factum by way of the ethnological and anthropological studies of cultures other than the one in which the transcendental investigator belongs. At times this gives the impression that mythical thinking is understood by Cassirer as a “primitive stage” of spirit that has – or should be – overcome in the move to the rational life of spirit as exemplified in

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science. However, clearly for Cassirer, myth forms a structurally permanent stratum of spirit, and in reading his analysis of myth, it is not difficult to see contemporary examples of the basic dynamics that govern mythical consciousness. Thus, the distinction between “primitive life and culture” and “cultural life” is one between the immediately lived mythical consciousness and the critical and self-­reflective mode of consciousness. In speaking of “Naturvölker” (natural people) in contrast to “Kulturvölker” (cultural people), Cassirer is taking up the technical language of the anthropology of his day, as it was established by Herder; he is, however, investing that language with a new more precise sense. Granted the category of “Naturvölker” (natural people) originally expressed a Eurocentric, colonial ideology: it did so, however, because the term was used to refer to socalled “primitives” socieities or to Aboriginal or Indigenous people. Cassirer does not make this identification. The distinction between “Naturvölker” (natural people) and “Kulturvölker” (cultural people) for Cassirer, can perhaps be better expressed as the distinction between a concrete immenance in the life-­world and a critical reflecive account of the being of the world, between an oral and written tradition. Mythical consciousness lacks a critical self-­reflective distance from its own products. It is, therefore, “primitive” in the sense of primal: it forms the fundamental layer of sense of the natural attitude of an absorbed immediacy in the life of sense against which the reflective consciousness must distinguish itself in and through an Auseinandersetzung with this primal original state. It is important to keep in mind the overall structure of Cassirer’s “phenomenology of mythical consciousness.”1 There are four stages to Cassirer’s analysis: In the first step, he examines myth as a “form of thought” establishing the distinctive logic of sense that determines its basic tendency of object-­consciousness and its basic categories. In the second step, he demonstrates the effect of this form of thought on the mythical “form of intuition” in the construction and structuring of the spatiotemporal world of mythical consciousness according to the basic difference that governs mythical consciousness: namely, the opposition between the sacred and the profane. In a third step, Cassirer roots both the mythical form of thought and mythical intuition in a “form of life” that forms the distinctive existence and function of myth as an immanent life in cultural significations that constitutes the



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identity of a people grounded in a shared sense of life operating in communal ritual action and given figure in the mana-­representation. In the fourth step, Cassirer provides an analysis of the “dialectic of mythical consciousness” that sets out the internal dynamic of mythical consciousness as it moves toward its own overcoming, to “a turning point and a point of return – a point at which the law that governs it becomes a problem.”2 This movement brings out the inner tension and interconnection between what Cassirer calls the “mythical magical” and the “truly religious.” The logic of sense that determines the thought-­form of myth levels down (Nivellierung) all analytic differences and differences between the image and word and the thing (Sache), between the imagined and the perceived, the dream and reality, meaning and being, the whole and the part, the community and the member, etc. into a pure identity that forms one uniform level of being and an immediate concrete presence. This “identity-­thinking” is governed by the “law of the concrescence or coincidence of the members of a relation,” in which the members flow together and merge into one another: The mythical world is not ‘concrete’ in as much as it has to do only with sensible-­objective contents and excludes and repels all merely “abstract” elements, everything that is simply signification and sign – rather, it is concrete because in it the two elements of thing and of signification merge undifferentiatedly into each other, because they are “concretized” here into an immediate coalesced unity.3

This identity-­thinking levels down the difference between signification and sign, between the spiritual and the material, and thus leads to “a kind of materialization of spiritual contents.”4 In this mythical-­ substantial-­identity-­thinking, anything can become anything, and thus the content of mythical thinking is characterized by a constant “metamorphosis,” a fluidity or sliding of signification from one moment to the next. This mythical-­substantial-­identity-­thinking is also a form of “structural thinking” that is governed by the logic of pars pro toto (a part for the whole): “regardless of how far we divide, we find in each part the form, the structure, of the whole.” The part does not represent the whole but “is” the whole itself. Thus, each thing not only belongs-­together with

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others as members of a whole but shares a common identity through being one with the whole. This thought-­form determines the mode of the mythical intuition of space, time, and number. The basic division between the sacred and the profane structures mythical intuition. The mana-­representation and the taboo (two sides of one and the same phenomena) determine all the basic divisions within mythical intuition. Mana has no content. Rather, the mana-­representation is a form of predication by which the separation, the spiritual crisis through which the sacred emerges out of the profane, by which the outstanding stands out from the everyday, penetrating it and providing it with its ultimate sense, its raison d’être. The mythical intuition thus posits a boundary that opens up and structures a sacred space of the extraordinary of the nameless and figureless force of life designated in and by the mana-­representation over against a profane space of the common, average, and everyday. “In observing the flights of birds, the augur divides the whole of the heavens into different regions, which he designates in advance as sacred precincts, each inhabited and governed by a god.”5 The sense of the sacred thus prefigures all intuition of space as a whole as well as the internal structure of its regions. “The east as the origin of light is also the source and origin of life – the west as the place of the setting sun is filled with all the terrors of death. . . . And this opposition of day and night, light, and darkness, birth and death, is also reflected in the most varied mediations and in the most diverse refractions in the mythical apprehensions of the individual concrete relationships of life.”6 This structural intuition of space according to the mana-­representation as an image of the sense of life determines the sense of the spatial organization and orientation of the dwelling space of the human. Hence, for example, “whereas the plan of the [Roman] camp was drawn up according to that of the city, the city in turn corresponded in its structure to the general plan of the world and the different spatial regions of the world.”7 The mythical intuition of time is also determined as the sacred time: “The primary mythical ‘feeling of phases’ can apprehend time only in the image of life – and, consequently, it must immediately transpose and dissolve everything that moves in time, everything that comes and goes in a set rhythm, into the form of life.”8 In keeping with its identity-­ thinking, it reduces all differences in time to an original substantial



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origin, to an absolute and immemorial past that functions as the Ur-­ sache, the originary-­thing or originary-­cause, as the Urgrund of all existence, all history: “The past itself no longer has a ‘why’: it is the why of things.”9 Everything that we call history is nothing other than the unfolding and rebirth of this prehistorical original event; every historical event is only a stage in the retelling of the beginning as it was written in the beginning: “It is not by its history that the mythology of a people is determined but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology – or rather, the mythology of a people does not determine but is itself its fate, its destiny as befallen it from the very beginning. The whole history of the Hindus, the Hellens, and others was given with their system of gods [Götterlehre].”10 The order of time is thus the cosmic power that determines the destiny of a people. It is the different “feelings of time” that constitutes one of the most profound differences in the character of the various religions. Cassirer illustrates this through an analysis of the image of time operating in the Hebraic, Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Egyptian religions. Finally, everything that possesses the same number is seen as identical in its being (Wesen), and each number has its own “individual physiognomy” that determines the nature (Wesen) of this being. Cassirer provides numerous examples to illustrate the distinctive symbolic sense of numbers within myth. For example, the entire mythical world possesses a “fourfold (vierfältige) organization.” Four is the “sacred number” (heiligen Zahl) par excellence, because it forms “the original actuality of all being – earthly and celestial, human and divine.” The mythical form of thought determines not only the objective form of intuition but also the subjective “form of life.” As the symbolic forms undertake the separation, formation, and configuration of the I and the world, Cassirer critiques any form of animism that sees the I or soul as existing before the symbolic process and thus as the source of mythical sense-­bestowing; rather, the I-­concept and soul-­concept are the products of the mythical process that gives expression to an indeterminate life-­ feeling in and through the construction of a cultural identity. The nameless and imageless life force of the mana is given a gestalt in and through the word and image that form and configure it. Thus, “word magic and picture magic stand in the centre of the mythical worldview”:11 “Word magic, image magic, and writing magic form the basic inventory

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[Grundbestand] of magical activity and the magical view of the world.”12 In the various objective figures (Gestalten) of the totem plant or animal, the figures and names of the gods, and the cultural heroes such as the chieftain or the warrior, the unity of the life force of the mana is concentrated in undiminished strength in each of these mana-­representations, and through them the being (Wesen) of a people is defined and, by extension, each of the individual members is subjected (assujetti) as a member of the community. It is important to keep in mind that the narrative and pictorial expressions of myth are only the cognitive surface of the mythical form of life. Borrowing from Hegel, Cassirer maintains that not the names and images of the gods but the cult devoted to them determines the real heart of mythical life. The aim of the cult consists in overcoming the separation of the I from the Absolute, to bring about a positive feeling of sharing and participation in the Absolute and a unity with it – this sublation (Aufhebung) of the rupture constitutes the sphere of the cult.13 Thus, “the cult is, ‘in general, the eternal process in which the subject posits itself as identical with its being [Wesen].”14 In the dance, for example, the dancer does not represent the god but instead becomes and, in fact, is the god. “The mythical narrative is for the most part only an outward reflection of this inner event, a light veil behind which this drama shines through.”15

ENDNOTES 1 In a footnote, Cassirer makes clear that phenomenology here is to be understood in the sense given it by Husserl. 2 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 285. 3 Ibid., 28. 4 Ibid., 67. 5 Ibid., 308. 6 Ibid., 122. 7 Ibid., 126. 8 Ibid., 134. 9 Ibid., 129. 10 Ibid., 6. 11 Cassirer, The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, trans. John Michael Krois (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 80. (Ernst Cassirer Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte, vol. 1, 78).



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12 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 27. 13 Ibid., 269. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Werk, vol. 15 (Leipzig: Meiner Verlag, 1925), 67. 14 Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, 269. 15 Ibid., 227.

T r a n s l at o r ’ s A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Steve G. Lofts A number of institutions have provided the material support without which this translation could not have been possible. I would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for its fellowship and King’s University College at the University of Western Ontario for its generous research grants and a sabbatical leave to complete this project. My thanks also go to Dr. Volker Peckhaus and the Universität Paderborn, Germany, and Dr. Ryugo Matsui and the Faculty of International Studies at the Ryukoku University, Japan, for the warm welcome into their scholarly communities and for providing important logistical support during my stay as a visiting professor. A number of individuals have contributed in different ways to the production of this translation. Although this translation departs in many ways from that of Ralph Manheim’s, it has benefited greatly from his often-­elegant solutions to difficult translation problems. Sadly, John M. Krois will never know that this translation was finally completed. It was his great desire that a new translation of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms be undertaken. I am grateful for his encouragement, for his generosity as a thinker, and for his friendship. Fabien Capeillères, Pierre Keller, and Sebastian Luft have all been patient with the unending questions concerning the translation of technical terms, and their insights have helped



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make this a better translation. Antonio Calcagno, Fabien Capeillères, Pierre Keller, Sebastian Luft, Samantha Matherne, Ingmar Meland, and Carmen Metta graciously commented on an early draft of the Introduction, and I am very grateful for their time and philosophical engagement with this project. The translation has also profited from feedback on previous translations of Cassirer and from the insightful comments of the four reviewers. I would also like to thank my colleagues Jonathan Geen, Antonio Calcagno, and Mark Yenson for their support and friendship. Finally, I cannot express my gratitude enough to my wife, Agnieszka Chuchrowska, whose wonder at the beauty of nature reminds me daily that there is more to life than philosophy.

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A “critique of mythical consciousness,” in the sense in which it is attempted in this second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, must appear not only as a precarious venture but even as a paradoxical one given the present state of critical and systematic philosophy. For, since Kant, the term “critique” has contained in itself the precondition that a factum is given [vorliegt] to which philosophical questioning turns – a factum whose distinctive significance and mode of validity philosophy does not create but once it has been encountered is examined for the “condition of its possibility.” Is the world of myth, however, a factum of this kind, in any way comparable to the world of theoretical cognition, the world of art, or the world of ethical consciousness? Or does this world not belong from the beginning to the domain of semblance – to that semblance from which philosophy, as a doctrine of being [Wesen], ought to remain aloof, in which it should not lose itself but from which, on the contrary, it should ever-­more clearly and sharply isolate itself? Indeed, the entire history of systematic philosophy may be regarded as a single continuous struggle to effect an isolation and detachment from this domain. No matter how much the forms of this struggle may change, its basic direction and general tendency clearly and explicitly emerge depending on the stage that theoretical self-­consciousness has

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achieved. And it is especially in philosophical idealism that this opposition first acquired its full sharpness. In the moment [Augenblick] in which idealism arrived at its own concept, in the moment it became conscious of the thought of being as its basic and originary problem, the world of myth vanished into the domain of nonbeing. And ever since ancient times, Parmenides’ dictum has warned pure thought against entering into this domain, with having any contact with nonbeing or being preoccupied with it, ἀλλὰ σὺ τῆσδ’ ἀφ’ ὁδοῦ διζήσιος εἶργε νόημα [restrain your thought from this way of inquiry].1 It is as if even though philosophy had long abandoned this warning in its view of the world of empirical perception, it continued to heed it in its view of the world of myth. Ever since thought had conquered its own realm and its own autonomy, the world of myth would appear to have been overcome and forgotten. Of course, a change seems to have taken place, for in the last century, Romanticism has rediscovered this lost world and since Schelling has attempted to give myth a fixed place within the system of philosophy. The newly awakened interest in myth and in the basic problems of comparative mythology was, however, of greater benefit to the research into its material content than it was to a philosophical analysis of its form. Thanks to the work done in this domain by systematic religious science, the history of religions, and ethnology, we have abundant material at our disposal. Today, however, the systematic problem of the unity of this manifold and heterogeneous material is seldom raised; or if it is raised, one attempts to solve it exclusively with the methods of developmental psychology and general ethnic psychology. Myth is considered as “comprehended” if it is possible to render its source intelligible from certain basic specific predispositions of “human nature” and to demonstrate the psychological rules that it follows in its unfolding from this original germ. If logic, ethics, and aesthetics have been able to assert their own systematic independence against such forms of explanation and deduction, it is because they have been able to evoke an independent principle of “objective” validity that resisted being reduced to psychology. Myth, by contrast, seems to lack any such support and thus appears to have been consigned and abandoned once and for all to psychology but also to psychologism. Insight into the conditions of its origin seems here to be synonymous with the negation of its independent existence [Bestand].

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To understand its content [Gehalt], this would seem to signify nothing else than to prove its objective nullity [Nichtigkeit] and to see through the general, but nevertheless wholly “subjective,” illusion to which it owes its existence. And yet in this “illusionism” that keeps cropping up – not only in the theory of mythical representing but also in the attempts at a foundation for aesthetics and a theory of art – a grave problem and a grave danger lurk as soon as we consider them from the stand point of a system of spiritual forms of expression. For if the totality [Gesamtheit] of these forms really constitutes a systematic unity, then the fate of any one of them is closely connected with the fate of all the others. Thus, every negation that affects one must, directly or indirectly, extend to the others; any destruction [Vernichtung] of a single member threatens the whole insofar as this whole is regarded not as a mere aggregate but as a spiritual-­ organic unity. And it becomes immediately evident that myth possesses a decisive significance in and for this whole if we consider the genesis of the basic forms of intellectual culture [geistigen Kultur] from that of mythical consciousness. None of these forms possesses from the beginning an independent being [Sein] and a clear, actual, and delimited shape; rather, each of them confronts us, as it were, disguised and enshrouded in some shape of myth. There is scarcely any realm of “objective spirit” that cannot be demonstrated to have originally entered into this fusion, this concrete unity, with mythical spirit. The formations [Gebilde] of art as well as those of cognition – the contents of ethics, law, language, and technology – all point here to the same basic relationship. The question of the “origin of language” is indissolubly interwoven with the question of the “origin of myth” – both can, if at all, be raised only with one another and in a reciprocal relation to one another. Similarly, the problem of the beginnings of art, the beginnings of writing, and the beginnings of law and science leads back to a stage [Stufe] in which they all rest in the immediate and undivided unity of mythical consciousness. Only very gradually do the basic theoretical concepts of cognition – the concepts of space, time, and number; the concepts of law and community, such as the concept of property; or the individual configurations of economics, art, and technology – free themselves from this containment and concatenation. And this genetic interconnection is not apprehended in its original significance and depth so long as it is regarded

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and accepted as a merely genetic one. As everywhere in the life of spirit, “becoming” points back to a being [Sein] without which it cannot be comprehended, without which it cannot be recognized in its distinctive “truth.” Psychology itself, in its modern scientific form [Gestalt], gives an account of this interconnection: here it has become increasingly evident that genetic problems can never be solved solely by themselves but only in a close connection and thoroughgoing correlation with “structural problems.” The emergence of the specific individual formations [Gebilde] of spirit from the generality and indifference of mythical consciousness can never be truly understood if this originary-­ground itself remains an uncomprehended riddle – if, instead of being recognized as an independent mode of spiritual forming [Formung], it is rather taken as a figureless [gestaltlos] chaos. Grasped in this way, the problem of myth expands beyond the narrow limits of psychology and psychologism and takes its place in that general circle of problems that Hegel has designated as the “phenomenology of spirit.” That myth stands in an inner and necessary relationship to the universal task of the phenomenology of spirit follows indirectly from Hegel’s own framing and determination of the concept. As Hegel writes in the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit: The spirit that, so developed, knows itself as spirit, is science. Science is its reality [Wirklichkeit] and the realm that it builds itself in its own element [Elemente]. . . . The beginning of philosophy presupposes or demands that consciousness find itself in this element. This element itself, however, achieves its own perfection and transparency only through the movement of its becoming. It is pure spirituality, as the universal, that has the mode of simple immediacy. . . . For its part, science requires that self-­consciousness should have raised itself into this aether, in order to be able to live with science and in science – and [so] live. Conversely, the individual has the right to demand that science should at least provide him with a ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself. . . . If the standpoint of consciousness, which knows things in their opposition [Gegensatze] to itself, and itself in opposition [Gegensatze] to them, is valid for Science as other [Andere] . . . then, the element [Element] of science is for consciousness a distant other word in which it no longer possesses

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itself. Each of these two aspects [of self-­conscious spirit] appears to the other as the inversion of truth. . . . Let Science be in its own self what it may, in relationship to immediate self-­consciousness it presents itself in an inverted posture; or, because this self-­consciousness has the principle of its reality in the certainty of itself, science appears to it not to be actual, since self-­consciousness exists on its own account outside of science it bears the form of unreality. Science must therefore unite this element [Element] of self-­certainty with itself, or rather show that and how this element belongs to it. So long as Science lacks this reality, it is only the content as the in-­itself [Ansich], the purpose that is as yet still something inward, not as Spirit, but only spiritual substance. This in-­self [Ansich] has to express itself and become for-­itself, and this means simply that it has to posit self-­consciousness as with itself. . . . Knowledge in its first phase, or immediate spirit, is the spiritualless, i.e. sense-­consciousness. In order to become genuine knowledge, to beget the element [Element] of Science which is the pure concept of Science itself, it must travel a long way and work its passage.2

These sentences, in which Hegel characterizes the relationship of “science” to sense-­consciousness, are valid in their full extent and in all their sharpness for the relationship of cognition to mythical consciousness. For the actual point of departure for the entire becoming of science, its beginning in the immediate, does not lie so much in the sensible sphere as it does in the sphere of mythical intuition. What is commonly called sense-­consciousness, the consistent existence of the “world of perception” – which is further subdivided into clearly separated individual spheres of perception, into the sensible “elements” [Elemente] of color, tone, etc. – is itself the product of an abstraction, of a theoretical elaboration of the “given.” Before self-­consciousness rises to this abstraction, it is and lives in the formations [Gebilde] of mythical consciousness – in a world not so much of “things” and their “properties” but rather of mythical potencies and forces, of daemonic and divine figures [Gestalten]. If, in accordance with Hegel’s demand, “science” is to provide natural consciousness with a ladder leading to itself, then it must first set this ladder a step lower. Insight into the “becoming” of science – understood in the ideal, not the temporal, sense – is complete only if science demonstrates

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its emergence and its own working out from the sphere of mythical immediacy and explains the tendency and law of this movement. And it is not merely a question here of a requirement that concerns only philosophical systematics; rather, this requirement concerns cognition itself. For cognition does not master myth by exiling it beyond its borders; rather, it is able to truly overcome what it has previously understood only in its own distinctive content [Gehalt] and according to its specific nature [Wesen]. As long as this spiritual work has not been completed, the battle, which theoretical cognition believes it has won for good, will continually break out anew. Cognition now discovers the opponent that it had seemingly and decisively defeated in its own midst. Even the epistemology of “positivism” provides clear evidence of this state of affairs. The isolation [Absonderung] of the purely factual, the factually given from all “subjective” admixture of the mythical or metaphysical spirit, forms here the ultimate goal of reflection. Science arrives at its own form only by expelling every mythical and metaphysical component from itself. And yet the development of Comte’s theory precisely shows that those elements and motives that were thought to have already been overcome in the beginning remain alive and effective in it. Comte’s system, which began with the banishment of all mythology to the originary-­time [Urzeit] and prehistory [Vorzeit] of science, culminates in a mythical-­religious superstructure. Thus, it can after all be seen that between theoretical cognitive consciousness and mythical consciousness there nowhere exists a hiatus in the sense of a sharp temporal incision – in the sense asserted in Comte’s “law of the three phases” – each separated over against and from the other. For a long time, science preserves a primordial mythical heritage, to which it merely imprints another form. For the theoretical natural sciences, recalling the centuries-­long inconclusive struggle, which continues today, to detach the concept of force from all mythical components, to transform it into a pure concept of function, is sufficient. Here it is not a question of an opposition that breaks forth again into the establishment of the content of basic individual concepts but rather a conflict that reaches deep down into the very form of theoretical cognition. How little within this form a truly sharp boundary has been erected between myth and logos proves more than anything else that myth today is also at

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home in the domain of pure methodology and claims rights [Bürgerrecht] for itself. Already the view is explicitly expressed such that no clear logical partition can be made between myth and history [Geschichte], such that, rather, all historical [historisch] comprehension is and must be permeated with mythical elements [Elemente] and necessarily bound to them. If this thesis were justified, then not only history [Geschichte] but also the entire system of the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] that rests on it as one of its foundations would be withdrawn from the domain of science and entrusted to that of myth. Such encroachments and infringements by myth into the circle of science can be warded off successfully only if we have previously recognized myth in its own sphere according to what it is and is capable of spiritually. Its real overcoming must be based on its cognition and recognition: only through an analysis of its spiritual structure can its distinctive sense and boundary be determined. The more sharply this general task became clear to me over the course of my investigation, the more clearly I perceived the difficulties in the way of carrying it out. Even less than for the problems in the philosophy of language treated in the first volume, did a sure path or even a partially blazed trail exist here. If in the case of language, a systematic consideration could – from the standpoint of method if not of content – build on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s seminal investigations, in the domain of mythical thinking there were no such methodological “guidelines.” The plethora of material that the research of the last decades had brought to light offered no compensation; on the contrary, it made the lacuna of a systematic insight into the “inner form” of mythology all the more evident. The present investigation hopes to advance along a path leading to such an insight – I am, however, far from supposing that it has reached the end of this path. It by no means claims to be conclusive but rather claims to be at most a beginning. Only once the framing of the question that is attempted here is taken up and carried further in progressive work, not only in systematic philosophy but also in the individual scientific disciplines – in particular, in the history of religion and ethnology – can it be hoped that the aim that this investigation originally set itself will be achieved. The first drafts and other preliminary work for this volume were already far advanced when, through my call to Hamburg, I came into close contact with the Warburg Library. I found in its abundant and

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particular nature almost incomparable material in the domain of mythology and the general history of religion, but in its organization and selection, in the intellectual stamp that Warburg gave it, this material dealt with a unitary and central problem closely related to the basic problem of my own work. This correspondence provided me with new incentive to continue along the path on which I had begun – for it suggested that the systematic task undertaken by this book is intimately connected to tendencies and demands that are the outgrowth of concrete work in the human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] and of an endeavor to deepen and reinforce their historical foundations. In my use of the Warburg Library, Fritz Saxl provided me with helpful and expert guidance. I am fully cognizant that without his active help and the lively personal interest that he showed in my work from the beginning, many difficulties in obtaining and penetrating the material could scarcely have been overcome. I should not wish this book to appear without this expression of my heartfelt gratitude. Hamburg, December 1924 Ernst Cassirer

ENDNOTES 1 [Parmenides, Fragment 7.] 2 [G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 12 – trans. amended.]

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INTRODUCTION The Problem of a “Philosophy of Mythology”

1. The philosophical consideration of the contents of mythical consciousness and the attempt at a theoretical apprehension and interpretation of these contents go back to the beginnings of systematic philosophy. Philosophy turned its attention to myth and its formations [Gebilde] earlier than to other domains of culture. This is historically and systematically understandable, for it was in the confrontation [Auseinandersetzung] with mythical thinking that philosophy first succeeded in advancing to a precise framing [Fassung] of its own concept and a clear consciousness of its own task. Wherever philosophy sought to constitute a theoretical consideration and explanation of the world, it was confronted not so much by the immediate appearance of reality itself but rather by the mythical apprehension and recasting [Umprägung] of this reality. It did not – at least not without the decisive contribution of philosophical reflection itself – encounter “nature” in the configuration that it would acquire in a later period, characterized by a highly developed and worked-­out consciousness of experience, but rather, all the shapes [Gestalten] of existence appeared shrouded in the atmosphere of mythical thinking and fantasy. Nature receives its form and color, receives its specific determination, only through these shapes. Long before the world is given to consciousness as a totality [Ganze] of empirical “things” and a complex of

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empirical “properties,” it is given as a totality [Ganze] of mythical forces and effects. And the philosophical view and genuine philosophical tendency of seeing were not immediately able to detach the world-­concept from this its originary spiritual ground and mother soil. For a long time afterward, the beginnings of philosophical thinking retained, as it were, an undecided middle position between a mythical and a truly philosophical framing [Fassung] of the problem of origins. This twofold relation is clearly and pregnantly expressed in the concept that early Greek philosophy created for this problem, the concept of the ἀρχή [arche]. It designates the boundary between myth and philosophy – a boundary, however, that as such has a share in both domains by separating them; it constitutes the point of transition and indifference between the mythical concept of beginning and the philosophical concept of “principle.” The further and the more sharply the methodological self-­awareness of philosophy progresses – since the Eleatic school, a “critique,” a κρίσις, penetrates within the concept of being itself – the more clearly the new world of logos, which now arose and asserted itself as an autonomous formation [Gebilde], emerges, separated from the world of mythical forces and the mythical figures [Gestalten] of the gods. If both worlds, however, can no longer immediately exist next to one another [nebeneinander: simultaneously], then at least an attempt was made to declare and justify the one as a preparatory stage of the other. Here lies the germ of that “allegorical” interpretation of myths that belongs to the fixed cultural inventory [Bildungsbestand] of ancient science. If, in comparison to the new being-­concept and world-­concept that philosophical thinking progressively establishes, myth is to retain any essential significance, any even mediated “truth,” then this would be possible only if it were recognized as an indication and preparation for this very world-­concept. The pictorial content [Bildgehalt] of myth was said to enclose and conceal a rational-­ cognitive content [Gehalt] that reflection had to flush out and expose as its true core. Thus, especially since the fifth century, since the century of the Greek “Enlightenment,” this method of interpreting myths was continually practiced. In this interpretation of myths, the Sophists liked to practice and test the force of their newly founded “doctrine of wisdom.” Myth was comprehended and “explained” by translating it into the conceptual language of popular philosophy, in which it was grasped as the veil of a speculative, natural-­scientific, or ethical truth.

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It is no accident that the very Greek thinker in whom the distinctive mythical force of configuration was still alive and immediately effective was foremost in opposing this view, which leads to a total leveling down of the mythical image-­world. Plato maintained an attitude of ironic superiority toward the attempts at an interpretation of myth as they were undertaken by the sophists and rhetoricians – for him, such interpretations were nothing more than an exercise of the wit, a gross and labored wisdom (ἄγροικος σοφία [rustic wisdom]1). If Goethe once praised the “simplicity” of the Platonic consideration of nature and compared it with the boundless multiplicity, fragmentation, and complexity of the modern theories of nature, Plato’s relationship to myth displayed the same basic characteristic features. For in the consideration of the mythical world, Plato’s vision also never dwells on the plethora of particular motives; rather, this world appears to him as a self-­contained whole that he juxtaposes to the whole of pure cognition in order to measure the one by the other. The philosophical “rescuing” of myth, which likewise signified its philosophical sublation, consisted in the fact that Plato apprehended it as a form and stage [Stufe] of knowledge itself – and, admittedly, as one that necessarily belongs to it as a determinate realm of objects and corresponded to it as an adequate expression. Thus, for Plato, too, myth harbors a certain conceptual content [Gehalt]: for it is the conceptual language in which alone the world of becoming can be expressed. What never is but always “becomes,” what does not – like the formations [Gebilde] of logical and mathematical cognition – remain in identical determinacy [Bestimmtheit: certainty] but manifests itself from moment to moment as something different, can be given only a mythical presentation. However sharply the mere “probability” [Wahrscheinlich­ keit] of myth is separated from the “truth” [Wahrheit] of rigorous science, there still exists, on the other hand, by virtue of this separation, a close methodological interconnection between the world of myth and that world that we call the empirical “reality” of appearances, the reality of “nature.” Here myth thus grows beyond every merely material signification; here it is thought of as a specific, and in its place, necessary function for the apprehending of the world. And now it is able to prove its value in the details of the construction of Platonic philosophy as truly creative, as an engendering and shaping motive. This profound view, to be sure, was not always sustained in the subsequent course of Greek thinking. The

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Stoics and Neoplatonists returned to the old paths of the speculative-­ allegorical interpretation of myth – and through them, this interpretation was transmitted to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The very thinker who first communicated the theory of Plato to the Renaissance may be regarded as a typical example of this tendency of thought: Georgios Gemistos Plethon’s presentation of the theory of ideas is so intermingled with his own mythical-­allegorical theory of the gods [Götterlehre] that the two are fused into an inseparable whole. Opposed to this objectivizing “hypostasis,” which the figures [Gestalts] of myth undergo in Neoplatonic speculation, the gradual turn toward the “subjective” that will take place in modern philosophy becomes increasingly prevelant at this point. Myth became a problem for philosophy insofar as it expresses an original tendency of spirit, an independent configuring mode of consciousness. Wherever a comprehensive systematic of spirit is demanded, contemplation is necessarily led back to myth. In this regard, Giambattista Vico, as the founder of the modern philosophy of language, became the founder of one of the sources of a completely modern philosophy of mythology. For Vico, the real and truly unitary concept of spirit is constituted in the triad of language, art, and myth.2 Vico’s idea was, however, brought to full systematic determinacy and clarity only with the foundation of the science of spirit [Geisteswis­ senschaft] undertaken by the philosophy of Romanticism. Here too, as in other spheres, Romantic poetry and philosophy reciprocally prepared the way: it was perhaps in response to Hölderlin’s spiritual impulse that Schelling, in the first draft of his system of objective spirit, composed at age twenty, called for an unification of the “monotheism of reason” and the “polytheism of the imagination” – that is, a “mythology of reason.”3 To carry out this demand, however, the philosophy of Absolute idealism, as elsewhere, also rejected here the conceptual means that Kant’s critical theory had created: the critical question of “origins” that Kant had raised for the theoretical, ethical, and aesthetic judgments was applied by Schelling to the domain of myth and mythical consciousness. As in Kant, this question is not concerned with the psychological emergence of myth but with its pure inventory [Bestand] and content [Gehalt]. Like cognition, morality, and art, myth now becomes an autonomous, self-­contained “world,” which may not be measured by the external criteria of value and reality but must rather be comprehended according to

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its own inherent, structural lawfulness. Any attempt to render this world “intelligible” by seeing in it something merely mediated, as simply a cloak of something else, is now decisively rejected once and for all. Like Herder in the philosophy of language, Schelling overcomes in his philosophy of mythology the principle of allegory; like Herder, Schelling turns back from the apparent explanation through allegory to the basic problem of symbolic expression. He replaces the allegorical interpretation of the world of myths with a “tautegorical” interpretation: i.e., he takes the mythical figures [Gestalten] as autonomous formations [Gebilde] of spirit, which must be comprehended on their own terms, based on a specific principle of sense-­bestowing and gestalt-­bestowing [Sinn-­und Gestaltgebung]. This principle – as Schelling’s introductory lectures on “the philosophy of mythology” set out in detail – is overlooked both by the euhemeristic interpretation [Deutung], which transforms myth into history, as well as by the physicalist interpretation [Auslegung], which makes it into a kind of primitive explanation of nature. They do not explain the distinctive reality [Realität] that the mythical possesses for consciousness but rather volatilize and deny it. The path of true speculation, however, is opposed to the direction of such a resolute consideration. It aims not at an analytical breaking down but rather at a synthetic understanding; it strives back toward the ultimate positive aspect of spirit and life. And myth must, by all means, be comprehended as just such a positive aspect. Schelling’s philosophical understanding of myth begins from the insight that myth, too, in no way moves in a purely “fabricated” or “poetically invented” [erdichteten4] world but rather possesses its own mode of necessity and, therefore, in accordance with the concept of the object of philosophical idealism, possesses its own mode of reality [Realität]. Only where such necessity is demonstrable does reason, and hence philosophy, have a place. For philosophy, the purely arbitrary – the absolutely accidental and random – cannot even form an object of inquiry, for it, the study of being [Wesen], cannot establish a foothold in the sheer void, in a domain that is itself without intrinsic [wesenhaft] truth. At first sight, to be sure, nothing seems more disparate than truth and mythology – accordingly, nothing more opposed than philosophy and mythology. However, precisely in the opposition itself lies the definite challenge and the task of uncovering reason in just this which is apparently

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unreasonable, of uncovering sense in just this which appears senseless – and, indeed, not in the way in which this has only been attempted up to now, by virtue of an arbitrary differentiation, such namely that anything one was confident in asserting as reasonable or meaningful was explained as essential, everything else however merely explained as contingeint, and counted as part of disguise or distortion. The intent must be, on the contrary, that also the form appears as a necessary and to that extent reasonable one.5

In keeping with the overall conception of Schelling’s philosophy, this basic intent must be realized in a twofold direction: toward the side of the subject and toward that of the object [Objekt], on the one hand, and with regard to self-­consciousness and with regard to the Absolute, on the other. As concerns self-­consciousness and the form in which the mythical is experienced in it, this form, when considered more precisely on its own, is already sufficient to rule out any theory that grounds myth in pure “invention.” For such a theory has already missed the pure factual existence [Bestand] of the phenomenon that was to be explained by it. The actual phenomenon that is to be understood here is not the mythical content of a representation as such but the significance that it possesses for human consciousness and the spiritual power [Macht] that it exerts over it. The problem is not the material content of mythology but the intensity with which it is lived [erlebt], with which it is believed – as only something objectively existing and actual can be believed. Already this originary factum of mythical consciousness frustrates any attempt to see its ultimate root in an invention [Erdichtung] – whether poetic or philosophical. For, even if we admit that the purely theoretical, intellectual content [Gehalt] of mythology might in this way be rendered intelligible, the dynamic, as it were, of mythical consciousness – the incomparable force [Kraft] that it has demonstrated over and over again in the history of human spirit – would remain entirely unexplained. In the relationship between myth and history, myth proves to be primary, history secondary and derived. It is not by its history that the mythology of a people is determined but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology – or rather, the mythology of a people does not determine but is itself its fate, its fate as befallen it from the very beginning. The whole history of the Hindus, the Hellens, and others was given with

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their system of gods [Götterlehre6]. There is, therefore, neither for an individual people nor for humanity as a whole a free choice here, a liberum arbitrium indifferentiae [free choice of indifference], by which given mythical representations can be accepted or rejected; rather, a strict necessity prevails everywhere. A real power [Macht], i.e. a power no longer situated in its forceful power [Gewalt] – has possession [bemächtigt] on consciousness in myth. Mythology originates in the true sense from something independent of all invention, something indeed that is opposed to invention in both form and essence; from the standpoint of consciousness, it arises out of a necessary process, whose origin is lost in a suprahistorical sphere, a process that consciousness can perhaps resist at certain moments but that, as a whole, it cannot impede, much less annul. We see ourselves taken back here to a region where there is no time for invention, either by individuals or by a people, no time for artificial disguises or misunderstandings. Whoever understands what a mythology is for a people – what inner forceful power [Gewalt] it possesses over a people and what reality [Realität] is manifested therein – will say that mythology, no more than language, was invented by the endeavors of individuals. Thus, according to Schelling, speculative philosophical reflection had touched on the actual vital source of mythology, which, however, it was able only to demonstrate but was not able to “explain” further. Schelling expressly claimed it as his distinctive intellectual achievement to have replaced inventors, poets, and individuals in general by human consciousness as the source, the subjectum agens of mythology.7 Indeed, mythology has no reality outside of consciousness; even though the mythological process consists only in the determinations of consciousness – that is, in representations – this process, this succession of representations [Vorstel­ lungen], cannot have been merely imagined [vorgestellt] as such but must have actually taken place, must really have occurred in consciousness. Mythology is, therefore, not merely a successively imagined [vorgestellt] system of gods [Götterlehre]; rather, the successive polytheism in which this system of gods exists can be explained only if we assume that the consciousness of humanity actually dwells in every moment of it. “The gods following one upon the other have actually successively taken possession [bemächtigt] of consciousness. Mythology as the history of the gods, thus

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actual mythology, was able to produce itself only in life itself; it had to be something lived and experienced.”8 If, however, myth is thus demonstrated to be a distinctive and original life-­form, then it therefore loses all semblance of merely one-­sided subjectivity. For “life,” according to Schelling’s basic view, signifies something neither merely subjective nor merely objective; rather, it stands precisely on the borderline between the two. It is the indifference between the subjective and objective. If we apply this to myth, then here, too, the movement and development of mythical representations in human consciousness, provided this movement is to have an inner truth, must correspond to an objective event, a necessary development in the Absolute. The mythological process is a theogonic process: a process in which God becomes, in which, as the true God, God creates himself step by step. Each individual stage [Stufe] of this production, provided it can be comprehended as a necessary point of passage [Durchgangspunkt], has its own significance; however, only in the whole, only in the unbroken interconnection of the mythical movement passing through all the moments, are its complete sense and true goal disclosed. In this, every particular and contingent individual phase appears as necessary and hence as justified. The mythological process is the process of the self-­restoring and thus self-­realizing truth: it is thus indeed not truth in the individual moment, for otherwise it would need no advance to one following, no process; but in this process itself the truth generates itself and therefore is – as a self-­generating one – contained within this process: the truth that is the end of the process, that thus the process in toto itself contains as completed.9

More closely considered, what determines this development for Schelling is a progress from the unity of God, as a merely existing [sei­ ende] but not as such conscious unity, to a multiplicity from which, through opposition to multiplicity, the true existing [seiende] and recognized unity of God is gained. Even the earliest human consciousness to which we can return must necessarily likewise be thought of as a divine consciousness, as a consciousness of [von] God: in its true and specific sense, human consciousness is a consciousness that does not have God outside it but rather – though not with knowledge and will and not by

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a free act of caprice but rather by virtue of its nature – contains within it the relation to God. The original human is the positing of God not by actu but rather by natura sua [its own nature] and indeed . . . there remains for originary consciousness nothing other than that it is that which the positing of God in His truth and absolute unity.10

If this is monotheism, however, then it is only a relative monotheism: the God who is postulated here is one only in the abstract sense that there are still no internal differences, that there is still nothing present with which he can be compared or to which he can be opposed. Only in the progress to polytheism is this “other” achieved: the religious consciousness now undergoes a split within itself, a particularization, an inner “alteration,” for which the multiplicity of gods is only a figurative-­objective expression. On the other hand, through this progress, the way is opened that raises up from the relative-­One to the absolute-­One actually revered on the way. Consciousness had to pass through the separation, the “crisis” of polytheism, before it could differentiate the true God, i.e. he who remains one and eternal as such – from the primal God [Urgott] whom consciousness comes to regard as the relative-­One and only temporarily eternal. Without the second God, without the solicitation to polytheism, there would have been no progress to true monotheism. God was not mediated to the human of the primal time [Urzeit] through a doctrine, through a science: the relationship was a real one and for that reason could only be a relationship to God in his reality, not to God in his essence, and thus also not to the true God. For the actual God is not immediately also the true God. . . . The God of pre-­historical time [Vorzeit] is an actual, real God, and in him also the true God Is, but not known as such. Thus, humanity worshiped what it did not know, to which it had no ideal (free) relation, but rather only a real relationship.11

To produce this ideal and free relationship, to transform the existing [seiend] unity into the known unity: such is the sense and content of the whole mythical, actual “theogonic” process. Once again, we see here a

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real relationship of human consciousness to God, whereas all previous philosophies had known only of a “religion of reason,” thus only of a rational relationship to God, and had seen all religious development only as a development of the idea, i.e. in representation and in thoughts. With this, according to Schelling, the circle of enlightenment is complete – subjectivity and objectivity are placed in their proper relationship within the mythical.

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It is not at all the things with which the human deals in the mythological process by which consciousness is moved, but rather it is the powers [Mächte] arising in the interior of consciousness itself. The theogonic process, through which mythology emerges, is a subjective one insofar as it takes place in consciousness and shows itself through the generating of representations: but the causes and thus also the objects of these representations are the actually and in themselves theogonic powers, just those powers through which consciousness is originally the God-­positing consciousness. The content of the process is not merely imagined potencies but rather the potencies themselves – which create consciousness, and which create nature (because consciousness is only the end of nature) and for this reason are also actual powers. The mythological process does not have to do with natural objects [Naturobjecten], but rather with the pure creating potencies whose original product is consciousness itself. Thus, it is here where the explanation fully breaks through into the objective realm, becomes fully objective.12

Indeed, the highest concept and form of “objectivity” that Schelling’s philosophical system knows has been reached here. Myth has attained its “essential” truth in that it is comprehended as a necessary moment in the process of the self-­unfolding [Selbstentfaltung] of the Absolute. The fact that it nowhere has to do with “things” in the sense of a naïve-­realistic view of the world but that it is merely a reality, a potency of spirit in which it constitutes itself, cannot establish an objection against its objectivity, its essential being and truth: even nature has no other or no higher truth than this. Nature itself is also nothing other than a stage [Stufe] in the development [Entwicklung] and self-­unfolding [Selbstentfaltung] of spirit, and the task of a philosophy of nature consists precisely in understanding and elucidating

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it as such. What we call nature – and this is already stated in The System of Transcendental Idealism – is a poem that lies hidden in a secret most wonderful writing: yet if the enigma could be unveiled, then we would recognize the odyssey of spirit, who, wonderfully deceived, flees from itself while seeking itself. This secret writing of nature is now approachable from another side, through the consideration of myth and its necessary phases of development. The “odyssey of spirit”13 here has reached a stage in which we no longer, as in the world of the senses, behold its ultimate goal before us through a semitransparent mist but rather behold it in figures [Gestalten] that, though immediately familiar to the mind, are still not completely penetrated. Myth is the odyssey of the pure consciousness of God that is conditioned and mediated in its unfolding equally through the consciousness of nature and the world as through the consciousness of the I. It unveils here an inner law that is fully analogous to the law prevailing in nature but of a higher mode of necessity. Because the cosmos is to be understood and interpreted only from spirit and thus from subjectivity, the seemingly purely subjective content [Gehalt] of the mythical has conversely also an immediate cosmic significance: Not that mythology would have emerged under an influence of nature, of which the interior of the human is, on the contrary, deprived through this process; rather, the mythological process passes, according to the same law, through the same levels [Stufen] through which nature originally passed. . . . Thus, the mythological process does not have merely religious significance – it has universal significance. For it is the universal process that repeats itself in it; accordingly, the truth that mythology has in the process is also a universal one, one excluding nothing. One cannot, as is customary, deny to mythology historical [historisch] truth, for the process by which it emerges into being is itself a true history [Geschichte], an actual set of events. Just as little is physical truth to be excluded from it, for nature is just as much a necessary passage point of the mythological process as of the universal process.14

The characteristic merit and limitations of Schelling’s idealistic explanation appear clearly in this passage. The concept of the unity of the Absolute truly and definitively assures the absolute unity of human consciousness by deriving everything that emerges in it as the particular

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achievement, as a specific tendency of spiritual doing, from a common ultimate origin. At the same time, however, the danger of this concept of unity is that in the end it will ultimately absorb the abundance of concrete, particular differences and render them unrecognizable. Thus, myth can become for Schelling a second “nature” because nature itself has previously been transformed into a kind of myth in which its purely empirical significance and truth are sublated into its spiritual significance, into its function – namely, to be the self-­revelation of the Absolute. If we refuse to take this first step, then it would seem that we must abandon the second as well; thus, there would seem to be no remaining path to the essential being and truth of the mythical, to its distinctive “objectivity.” Or is there perhaps a means and possibility to retain as such the question put forward by Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology but, at the same time, to transplant it from the ground [Boden] of a philosophy of the Absolute to that of a critical philosophy? Is there sheltered in it not only a problem of metaphysics but also a purely “transcendental” problem that is as such susceptible to a critical-­transcendental solution? If we take the concept of the “transcendental” in a strictly Kantian sense, then it would indeed seem paradoxical even to suggest such a question. For Kant’s transcendental framing of the problem limits itself expressly to the conditions of possibility of experience and restricts itself to these conditions. What “experience,” however, can be shown in which the world of the mythical can be authenticated and in which any kind of objective truth and objective validity might be proven? If this were demonstrable for myth in general, it would at least seem possible to ground it in its psychological truth and in its psychological necessity. The necessity with which myth arises in relatively corresponding forms at certain stages in the development of spirit seems to constitute its only objective and tangible content [Gehalt]. Indeed, since the epoch of German speculative idealism, the problem of myth has been posited only in this sense and sought in this way. Insight into the ultimate absolute grounds of myth has been replaced by insight into the natural causes of its emergence: the methodology of metaphysics has been replaced by the methodology of ethnic psychology [Völkerpsychologie]. True access to the world of the mythical and to its explanation seemed to have been opened only after Schelling and Hegel’s dialectical concept of development had been replaced once and for all by the empirical

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concept of development. That the mythical world was an ensemble of mere “representations” was now taken for granted; however, these representations were comprehended only if we succeeded in making them intelligible from the general rules governing the formation of representations, namely by the elementary laws of association and reproduction. Myth now appeared in an entirely different sense, as a “natural form” of spirit, which could be understood in no other way than by the methods of empirical natural science and empirical psychology. And yet is it not possible to conceive of a third “form of determination” of mythical thinking that explains the mythical world neither through the being [Wesen] of the Absolute nor merely reduces it to a play of empirical-­ psychological forces? If this determination seeks, like Schelling and the methodology of psychology, the subjectum agens of mythology solely in human consciousness, then must we necessarily accept either the empirical-­psychological or the metaphysical concepts of consciousness? Or is there not a form of critical analysis of consciousness that distances itself from both of these points of view? The modern critique of cognition, the analysis of the laws and principles of knowledge, has detached itself more and more resolutely from the presuppositions of both metaphysics and those of psychologism. The struggle that is conducted here between psychologism and pure logic seems today to have been finally decided: we may also venture to predict that it will never recur in the same form. What is true of logic, however, is no less true of every independent domain and every basic original function of spirit. In them all, the determination of their pure content [Gehalt], the determination of what they signify and are, is independent of the question of their empirical becoming and of the psychological conditions of their origins. We can and must inquire in a purely objective sense into the “being” [Sein] of science, into the content [Gehalt] and principles of its truth, without reflecting on the temporal order in which the particular truths and insights [Erkenntnisse] are manifested to empirical consciousness, and the same problem recurs for every form of spirit. We can never do away with the question of their “being” [Wesen] by transforming it into an empirical, genetic question. The presupposition of such a unity of being [Wesen] signifies for art and myth, just as for cognition, a general lawfulness of consciousness that conditions every configuration of the particular. In accordance with the basic critical view,

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we obtain the unity of nature only in that we “put it into” [hineinlegen] the appearances; we do not obtain it as the unity of an intellectual form from the individual phenomena but rather constitute [darstellen] and produce [herstellen] it in them – the same is true of the unity of culture and of each of its original tendencies. It is not enough to demonstrate it factually in the appearances; rather, we must explain them through the unity of a determinate “structural form” of spirit. Thus, here too, as in the theory of cognition, the method of critical analysis stands between the methodologies of metaphysical deduction and psychological induction. Like the latter, it must always begin from the “given,” from the empirically ascertained and secured facts [Tatsachen] of cultural consciousness; however, it cannot stop with them as merely given. From the reality of the factum, it must inquire back into the “conditions of its possibility.” In these conditions of possibility, it seeks to disclose a certain hierarchical structure, a superordination and subordination of the structural laws of the domain in question, an interconnection and reciprocal determination of individual configuring elements. In this sense, to inquire into a “form” of mythical consciousness means to search neither after its ultimate metaphysical grounds nor after its psychological, historical, or social causes: rather, it is only to inquire after the unity of the spiritual principle by which all its particular configurations, in all their diversity and their vast empirical abundance, appear to be governed.15 And with this, the question of the “subject” of myth takes another turn. Metaphysics and psychology have answered it in opposing senses: metaphysics from the ground [Boden] of “theogony,” psychology from the ground [Boden] of “anthropogeny.” In one case, the mythological process is explained as a particular instance, a determined and necessary individual phase of the “absolute process”; in the other, mythical apperception is deduced from the general factors and rules governing the formation of representations. Is this, however, not basically a recurrence of that “allegorical” view of the mythical that had, in principle, already been discredited by Schelling’s Philosophy of Mythology? In both cases, do we not “comprehend” myth by referring it and reducing it to something other than what it immediately is and signifies? As Schelling formulates it, Mythology is known in its truth, and, thus, only truly known, when it is known in the process. However, the process that repeats itself in it,

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only in a particular way, is the universal, the absolute process, and, thus, the true science of mythology is accordingly the one that presents the absolute process in it. But to present this process is the task of philosophy. The true science of mythology is, for this reason, the philosophy of mythology.

Ethnic psychology only replaces this identity of the Absolute with the identity of human nature, which always and necessarily brings forth the same “elementary thoughts” of myth. However, in beginning in this way from the constancy and unity of human nature and making it the presupposition for all its attempted explanations, it ultimately falls into a petitio principii. For instead of demonstrating the unity of spirit through analysis and establishing it as the outcome of analysis, it treats this unity as a self-­ evident datum existing in itself. As in cognition, however, the certainty of a systematic unity stands here at the end rather than at the beginning; it signifies not the point of departure but the goal of consideration. Within the boundaries of the critical point of view, we therefore cannot conclude the unity of the function from the preexisting or assumed unity of a metaphysical or psychological substrate; rather, we must begin from the function as such: if despite the change in the individual motives, we find in the function a relatively constant “inner form,” then we shall not return back from this form to infer the substantial unity of spirit. Rather, the constancy of inner form seems to constitute and designate this unity. Unity, in other words, appears not as the ground but as another expression of this same determinacy of form. This must be apprehended as a pure, immanent determinacy, in its immanent significance, without our needing to answer the question about its ground, be it transcendent or empirical. Thus, we may inquire into the pure determination of the being [Wesen] of the mythical function – its τί ἔστι [what x is], in the Socratic sense – and compare this pure form with that of the linguistic, 16 aesthetic, and logical-­conceptual functions. For Schelling, mythology has a philosophical truth because expressed in it is not only a thought but a real relationship of human consciousness to God, because it is the Absolute, God himself, who passes here from the first potency of “being-­in-­itself” to the potency of “being-­ outside-­itself” and through it to the perfect “being-­with-­itself.” For the opposite view, for the standpoint of “anthropogeny,” as represented by

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Feuerbach and his successors, inversely the empirical-­real unity of human nature is taken as a starting point – as a basic original causal factor of the mythological process, which explains why under the most diverse conditions and beginning from the most multifarious spatiotemporal points it develops in essentially the same way. As opposed to these approaches, a critical phenomenology of mythical consciousness can begin neither from the godhead, as an originary metaphysical fact, nor from humanity, as an originary empirical fact, but rather will seek to apprehend the subject of the cultural process, “spirit,” solely in its pure actuality, in the manifold of its modes of configurations and will seek to determine the immanent norms that each of them follows. “Humanity” constitutes itself only in the whole of these activities, in accordance with its ideal concept and concrete-­historical existence; the progressive separation of “subject” and “object,” of “I” and “world,” occurs only in these activities, through which consciousness issues from its stupor, its captivity in mere existence and in sensible impression and affect, and forms itself into a consciousness of culture. From the standpoint of this framing of the problem, the relative “truth” that is awarded to myth can no longer be questioned. It can now no longer be grounded as the expression and reflection of a transcendent process nor by the fact that certain constant soul-­like [Seelisch: emotional] forces operate in its empirical becoming. Its “objectivity” – and from the critical standpoint this is true of each mode of spiritual objectivity – is to be determined not tangibly but functionally: this objectivity lies neither in a metaphysical nor in an empirical-­psychological being that stands behind it but rather in what myth itself is and achieves, in the mode and form of objectivization that it accomplishes. It is “objective” provided that it is recognized as one of the determining factors by virtue of which consciousness frees itself from its passive constraint in sensible impression and progresses to the creation of its own “world,” configured according to a spiritual principle. If we formulate the question in this way, then the “unreality” of the mythical world can no longer be said to argue against its significance and truth. To be sure, the mythical world is and remains a world of “mere representations”; however, in terms of its content, its mere matter, the world of cognition is no different. We arrive at the scientific concept of nature not by apprehending behind our representations their absolute archetype [Urbild], the transcendent object, but

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by discovering in them and through them the rule determining their order and sequence. The representation acquires an objective character for us when we divest it of its contingency and emphasize in it a universal, objectively necessary law. Likewise, in connection with myth, we can raise the question of objectivity only in the sense of inquiring whether it, too, discloses an immanent rule, a “necessity” distinctive to it. Of course, in this case, the rule would seem to always be concerned with only a lower level [Stufe] of objectivity. Is not, then, this rule destined to vanish in the face of real, scientific truth, before the concept of nature and that of the object that are gained in pure cognition? With the dawn of scientific insight, the mythical world of dream and magic seems once and for all to sink into nothingness. And yet even this relationship appears in another light when, if instead of comparing the content of myth with the content of the final worldview of cognition, we instead compare the process of the construction of the mythical world with the logical genesis of the scientific concept of nature. There are here individual stages [Stufen] and phases in which the different levels [Stufen] of objectivation [Objektivierung] and spheres of objectification [Objektivation] are not yet sharply separated. Indeed, even the world of our immediate experience – that world in which we all constantly live as long as we are outside the sphere of conscious, critical-­scientific reflection – contains a wealth of features that, from the standpoint of this same reflection, can be designated only as mythical. In particular, the concept of causality, the general concept of “force,” must pass through the sphere of mythical intuition of effective action before being solved in the mathematical-­logical concept of function. Thus, everywhere, right into the configuration of our perceptive world, right into that domain that from the naïve standpoint we tend to designate as actual “reality,” we find this distinctive survival of basic, originary mythical motives. Little though these motives correspond immediately to objects, they are, nevertheless, on the way to “objectivity” [Gegenständlichkeit] in general, insofar as they constitute a determinate (not accidental) and necessary mode of spiritual forming [Formung]. Thus, the objectivity [Objektivität] of myth exists above all there where it seems farthest removed from the reality [Realität] of things, from the “reality” [Wirklichkeit] in the sense of naïve realism and dogmatism – this objectivity is not the picture [Abbild] of a given existence but is a proper, typical

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mode of forming [Bilden] itself, in which consciousness disengages itself from and confronts the mere receptivity of sensible impressions. Proof of this relationship cannot, to be sure, be attempted from above, in a purely constructive construction [konstruktivem Aufbau], but rather, it must presuppose the facts of mythical consciousness, the empirical material of comparative mythology and comparative religion. The problem of a “philosophy of mythology” has been vastly broadened by this material, particularly by the increasing mass of data that has come to light since the middle of the nineteenth century. For Schelling, who depended principally on Georg Creuzer’s Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker [The Symbol­ ism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples], all mythology was essentially the system and history of the gods. For him, the concept of God and the knowledge of God [Gotteserkenntnis] formed the beginning of all mythological thinking – a notitia insita [innate knowledge] that it takes as its actual starting point. Creuzer vehemently opposes those who made the religious development of humanity begin not with the unity of the concept of God but with the multiplicity of partial, or even initially local, representations, with so-­called fetishisms or deifications of nature, in which the object of worship was not even concepts or kinds but an individual natural object, e.g. this tree or this river. No, humanity has not proceeded from such misery; the majestic course of history has an entirely different beginning; the keynote in the consciousness of humanity always remained that great One, who did not yet know his equal, who actually filled heaven and earth, that is – the all.16

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Modern ethnological research – e.g. the theories of Andrew Lang and Wilhelm Schmidt – has also attempted to revive Schelling’s basic thesis of a primary “originary monotheism” and to support it by way of extensive empirical material.17 The further they advanced, however, the clearer it became that it was impossible to combine the pure content of the configurations of mythical consciousness into a unity and genetically derive them from it as from a common root. If animism, which for a long time after the appearance of Tylor’s seminal work dominated all interpretation of myth, believed this root to be found in the nature of the primitive representation of the soul rather than in the primary intuition of God, then

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today this mode of explanation appears to have increasingly been pushed back and at the very least shaken in its singular, general validity. More and more clearly, features of a basic mythological outlook emerge that know neither a distinct concept of God nor a concept of the soul or personality but begin from a still entirely undifferentiated intuition of magical efficacy, from the intuition of a substantive magical force inherent in things. This demonstrates a distinctive “stratification” within mythical thinking – a superordination and subordination of its structural elements [Elemente], which is significant in a purely phenomenological sense, even for those who do not venture to identify the temporally first elements [Elemente], the empirical beginnings of myth on the strength of it.18 With this, however, we are brought from another direction of inquiry to the same requirement that Schelling had also established as the basic postulate of his philosophy of mythology: namely, that no element in the process of mythical thinking, no matter how unimposing, fantastic, or arbitrary it may appear, should be considered insignificant as such, but rather, each factor must be assigned to the specific place within the whole from which this thinking receives its ideal sense. This whole contains its own inner “truth,” insofar as it designates one of the paths by which humanity has advanced to its specific self-­consciousness and to its specific objective consciousness.

2. Even within purely empirical research and comparative mythology, a tendency has been evident for some time, not merely to survey the extent of mythical thinking and representing [Vorstellen] but also to describe it as a unitary form of consciousness with its own specifically distinctive characteristic features. It expresses itself in the same philosophical tendency that has in other domains, such as natural science or linguistics, led to a reversal in the framing of the problem, to a return from “positivism” to “idealism.” In physics, the question of the “unity of the physical worldview” has led to a renewal and deepening of its general theoretical principles, and in ethnology, the problem of a “universal mythology”19 has been increasingly taken on by those engaged in specialized research in recent decades. From the conflict of the individual schools and tendencies, there would appear to be here ultimately no other alternative than to

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mindfully return to unitary principles and to the fixed and determinate points of the orientation of research. However, as long as it was believed possible to simply infer these principles from objects of mythology, as long as we began from a classification of mythical objects [Objekt], it quickly became evident that the conflicts between the basic views could not be resolved. While it established an overview grouping of the basic mythical motives that were to be found throughout the world and whose kinship was illuminated, even where there was the possibility of an immediate spatiotemporal interconnection, a direct borrowing would seem to be lacking. However, as soon as it was undertaken to separate these motifs, as soon as we attempted to distinguish some as truly original and others by contrast as derived, the strife of opinions at once reared itself again and in the strongest possible terms. The task of ethnology, it was declared, was to ascertain in conjunction with ethnic psychology a general validity in the alteration of phenomena and to determine the principles that underlie all particular mythical formations.20 However, the unity of these principles was, no sooner than it was believed to have been secured, lost amid the abundance and diversity of concrete objects [Objekt]. Soul mythology stood alongside nature mythology – and within nature mythology different tendencies, each of which strove with determination and perseverance to prove that a specific object of nature was the heart and origin of all myth formation. It was assumed that for each individual myth – if it was at all scientifically “explainable” – a certain connection with some natural being or event was required, since this was the only way of limiting the arbitrary formation of fantasies and bringing research to a rigorous “objective” path.21 However, the formation of hypotheses, which resulted from this supposedly rigorous objective path, proved in the end no less arbitrary than the formation of fantasies. The older form of storm and thunder mythology was now challenged by the astral mythology, which itself soon broke down into the various forms of sun mythology, moon mythology, and planet mythology. To the degree that each of these forms strove, to the exclusion of the others, to constitute and to affirm itself as the sole principle of explanation, it became increasingly clear that the connection with certain individual spheres of given objects [Objekte] was not able to guarantee the objective unity of explanation that was sought.

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Another path to an ultimate unity of myth formation seemed to open when this unity was determined as a spiritual unity rather than as a natural one – in that it was apprehended as the unity of a historical-­cultural sphere rather than as the unity of a sphere of objects [Objekt]. If it were possible to show that such a cultural sphere was the common origin of all the great fundamental mythical motives and the center from which they gradually spread over the whole earth, then the inner interconnection and systematic consistency of these motives would seem to be explained. If this interconnection might be obscure in the derived and mediated forms, it would become immediately evident again as soon as we returned to the ultimate historical sources and to relatively simple conditions of emergence. If older theories – such as Benfey’s theory of folk legends – had sought here the proper home of the most important mythical motives in India, then a conclusive proof of the historical interconnections and the historical uniformity of myth formation could be produced, it would seem, only once research had made available the content of Babylonian culture. The question of the original, unitary structure of mythology would now seem to have been answered, along with the question of the originary home [Urheimat] of culture. Indeed, according to the Panbabylonian theory, myth could never have developed into an inherently consistent “Weltanschauung” if it had emerged solely from primitive magical representations or dream experiences, from animistic beliefs or other superstitions. Rather, the path to such a Weltanschauung was given only where there was a specific concept, a thought of the world as an ordered whole led the way – a condition that was fulfilled only in the inception of Babylonian astronomy and cosmogony. This intellectual and historical orientation seemed to open up the possibility of comprehending myth no longer as a pure figment of the imagination [Phantasie] but as a self-­contained system, intelligible in itself. We do not need to discuss the empirical foundations of this theory of Panbabylonianism in greater detail here;22 however, what makes this theory noteworthy in a purely methodological sense is that upon closer examination it by no means proves to be a merely empirical assertion concerning the factual historical origins of myth but rather a kind of a priori assertion about the tendency and aim of mythological research. That all myths must be of astral origin, that they must ultimately be “calendar myths,” was for the followers of the Panbabylonian method the basic

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methodological claim, the “Ariadne’s thread” that alone would be able to lead us through the labyrinth of mythology. It was repeatedly this general postulate that would serve to fill the lacunae in the empirical tradition and evidence; however, with this, it became increasingly clear that no definitive solution to the basic question of the unity of mythological consciousness could be arrived at by way of a purely empirical and historically objective inquiry. More and more firmly, the insight established itself that a merely factual unity of the basic mythical formations [Gebilde], even if we could succeed in demonstrating it beyond any doubt, would still represent a puzzle unless it could be referred back to an underlying structural form of mythical fantasy and thinking. If, however, we do not want to abandon the ground [Boden] of purely descriptive consideration to the designation of this structural form, then in the end, we would have to rely on the only other concept that offered itself, which was the Bastianian concept of “folk thoughts” [Völkergedanken].23 Fundamentally considered, this theory possesses one important advantage over all the purely objective, elegant forms of explanation: the focus of its inquiry is directed not merely toward the contents and objects of mythology but also toward the function of the mythical itself. The basic tendency of this function is always the same, regardless of the diverse conditions under which it is exercised and the variety of the objects [Objekte] it draws into its sphere. Thus, from the outset, the desired unity is transposed from the outside to the inner, from the reality of things to the reality of spirit. Even this ideality, however, is not clearly characterized as long as it is only grasped psychologically and determined according to the categories of psychology. When mythology is spoken of as an integral spiritual possession of humanity, whose unity is to be ultimately explained by way of the unity of the human “psyche” [Seele] and the similarity of its doing, then the unity of the psyche [Seele] itself once again breaks down into a plurality of diverse potencies and “faculties.” As soon as we ask which of these potencies plays the decisive role in the construction of the mythical world, the rivalry and conflict of the different modes of explanation become apparent once again. In the final analysis, does myth stem from the play of subjective fantasy, or does it, in each individual case, go back to a “real intuition” in which it is grounded? Does it depict a primitive form of cognition and, therefore,

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is essentially a formation [Gebilde] of the intellect, or does it owe its basic manifestations to the sphere of affect and will? The answers given to these questions open up entirely different avenues of scientific research and interpretations of myth. Just as theories were previously distinguished according to the class of objects [Objekt] that they viewed as decisive for the formation of myth, the psychological theories differ according to the basic psychic [seelisch] energies to which they are reduced. And here too, the basic different possible types of explanations seem to constantly reappear and succeed one another in a kind of cycle. Even the form of a purely “intellectual mythology” that for a long time seemed superseded – the view that the core of myth was to be sought in an intellectual interpretation of the phenomena – has recently been revived. In opposition to Schelling’s demand for a “tautegorical” interpretation of mythical figures [Gestalten], an attempt has been made to rehabilitate “allegory and allegorical interpretation.”24 All this shows how the inquiry into the unity of myth is constantly in danger of losing itself in some individual detail and satisfying itself in it. Whether this individual detail turns out to be a domain of natural objects [Objekt], a specific historical-­cultural sphere, or a particular basic psychological force is essentially indifferent. For in all these cases, the desired unity is mistakenly transposed into elements [Elemente] rather than being sought in the characteristic form that produces from these elements [Elemente] a new spiritual whole, a world of symbolic “significance.” Critical epistemology, however, looks at cognition – despite the incalculable diversity of the objects toward which it is directed and despite all the different psychological forces on which it is based in its actual execution – as an ideal whole whose general constitutive conditions it seeks, and the same point of view applies to every spiritual unity of “sense.” In the final analysis, this unity must be ascertained and secured in a teleological regard rather than in a genetical-­causal one – as a directional goal followed by consciousness in the construction of spiritual reality. What emerges from such a directional goal and finally stands before us as a finished formation [Gebilde] possesses a self-­sufficient “being” and an autonomous sense, regardless of whether we penetrate the nature of its emergence or how we think of it. Thus, although it is limited to no single group of things or events but instead encompasses and penetrates the whole of being, and although it employs the most diverse spiritual potencies

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as its organs, myth constitutes a unitary “perspective” of consciousness from which “nature” as well as the “psyche” [Seele], “outward” being as well as the “inward” being, appear in a new shape [Gestalt]. It is necessary to apprehend this “modality” and understand it according to its conditions.25 Empirical science, ethnology as a comparative mythology and a history of religion, establishes only the problem: the more it expands the circle of consideration, the more evident the “synchronicity” [Gleichläu­ figkeit] of myth formation becomes.26 Here too, however, it is important to seek behind this empirical regularity the original lawfulness of spirit from which it derives. Just as within cognition, the mere “rhapsody of perceptions” is transformed by virtue of certain formal laws of thinking into a system of knowing; here too, we can and must inquire into the constitution of that formal unity that brings it about that the infinitely manifold world of myth is not a mere conglomeration of arbitrary representations and unrelated notions but a condensing into a characteristic spiritual for­ mation [Gebilde]. Here too, the mere enrichment of our factual cognizing is fruitless as long as it does not at the same time lead to a deepening of the fundamental cognition in which instead of a mere aggregate of individual motives a thoroughgoing organization, a certain superordination and subordination of form-­bestowing elements is rendered visible between them. Nevertheless, if from this perspective, the subordination of myth to a general system of “symbolic forms” immediately proves beneficial, then of course, it seems to include a certain danger. For a comparison of the mythical form with other basic spiritual forms threatens to level down [Nivellierung] its proper content [Gehalt] as soon as we accept it in a purely contentive sense [inhaltlichem Sinne] and seek to ground it in merely contentive correspondences or relations. Indeed, there has been no lack of attempts to render myth “intelligible” by reducing it to another form of spirit – whether cognition, art, or language. If in determining the interconnection between language and myth, Schelling considered language to be a “faded mythology,”27 comparative mythology begins from the reverse direction and rendered language as the primary formation [Gebilde] and myth as the secondary formation [Gebilde]. Max Müller, for example, attempts to interlink myth and language by making the word and its ambiguity the motive behind mythical concept formation. As the connecting link between word and myth, the metaphor, which is itself

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rooted in the nature [Wesen] and function of language itself, gives itself to representing [vorstellen] that tendency that leads to the formations [Gebilde] of myth: Mythology is inevitable; it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the external form of thought: it is the dark shadow that language throws upon thought and which will never disappear as long as language and thought do not coincide, which can never be the case. . . . Mythology, in the highest sense of the word, is the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity.28

The fact of “paronymy,” the fact that one and the same word can be used for an entirely different representative formation [Vorstellungsgebilde], becomes here the key to the interpretation of myths. The source and origin of all mythical sense [Sinn] is linguistic ambiguity [Dopplesinn] – myth itself is nothing else but a kind of disease of spirit that has its ultimate ground in a “disease of language.” The Greek word σάφνη, which designates laurel, goes back to the Sanskrit root Ahanâ, which signifies the dawn – thus, the myth of Daphne, who in her flight from Apollo is transformed into a laurel tree, is essentially a presentation [Darstellung] of the sun god pursuing his bride, the dawn [Morgenröte], who ultimately takes refuge in the bosom of her mother, the earth, and in Greek, the words for “human being” and “stones” (λαοί and λᾶας) resemble one another, according to Greek myth, as in the well-­known tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha, human beings who come from stones.29 The linguistic “explanation” of mythological motive no longer takes this naïve form; however, it still seems tempting to render language as the proper vehicle of myth formation.30 Indeed, comparative mythology and the comparative history of religion constantly reveal facts that seem to confirm from the most diverse angles the following equation: numina [divinity] = nomina [names]. Usener has given an entirely new depth and fertility to the idea at the base of this equation. The analysis and critique of the “names of the gods” has proven here to be the spiritual instrument that, if correctly used, can establish an understanding of the process of religious concept formation. In this way, we arrive at a general theory of signification in which the linguistic and the mythical become inseparable from, united with, and correlated with one another.

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In philosophical terms, the progress that philology and the history of religion have achieved through Usener’s theory consists in the fact that here again inquiry is no longer directed at the naked content of individual myths but at myth and language as a whole, as lawful, spiritual forms. For Usener, mythology is nothing more than the theory (λόγος) of myth, or the “morphology [formenlehre] of religious representations.” Its purpose is nothing less than “to exhibit [aufweisen] the necessity and lawfulness of mythical representing [vorstellen] and render intelligible not only the mythological formations [Gebilde] of folk religions but also the representational forms of the monotheistic religions.” The possibilities inherent in this method of reading the nature [Wesen] of the gods from their names and from the history of their names, and the luminous light it is able to cast on the structure of the mythical world, are admirably shown by Usener’s Götternamen [The Names of the Gods]. Not only is the sense and becoming of the Greek figures of the gods [Götterge­ stalten] illuminated here in detail by philology and the history of language, but at the same time, the attempt is made to exhibit a certain general and typical sequence in mythical and linguistic representing [Vorstellen] itself and accordingly a reciprocal correspondence in their mutual development.31 And since, on the other hand, myth subsumes in itself the first beginnings and attempts at a cognition of the world, since it furthermore constitutes perhaps the earliest and most general product of aesthetic fantasy, we would again have before us that immediate unity of “the” spirit, from which all the separate forms are only fragments, only individual manifestations [Äußerungen]. Once again, however, our general task demands that in lieu of an original unity in which oppositions resolve themselves and seem to merge into one another, a critical-­transcendental conceptual unity be sought that aims, rather, at the preservation, at the clear determination and delimitation of separate forms. The principle of this separation becomes clear when we connect the problem of signification with that of designation – that is, when we reflect on the manner by which, in the diverse spiritual forms of manifestation [Äußerungsformen], the “object” is connected with the “image,” the “content” [Gehalt] with the “sign,” and by which, at the same time, both separate from one another and independently maintain themselves over against each other. For the active, creative force of signs appears to be a basic element of agreement in myth as in language, in artistic configuration as in the

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formation of the basic theoretical concepts of the world, and in the formation of the coherence [Zusammenhang] of the world. What Humboldt says about language, that the human places it between itself and the nature that inwardly and outwardly acts on it, that it surrounds itself with a world of sounds in order to assimilate and rework [bearbeiten] the world of objects, is equally true of the formations [Gebilde] of mythical and aesthetic fantasy. They are not so much reactions and impressions that act on spirit from outside, as rather genuine spiritual actions. It already becomes clear in the first, in a certain sense “most primitive,” manifestations of myth that what we are dealing with is not a mere reflection of being but a distinctive formative reworking and presentation of being. Once again, we can trace here how an initial existing tension between “subject” and “object,” between “inside” and “outside,” is gradually resolved as a new intermediary realm, growing constantly richer and more varied, is placed between the two worlds. To the factual world [Sachewelt] that envelops and dominates it, spirit opposes an independent image-­world – the active force [Kraft] of “expression” ever-­more clearly and consciously opposes the power [Macht] of “impression.” This creation, however, does not yet bear the character of a free spiritual act; rather, it has a character of natural necessity, the character of a determinate psychological “mechanism.” This is precisely because at this stage [Stufe] there still exists [vorhanden ist] no independent and self-­conscious, free in its productions, living I; rather, because we stand here at the threshold of the spiritual process that is intended to delimit the “I” and the “world” over against each other, the new world of signs must appear to consciousness itself as a thoroughly “objective” reality. Every inception of myth, particularly every magical apprehension of the world, is permeated by this belief in the objective, essential being and in the objective force of the sign. Word magic, image magic, and writing magic form the basic inventory [Grundbestand] of magical activity and the magical view of the world. If we look at the general structure of mythical consciousness, we might find a curious paradox. For if, according to a widely prevalent view, the basic drive of myth is a drive to vitalization, i.e. to the concrete-­intuitive grasping and presentation of all the elements of existence, then how does it come about that this drive is directed with particular intensity toward what is “most unreal” and lifeless, that the shadow realm of words, images, and signs obtains such

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a substantial forceful power over mythical consciousness? How does this belief in the “abstract,” this cult of the symbol, come about in a world in which the general concept is nothing, in which sentiment, immediate drive, sense perception, and intuition seem to be everything? Answers to these questions can be found only if we recognize that the question, at least in this form, is incorrectly formulated – as long as it imports a separation that we make and must necessarily make at the level [Stufe] of thoughtful consideration, reflection, and scientific cognition into a domain of spiritual life that precedes this separation and remains indifferent to it. The mythical world is not “concrete” in as much as it has to do only with sensible-­objective contents and excludes and repels all merely “abstract” elements [Momente], everything that is simply signification and sign; rather, it is concrete because in it the two elements [Momente], the element of thing [Dingmoment] and the element of signification [Bedeutungsmoment], merge undifferentiatedly into each other, because they are “concretized” here into an immediate coalesced unity. From the start, myth, as an original mode of configuration, erects a certain barrier against the world of passive sense impression; it, too, like art and cognition, arises in a process of divorce [Scheidung], in a separation [Trennung] from immediate “actuality,” i.e. from the simply given. However, though in this sense it signifies one of the first steps beyond the “given,” its own product recedes without delay into the form of givenness. Myth rises spiritually above the thing-­world; however, in the figures [Gestalten] and images that it sets in their place, it only substitutes another form of existence [Dasein] and bondage. What seems to free spirit from the fetters of things becomes a new fetter that is even more unbreakable since it is not merely a physical power but itself already a spiritual power whose violence [Gewalt] it undergoes. Of course, a coercion of this sort already contains within itself the immanent condition for its future sublation; it contains the possibility of a process of spiritual liberation that is actually performed [vollziehen] in the progress from the stage [Stufe] of the magical-­mythical view of the world to the authentic religious view of the world. This transition is also – as our investigation will show in detail – conditioned by the fact that spirit posits a new, free relationship to the world of “images” and “signs” and that while still living immediately in them and making use of them, it likewise sees

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through them in a different way than before and for this reason raises above them. And the same dialectic of this basic relationship, this bonding and liberating that spirit undergoes through its own self-­made image-­worlds and confronts us more intensely and with greater clarity when we compare myth with the other domains of symbolic expression. Even for language, no sharp dividing line by which the word and its signification, the material content [Sachgehalt] of the “representation” and the content [Gehalt] of the mere sign, are separated from one another exists at first, but both immediately enter [eingehen] into one another and immediately transition [übergehen] into one another. The “nominalistic” view, in which words are still only conventional signs, mere flatus vocis, is a product of late reflection, not an expression of “natural,” immediate linguistic consciousness. For this to be valid, the “being” [Wesen] of the thing is not only mediately designated in the word but also in some way contained and present [gegenwärtig] in it. In the linguistic consciousness of “primitive peoples,” and in that of children, this stage [Stufe] of the full “concrescence” of names and things [Sache] can still be shown in highly pregnant examples – we need only think of the various forms of name-­taboo. In the progress of the spiritual development of language, however, an ever sharper and more conscious separation also asserts itself here. If the world of language – like that of myth in which it is still, as it were, initially embedded – appears to immediately cling, at first thoroughly, to the one-­and-­the-­sameness [Einerleiheit] of word and being [Wesen], of “signifier” and “signified,” then there nevertheless arises, to the extent that its independent and basic intellectual form, the actual force of logos, which emerges in it as an ever-­more determinate detachment. Compared to any other merely physical existence and any physical efficacy, the word emerges as something proper and authentic, in its purely ideal, “significative” function. And art leads us to a new stage of “detachment.” Even here, there is from the beginning no sharp and clear delimitation between the “ideal” and the “real”; here too, the “formation” [Gibilde] is not immediately sought as the outcome of a creative process of forming [Bilden], as a pure creation of the “productive imagination [Einbildungs­ kraft]” and known as such as a creation. Rather, the inception of plastic art [bildenden Kunst] reaches, as it creates, back into a sphere in which the activity of forming [Bilden] itself is still immediately rooted in the

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circle of magical representation and directed at certain magical purposes, in which, as a consequence, the image [Bild] itself still has no independent, purely “aesthetic” significance. Nevertheless, already in the first stirring of authentic artistic configuration there is achieved an entirely new inception, a new “principle” in the gradual progress of the spiritual form of expression. For here, the image-­world [Bildwelt], which spirit opposes to the mere object-­world [Sachwelt] and the thing-­world, obtains for the first time a purely immanent validity and truth. It does not aim at something else or refer to something else; rather, it simply “is” and exists in itself. From the sphere of effectiveness, in which mythical consciousness remains, and from the sphere of signification, in which the linguistic sign remains, we are now displaced into a domain in which, as it were, only pure “being,” only the proper inherent essential being of the image as such, is seized upon. Thus, the world of the image forms itself into a self-­contained cosmos that rests in its own center of gravity. And only now is spirit able to enter into a truly free relationship with it. Measured by the standard of the tangible, “realistic” view, the aesthetic world becomes a world of “semblance.” However, by this same semblance, the relation to immediate reality, to the world of existence and effective action in which magical-­mythical intuition also moves, is left behind; it concludes in this way an entirely new step toward “truth.” Thus, however much their configurations immediately grasp within one another [ineinandergreifen] in the concrete-­historical appearances, the relationship between myth, language, and art constitutes a specific systematic gradation, an ideal progression whose end marks a point at which spirit not only is and lives in its own formations, its self-­created symbols, but also knows them for what they are. This problem thus proves to be what Hegel has designated as the thoroughgoing theme of the Phenomenology of Spirit: the end of development is that spiritual being is apprehended and expressed not only as substance but “equally as subject.” In this respect, the problems that grow out of a “philosophy of mythology” are immediately related to those arising from the philosophy and logic of pure cognition. For what distinguishes science from the other stages [Stufen] of spiritual life is not that it requires no mediation of signs and symbols and confronts the unveiled truth, the truth of “things in themselves,” but that, differently

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and more profoundly than is possible for the other forms, it knows and understands the symbols it employs as such. And this achievement is not carried out in one stroke; rather, here again, the typical fundamental relationship of spirit to its own creations is repeated at a new level. Once again, freedom toward these creations must be obtained and secured here by a constant work of critique. Even in knowledge, the use of the hypotheses and the “foundations” of cognition precedes their distinctive function as foundations, and as long as this has not been reached, cognition is able to express and behold the knowledge of its own principles only in a tangible – that is, semi-­mythical – form. However, these general considerations were meant only to provisionally designate and delimit the place occupied by myth in the system of spiritual forms, in order to grasp more sharply the particularity of the mythical concept of “reality” [Realität] and the distinctive mythical consciousness of objectivity.

ENDNOTES 1 Plato, Phaedrus, 229D. 2 Cf. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 82ff. 3 Cf. “Hölderlin und der Deutsche Idealismus,” in my Idee und Gestalt – Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Kleist (2nd ed., Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1924), 115ff. 4 [See Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Marcus Zisselsberger (New York: SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2007), 51.] 5 Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, “Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie,” in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. Verlag, 1856), part II, 1, 220ff. Cf. 194ff. [Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 153 – trans. amended.] 6 [See Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, cf. 190 n 8.] 7 [Ibid., 141.] 8 Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, 124ff.; cf. 56ff., 192ff. [Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 89; cf. 43, cf. 133.] 9 [Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 146.] 10 [Ibid., 126 – trans. amended.] 11 [Ibid., 123 – trans. amended.] 12 Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, 207ff.; cf. 175ff., 185ff. [Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 144; cf. 123, cf. 129 – trans. amended.]

32 introduction 13 [Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, The System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 232.] 14 Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, 216. [Schelling, Historical-­ critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 150 – trans. amended.] 15 It is one of the fundamental merits of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology that it has once again sharpened our perception of the different spiritual “structural forms” and demonstrated a new approach to their study, departing from the psychological framing of the question and methodology. Particularly, the sharp separation of the psychological “acts” from the “objects” intended in them is vital here. Husserl’s own development from the Logische Untersuchungen (2 vols., Halle: Niemeyer, 1913–22) to the Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Halle: Niemeyer, 1928) makes it increasingly clear that the task of phenomenology, as Husserl understood it, is not exhausted in the analysis of cognition, but rather, it calls for an investigation of structures of entirely different objective spheres, according to what they “signify” and without concern for the “reality” of their objects. Such an investigation must include the mythical “world,” not to derive its specific “existence” [Bestand] by induction from the manifold of ethnological and ethnic-­psychological experience but to apprehend it in a purely “ideational” analysis. As far as I can see, however, no attempt of this sort has been undertaken either in phenomenology or in mythological research, where the genetic-­psychological framing of the question still holds almost uncontested sway. 16 Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, 178. [Schelling, Historical-­ critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 125 – trans. amended.] 17 A summary of this material and an examination of the objections that have been raised against the theory of Andrew Lang can be found in Wilhelm Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee Eine historisch-­kritische und positive Studie (6 vols., Munster: Aschendorff, 1926–35). See also Wilhelm Schmidt, Die Stellung der Pygmäenvölker in der entwicklungsgeschichte des Menschen (Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder, 1910). 18 On the theory of so-­called “pre-­animism,” cf. Konrad T. Preuss, “Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,” Globus. Illustrierte Zeitschrift für Länder-­und Völkerkunde, 86 (1904); and Alfred Vierkandt, “Die Anfänge der Religion und Zauberei,” Globus, 92 (1907). Cf. particularly Robert R. Marett, “Pre-­Animistic Religion,” Folk Lore, 46 (1900), 162–182; and “From Spell to Prayer,” Folk Lore, 54 (1904), 132–165, reprinted in R. R. Marett’s The Threshold of Religion (London: Methuen, 1909). 19 [See Max Planck, “Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes,” talk given on December 9, 1908, to the Faculty of Natural Science at the University of Leiden, Leipzig 1909.] 20 Cf. Paul M. A. Ehrenreich, Die allgemeine Mythologie und ihre ethnologischen Grundlagen and Die Sonne im Mythos (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1910); Heinrich

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Lessmann, Aufgaben und Ziele der vergleichenden Mythenforschung (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1908). Ehrenreich – e.g., 41, 192ff., 213 – makes this the “postulate” of every explanation of myth. For the arguments in support of “Panbabylonianism,” cf. Hugo Winkler, Himmels-­und Weltbild der Babylonier als Grundlage der Weltanschauung und Mythologie aller Völker. Der alte Orient und die Bibel, vol. 3 (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1901); idem, Die Weltanschauung des alten Orients (Leipzig: E. Pfeiffer, 1905); idem, Die babylonische Geisteskultur (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1919). See also, Alfred Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (Berlin und Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1913). For a critique of Panbabylonianism, see Morris Jastrow, Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (London and New York: B. Blom, 1911), 413ff.; Carl Bezold, Himmelsschau und Astrallehre bei den Babyloniern (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1911). [See Adolf Bastian, Der Völkergedanke im Aufbau einer Wissenschaft vom Menschen und seine Begründung auf ethnologische Sammlungen (Berlin: F. Dümmlers, 1881).] Cf. Fritz Langer, Intellektualmythologie. Betrachtungen über das Wesen des Mythus und die mythologische Methode (Leipzig: Teubner, 1916), especially chaps. 10–12. On the concept of “modality,” see Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 87, 27ff. It seems to me that the problem contained in this parallelism has been most sharply defined from the perspective of pure “positivism” by Tito Vignoli, Mito e scienza (1879). German trans., Mythus und Wissenschaft. Eine Studie (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1880). [Tito Vignoli, Myth and Science (London: Kegan Paul, Trench et Co., 1882)]. Despite his strictly empiricist attitude, Vignoli sees myth as a “necessary and spontaneous function of the understanding,” an “innate” activity of spirit, whose roots he tries to follow back to the thinking of animals. Already here that tendency toward the objectivization [Vergegenständlichung], “entification,” and “personification” of sensible impressions prevails, as this tendency is transformed from the individual into the universal, from the singular into the typical, which the world of mythical figures develops. In this sense, a “transcendental principle” of its own is imputed to myth – a distinctive law of formation that does not simply disappear as spirit advances to empirical exact science but that asserts itself side by side with the forms of rigorous science: “For the share of pure thinking in the progressive development of myth is precisely that activity of the understanding that creates science and makes it possible” (Vignoli, 99ff.). Cf. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, 22. [Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 40.] [Friedrich Max Müller, “Über die Philosophie der Mythologie,” append. to his Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaften (2nd ed., Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1876), 316.]

34 introduction 29 Cf. for more details Müller, “Über die Philosophie der Mythologie.” 30 Müller’s basic thesis has recently been revived in somewhat modified form by Daniel G. Brinton, e.g.; cf. Religions of Primitive Peoples (London and New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 115ff. 31 See Hermann K. Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: Cohen, 1896). Cf. also my book Sprache und Mythos: Ein Beitrag zum Problem der Götternamen (Leipzig and Berlin, 1925). [Ernst Cassirer, “Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).]

Part One Myth as Thought-­Form

I THE CHARACTER AND BASIC TENDENCY OF MYTHICAL OBJECT CONSCIOUSNESS It is one of the first and essential insights of critical philosophy that 35 objects are not “given” to consciousness in a rigid, finished state, nakedly in themselves but that the relation of representation to the object presupposes an independent, spontaneous act of consciousness. The object does not exist before and outside of synthetic unity but is rather constituted only through it – it is no shaped form [geprägte Form] that consciousness itself simply imposes and impresses, but rather, it is the result of a forming [Formung] that takes place by virtue of the basic medium of consciousness, by virtue of the conditions of intuition and pure thinking. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms takes up this basic critical idea, this fundamental principle of Kant’s “Copernican revolution,” in order to broaden it. It not only seeks the categories of object consciousness in the theoretical-­ intellectual sphere but also assumes that such categories must be effective wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical “worldview,” takes form out of the chaos of impressions. Every such worldview is possible only through specific acts of objectivization, the reshaping of mere “impressions” into intrinsically determinate and configured “representations.” If

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in this way, however, the end of objectivization can be traced back to strata that precede the theoretical object consciousness of our experience, of our scientific worldview, then when we descend into these strata: the way and the means of this process of objectivization change. So long as the direction of this path is not recognized and generally designated, no clarity can be obtained with regard to its particular course, its individual stages, and its stopping places and turning points. That this direction is not simply “one way” and unique, that the mode and tendency in which the manifold of sensible impressions is combined together into spiritual unities, can exhibit in itself the most diverse nuances of signification: this overall result of our previous investigation undergoes a clear and pregnant confirmation when we now focus on the oppositions in the process of objectivization in mythical, theoretical, and pure experiential thinking [Erfahrungsdenken]. The logical form of experiential thinking emerges most sharply when we consider its highest working-­out [Ausbildung] in the configuration and construction of science, particularly the foundation of an “exact” science of nature. What is achieved here in the highest perfection is, however, already inherent [angelegt] in each of the simplest acts of empirical judgment, in the empirical comparison and coordination of certain contents of perception. The development of science brings only the principles on which, to speak with Kant, “the possibility of every perception”1 rests to full actuality, to elaboration, and to a thoroughgoing logical determination. In truth, however, what we call the world of our perception is already not simply nor self-­evidently given from the outset but “is” only insofar as it has passed through certain basic theoretical acts [Grundakte], grasped through the world, by which it is “apprehended” and determined. Perhaps this general basic relationship most clearly takes shape when we begin from the intuitive originary-­form of our perceptual world, in its spatial configuration. The relationships of “with one another” [Mitein­ ander: together], “next to one another” [Beieinander: together], “apart from one another” [Auseinander: apart], and “side by side to one another” [Nebeneinander: juxtaposed] in space are not as such given with our “simple” sensations, the sensible “matter” that is ordered in space; they are a highly complex, thoroughly mediated result of experiential thinking. If we ascribe a certain size, a certain position, and a certain distance to things



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in space, we are not thereby speaking about a simple datum of sense impression but are situating the sensible data in an interconnection of relations [Relationszusammenhang] and coherent system [Systemzusammenhang], one that proves ultimately to be nothing other than a judgment-­complex [Urteilszusammenhang]. Every organization in space presupposes an organization in judgment; a difference in positions, sizes, and distances can be grasped and posited only because the individual sensible impressions are judged by different measures of judgment, because a different signifi­ cation is attributed to them. The epistemo-­critical as well as psychological analysis of the problem of space has illuminated this state of affairs from every side and secured its basic features: whether we take as the expression of this Helmholtz’s concept of “unconscious inferences” or whether we reject this expression, which indeed involves certain dangers and ambiguities. The “transcendental” as well as the physiological-­psychological considerations both show that the spatial order of the world of perception, as a whole as well as in its details, goes back to acts of identification, differentiation, comparison, and coordination that are in their basic form purely intellectual acts. Only in that impressions are structured by such acts, in that they are assigned to a different strata of signification, does the organization “in” space occur for us, as an intuitive reflex, as it were, of this theoretical stratification of signification. And this diverse “stratification” of impressions, which we come to know in detail in physiological optics, would not be possible if it were not in turn grounded in a general principle, a thoroughgoing required standard. The transition from the world of immediate sense impression to the mediated world of intuitive “representation,” particularly of spatial “representation,” is based on the fact that in the fleeting, always the same series of impressions, the constant relationships, in which they stand and according to which they recur, must gradually be emphasized as something independent, and precisely by this means of changing from moment to moment, they are distinguished by the perpetual flux of sensible contents. These constant relationships now form the fixed structure [Gefüge] and, as it were, the fixed framework [Gerüst] of “objectivity.” Naïve thinking, untainted by epistemological doubts and questions, tends to speak without inhibition of constant “things” and their properties; for critical contemplation, this assertion of constant things and properties dissolves when one traces them back to their origins and to their ultimate logical

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grounds, to the certainty of such relationships, in particular to the certainty of the content relationships of measure and number. The being of the objects [Objekt] of experience is constituted in and through them. For this reason, however, every apprehension of a particular empirical “thing” or a determinate empirical event contains within it an act of evaluation. The empirical “reality,” the fixed core of “objective” being, in difference to the world of mere representation or imagination, stands out in that the permanent is more and more sharply and clearly distinguished over against the fluid, the constant over against the variable, the fixed over against the mutable. The individual sense impression is not simply taken for what it is and immediately gives; rather, it is questioned as to what extent it is confirmed by the whole of experience and is able to assert itself against this whole. Only if it can withstand this inquiry and this critical test is it considered to be included in the realm of reality, of objective determinacy. And at no stage of experiential thinking and experiential knowing is this test, this confirmation, ever at an end; rather, it can and must continuously begin anew. Over and over again, the constants of our experience prove to be merely relative constants that in turn require the support and grounding of other, firmer constants. Thus, the boundaries between the “objective” and the merely “subjective” are not rigidly determined from the beginning but instead are formed and determined only in the continuing process of experience and its theoretical foundation. It is by virtue of a constantly renewed work of spirit that the outline of what we call objective being is constantly displaced in order to be restored in a modified and renewed shape [Gestalt]. This work, however, is of an essentially critical nature. Again and again, elements [Elemente] that were previously considered as secured, as valid, as “objective-­actual” are eliminated, because it turns out that they did not fit without contradiction into the unity of experience as a whole or at least that, measured by this unity, they possessed only a relative and limited and not an absolute significance. Time and again, the order, the lawfulness of appearances in general, is required as a criterion for the truth of the individual empirical phenomenon and of the “being” that is attributed to this phenomenon. Thus, in the theoretical construction of the interconnected coherence of the world of experience, every particular is mediately or immediately referred to a universal and measured by it. In the final analysis, the “relation of the representation to the object”



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means and is grounded in nothing other than this subordination into a more comprehensive, systematic totality of coherence, in which an explicit determinate position is assigned to it. The apprehending, the mere apprehension of the individual already occurs, therefore, in this form of thinking, as a consequence sub specie of the concept of law. The individual, particular being and the concrete-­ 39 particular event are and exist [bestehen]; however, this consistent existence [Bestand] is to be secured and authenticated only in that we are able to think it and must think it as a special case of a general law, or more precisely, as an ensemble, a system of general laws. The objectivity of this worldview is, thus, nothing more than the expression of its complete uniformity [Geschlossenheit], the expression of the fact that in and with each individual, we must think the form of the whole, and the individual must be considered, as it were, only as a particular expression, as a “representative” [Repräsentant] of this total form [Gesamtform]. From this task, which is set for theoretical experiential thinking, the intellectual means are, however, now produced that must be progressively used to accomplish its task. If its aim consists in the highest and most general synthesis, in the combination [Zusammenfassung] of all particulars in the thoroughgoing unity of experience, then the method by which it can attain this goal seems, however, to point in the opposite direction. Before the contents are rearranged in this way, before they can enter into the form of the systematic whole, they must undergo a transformation; they must, in the end, be reduced to – and in a sense dissolved into – ultimate “elements” [Elemente] that cannot be apprehended by immediate sensible impression but that can be postulated only by theoretical thinking. Without the positing of such elements [Elemente], the lawful thinking of experience and science would, as it were, lack a substrate to which it could connect. For as such the undissected contents and configurations of perception as such provide this thinking with no support or basis. They fit into no thoroughgoing and fixed order; they nowhere bear the character of truly unequivocal determinacy but rather are apprehended only in their immediate existence and constitute a pure ephemeral flow and flux that defies any attempt to distinguish sharp and exact “boundaries.” Such boundaries can, on the contrary, be determined only if we return from the immediate existence and constitution of appearances to something else that no longer appears but must rather be thought of as

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the “ground” of the appearance. For example, there can be no formulation of the truly “exact” laws of motion as long as we seek the subjects of motion simply in the realm of concrete-­perceptible objects. Only when thinking passes beyond this sphere, when it continues onto the positing of atoms as the “true” subjects of motion, does the phenomenon of motion in these new ideal elements [Elemente] become mathematically comprehensible. And in a like manner, the synthesis toward which theoretical experiential thinking strives always presupposes a corresponding analysis and can be constructed only based on such an analysis. Here connection presupposes separation, as in turn separation aims only at making the connection possible and preparing the way for it. In this sense, all experiential thinking is intrinsically dialectical – if we take the concept of dialectic in its original historical significance, given it by Plato, and think in it the unity of connection and separation, of συναγωγή [collection] and διἁίρεσις [division]. The logical circle that seems inherent in dialectical thinking is, on the contrary, nothing other than the expression of the constant cycle of experiential thinking, which must always operate at once analytically and synthetically, progressively and regressively, by breaking down the particular content into its constitutive factors in order to reproduce it “genetically” from them as its preconditions. The world of knowledge receives its characteristic form only in the interdependency, in the correlation of these two basic methods. What distinguishes this world from the world of sensible impressions is not the matter [Stoff] from which it is constructed but the new order in which it is grasped. This form of order requires that what still stands undifferentiated side by side in immediate perception be gradually distinguished, that what is given in mere togetherness be transformed into subordination and superordination – into a system of “grounds” and “consequences.” It is in this category of ground and consequence that thought finds the truly effective instrument of analysis, which in turn makes possible the new mode of connection that it now applies to sensible data. Where the sensible view of the world sees only a peaceful togetherness, a conglomerate of “things” [Dingen], empirical-­theoretical thinking finds instead a meshing with one another, a complex of “conditions” [Bedingungen]. And each particular content is assigned a determinate place in this hierarchy of conditions. Whereas sensible apprehension contents itself with ascertaining the “what” of the individual contents,



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this mere “what” is now transformed into the form of “because”; the mere coexistence or succession of contents, their co-­givenness in space and time, is replaced by an ideal dependency (their being-­grounded-­in-­ one-­another). At the same time, however, this is compared to the simplicity [Ein­ fachheit] and, as it were, simplicity [Einfalt] of the first unreflecting view of things to an extraordinary refinement and differentiation in the sig- 41 nificance of the concept of the object [Objekt]. From the standpoint of the theoretical view of the world and its cognitive ideal, “objective” no longer means everything that sensation sets before us as a simple “existence” [Dasein] and as a simple “being-­a-­certain-­way,” [Sosein] but only what possesses a guarantee of constancy, of enduring and thoroughgoing determinacy. Because this determinacy – as any phenomenon of “optical illusion” shows – is not an immediate property of perceptions, perceptions are progressively displaced from the center of objectivity, which they originally seemed to occupy, toward the periphery. The objective significance of an element [Element] of experience no longer depends on the sensible, forceful power with which it individually strikes consciousness but instead on the clarity with which the form, the lawfulness of the whole, is expressed and reflected in it. However, as this form does not exist all at once but rather is constructed only in a continuous sequence of stages, the empirical concept of truth itself is subject to differentiations and gradations. Mere sensible semblance separates itself from the empirical truth of the object [Objekt], which cannot be apprehended immediately but rather can be achieved only in the progress of theory, in the progress of the scientific thinking of law. Precisely for this reason, however, this truth is not absolute but rather has only a relative character: for it stands and falls with the general interconnection of the condition [Bedingungszusammenhang] in which it must be achieved and with the preconditions [Voraussetzung], the “hypotheses,” on which this interconnection of the condition rests. Over and over again, the constant is differentiated from the variable, the objective from the subjective, truth from semblance, and it is through this movement that the certainty of the empirical is gained for thinking – constituting its true logical character. The positive being of the empirical object [Objekt] is obtained, as it were, through a double negation: through its delimitation from the “absolute” on the one hand and from

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sensible semblance on the other. It is the object [Objekt] of “appearance” [Erscheinung]; but this is not a “semblance” [Schein], provided it is grounded in necessary laws of cognition – provided it is a “phenomenon bene funda­ tum.” Again, we see that the general concept of objectivity, as well as its individual concrete fulfillments – because both are shaped in the sphere of theoretical thought – are both based on a progressive separation of the elements [Elemente] of experience, on a critical work of spirit in which the “essential” progressively separates itself from the “accidental,” the constant from the variable, the necessary from the contingent. And there is no phase of experiential consciousness, however “primitive” and unreflected, in which this basic character is not clearly discernible. To be sure, epistemological considerations often take a state of pure immediacy at the beginning of all empirical cognition in which impressions are absorbed and “lived” [erlebt] in their simple, sensible constitution – without that any sort of forming [Formung] or intellectual reworking is undertaken in them. Thus, all the contents are still situated here, as it were, on one plane; they are still endowed with a single unsplit and unseparated character of an unadorned and simple “existence.” What is too readily forgotten here, however, is that the presumed absolutely “naïve” stage of experiential consciousness is not itself a factum but a theoretical construction – it is basically nothing other than a boundary concept created by an epistemo-­critical reflection. Even where empirical perceptual consciousness has not yet developed into the cognitive consciousness of abstract science, it already implicitly contains those separations and divisions that emerge in cognitive consciousness in explicit logical form. This has already been shown through the example of spatial consciousness; however, what is valid for space is no less valid of the other forms of order on which the “object of experience” is based and through which it is constituted. For every simple “perception” [Wahrnehmung] implies a “taking-­for-­true” [Für-­wahr-­Nehmen] – thus, a determinate norm and a standard of objectivity. Upon closer scrutiny, consciousness already carries out a process of selection and differentiation vis-­à-­vis the chaotic mass of “impressions.” As these impressions surge together in a particular given temporal moment, certain features in them must be retained as recurrent and “typical,” while others are antithetically merely accidental and transient – certain elements must be stressed, while others are



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excluded as “nonessential.” Upon such a “selection,” which we undertake on the matter [Stoff] of perception that presses in from all sides, rests the sole possibility of giving it a determinate form, hence of obtaining a determinate “object”: the sole possibility of relating perception in general to an object [Objekt]. Thus, object consciousness of perception and object consciousness of scientific experience do not differ in principle, only in degree – insofar as differences in validity that are already present and effective in perception are in scientific experience raised to the form of cognition, i.e. are fixed in concept and judgment.2 We are, however, carried one step further in the direction of “immediacy” when we consider the type of objects and objectivity that confront us in mythical consciousness. Myth, too, lives in a world of pure figures [Gestalten] that confront it as something thoroughly objective – indeed, as the objective, pure and simple. The relation to this world, however, discloses no sign of that decisive “crisis” with which empirical and conceptual knowledge begins. Its contents, to be sure, are given in an objective fashion, as “actual contents,” but this form of reality is still completely homogeneous and undifferentiated. The nuances of significance and value that cognition develops here in its object-­concept [Objekt] and by virtue of which it comes to rigorously distinguish different spheres of objects [Objekte] and to draw a dividing line between the world of “truth” and the world of “semblance” are utterly lacking. Myth holds itself [hält sich] exclusively in the presence [Gegenwart] of its object [Objekt] – in the intensity with which the object seizes and takes possession of consciousness in a determinate moment [Augenblick]. Myth, therefore, lacks any possibility of extending the moment [Augenblick] beyond itself, of looking ahead of it or behind it, of relating it as a particular to the elements [Elemente] of reality as a whole. Instead of the dialectical movement of thinking, for which every given particular is only the occasion to incorporate it with others into a series of particulars and ultimately in this way to subordinate it to a general lawfulness of events, here stands a mere devotion to the impression itself and its momentary “presence” [Präsenz]. Consciousness is imprisoned in it as a simple existent – it possesses neither the impulse nor the possibility to correct or criticize what is given here and now, to limit its objectivity by measuring it against something not given, a past or a future. If this mediate standard is absent, however, then all being, “truth,” and “reality” merge into the mere presence [Präsenz] of

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the content and in general all appearances surge together [zusammendrän­ gen] into a single plane. Here, there are no different levels of reality [Real­ ität], no mutually delimited grades of objective certainty. The image of reality [Bilde der Realität] that emerges in this way thus lacks the dimension of depth – the separation of foreground and background that is so characteristic of the mode of the empirical-­scientific concept in which the difference between “ground” and “grounded” is realized. And with this one basic feature [Grundzug] of mythical thinking, which has initially been only generally portrayed here, a wealth of other features are determined as its simple and necessary consequence, and with this, the special phenomenology of myth is already indicated in its broad outlines. Indeed, even a cursory look at the facts of mythical consciousness shows that this consciousness in general knows nothing of such determinate lines of separation that the empirical concept and empirical-­ scientific thinking esteems as absolutely necessary. Above all, it lacks any fixed boundary between the merely “imagined” [Vorgestellt] and “actual” perception, between wish [Wunsch] and fulfillment, between image and thing [Sache]. This is most clearly revealed by the decisive significance that dream experience possesses for the genesis and construction of mythical consciousness. To be sure, the animistic theory – which attempts to derive the entire content of myth essentially from this one source, which would have myth primarily spring from a “confusion” and conflating of dream experience and waking experience – is unbalanced and inadequate in the form primarily given to it by Tylor.3 There can, however, be no doubt that certain basic mythical concepts can be rendered intelligible and transparent in their distinctive structure only if we consider that for mythical thinking and “experience,” there exists a constant impending transition between the world of dream and the world of objective “reality.” Even in a purely practical sense – in the position that the human takes vis-à-vis reality, not merely in representation but in behavior and doing – certain dream experiences are accorded the same force and significance and indirectly come to the same “truth” that is lived while being awake. The whole life and effective activity of many “natural peoples” are determined and guided down to the smallest details by their dreams.4 And mythical thinking makes no clearer difference between the spheres of life and those of death than it does between dreaming and



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being awake. The two are related not as being and nonbeing but as two similar, homogeneous parts of one and the same being. For mythical thinking, there is no determinate, clearly delimited moment in which life transitions into death and death into life. It thinks of birth as a return and death as a continuation. In this sense, all the “doctrines of immortality” of myth originally have not so much a positive-­dogmatic significance but rather a negative significance. The undifferentiated and unreflecting consciousness refuses to make a separation that in fact is not immediately and necessarily found in the content of lived-­experience as such but that ultimately is postulated only through a mindfulness of the empirical conditions of life – that is, through a specific form of causal analysis. If all “reality” is entirely accepted as it is given in immediate impression – if it is valid in the power that it exercises on the representation of life, affective life, and the life of the will, then indeed the dead person still “is” even when their previous appearance has changed, even when a merely disembodied shadow existence [Dasein] has taken the place of the sensible-­material existence [Existenz]. The fact that the living is intercon­ nected as before with the deceased in the appearance of the dream as well as in emotions of love, fear, etc. can be expressed and “explained” here – where “to be actual” [wirklich sein] and “to be effective” [wirksam sein] merge into one – in no other way than by the continued existence [Fortbestand: survival] of the dead. The analytical discretion, which advanced experiential thinking carries out between the appearance of life and that of death and between their empirical presuppositions, is replaced here by an undivided intuition of “existence” [Dasein] as such. Even physical existence [Dasein], according to this intuition, does not suddenly break off in the moment [Augenblick] of death but instead only changes its venue [Schauplatz]. All the cults of the dead rest essentially on the belief that the dead also require a physical means of preserving their existence [Sein], that they require their food, clothing, and possessions. Thus, if at the stage [Stufe] of thinking, at the stage [Stufe] of metaphysics, thought must struggle to provide “proof” for the survival of the soul after death, in the natural progress of the history of human spirit, it is rather the inverse relationship that is the case. It is not immortality but mortality that must here be “proven,” i.e. that must be theoretically recognized, which must be set out and secured through dividing lines that progressive reflection must introduce into the content of immediate experience.

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This distinctive interpenetration, this indifference of all the various levels [Stufen] of objectivization that are distinguished by empirical thinking and critical understanding [Verstand], must be kept constantly in mind if instead of reflecting on the contents of mythical consciousness from the outside, we wish to understand [verstehen] them from within. We are accustomed to view these contents as “symbolic,” to seek behind them another hidden sense to which they mediately refer. In this way, myth becomes mysterium: its proper signification and depth lie not in what its own figures reveal but in what they conceal. Mythical consciousness resembles a cipher script that is readable and intelligible only for those who possess the key for it – i.e. for whom the particular content of this consciousness is basically not taken as conventional signs for “another,” another who is in itself not contained in them. From this result, the various types and tendencies of the interpretations of myth are attempts to bring to light the sense of the content, be it theoretical or moral, that myths shelter in themselves.5 Medieval philosophy distinguished three levels of interpretation: a sensus allegoricus [allegorical sense], a sensus anagogicus [anagogical sense], and a sensus mysticus [mythical sense]. And even the Romantics, however much they strove to replace the “allegorical” view of myth with a purely “tautegorical” view – that is, to understand the basic phenomena of the mythical from itself and not through its relation to something else – did not in principle overcome this type of “allegoresis.” Furthermore, both Creuzer in his The Symbolism and Mythology of Ancient Peoples and Johann von Gorres in his A History of the Myths of the Asian World see in myth an allegorical and symbolic language that conceals a secret deeper meaning, a purely ideal content [Gehalt] that shines through the pictorial expression itself. On the other hand, if we look at myth itself, at what it is and what it knows itself to be, we see that this separation of the ideal from the real, this divorce between a world of immediate being and a world of mediated signification, this opposition of “image” and “thing” [Sache], is alien to it. Only we, spectators who no longer live and are in myth but who face it merely reflectively, read such differences into myth. Where we see a relationship of mere “representation” [Repräsentation], myth, insofar as it has not yet deviated from its basic and originary-­form [Urform], sees rather a relationship of real identity. The “image” does not present the “thing” [Sache]; it is the thing [Sache]. It does not merely represent



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[vertreten] it; rather, it is effectively equal to it, so that it supplants its immediate presence [Gegenwart]. Thus, accordingly we can almost call it a characteristic trait of mythical thinking that it lacks the category of the “ideal” and that, as a consequence, wherever it encounters something concerning pure significance, this concerning significance itself, in order to be grasped at all, must be transcribed into something tangible [Dinglich], into something being-­like [Seinsartig]. This basic relationship repeats itself in the most diverse stages of mythical thinking; however, it comes to expression in mythical doing, far more clearly than it does in mere thinking. In all mythical doing, there is a moment in which a true transubstantiation takes place – the transformation of the subject of this doing into the god or a daemon whom it presents. This basic feature can be followed from the most primitive manifestations [Äußerungen] of the magical view of the world to the highest enunciation [Kundgebungen] of the religious spirit. It has rightly been stressed that in the relationship between myth and rite: rite is the earlier, myth the later. Instead of attempting to explain ritual doing from the content of faith, as a mere representational content, we must rather forge a path the other way: we must understand that part of myth that belongs to the world of theoretical representation, that is a mere record or believed narrative, as a mediate interpretation of the part that is immediately living in the doing of the human being and in human emotion and will. Thus apprehended, however, no rite is originally “allegorical,” simulative, or depictive but rather in a very real sense, they are so woven into the reality [Realität] of effective action as to form an indispensable component of it. It is a constant belief – encountered in the most varied forms and from the most diverse forms of culture [Kulturformen] –, that the survival of human life, indeed the very existence of the world itself, depends on the correct execution of rites. Preuss tells us that the Cora and Uitoto Indians attach more importance to the performance of the sacred rites, festivals, and chants than to the results of all their fieldwork – for it is on them that everything that flourishes and grows depends. The cult is the true instrument by virtue of which the human subjugates the world, not so much in a spiritual as in a purely physical sense – the main concern [Fürsorge] is that the originator, the creator of the world has affected, consists in imparting the human with the various forms of cult by which the human has been able

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to subjugate the forces of nature. For despite its regular course, nature yields nothing without ceremonies.6 And this transition, this merging of being into magical-­ mythical action, as well as the immediate repercussion of this action on being, occurs in both the subjective as well as the objective sense. It is no mere show [Schaustück] and spectacle [Schauspiel] that the dancer, who participates in a mythical drama, performs; rather, the dancer is the god, becomes the god. In particular, this basic feeling of identity, of a real identification, is repeatedly expressed in every vegetation rite in which the death and the resurrection of the god is celebrated. What is advanced in these rites, as in most of the mystery cults, is no mere imitative presentation of an occurrence but the occurrence itself and its immediate performance; it is a δρώμενον [off-­stage drama] just as real and actual because it is through and through an effective event.7 This form of mime, to which we can trace all dramatic art, is never a mere aesthetic play; rather, it is tragically serious – with the seriousness characteristic of the sacred action itself. Consequently, the expression of “analogy magic,” which we are accustomed to employ for a certain tendency of magical efficacy, does not correspond to the true sense of this efficacy: for where we see mere sign and similarity of signs, for magical consciousness, and so to speak for mythical perception, the object itself is, on the contrary, present [gegenwärtig]. Only in this light is the “belief” in magic intelligible: magic not only needs to believe in the effectivity of magical means, but in what for us is just called the means it posseses the thing [Sache] as such and seizes it immediately. This inability of mythical thinking to apprehend only according to signification, to apprehend a pure ideal and significative, is most pregnantly expressed in the position that language is given here. Myth and language are in constant reciprocal contact – their contents bear and condition each other. Image magic stands beside word and name magic, which makes up an integral component of the magical view of the world. In all this, however, the decisive presuppositions are that word and name possess a presentative function and that the object itself and its real force are contained within them. Even word and name do not designate and signify; rather, they are and act effectively. A distinctive power over things is already inherent in the mere sensible matter out of which language forms itself, already in every utterance [Äußerung] of the human voice



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as such. For example, natural peoples repel and “conjure” threatening events and catastrophe through loud shouting and crying. In this way, shouting and noise seek to banish solar and lunar eclipses, severe storms, and thunderstorms.8 The proper mythical-­magical force of language emerges, however, only where it appears in the form of an organized, articulated sound. The formed word is in itself delimited and individual, so that a particular domain of being is subject to each word, an individual sphere over which, as it were, it absolutely governs and prevails. In particular, it is the proper name [Eigenname] that is in this way fastened by mysterious bonds to the particularity of being [die Eigenheit des Wesens]. In many cases, this distinctive awe before the proper name still affects us – this feeling that it is not outwardly appended to the person [Mensch] but that in some way “belongs” to him or her. As Goethe puts it in a famous passage from Poetry and Truth: the proper name of a person [Mensch] is not like a cloak that only hangs around them, that may be loosened and tightened at will; rather, it is a perfectly fitting garment. It grows over them like their very skin; one cannot scrape and scratch at it without injuring the person themself.9

For original mythical thinking, however, the name is even more than such a skin: it expresses the inner, essential being of the person [Mensch] and “is” literally this interiority. Name and personality [Persönlichkeit] flow together into one here.10 In the coming-­of-­age rites and other rites of initiation, the person receives a new name because what he or she is given here is a new self.11 It is above all, however, the name of a god that constitutes a real part of the god’s being [Wesen] and efficacy. It designates the sphere of forces within which each particular deity is and effectively acts. Thus, in prayer, hymns, and all forms of religious speech, great care must be taken that each god is called [nennen] by its proper name, because the god will accept the proffered sacrifice only if it is invoked [anrufen] in the proper way. Among the Romans, the ability to invoke the right god in a suitable form was developed into a particular art, which was practiced by the pontifices and in which the indigitamenta that they administered was enshrined.12 And we encounter repeatedly elsewhere in the history of

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religion the basic view that the proper nature of the god, the strength and diversity of its doing, is contained and, as it were, concentrated in its name. In the name rests the mystery of divine plenitude: the diversity of a god’s names, the divine “polyonymy” and “meronymy,” is a true indication of the inexhaustibility of the work of the god. This belief in the power of the divine name immediately plays out in the books of the Old Testament.13 In Egypt, which as the classical land of magic and name magic, this feature has most clearly developed in its religious history, the universe is considered to have been created by the divine logos, and the first god is held to have brought himself into being through the force [Kraft] of his own powerful [gewaltig] name: in the beginning was the name, out of which all being, including divine being, was brought forth. Whoever knows the true name of a god or daemon has unlimited power [Macht] over the bearer of the name; an Egyptian legend tells how Isis, the great enchantress, tricked the sun god Ra into revealing his name to her and how she thus obtained dominion over him and all the other gods.14 And in particular, the image, like the name, of a person or thing [Sache] makes immediately clear the indifference of mythical thinking toward all differences in the “stage of objectivization.” For mythical thinking – for which all contents condense into a single plane of being, for which everything perceived already possesses as such the character of reality [Realität] – the seen image, like the spoken and heard word, is endowed with real forces. The image, too, not only presents the thing [Sache] for the subjective reflection of a third party, an observer, but is a part of its proper reality and efficacy. Like the proper name of the person [Mensch], their image is an alter ego: what befalls the image befalls the person [Mensch] themself.15 Thus, in the circle of magical representation, image magic and thing [Sache] magic are never sharply separated. As its means and vehicle, magic can equally well make use of a person’s image as some physical part of them, such as their fingernails or hair. If an enemy’s image is pierced with pins or darts, this magically effects the enemy immediately. And the image possesses not only a passive but also a fully active effectiveness [Wirkungsfähigkeit] – an effective capacity [Wirkungsfähigkeit] that is equivalent to that of the object itself. A wax model of an object is the same and performs the same as the object [Objekt] it depicts.16 This role of image befalls in particular even the shadow



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of a person. It, too, is a real vulnerable part of them – and every injury to the shadow is an injury to the person themself. It is forbidden to step on the shadow of a person, because this can bring an illness on them. Certain natural peoples are said to tremble at the sight of a rainbow, because they regard it as a net thrown out by a mighty magician to catch their shadows.17 In West Africa, a murder is sometimes secretly committed by striking a nail or thrusting a knife into the shadow of a man.18 It is all most certainly a later reflection that we only subsequently introduce into the phenomena of mythical thinking, when we attempt to explain the significance of the shadow as animistic by equating the shadow of the person with their soul. Actually, we seem to be dealing here with a far simpler and more original identification – namely, the identification that merges together waking and dreaming, name and thing [Sache], etc., and allows no strict separation between the forms of “pictural” [abbil­ dich] being and the forms of “archetypal” [urbildich] being. For a separation of this sort would require something other than a mere intuitive immersion in the content itself; it would require that the individual contents were not apprehended in their mere presence [Präsenz] but traced back to the conditions of their emergence in consciousness and to the causal law that governs this emergence. This, however, would again require a mode of analysis [Analyse] that is presupposed by a purely intellectual analysis [Zerlegung] and which is completely remote to mythical thinking. In general, the specific particular nature of mythical thinking, and the decisive opposition in which it finds itself vis-­à-­vis the purely “theoretical” apprehension of the world, can be comprehended no more from the side of its object-­concept [Objektbegriff] than from the side of its causal-­concept. For both concepts reciprocally condition each other: the form of causal thinking determines the form of object thinking [Objektdenken], and vice versa. Mythical thinking is by no means lacking in the general category of “cause” and “effect”; indeed, in a certain sense, they belong to its basic inventory. This is evidenced not only by the mythical cosmogonies and theogonies that seek to explain the emergence of the world and the birth of the gods but also by a wealth of mythical fables [Märchen] that possess a wholly “explicative” character, i.e. in that they seek to provide a particular “explanation” for the origin of some concrete-­individual thing, such as the origin of the sun or the moon, the human, or some genus of animal or plant. And the cultural fables [Märchen] that trace the possession

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of a cultural heritage back to an individual hero or “savior” [Heilbringer] belong to this circle of intuition. The causality of myth is, however, distinguished from the form of the causal explanation that is required and established by scientific cognition by the same feature to which the opposition between their mutual object-­concepts [Objektbegriffe] ultimately reduces itself. According to Kant, the causal clause [Kausalsatz] is a “synthetic principle” [Grundsatz] – a statement [Satz] that serves to spell out phenomena in order to read them as experience. However, this synthesis of the causal-­concept as well as the synthesis that takes place in object-­concepts [Objektbegriffe] includes at the same time an entirely determinate tendency of analysis within itself. Once again, synthesis and analysis complement each other; they are methods requiring each other. It is a basic lacuna in Hume’s psychological view and his psychological critique of the concept of causality that he does not sufficiently recognize this analytical function. According to Hume, every representation of causality should ultimately be derived from the representation of mere coexistence. Two contents that have appeared together in consciousness with sufficient frequency are ultimately transposed, through the mediating psychological function of “imagination,” from a relationship of mere proximity, of mere spatial togetherness or temporal succession, into a causal relation. Local [örtlich] or temporal contiguity is transformed into causality by a simple mechanism of “association.” In truth, however, scientific cognition obtains its causal concepts and its judgments of causality in precisely the opposite way. Through these concepts and judgments, contents that are contiguous for immediate sensible impressions are progressively dissected and assigned to different complexes of conditions. In mere perception, a certain state A in moment A1 is followed by another state B in moment A2. Regardless of how often this succession is repeated, however, it would not lead to the thought that A is the “cause” of B – the post hoc [after this] would never become a propter hoc [because of this] if a new mediating concept were not introduced. From a general state A, thinking isolates a certain element α, which it connects with an element β in B. And that α and β stand in a “necessary” relationship to each other, a relationship of “ground” and “consequence,” of “condition” and “conditioned,” is not passively read from a given perception or a plurality of



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such perceptions; rather, we put it to the test by producing the condition α by itself and then seeking the consequence connected with it. The physical experiment, in particular, on which causal judgments in physics ultimately depend, is always based on such a breakdown [Ver­ legung] of the event into individual spheres of conditions, into different strata of relations [Relation]. By virtue of this progressive analysis, the spatiotemporal event, which was initially given to us as a mere play of impressions, as a “rhapsody of perceptions,” takes on the new sense that stamps it as a causal event [Geschehen]. The individual occurrence [Vor­ gang] that we have before us is no longer considered merely as such: it becomes the bearer and expression of a universal, comprehensive lawfulness that is present in it. The twitching of the frog’s leg in Galvani’s laboratory becomes, not as an undisassembled phenomenon but, by virtue of the process of analytical thought that was connected with it, the proof and evidence for the new fundamental force of “galvanism.” Thus, the causal relations produced by science do not simply reestablish a sensible-­empirical existence; rather, inversely, they interrupt and break up the mere contiguity of the elements of experience: contents, which in empirical existence stand side by side, are separated according to their “ground” and “essence,” while, for the concept, for the intellectual construction of reality, others, which for the immediate sensible view lie far apart, move close together and are related to one another. It was, in this way, that Newton discovered a new causal-­concept of gravitation, through which such diverse phenomena as the free fall of bodies, the orbit of the planets, and the phenomena of the tides and floods were grasped together as a unity and subjected to one and the same general rule of events. However, this isolating abstraction – by which, from an entire complex, a determinate individual element is emphasized and apprehended as a “condition” – is and remains alien to mythical thinking. Here every simultaneity – every spatial accompaniment and contact – provides a real causal “sequence.” It has even been called a principle of mythical causality and of the “physics” based on it that every contact in time and space is taken as an immediate relationship of cause and effect. In addition to the principles of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc” [after this, therefore because of this] the principle of “juxta hoc, ergo propter hoc” [after this, therefore because of this] is especially characteristic of mythical thinking. A common view in

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this thinking is that animals that appear in a certain season are the bringers, the initiators, of this season: in the mythical view, the swallow makes the summer.19 In connection with the basic intuition that underlies the customs of magic and sacrifice in the Vedic religion, Oldenberg writes: Networks of fantastically arbitrary relations embrace all . . . essential beings whose action is believed to explain the structure of sacrifice and its effect on the course of the world and on the I. They effectively act on one another by contact, by the number inherent in them, by something adhering to them. . . . They fear one another, penetrate one another, interweave and pair with one another. . . . One transitions into the other, becomes the other, is a form of the other, is the other. . . . It would seem that once two representations find themselves in a certain proximity, it is impossible to keep them apart.20 57

If this is true, we must come to the astonishing conclusion that Hume, in attempting to analyze the causal judgment of science, instead revealed a root of all mythical explanations of the world. Indeed, mythical representing [Vorstellen] has been designated – with an expression taken from the classification of languages – as “polysynthetic” and this designation has been explained as meaning that for mythical representing, no separation of a total representation [Gesamtvorstellung] into its elements [Elemente] is carried out but that only a single undivided whole [Ganze] of intuition is given – a whole in which there has been no “dissociation” of individual elements, in particular, of the elements of objective perception and subjective feeling.21 Preuss has illustrated this particular nature of the mythical-­complex mode of representation in opposition to the analytical view of conceptual thinking by way of a reference to the cosmological and religious representations of the Cora Indians: here, it is not the individual star, not the moon or sun, that possesses predominance but the totality of the stars taken as an undivided whole and this whole that is religiously venerated. Thus, the view of the heavens at night and during the day in its totality precedes, he says, that of the particular heavenly bodies: “because the whole was apprehended as a unitary being [Wesen] and the religious representations connected with the stars often confounded them with the heavens as a whole; they could not free themselves from the holistic view [Gesamtauffassung].”22



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In the context of our discussion up to this point, we now recognize, however, that this often-­stressed and often-­described feature of mythical thinking23 is not external or accidental to it but follows necessarily from the structure of this thinking. We have before us here, so to speak, the reverse of the important epistemo-­critical insight that the basic logical function of the scientific concept of causality is not exhausted in its subsequent “combining,” either by the “imagination” or by the understanding, elements [Elemente] that have already been given in perception, but it has to first posit and determine these elements [Elemente] as such. As long as this determination is lacking, we also lack all those lines of separation and demarcation that divide the different objects and object spheres for our formed [ausgebildet] conscious experience that is already entirely permeated with causal “inferences.” Whereas the thought-­ form of empirical causality is essentially directed toward establishing an unequivocal relation between determinate “causes” and determinate “effects,” mythical thinking, even where it raises the question of origins as such, has a free selection of “causes” at its disposal. Here, anything can come from anything, because anything can stand in temporal or spatial contact with anything. Whereas empirical-­causal thinking speaks about “alteration” and seeks to understand it on the basis of a general rule, mythical thinking knows only a simple metamorphosis (understood in the Ovidian, not in the Goethean, sense). When scientific thinking turns to the fact of “alteration,” its interest is not essentially directed at the transition of a single sensibly given thing into another; rather, this transition appears for it as “possible” and admissible only insofar as a general law is expressed in it, insofar as it is based on certain functional relations and determinations that can be regarded as valid independently of the merely here and now and of the constellation of things in the here and now. Mythical “metamorphosis,” on the other hand, is always the record of an individual event – a progress from one individual and concrete form of a thing and existence to another. The world is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise – the earth is formed from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun emerges from a stone, the human from rocks or trees. In all of these diverse mythical “explanations,” as chaotic and lawless as they may seem in their mere content, one and the same tendency of apprehending the world takes shape [ausprägen]. Whereas

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the conceptual-­causal judgment breaks down an event into constant elements [Elemente] and seeks to “understand” it through the complexion and penetration of these elements [Elemente] from their similar recurrence, the image of a simple process of the event itself satisfies mythical representing, which remains within a holistic representation. In this event, certain typical features may, however, be repeated without being able to speak of a rule and therefore of a determinate restrictive formal condition of becoming. Of course, even the opposition between law and lawlessness, “necessity” and “contingency,” requires a sharp, critical analysis and a more rigorous determination before it can be applied to the relationship between mythical and scientific thinking. Leucippus and Democritus seem to express the principle of a scientific explanation of the world and its definitive break with myth when they set forth the proposition that nothing in the world happens “at random” [von ungefähr] but rather that everything happens for a reason [Grunde] and by necessity (“οὐδὲν χρῆμν μάιην γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης”).24 And yet, at first glance, it would seem that this principle of causality is no less valid for the structure of the mythical world, such that it still undergoes a particular accentuation and intensification. That mythical thinking is unable to grasp the thought of an event that is in some sense absolutely “by chance” has, in any case, been called an essential feature of mythical thinking. We frequently find that where we, from the standpoint of the scientific explanation of the world, would speak of a “chance,” mythical consciousness insists on a “cause” and in every single case postulate such a cause. Thus, e.g., for the thinking of natural peoples, a catastrophe that descends upon the land, an injury that an individual suffers, sickness, and death are never “chance” events [Ereignisse]; rather, they are always traced back to a magical influence [Einwirkung] as their proper cause. In particular, death never occurs “of itself” but is always brought about by magical influence [Einfluß].25 Mythical thinking, therefore, seems to be so far from an arbitrary lawlessness that, on the contrary, we are tempted rather to speak of a kind of hypertrophy of the causal “instinct” and of a need for causal explanation. Indeed, the proposition [Satz] that nothing in the world happens by chance but that everything happens by conscious intent has sometimes been designated as the fundamental principle [Satz] of the mythical view of the world.26



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Once again, it is not the concept of causality as such but the specific form of causal explanation that underlies here the difference and the opposition between the two spiritual worlds. It is as if pure cognitive consciousness [Erkenntnisbewußtsein] and mythical consciousness applied the lever of “explanation” at entirely different points. Pure cognitive consciousness [Erkenntnisbewußtsein] is satisfied if it succeeds in comprehending the individual event in space and time as a special instance of a general law, whereas it asks no further of the “why” regarding the individualization itself, regarding the here and now as such. On the other hand, mythical consciousness directs the question of “the why” precisely to the particular, to the individual and unique. It “explains” the individual event by positing and assuming individual acts of the will. Our concepts of causal law can, however much they are directed toward the apprehension and determination of the particular and however much they differentiate themselves and complement and determine one another in order to fulfill this intent, nevertheless always return this particular back, as it were, into a sphere of indeterminacy. For precisely as concepts, they are not able to exhaust concrete-­intuitive existence and events; they are not able to exhaust all the countless “modifications” of the general case. Every particular, therefore, is indeed subject here to the universal but cannot be completely derived from it alone. Even the “particular laws of nature” do not present anything new and distinct, as opposed to the general principle [Prinzip], the principle [Grundsatz] of causality as such. They are subject to this basic principle; they fall under it, but in their concrete framing, they are not postulated by it and cannot be determined by it alone. Theoretical thinking and the theoretical science of nature encounter here the problem of “random chance” [Zufälligen] – for in this connection, “random” [zufällig] does not mean what deviates from the form of general lawfulness but what rests on a modification of this form that is not wholly derivable. If theoretical thinking wants in some way to apprehend and determine this element, which is, from the standpoint of the general law of causality, a “random chance,” it must – as the “critique of teleological judgment” has set out in detail – move it into another category. The pure principle of causality is now replaced by the principle of purpose: for what we call purposiveness is really the “lawfulness of random chance.”27

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Myth, however, takes the opposite path. It begins with the intuition of the purposeful effective action – for all the “forces” of nature are for myth nothing other than the manifestation of a daemonic or divine will. This principle forms the source of light that progressively illuminates for myth the whole of being – however, outside of this, there is for it no possibility of understanding [Verstehen] the world. For scientific thinking, to “understand” [Verstehen] an event signifies nothing other than to reduce it to certain general conditions, to subordinate it to that universal complex of conditions that we call “nature.” A phenomenon such as the death of a person is understood [verstanden] if we succeed in assigning a place to it within this complex – if we can recognize it as “necessary” on the basis of the physiological conditions of life. Even if myth could conceive of this necessity of the general “course of nature,” it would, however, remain for myth a mere random chance, because it leaves unexplained precisely what holds the interest and attention of myth, namely the here and now of the particular case, the death of precisely this person, at precisely this moment in time. This individual event seems to be “intelligible” [verständlich] only if we succeed in tracing it back to something no less individual, to a personal act of the will, which, as a free act, requires and is susceptible of no further explanation. If the tendency of the general concept thinks of all freedom of doing as having been determined by an unequivocal causal order, then myth, on the contrary, dissolves all determination of the event into a freedom of doing – and both have “explained” an occurrence when they have interpreted it from their own specific point of view. And this framing of the concept of causality is connected to another feature that has always been stressed as particularly characteristic of the mythical view of the world: namely, the distinctive relationship that it assumes between the whole of a concrete object [Objekt] and its individual parts. For our empirical apprehension, the whole “consists” of its parts; for the logic of the cognition of nature [Naturerkenntnis], for the logic of the analytical-­scientific concept of causality, it results from them. However, essentially neither of them applies for the mythical apprehension; rather, here an actual undifferentiatedness [Ungeschiedenheit], an intellectual and real “indifference” between the whole and its parts prevails. The whole does not “have” parts and does not break down into them; rather, the part is immediately the whole and effectively acts and functions as such.



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This relationship, this principle of the pars pro toto [a part for the whole], has also been designated as a basic principle of “primitive logic.” And once again, it is by no means a question of a mere substitution but of a real determination, not a symbolic-­thought, but a tangible-­effective interconnection. The part, mythically speaking, is the same thing as the whole because it is a real bearer of efficacy – because everything that it incurs or does, that actively or passively happens to [an] it, is incurred or done of [des] the whole. Consciousness of the part as such, as a “mere” part, does not belong to the immediate, “naïve” intuition of the actual but rather is achieved only by that separating and organizing function of mediating thinking that goes back from objects, as concrete thing-­ unities, to their constitutive conditions. If we follow the progress of scientific thinking, we see how the working out [Ausbildung] of the concept of causality and the working out of the category of the whole and the parts develop hand in hand and how both belong to one and the same tendency of analysis. The question of the “origin” of being detaches itself in the inception of Greek speculation from the question of the origins of mythical cosmogonies in that it penetrates it at the same time with the question of the “elements” [Elemente] of being. The ἀρχὴ [arche] in its new philosophical sense, in the sense of a “principle,” henceforth signifies both: it is origin as well as element [Element]. The world is not only, as in myth, “coming into being” out of the originary-­ water [Urwasser]; rather, the water accounts for its “consistent existence,” its lasting material [stoffliche] constitution. And if this constitution is initially sought in a single material, in a concrete originary-­stuff, then once the concept of the element [Element] is displaced, insofar as the physical view of the world is replaced by mathematical intuition and with it the basic form of mathematical analysis emerges. Earth, air, water, and fire no longer form the “elements” [Elemente] of things – and “love” and “hate,” as basic semi-­mythical forces, no longer intertwine with one another and separate from one another; rather, being as a mathematical-­physical cosmos is now constructed by the simplest spatial figures [Gestalten] and movements and the integrated and necessary laws according to which they are ordered. In the emergence of the ancient atomic theory, one can clearly fol- 63 low how the new concept of “ground,” the new concept of causality, demanded and called forth a new concept of the element [Element], a new relationship between the “whole” and its “parts.” The idea of the atom

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forms only a single element [Moment] in the construction and development of the general view of being that manifested itself in Democritus’ concept of natural law, of “etiology.”28 And the further development that the concept of the atom has undergone in the history of science has continued to confirm this interconnection. Atoms were valid as the ultimate, irreducible parts of being only as long as the analysis of becoming seemed to have found in them an ultimate resting point. In the moment, however, when the causal analysis [Zerlegung] of becoming into its individual factors progressed further and advanced beyond these resting points, the picture [Bild] of the atom changed. It “disintegrated” [zerfallen] into other, simpler elements [Elemente] that were then established as the actual bearers of events, as the starting points for the formulation of determinate causal relations. We thus see that the divisions and subdivisions made by scientific cognition in being are always only the expression and, as it were, the conceptual cloak for the lawful relations by which science seeks to comprehend and unambiguously determine the world of becoming. The whole is here not so much the sum of its parts as it is constructed out of their reciprocal relationship; it signifies the unity of the dynamic connection, in which each individual “participates” and which in its place it helps to accomplish. And here too, myth now shows us the reverse side of this relationship and thus allows us to prove our point inversely. Because myth does not know the thought-­form of causal analysis, there consists for it no sharp boundary that only this thought-­form initially posits between the whole and its parts. Even where empirical-­sensible intuition seems to give itself, so to speak, as separated and divorced, myth replaces this sensible apartness [Auseinander] and proximity [Nebeneinander] by a distinctive form of “interpenetration” [Ineinander]. The whole and its parts are interwoven into each other [ineinander], their destinies are linked, as it were, with one another [miteinander] – and so the parts are still the whole, even if they have been detached from one another [voneinander] in pure fact. Even after this separation, the fate of the part hangs over the whole as well. Whoever acquires even the most insignificant bodily part of a person, be it their name, their shadow, their reflected image – which in a sense are for mythical intuition likewise real “parts” of a person – has thereby taken possession of them, has achieved forceful magical power over them. From a purely formal point of view, the whole of the “phenomenology



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of magic” goes back to this one basic prerequisite, in which the “complex” intuition of myth is distinguished with particular clarity from the particular nature of the “abstract,” or, more precisely, the abstracting and analyzing concept. The influence of this thought-­form can be followed in the direction of time as well as in the direction of space: it has reorganized after itself the apprehension of succession as well as that of simultaneity. In both cases, mythical thinking has a tendency to impede the possibility of that analytical dissection of being into independent partial elements [Teilelemente] and partial conditions [Teilbedingungen], with which the scientific apprehension of nature begins and which remains typical of it. According to the basic representation of “sympathetic magic,” a constant connection, a true causal nexus, exists between everything whose spatial proximity or whose affinity to the same tangible whole designates them, however externally, as “belonging together.” To leave remnants of food about, or the bones of animals one has eaten, involves grave dangers: anything that happens to these remains through hostile magic influences will simultaneously happen to the food in the body and to whoever has eaten it. A person’s excrement and the cuttings of their hair and nails must be buried or burned to prevent them from falling into the hands of a hostile magician. Among certain Indian tribes, if the saliva of the enemy can be obtained, it is enclosed in a potato and hung in the chimney: as the saliva dries in the smoke, the enemy’s strength dwindles with it.29 As we see, the “sympathetic” interconnection that is assumed between the individual parts of the body is totally indifferent to their physical and spatial separation. The force of this interconnection sublates the separation of the whole of an organism into its parts and the fixed delimitation of what these parts are for themselves and what they signify for the whole. Whereas conceptual-­causal apprehension, in its presentation and explanation of the occurrences of life, lays out [auseinanderlegen] the whole event taking place in the organism into single characteristic activities and performances, the mythical view accomplishes no such separation into elementary processes and, therefore, no proper “articulation” of the organism itself. Any part of the body, however “inorganic,” such as the nail or the little toe, is equal to any other in what it magically signifies for the whole; instead of the organic construction, which always presupposes an organic differentiation, a simple equivalence prevails. Once again, it

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remains here with the intuition of a simple togetherness of tangible pieces without arriving at a superordination and subordination of functions, each of which is differentiated according to its particular conditions. And just as the physical parts of the organism do not sharply separate from each other [auseinandertreten] according to their significance, so too are the temporal determinations of the event, the individual moments of time, not set apart from each other according to each one’s causal significance. If a warrior is wounded by an arrow, he can, according to the magical mode of representation, be healed or diminish his pain by hanging the arrow in a cool place or smearing it with an ointment. Strange as this kind of “causality” may seem to us, it immediately becomes intelligible when we consider that here the arrow and the wound, the “cause” and the “effect,” are still an entirely simple, unanalyzed thing-­unity. From the standpoint of a scientific consideration of the world, one “thing” is never simply the cause of another; rather, its effect on this thing is produced only under very specific determining circumstances and above all in a rigidly delimited temporal moment. The causal relationship here is not so much a relationship of things but rather a relationship between alterations that occur in certain objects [Objekte] at determinate times. By virtue of this tracing out of the temporal course of events and its laying out [Auseinanderlegung] into different, clearly distant from one another “phases,” causal interconnections become more and more complex and mediate as scientific cognition progresses. “The” arrow can no longer be thought of as the cause of “the” wound – rather, in a determinate moment (t1), in which it penetrates the body, the arrow evokes [her­ vorrufen] a determinate alteration in it, and this is followed (in the ensuing moments t2, t3, etc.) by other determinate alterations and a series of alterations in the bodily organism, all of which must be considered as necessary partial conditions [Teilbedingungen] of the wound. Because myth and magic nowhere undertake this separation into the partial conditions, each of which would only possess a certain relative value within the whole of the interconnection of effect, there are for them essentially just as few such barriers that distinguish the elements of time as there are barriers for the parts of a spatial whole.The sympathetic-­ magical interconnection bridges spatial differences as well as temporal differences: the resolution of spatial togetherness, the physical separation of a body part from the whole of the body, does not sublate the effective



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interconnection between them, and similarly, the borders of “before” and “after,” “earlier” and “later” transition into one another. More precisely, the magical relation does not have to first establish itself between spatially and temporally separate elements [Elemente] – this would only be a mediate, reflexive expression of the relationship – rather, in general, magic thwarts from the outset that such a decomposition [Zerfällung] into elements [Elemente] can come about. And even where empirical intuition seems to immediately render present such a separation, it is at once sublated by magical intuition as the tension between the differences in space and time is resolved into the simple identity of the magical “ground.”30 A further consequence of this barrier that is set before the mythical view manifests itself in the tangible-­substantial view of effective action that is everywhere characteristic of it. The logical-­causal analysis of events is essentially directed toward dissolving the given into simple processes that we can observe separately and assess in the regularity of their course – mythical intuition sees it the other way around, where it turns to the consideration of the processes of the event, where it poses the question of emergence and origin, the “genesis” itself is always already linked to a concrete given existence. It always knows and apprehends the process of effective action only as a simple variation between forms of concrete-­ individual existence. There the path goes from the “thing” [Ding] to the “condition” [Bedingung], from “substantial” to “functional” intuition – here, the intuition of becoming remains confined within the intuition of a simple existence. 67 If cognition, the further it advances, progressively limits itself to inquiring into the pure “how” of becoming, i.e. into its lawful form – then myth inquires solely into its “what,” whence, and whither. And it insists on seeing both the whence and the whither in full tangible determination before itself. Here causality is not a relational form of mediating thinking, which, as real [Eigen] and independent, places itself, as it were, “between” the individual elements [Elemente] in order to implement their connection and separation; rather, here the elements [Momente] into which becoming is dissected still possess and preserve [bewahren] a true character of an originary-­thing [Ur-­Sache: primal matter], of the independent, concrete thing-­character. While conceptual thinking, in that it lays out a continuous series of events into “causes” [Ursachen] and “effects,” is in this way essentially directed toward the mode, the

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constancy, and the rule of the transition, the beginning and end of the process being clearly contrasted against each other is enough for the mythical need for explanation. A great number of creation myths relate how the world [Welt] emerged from a simple, originary-­thing or a beginning-­thing [Ur-­ und Anfangssa­ che], from the cosmic egg [Weltei] or the world ash tree [Weltesche]. In Nordic mythology, it is formed from the lived body of the giant Ymir: from Ymir’s flesh that the earth is created, from his blood the roaring sea, from the bones the mountains, from his hair the trees, from his skull the dome of heaven. That this is a typical form of representation is shown by the analogy of a Vedic creation hymn, which describes how the living nature [Wesen], the animals of the air and wilderness, the sun, the moon, and the air issued from the limbs of the Purusha, the human who was offered up as a sacrifice by the gods. Here the distinctive hypostatization that is essential to all mythical thinking stands out even more sharply: they are not only individual, concrete-­perceptible objects [Objekte] whose emergence is explained in this way but also highly complex and mediated formal relations. The songs and melodies, the meters, and the sacrificial formulas are also issued from different parts of the Purusha, and the social differences and orders disclose the same concrete-­tangible origin. “The Brahmin was his mouth, his arms were made the Rajanya (warrior), his two thighs the Vaiśya (trader and agriculturist), from his feet the Śûdra (servile class) was born.”31 Whereas conceptual-­causal thinking seeks to dissolve all being [Seiende] into relations and understand it through them, the mythical question of origins is addressed only in that it traces even intricate complexes of relations – such as rhythms of a melody or the organization of the castes – back to a pre-­given tangible existence. According to its original thought-­form, all the mere states or properties must also for myth ultimately become bodies. The fact that the Brahman, the warrior, and the Sudra distinguish themselves from each other is intelligible only in that they contain different substances: the Brahman, the Kshatra, the Sudra, each lends their particular property to those who partake of it. According to Vedic theology, the “husband-­killing body” dwells in an evil, faithless woman: the “body (tanu) of soulessness” dwells in a barren woman.32 In such determinations, the immanent conflict, the dialectic in which the mythical mode of representation moves, becomes particularly



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evident. The mythical fantasy drives toward animation and ensoulment, toward a thoroughgoing “spiritualization” of the all [All]; however, the mythical thought-­form, which attaches all qualities and activities, all states and relations to a fixed substratum, leads to the opposite extreme: a kind of materialization of spiritual contents. Indeed, mythical thinking also seeks to establish a kind of continuity between “cause” and “effect” by intercalating a series of middle links between them as beginning and end states. Even these middle links, however, preserve a merely substantive character [Sachcharakter]. From the standpoint of analytic-­scientific causality, the continuity of events is essentially established in that a unitary law, an analytical function, is demonstrated by which the whole of the event can be intellectually mastered and determined from temporal moment to temporal moment. Each temporal moment is a determined “state” of the event, which can be expressed mathematically by certain values of magnitude; however, in their totality, all these different values constitute a single series of alterations, because the alterations that they undergo is subject to a general rule and is thought of as issuing necessarily from that rule. In this rule, both the unity and the separation, the “continuity” and the “discretion” of the particular moments of the event are constituted. Mythical thinking, however, knows no such unity of connection nor such a separation. It apprehends the effective process, even where it would seem to be dismantled and unfolded into a plurality of stages, in an entirely substantial form. The entire particular nature of effective action is explained in that a determinate tangible quality of the thing [Sache] successively passes over from one thing [Sache] in which it is inherent to other things [Sachen]. Even everything that in empirical and scientific thinking appears to be a mere dependent “property” or a mere state, obtains here the character of complete substantiality and hence of immediate transferability. It is reported that the Hupa Indians look on pain as a substance.33 And even purely “spiritual,” purely “moral” properties are, in this sense, apprehended as transferable substances, as is shown by a number of ritual rules regulating this transference. Thus, a taint, a miasma that a community has brought on itself, can be transferred to an individual, a slave for example, and destroyed by the sacrifice of the slave. One such atonement ritual34 found in the Greek Thargelia festivals and also in otherwise extraordinary events that took place in Ionian cities traces back to the most ancient and

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widespread basic mythical intuition.35 When one considers the original sense of all these rites of purification and atonement, their use was in no way a merely symbolic substitution but rather a thoroughly real, almost physical transference.36 A Batak suffering under a curse can “make it fly away” by transferring it to a swallow and letting it fly away.37 And the transference can occur to a mere object [Objekt] as well as to an ensouled or animate subject, as is reported, for example, of a custom of the Shinto religion. Here, the priest gives the person who is to be cleansed a sheet of white paper cut in the shape [Gestalt] of a human garment, called kata-­shiro, “representative [Repräsentant] of the human shape [Gestalt],” on which the year and month of their birth and their family name are written. The person then rubs it over their body and breathes on it, whereupon their sins are transferred to the kata-­shiro. At the end of the purification ceremony, these “scapegoats” are thrown into a river or sea, so that the four gods of purification may guide them into the underworld, where they will disappear without trace.38 And all other spiritual properties and faculties are, for mythical thinking, bound up with some specific tangible substrate. In the Egyptian coronation ceremonies, there are detailed instructions as to how, in each of the specific stages, all the properties, all the attributes of the god are to be transferred to the Pharaoh through the regalia, the scepter, the scourge, and the sword. These are looked upon not as mere symbols but as true talismans – bearers and guardians of divine forces.39 In general, the mythical concept of force distinguishes itself from the scientific concept of force in that for myth, force never appears as a dynamic relationship, as the expression for a totality [Ganze] of causal relations [Relationen], but rather always as something thing-­like or substance-­ like.40 This thing-­like is widespread throughout the world, but it seems thickened, as it were, in certain powerful personalities, in the magician and the priest, in the chieftain and the warrior. And from this substantial whole [Ganze], from this store of force, individual parts can detach themselves and enter into another individual by mere contact. The magical force of magic [Die magische Zauberkraft] proper to the priest or chieftain, the “mana” that is concentrated in them, is not bound to them as individual subjects but is capable of the most varied transformations and communications [Mitteilungen]. Mythical force is not, therefore, like physical force, a mere synoptic expression, only an event and mere “resultant” of causal factors and



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conditions that can be thought as “effective” only in their combination, in their reciprocal relation to one another – rather, it is a unique substantive being that as such wanders from place to place, from subject to subject. Among the Ewes, for example, the vessels and secrets belonging to the magician can be acquired by purchase; however, an individual can acquire the magic force only by physical transference, which is accomplished mainly by mixing the blood and saliva of the seller and purchaser of the magic.41 Even a sickness from which a person suffers is never, mythically speaking, a process operating that plays out in their body under empirically known and general-­empirical conditions but rather is a daemon that has taken possession of them. And the emphasis here is not on the animistic but on substantial apprehension – for the sickness can be apprehended equally as well as an animated daemonic being [Wesen] as a kind of foreign body that has entered into a person.42 The profound gulf between this mythical form of medicine and the empirical-­ scientific form that found its first basis in Greek thinking becomes apparent when we compare, for example, the Hippocratic corpus with the lore of the priests of Asclepias at Epidaurus. Throughout mythical thinking, even the hypostatization of properties and processes returns in other ways from forces and activities that often simply lead to their immediate materialization.43 To allude to this distinctive detachability and transferability of mere properties and states, a principle of “emanism” is said to dominate mythical thinking.44 Perhaps we can best appreciate the sense and origin of this mode of thinking, however, if we consider that even in scientific cognition, the sharp separation between the thing, on the one hand, and a property, state, and relation, on the other, only gradually results from unremitting intellectual struggles. Here too, the boundaries between the “substantial” and the “functional” are ever and again blurred, so that a semi-­mythical hypostasis of purely functional and relational concepts arises. Even the physical concept of force, for example, was only able to slowly free itself from this entanglement. In the history of physics, we frequently encounter attempts to understand and classify the different forms of effective action by attaching them to determinate stuff and their transference from one point in space to another, from one “thing” to another. The physics of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century still spoke in this way of a “thermal stuff,” or of an electrical or magnetic “matter.” However, while

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the true tendency of scientific, analytical-­critical thinking is toward liberation from this material mode of representation [stofflichen Vorstellungsart], it is distinctive of myth that despite all the “spirituality” of its objects [Objekte] and contents, in its “logic,” in the form of its concepts, it clings to bodies. So far, we have attempted to characterize this logic in its most general basic features – now, we must consider the impact of the specific object [Objekt] concept and causal-­concept of mythical thinking in the framing and forming of individuals and how they decisively determine all the par­ ticular “categories” of the mythical.

ENDNOTES 1 [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 226.] 2 For a more detailed treatment of these epistemological considerations, I must refer the reader to my Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1910), chap. 4, 6. [Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function, and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (New York: Dover Publications) chap. 4, 6: (Ernst Cassirer Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6).] 3 That also the content of the primitive “soul-­concept” can in no way be derived or understood from the dream experience, either completely or even in its most striking features, has been recently stressed, in particular, by Walter Friedrich Otto, Die Manen oder Von den Urformen des Totenglaubens. Eine Untersuchung zur Religion der Griechen, Römer und Semiten und zum Volksglauben überhaupt (Berlin: J. Springer, 1923), especially 67ff. 4 Cf. the abundant material compiled in Lucien Lévy-­Bruhl, La Mentalité primitive (Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1922). See also Daniel G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (New York, London: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1897), 65ff. 5 On the history of the interpretation of myths, cf. Otto Gruppe, Geschichte der klassischen Mythologie und Religionsgeschichte während des Mittelalters im Abendland und während der Neuzeit (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1921). 6 Cf. Konrad T. Preuss, “Ursprünge der Religion und Kunst,” Globus, 87 (1905), 336; Konrad T. Preuss and Kunst und Volksbildung, Die Nayarit-­Expedition. Textaufnahmen und Beobachtungen unter mexikanischen Indianern (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1912), lxviii, lxxxixff.; idem, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto (2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1921–23), 1, 123ff.; and idem, “Die höchste Gottheit bei den kulturarmen Völkern,” Psychologische Forschung, 2 (1922), 165. 7 For the ancient mysteries, cf. particularly Richard Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen; Vortrag Ursprünglich Gehalten in dem Wissenschaftlichen predigerverein für Elsass-­ Lothringen den 11. November 1909 (2nd ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927), and the decisive documentation in Hermann K. Usener, “Heilige Handlung,” in



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Kleine Schriften (4 vols., Leipzig: Teubner, 1912–14), 4, 424. Only in one passage in Clement of Alexandria – according to Karel H. E. de Jong, Das antike Mysterienwesen in religionsgeschichtlicher ethnologischer und psychologischer Beleuchtung (Leiden: Brill, 1919), 19 – are the mythical ceremonies called a drama; they are usually referred to as dromena, which as a rule means ceremonies, particularly secret ones – never a theatrical performance. And there is no rite without dancing: when someone betrays the mysteries, he is said not to speak them out but to “dance them out.” The same is true of the rites of primitive peoples. The animal and ghost dances both have a magic purpose. . . . No mythical narratives are presented, and the purpose is never the mere presentation of scenes and thoughts. This can only come about when the dances have become profane or reached a higher stage of development. Preuss, “Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,” 392. 8 For natural peoples, cf. Ibid., 384. For documentation of the same phenomenon in ancient literature cf. Erwin Rohde, Psyche, Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (2nd ed., Leipzig and Tubingen: Kröner, 1898), 2, 28, n. 2; 77. 9 [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Werke, Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Grossherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, ser. I, vol. 27, 311.] 10 Still in Roman civil law, slaves had no names, because from a legal point of view they had no personality. See Theodor Mommsen, Römisches Staatsrecht (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1888), 1, 203, cited in Rudolf Hirzel, Der Name. Ein Beitrag zu seiner Geschichte im Altertum und besonders bei den Griechen, in Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, vol. 26 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1918). 11 Extensive documentation for this is found in Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 86ff.; also in Edwin O. James, Primitive Ritual and Belief. An Anthropological Essay (London: Methuen, 1917), 16ff.; Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage étude systématique des rites de la porte et du seuil, de l’hospitalité, de l’adoption, de la grossesse et de l'accouchement, de la naissance, de l’enfance, de la puberté, de l’initiation, de l’ordination, du couronnement des fiançailles et du mariage, des funérailles, des saisons, etc. (Paris: E. Nourry, 1909). 12 See Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (München: C. H. Beck, 1912), 37. Cf. Eduard Norden, Agnostos theos. Untersuchungen zur Formengeschiehte religiöser Rede (Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 144ff. 13 Cf. Friedrich Giesebrecht, Die alttestamentliche Schätzung des Gottesnamens und ihre religionsgeschichtliche Grundlage (Königsberg: Thomas & Oppermann, 1901). 14 For more details on the “omnipotence of the name” and its cosmological significance, see my “Language and Myth.” [Cf. Ernst Cassirer, “Language and Myth: A Contribution to the Problem of the Names of the Gods” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 127.] At the same time, the belief in the “substantiality” of the word, which

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dominates all mythical thinking, may be observed in almost unchanged form in certain pathological phenomena, where it seems to follow from the same mental condition, an intermingling of “stages of objectivization,” which in critical thinking and analytical concept formation are kept apart. Important and instructive in this respect is a case reported by Paul Schilder in Wahn und Erkenntnis, Eine psychopathologische Studie, Monographien aus dem Gesamtgebiete der Neurologic und Psychiatric, vol. 15 (Berlin: J. Springer, 1918), 66ff. The patient in question is asked what is most powerful in the world and replies “words.” The heavenly bodies, he says, “give” certain words, and by the knowledge of these words, one dominates things. And not only every word as a whole but each of its parts is effective in the same way. The patient was convinced, e.g., that words such as “chaos” can be broken apart and that the pieces will also have meaning; his relation “to his words was the same as that of the chemist to a complex composite substance.” 15 A large number of examples for this relationship are cited from the Chinese sphere of representation by Johann Jakob Maria de Groot, The Religious System of China, Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect. Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1901). See 4, 340ff.: An image, especially if pictorial or sculptured, and thus approaching close to the reality, is an alter ego of the living reality, an abode of its soul, nay, it is that reality itself. By myriads are such images made of the dead, expressly to enable mankind to keep the latter in their immediate presence, as protectors and advisers. . . . Such intense association is, in fact, the very backbone of China’s inveterate idolatry and fetish-­worship, and, accordingly, a phenomenon of paramount importance in her Religious System. 16 Characteristic examples of this may be found in Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, “Magical Pictures,” in Egyptian Magic (2nd ed., London: Kegan Paul, 1901), 104ff. 17 See the abundant ethnological material assembled by James G. Frazer in “Taboo and the Perils of the Soul,” in The Golden Bough (3rd ed., London: Macmillan and Co., 1911–1915), vol. 3, part II, 77. 18 Mary H. Kingsley, West African Studies (London: Macmillan and Co., Limited; New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899), 207. 19 Cf. Preuss, “Ursprung der Religion und Kunst.” For the mythical principle of juxta hoc, ergo propter hoc, cf. the abundant documentation compiled by Lucien Lévy-­ Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures (Paris: F. Alcan, 1910). German trans., Das Denken der Naturvölker (Wien: W. Braumüller, 1921), 252ff. 20 Hermann Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1915), 20ff. 21 Lévy-­Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker, 30.



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22 Preuss and Volksbildung, Die Nayarit-­expedition, Textaufnahmen und Beobachtungen unter mexikanischen Indianern, 1ff. Cf. idem, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker (Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914), 9ff. 23 Cf., for example, Richard Thurnwald, “Das Problem des Totemismus,” Anthropos, 13 (1918), 1094–1113. Thurnwald speaks not of a “complex” thinking but of a thinking in “complete pictures.” 24 [Leucippus, frag. 2.] 25 For examples from African religions, see Carl Meinhof, Religionen der schriftlosen Völker Afrikas (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Siebeck], 1913), 15ff. 26 Cf. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 47ff.; see Lévy-­Bruhl, La Mentalité primitive. 27 Cf. the analysis of the Critique of Judgment in my Kants Leben und Lehre (3rd ed., Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), 310ff. [Cassirer, Kant’s Life and Thought, trans. by James Haden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press) 290.] 28 Cf. my account of the history of Greek philosophy in Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Max Dessoir (Berlin: Ullstein, 1925), vol. 1. 29 Cf. Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. 3. part II, 126ff., 258ff., 287ff., etc. 30 In my study Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 1 (Leipzig and Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), I have attempted to demonstrate how the same thought-­form of mythical “causality” operates not only in magic but also in the highest stages of mythical thinking, particularly in the system of astrology. [Ernst Cassirer, “The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013),1–71.] 31 See Lieder des Rgveda, German trans. Alfred von Hillebrandt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Leipzig, J. C. Hinrichs, 1913), 130ff. [Rigveda, x, 90. trans. by Edward J. Thomas, Vedic Hymns (London: J. Murray, 1923), 122.] For a German translation of the song of Edda, describing the creation of the world from the body of the giant Ymir, see Wolfgang Golther, Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895), 517. 32 Cf. Hermann Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda (2nd ed., Berlin: W. Hertz, 1894), 478ff. 33 Pliny E. Goddard, Life and Culture of the Hupa, in American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 1 (Berkeley: Berkely University Press, 1903–4). 34 For further details, see, e.g., Rohde, Psyche, 2, 78. 35 On the widespread representation of the “scapegoat,” cf. James Frazer, “The Scapegoat,” The Golden Bough, vol. 9, part IV. 36 For further details, see, e.g., Lewis R. Farnell, The Evolution of Religion (London: Williams & Norgate; New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), 88ff., 117ff. 37 Johannes G. Warneck, Die Religion der Batak. Ein Paradigma für die animistischen Religionen des indischen Archipels (Göttingen and Leipzig: T. Weicher, 1909), 13. We find similar conceptions in Indian and Germanic folk superstition. “Every peasant woman in India,” says E. Washburn Hopkins, Origin and

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myth as thought-­f orm Evolution of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 163, “who is afflicted leaves a rag infected with her trouble on the road, hoping someone else will pick it up, for she has laid her sickness on it and when another takes it she herself becomes free of the sickness.” For the Germanic sphere, cf. Karl Weinhold, Die Mystische Neunzahl bei den Deutschen, (Berlin: Verlag der Königl. Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1897), 51. Karl Florenz, “Die Religionen der Japaner: 1. der Shintoismus,” in Die orientalischen Religionen, Die Kultur der Gegenwart, vol. 1, part III (Berlin and Leipzig: Druck und Verlag von B. G. Teubner, 1906), 194–219. Cf. Alexandre Moret, Du Caractère religieux de la royauté pharaonique (Paris: E. Leroux, 1902). The same is true in connection with other rites – e.g., of marriage. Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage, 191, writes: “Ils doivent être pris non pas dans un sens symbolique, mais au sens strictement matériel: la corde, qui attache, l’anneau, le bracelet, la couronne, qui ceignent, etc. ont une action réelle coexercitive.” This view of mythical thinking seems to immediately be contradicted by Fritz Graebner’s thesis, put forward in Das Weltbild der Primitiven. Eine Untersuchung der Urformen weltanschaulichen Denkens bei Naturvölkern (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1924): for mythical thinking, “the attributes of a particular object, its effects and relations to other objects enter consciousness with greater force . . . than its substance” (23). “In primitive thinking, the attributes play a far greater, the substances a far lesser role than with us” (132). If we consider the concrete examples by which Graebner seeks to support this thesis, we find that the contradiction lies far less in fact than in formulation. For these examples show unmistakably that mythical thinking does not know any sharp difference between substances on the one hand and “attributes,” “relations,” and “forces” on the other but instead condenses everything that is from our standpoint a “mere” attribute or a mere dependent relation into independent things. The critical, scientific view of substance-­concept – according to which, as Kant put it, the “permanence of the real in time” is the schema of the substance and the characteristic by which it is empirically recognized – is indeed alien to mythical thinking, which permits an unlimited “transformation” of substances into one another. This fact, however, should not lead us to conclude with Graebner “that of the two most important categories of human thinking, those of causality and of substance, the former is far more pronounced than the latter in mythical thinking” (24). For as we showed earlier, the distance between what can be called “causality” in the mythical sense and its scientific concept is just as great as the distance between the two concepts of substance. Jakob Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-­Togo (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1911), 12. This transference of the mana, the magical force – which according to mythical intuition is no transference, because by it, the force is preserved in full substantial identity – is excellently illustrated by a Maori tradition. It is reported – in “The Kurahoupo Canoe,” Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2 (1893), 186ff, the quotation from Friedrich R. Lehmann, Mana. Der



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Begriff des “ausserordentlich Wirkungsvollen” bei Südseevölkern (Leipzig: O. Spamer, 1922) 13 – that the Maoris reached their present home in a canoe, known as Kurahoup or Kurahoupo: According to the version communicated by the Maori Te Kahui Kararehe the canoe was wrecked on the coast of Hawaiki, soon after setting out for the new home, through magic inspired by envy of the boat’s special mana-­kura. However, the enemies’ intention of destroying the boat’s mana was thwarted, for the chieftain of the Kurahoupo canoe, Te Moungaroa, who is called the “embodiment of the mana of the Kurahoupo canoe,” reached New Zealand, though in a different canoe. . . . On his arrival Te Moungaroa (in accordance with this theory of embodiment) introduced himself to the other Maori tribes with the words: “I am the Kurahoupo canoe.” 42 Cf. Georg Thilenius, “Kröte und Gebärmutter” in Globus, 87 (1905), 105ff.; Vierkandt, “Die Anfänge der Religion und Zauberei” in Globus, 92 (1907), 45; also Alfred W. Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-­East Australia (London and New York: Macmillan Co., 1904), 380ff. 43 Thus, e.g., the manitou of the Algonquin tribes in North America is characterized as a kind of “mysterious force-­substance” that can manifest itself and penetrate everywhere: A person in a steam bath often makes incisions on their arms and legs in order that the manitou that is awakened in the stone by the heat and dispersed in the steam of the water poured on the stone may enter into their body. (Preuss, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker, 54.) 44 Cf. Richard Karutz, “Der Emanismus,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 45 (1913), 545–611. Cf. Friedrich Lehmann, Mana. Der Begriff des “ausserordentlich Wirkungsvollen” bei Südseevölkern (Leipzig: O. Spamer, 1922), 14, 25, 111.

II THE INDIVIDUAL CATEGORIES OF MYTHICAL THINKING 74

When we compare the empirical-­scientific and the mythical worldviews with one another, it immediately becomes clear that the opposition between them is not in their employing entirely different categories in the consideration and interpretation of the actual. Not the constitution, the quality of these categories, but rather their modality distinguishes myth from empirical-­scientific cognition.1 The modes of connection that they both employ to give the form of unity to the sensible manifold, to imprint a shape [Gestalt] on the diffluent, disclose a thorough­going analogy and correspondence. They are the same general “forms” of intuition and thinking that constitute the unity of consciousness as such and that accordingly constitute the unity of mythical consciousness, as well as the unity of the pure cognitive consciousness. In this respect, it may be said that each of these forms, before taking on its specific logical shape [Gestalt] and imprinting, must pass through a preliminary mythical stage. The image of the cosmos, the image of the world-­space [Weltraum] and of the organization of bodies in the world-­space as the astrological science designed it, underlies the astrological intuition of space and of events in space.



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Before the general theory of motion became pure mechanics, the mathematical presentation of the phenomena of motion [Bewegung], it had sought to answer the question of the “wherefrom” [Woher] of motion [Bewegung], which took it back to the mythical problem of creation, to the problem of the “prime mover” [Beweger]. And no less than the concepts of space and time, the concept of number, before becoming a purely mathematical concept, was also a mythical concept – as a precondition that, if foreign to the primitive-­mythical consciousness, underlies all its further, higher formations. Long before number became a pure unit of measurement, it was revered as a “sacred number,” and an aura of this reverence still attended the inception of systematic mathematics. Thus, taken abstractly, the same types of relation, unity and multiplicity, “co-­ existence” [Miteinander], “togetherness” [Beisammen], and “succession” [Nacheinander] dominate the mythical and the scientific explanations of the world. And yet each of these concepts, as soon as we restore them to the mythical sphere, immediately take on a unique particularity and, as it 75 were, a certain distinctive “tonality.” This tonality, this nuancing of individual concepts within mythical consciousness, seems at first glance to be entirely individual, something that can only be empathized with but that can in no way be recognized and “comprehended.” Nevertheless, this individual is still based on a universal. On closer consideration, as the particular constitution and the particular nature of each individual category are repeated, a determinate type of thinking shows itself. The basic structure of mythical thinking, which manifests itself in the tendency of mythical object consciousness and in the character of its concepts of reality [Realität], substance, and causality, goes further – it also seizes and determines the individual configurations of this thinking and, as it were, imprints its seal on them. Object [Objekt] relation and object [Objekt] determination within pure cognition go back to the basic form of the synthetic judgment: “We say that we cognize the object if we have effected a synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition.”2 The synthetic unity is, however, essentially a systematic unity: its production stands still at no point but progressively seizes upon the whole of experience, to transform it into a single logical coherent interconnection, a totality [Ganze] of “grounds” and “consequences.” In the construction, in the hierarchy of these grounds and

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consequences, each individual appearance, each particular existence and event, is assigned a particular position, by virtue of which it is distinguished from all the others and at the same time related to them. This emerges most clearly in the mathematical framing [Fassung] of the worldview. The particularity of a being or event is designated here in that specific, characteristic, numerical, and quantitative values are assigned to it – however, all these values are connected to one another in definite equations, in functional interconnections, so that they form a lawfully organized series, a fixed “framework” [Gefüge] of exact quantitative determinations. In this sense, modern physics, for example, “comprehends” the totality of events in that it expresses each particular event in its four space-­time coordinates, x1, x2, x3, x4, and traces the alterations of these coordinates back to an ultimate invariant lawfulness. This example shows once again that for scientific thinking, connection and separation do not form two different or entirely opposite basic acts, but rather through one and the same logical process, in which both remain, the sharp keeping asunder of particulars and their combination [Zusammenfassung] into the systematic unity of the whole is carried out. And the deeper reason for this is to be sought in the essential nature of the synthetic judgment itself. For what distinguishes the synthetic judgment from the analytical judgment is that it thinks of the unity that it undertakes not as a conceptual identity but as a unity of differences. Each element [Element] that is posited in it is thus characterized not by the fact that it simply “is in itself” and logically remains in itself but rather by the fact that it is correlative to some “other” element. To bring this relationship to schematic expression, we call the elements [Elemente] of the relation a and b and the relation [Relation] by which they are held together R – so that every such relation shows a threefold organization. Not only do the two basic elements [Elemente] (a and b) contrast clearly and distinctly with one another through the relation into which they enter and by virtue of it, but the form of the relation itself (R) signifies something new and specific as opposed to the contents that are ordered in it. It belongs, so to speak, to another plane of signification than the individual contents themselves; it is not itself a particular content, a particular thing, but a general, purely ideal relationship. Such ideal relations ground what scientific cognition calls the “truth” of appearances: what is understood by this truth is nothing other than the totality of the appearances



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themselves, insofar as they are not taken in their concrete existence but are transposed into the form of an intellectual interconnection, an interconnection that is based to an equal degree and with equal necessity on acts both of logical connection and of logical separation. Myth also strives for a “unity of the world.” and in satisfying this striving, it moves in specific channels prescribed by its spiritual “nature.” Even in the lowest levels of mythical thinking, in which it seems to be wholly subjected to immediate sensible impressions and elementary sensible drives, and even in magical apprehension, which disperses the world into a confused multiplicity of daemonic forces, we find features pointing to a kind of organization [Gliederung], a future “organization” [Organisation] of these forces. And as myth rises to higher formations, as it transforms the daemons into gods, each with its own individuality and history, the more clearly it delimits their essential being and effectiveness over against each other. Just as scientific cognition strives for a hierarchy of laws, a systematic superordination and subordination of grounds and consequences, so too does myth strive for a hierarchy of forces and figures [Gestalten] of the gods. The world becomes progressively transparent in that its parts are assigned to the various gods, in that in particular regions [Bezirk] of existence and human activity are subjected to the guardianship of a particular god. No matter how much the mythical world is woven into a whole, however, this intuitive whole is of a very different character than the conceptual whole in which cognition seeks to hold together reality. There are no ideal forms of relation here that constitute the objective world as a thoroughly and lawfully determined world; rather, here all being melts together into concrete-­pictorial [bildhaft] unities. And this opposition, which is visible in the result, rests ultimately on an opposition in principle. Every individual connection that takes place in mythical thinking bears this character, which comes to complete clarity and visibility only in the whole. If scientific cognition is able to connect elements [Elemente] only by separating them over against each other in one and the same basic critical act, then myth, as it were, rolls up everything it touches together into an undifferentiated unity. The relations it posits are of such a nature that the members that enter into them not only enter into a reciprocal ideal relationship but also become positively identical with one another, become one and the same thing. These relations in a mythical sense only

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ever “touch” [berührt] one another – whether this contact [Berührung] is understood as a spatial or temporal togetherness or as a similarity, however remote, or as belonging to the same “class” or “species” – have fundamentally ceased to be many and diverse: it has acquired a substantial unity of being [Wesen]. This intuition clearly emerges even at the lowest stages of myth. Concerning the basic tendency of the magical view of the world Preuss has written, for example: It is as if a single object [Objekt] cannot be regarded as separate once it has aroused magical interest but always bears within it the belongingness [Zugehörigkeit] to other objects [Objekte] with which it is identified, so that its outward appearance forms only a kind of veil, a mask.3

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Along this line, mythical thinking shows it­self to be “concrete” thinking in the literal sense of the word: whatever it seizes undergoes a distinctive concretion and grows together. If scientific cognition seeks an amalgamation of clearly separated elements [Elemente], then mythical intuition allows whatever it connects to ultimately fall together [zusammenfallen: coincide]. In place of a unity of connection – as a synthetic unity, thus as a unity of differences – we have a tangible unitary-­sameness [Einerleiheit] of coincidence. And this becomes comprehensible if we take into account that in the mythical view, there is fundamentally only one dimension of relation, only one single “plane of being.” In cognizing, the pure relational concept enters, as it were, between the elements [Elemente] that it connects together. For it is itself not of the same world as these elements [Ele­ mente] – it has no tangible existence [Existenz] comparable to theirs, but only an ideal signification. The history of philosophy and the history of science show how the first consciousness of this exceptional position of pure relational concepts [Relationsbegriffe] grounded a new epoch in scientific spirit. The first strictly logical characterization of these concepts stressed this opposition as the decisive element: the pure “forms” of intuition and of thinking were designated as a “not-­being,” a μὴ ὄν, in order to distinguish them from the mode of existence [Existenz] pertaining to things, to sensible phenomena. For myth, however, there is no such not-­ being that indirectly [mittelbar] grounds being, that indirectly grounds the



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“truth” of the appearance: it knows only immediate existents [Daseiende] and the immediately effective. The relations [Relationen] that it posits are therefore not intellectual bonds in which everything that enters into them are at once separated and connected but rather a kind of glue that is able to somehow fasten the most dissimilar things together. This distinctive law of the concrescence or coincidence of the members of a relation [Relation] in mythical thinking can be followed through all its individual categories. If we begin with the category of quantity, it has already been shown that mythical thinking does not posit a sharp dividing line between the whole and its parts, that the part not only represents [vertritt] the whole but positively is the whole. For the basic scientific insight, which takes quantity as a synthetic form of relation, the magnitude is the one in many: i.e., unity and multiplicity form equally necessary, strictly correlative elements [Momente] in it. The connection of elements [Elemente] into a “whole” assumes [voraussetzen: pre-­posits] their sharp separations, their differentiation as elements [Elemente]. Thus, number is defined by the Pythagoreans as that which brings all things into harmony within the soul and what thus lends them corporeality and separates the relationships of delimited and unlimited things each for itself. And precisely on this separation rest the necessity as well as the possibility of all harmony: the like [Gleich] and related needed no harmony, but unlike [Ungleich] and unrelated and unequally allocated are necessarily fastened together by such a harmony, through which they are able to hold together the world order.4

Instead of such a harmony, which is the “arrangement of mixed things and the correct agreement of diversity,”5 mythical thinking knows only the principle of one-­and-­the-­sameness [Einerleiheit] of the part with the whole. The whole is the part, in the sense that it enters into it with its whole mythical-­substantial essential being, that is almost sensibly and materially “set” into it. The whole person is contained in their hair, their nail cuttings, their clothes, their footprints. Every trace that the person leaves behind them is effectively a real part of them, which can react on them as a whole and endanger them as a whole.6 And the same mythical

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law of “participation” that holds for real relationships prevails for purely ideal relationships in our sense. Similarly, the genus, in its relation to the species or individuals that it comprises, is not the relationship that logically determines the particular as something general but is immediately present, living, and acting in this particular. Here, we have no mere intellectual subordination but an actual subjugation of the individual to its generic “concept.” The structure of the totemic worldview, for example, can scarcely be comprehended except through this essential feature of mythical thinking. For in the totemic classification of people [Menschen] and the totality [Gesamtheit] of the world, there is no mere coordination between the classes of people [Menschen] and things, on the one hand, and certain classes of animals and plants, on the other; rather, the individual is thought of here as dependent on, even identical with, their totemic ancestor. According to Karl von den Steinen, the Trumais of Northern Brazil say, for example, that they are aquatic animals, whereas the Bororos call themselves red parrots.7 For mythical thinking does not even know that relationship that we call a relationship of logical subsumption, the relationship of “exemplars” to its species or genus, but always configures an objective effective relationship and thus – since in mythical thinking only “like” [Gleich] can act on “like” [Gleich] – an objective relationship of a likeness [sachliches Gleichheitsverhältnis]. The same tendency becomes still more evident if we consider it from the standpoint of quality rather than quantity – i.e. when, if instead of the relation between the “whole” and its “parts,” we consider the relation between the “thing” and its “properties.” Once again, we observe here the same distinctive coincidence of the members of the relation: for mythical thinking, the property expresses and contains a determination not so much “in” the thing but as the totality [Gesamtheit] of the thing itself seen only from a certain angle. For scientific cognition, the reciprocal determination that is created in it also rests on an opposition that in this determination is reconciled but not effaced. For the subject, the “substance” in which properties “inhere” is not itself immediately comparable with any property. It cannot be apprehended and demonstrated as something concrete but rather opposes each particular property as well as the totality [Gesamtheit] of properties as something “other,” something independent. Here “accidents” are not tangibly real “pieces” of the



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substance – rather, the substance forms the ideal center and mediation through which they are related to one another and through which they are united with one another. For myth, however, the unity it creates is here again immediately absorbed into sheer one-­and-­the-­sameness [Einerleiheit]. For myth, which moves all actuality together within the same plane, one and the same substance does not “have” different properties; rather, each particularization as such is already substance: i.e., it can be apprehended in no other way than in an immediate concretion, in a direct reification. We have already seen how all mere states and properties, all activities and all relations, undergo this reification.8 The distinctive principle of thinking 81 on which it is based, however, emerges far more sharply than at the primitive stages of the mythical worldview, where, in the concept, it is already in an alliance with the basic principle of scientific thinking and penetrates it – where in communion with this principle, it creates a kind of hybrid being [Wesen]: a semi-­mythical “science” of nature. Just as the particular nature of the mythical concept of causality can perhaps be most clearly illustrated by the construction of astrology,9 so too is the particular tendency of the mythical concept of property most evident in the structure of alchemy. The kinship between alchemy and astrology, which can be traced through their whole history, finds here its systematic explanation:10 this explanation is based on both being merely different manifestations [Äußerungen] of the same thought-­ form, of mythical-­ substantial identity-­thinking. For here, all the common features of properties, all the similarities in the sensible appearance of different things or in their mode of effect, are ultimately explained by the supposition that one and the same tangible cause is in some way “contained” in them. In this sense, for example, alchemy looks on particular bodies as complexes of simple basic qualities from which they emerge through mere aggregation. Each property constitutes for it a determinate elementary thing, and from the sum of these elementary things, the world of composites, the empirical world of bodies, is constructed. Anyone familiar with the mixture of these elementary things consequently knows the secret of their transformations and is therefore lord over them, because they not only understand these transformations but also understand that their own self-­activity is able to produce them. Thus, the alchemist can obtain the “philosopher’s stone” from common quicksilver by first extracting

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the water, i.e. that element of mobility and fluidity that detracts from the true perfection of the quicksilver. The next task consists of “fixing” the body thus obtained, i.e. to free it from its volatility by removing an airy element that it still contains. In the course of its history, alchemy developed this addition and subtraction of properties into a highly ingenious and intricate system. Even in these extreme refinements and sublimations, however, we can still clearly discern the mythical root of the whole process. Every operation of alchemy, regardless of its individual type, is grounded in the originary thought [Urgedanke] of the transferability and tangible detachability of properties and states – the same thought is also manifested in a more naïve and primitive stage, for example, in the view of the “scapegoat” and the like.11 Every particular state [Beschaffenheit] that possesses matter, every form that it can assume, and every effectiveness that it can exert is hypostatized into a particular substance, an independent being [Wesen für sich].12 Modern science, and in particular modern chemistry in the form given it by Lavoisier, has succeeded in overcoming this semi-­mythical concept of the property of alchemy only through a fundamental transformation and reversal of the whole framing of the question. For modern science, the “property” is not something simple but very much a compound; not something original and elementary but rather something derived; not an absolute but something thoroughly relative. What the sensationalist view calls a “property” of the thing and what it believes to immediately grasp and understand as such is dissolved by critical analysis into a determinate mode of effect, a specific “reaction” that occurs, however, only under specific conditions. Thus, the inflammability of a body no longer implies the presence [Anwesenheit] of a specific substance, of the phlogiston, in it but rather signifies its reaction to oxygen; just as the solubility of a body signifies its reaction to water or an acid, etc. The individual quality no longer appears as something thing-­like but as something thoroughly conditioned – as something that, under causal analysis, dissolves into a framework [Gefüge] of relations. From this, however, there arises at the same time the reverse position: as long as the thought-­form of this analysis has not been developed, “thing” and “attribute” cannot be sharply separated; instead, the categorical spheres of the two concepts must move against each other and ultimately merge into one another.



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The typical opposition between myth and cognition can be shown in the category of “similarity” no less than in the categories of the “whole” and the “part” and the category of the “property.” The organizing of the chaos of sensible impressions, in which certain groups of similarities are emphasized and certain series of similarities are formed, is, again, common to both logical and mythical thinking; without it, myth would not be able to arrive at fixed shapes [Gestalten] any more than logical thought would be able to arrive at fixed concepts. Once again, however, the grasping of the “similarities” of things moves here along different paths. For mythical thinking, any similarity in the sensible appearance suffices to group the formations [Gebilde] in which it appears together into a single mythical “genus.” Every distinguishing mark, however “external,” is nonetheless as good as another – there can be no sharp separation between “inward” and “outward,” “essential” and “nonessential,” precisely because for myth every perceptible equality [Gleichheit] or similarity is an immediate expression of an identity of being [Wesen]. Equality [Gleichheit] or similarity is never a mere concept of relation [Relation] and reflection; rather, it is a real force – absolutely actual because it is absolutely effective. All so-­called “analogy magic” manifests this basic mythical intuition, which, indeed, is more obscured than clarified by the false name of analogy magic. For precisely where we see a mere “analogy,” i.e. a mere relationship – for myth, it is a question of immediate existence and immediate presence [Gegenwart]. There is no mere sign that “points to” something distant and absent in myth, but rather, the thing is present with a part of itself, i.e. in the mythical view, the thing is there as a whole as soon as anything similar to it is given. In the smoke rising from the pipe, mythical consciousness sees neither a mere “symbol” [Sinnbild] nor a mere means for making rain – rather, in it, mythical consciousness has the tangible image of a cloud and in this image the thing [Sache] itself, the longed-­for rain. It is even a general principle of magic that one can gain possession of things by a mere mimetic presentation of them, even without undertaking any “purposeful” action13 in our sense of the term – because, from the standpoint of mythical consciousness, nothing is merely mimesis, merely significative. Cognitive-­consciousness again demonstrates its distinctive twofold logical character in the positing of similarities and in the production of a series of similarities [Ähnlichkeitsreihen]: here too, it proceeds at once

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synthetically and analytically, at once connecting and separating. In similar contents it therefore emphasizes the element of inequality as well as the element of equality; indeed, it gives special emphasis to the element of inequality, since in setting up its genera and species, it is concerned less with bringing out the common element in them than with the principle on which differentiation and gradation within one and the same genus are based. Thus, the interpenetration [Ineinander] of these two tendencies is demonstrable, for example, in the structure of every mathemat­ ical concept of class and genus. When mathematical thinking subsumes the circle and the ellipse, the hyperbola and parabola under one concept, this combination [Zusammenfassung] is not grounded in any immediate similarity of the figures, which from the standpoint of the senses are as dissimilar as possible. In the midst of this heterogeneity, however, thinking now detects a unity of law – a unity of the principle of construction, in which it determines all the formations [Gebilde] as “conic sections.” The expression of this law, the general “formula” for curves of the second order, fully describes their interconnection as well as their inner differences: it shows how through the simple variation of certain magnitudes, one geometrical form transitions into another. This principle, which determines and regulates the transition, is here no less necessary and, in the strict sense, “constitutive” of the content of the concept than the positing of the common factor. Thus, the view of the traditional theory of concepts – which ordinarily attributes the formation of logical classes and genera to “abstraction” and by abstraction understands nothing other than the selection of those features in which a plurality of contents agrees – is just as one-­sided as the view that sees the function of causal thinking solely in terms of the connection, or “association,” of representations. Rather, in both cases, the point is not to combine after the fact merely given and fixed, opposing and delimited contents but rather to perform this logical act of delimitation only in thinking. And, here again, myth shows that this delimitation, this separating of the “individual,” the “species,” and the “genus” in the sense of a logical superordination and subordination, of “abstraction” and “determination” is alien to it. Just as it sees in every part the whole, so too in every “exemplar” of a genus does it immediately see the genus with the totality [Gesamtheit] of its mythical “characteristic traits,” i.e. their mythical forces. Thus, whereas the logical genus separates and unites at the same time – as it



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seeks to let the particular emerge from the unity of an overarching principle – myth rolls up the individuals together into the unity of an image, of a mythical figure [Gestalt]. As soon as the “parts” – the “exemplar,” the “species” – have in this way grown into one another, there is for them no more separation; there is, rather, only a total indifference by virtue of which they continuously transition into one another. Admittedly, however, it might seem as if with this delimitation of the mythical thought-­form and the logical thought-­form, as it has so far been attempted, virtually nothing is gained for an understanding of myth as a whole, for the insight into the originary spiritual stratum from which it arose. For does it not signify a petitio principii? Does it not essentially undertake a false rationalization of myth if we attempt to understand it through its thought-­form? Granted, such a form exists – but does it signify more than an outward shell that surrounds the core of the mythical and conceals it in this enclosure? Does myth not imply a unity of intuition [Anschauung], an intuitive [intuitive] unity that precedes and underlies all the interpretative unfolding that it undergoes in “discursive” thinking? And even this form of intuition [Anschauung] does not yet designate the ultimate stratum from which it rises and from which new life continuously pours into it. For nowhere in myth is it a question of a passive vision, a quiet consideration of things; rather, here, all consideration begins from an act of taking a position, an act of the emotion and will. Insofar as myth thickens into lasting formations [Gebilde], insofar as it sets before us the fixed outlines of an “objective” world of figures [Gestalten], the significance of this world is comprehensible for us only if behind it we feel the dynamic of life-­feeling from which it originally grew. Only where this life-­feeling is aroused from within, only where it is manifested itself in love and hate, in fear and hope, in joy and grief, is there that excitement of the mythical fantasy out of which a determined world of representations grows. From this, however, it seems to follow that any characterization of the mythical thought-­form applies only to something mediated and derived – that it must remain inadequate as long as it does not succeed in going back from the mere thought-­form of myth to its form of intuition and to its distinctive life-­form. That these forms are nowhere separated from one another – that from the most primitive formations [Gebilde] to the highest and purest figures [Gestalten] of the mythical they remain interwoven in

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one another – gives the mythical world its distinctive coherence and its specific imprint. This world also configures and organizes itself according to the basic forms of “pure intuition” – it also unfolds [auseinanderlegen] itself into a unity and multiplicity, into a “togetherness” of objects and into a consequence of events [Ereignissen]. However, the mythical intuition of space, time, and number that thus emerges here remains distinct from the highly characteristic boundaries that signify space, time, and number for theoretical thinking and the theoretical construction of the object-­world. These boundaries can become clear and visible only if we succeed in reducing the mediated divisions that we encounter in mythical thinking as in the thinking of pure cognition to a kind of originary-­division [Ur-­ Teilung] from which they emerge. For myth also presupposes a spiritual “crisis” of this sort – it also takes form only when a separation takes place in the whole of conscious­ ness through which a certain separation penetrates the intuition of the world-­whole [Weltganze], by which a dissection of this whole into different strata of signification is effected. This first separation contains in germ all subsequent separations, and through it, they remain conditioned and dominated. In this separation, if anywhere, we shall find not so much the particular nature of mythical thinking as that of mythical intuiting and the mythical life-­feeling.

ENDNOTES 1 On the concept of “modality,” see Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 27ff. 2 [Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 105.] 3 Konrad T. Preuss, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker (Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914), 13. 4 Philolaus of Tarentum, Fragment 11 in Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Griechisch und Deutsch (6th ed., 3 vols., Berlin: Weidmann, 1951– 52), 75. 5 [Philolaus of Tarentum, Fragment 10.] 6 For examples, see 60ff. 7 Karl von den Steinen, Unter den naturvölkern Zentral-­Brasiliens: Reiseschilderung und Ergebnisse der zweiten Schingú-­Expedition, 1887-­1888 (2nd ed., Berlin: D. Reimer [Ernst Vohsen], 1897), 307. Other characteristic examples of this mythical “law of participation” may be found in Lévy-­Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker, chap. 2.



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8 See 62ff. 9 For more details, see my Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 1 (Leipzig and Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), 29ff. [Ernst Cassirer, “The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 26ff.] 10 For documentation of this fact, see Hermann Kopp, Die Alchemie in Alterer Und Neuerer Zeit (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1886); Edmund O. Von Lippmann, Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchimie (Berlin: J. Springer, 1919). 11 Cf. 66f. 12 For details, cf. Lippmann presentation (especially Entstehung und Ausbreitung der Alchemie, 318ff.) and Marcellin E. Berthelot, Les Origines de l’alchimie (Paris: G. Steinheil, 1885). 13 A wealth of documentation can be found in Frazer, “The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings,” Golden Bough, Vols. 1–2, part I. Cf. also Preuss, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker, 29. See 46ff.

Part Two Myth as Form of Intuition: The Construction and Organization of the Spatiotemporal World in Mythical Consciousness

I THE BASIC OPPOSITION The theoretical construction of the worldview arose at the point where consciousness first performed a clear separation between “semblance” and “truth,” between what is merely “perceived” or “represented” and “true beings” [Seienden], between the “subjective” and the “objective.” The criterion for truth and objectivity employed here is the element of persistence, logical constancy, and logical lawfulness. All the individual contents of consciousness are oriented toward this demand for universal lawfulness and are measured by it. Thus, spheres of being unfold themselves: the relatively transient is divorced from the relatively permanent and the accidental and unique from the universally valid. Certain elements [Elemente] of experience prove necessary and fundamental as the framework that bears the structure of the whole. On the other hand, others are assigned only a dependent and mediated being: they “are,” only insofar as the particular conditions of their appearance is realized, and by virtue of these conditions, they are restricted to a certain ambit, to a certain sector of being. Thus, theoretical thinking proceeds in that it continuously posits certain differences of logical dignity, one might say logical “valency,” in the immediately given. The general criterion that it draws on, however, is the “principle of sufficient reason [Grund],” which is held by it as its ultimate postulate, as its primary requirement of thinking. The

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original, essential tendency, the characteristic “modality” of cognition, is expressed in it. “To cognize” means to advance from the immediacy of sensation and perception to the mediacy of a merely thought “ground” [Grund] – it means to unfold the simple existence of sensible impressions into strata of “grounds” and “consequences.” As we have seen, such a separation and stratification is totally alien to mythical consciousness. This consciousness is and lives in the immediate impression, which it accepts without “measuring” it by something else. The impression is not merely relative but absolute; the impression is not “through” something other and does not depend on another as its condition; rather, it manifests and confirms itself by the simple intensity of its existence: through the irresistible compulsion with which it imposes itself upon consciousness. If thinking opposes, inquires, and questions its “object” with the claims of objectivity and necessity, it contains doubt and requires checks if it turns to itself with its own norms: mythical consciousness knows of no such contrast. It “has” the object only insofar as it is overpowered by it; it does not possess the object by progressively constructing it for itself but is simply possessed by it. The will is not able to comprehend the object in the sense that it encompasses it in thought and arranges it in a complex of grounds and consequences; rather, here there is only the simple emotion [Ergriffenheit] owing to it. However, this very intensity, this immediate forceful power with which the mythical object [Objekt] is there for consciousness, now raises forth from the mere series, which is always uniform and recurs identically. Instead, every object [Objekt] appears spellbound in the schema of a rule, a necessary law, insofar as it seizes and fulfills mythical consciousness as something only akin to itself, as something incomparable and unique. It lives, as it were, in an individual atmosphere; it is something unique that can be comprehended only in its uniqueness, in its immediate here and now. And yet, on the other hand, the contents of mythical consciousness are not simply abandoned to unconnected singularities; rather, there prevails in them also a universal – which, however, is of an entirely different kind and source from the universal of the logical concept. For precisely through their special character, all the contents that belong to mythical consciousness are rejoined into a whole. They form a self-­enclosed realm – they possess a common tonality, by virtue of which



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they are singled out from the series of the everyday and ordinary, from common empirical existence. This feature of isolation [Absonderung], this character of the “uncommon,” is essential to the content of mythical consciousness as such; it can be traced from the lowest to the highest stages, from the magical view of the world, which still understands [verstehen] magic in a purely practical and thus semi-­technical sense, up to the purest expression [Ausprägung] of religion, in which all miracles are ultimately dissolved in the one miracle of religious spirit itself. This distinctive feature of “transcendence” always connects all the contents of mythical and religious consciousness with one another. In their mere existence, and in their immediate constitution, they all contain a revelation which, nevertheless, also retains as such a kind of mystery, and this interpenetration, this revelation, is at once an unveiling and a veiling and imprints the mythical-­religious content with its basic feature, its character of the “sacred.”1 What this basic character implies and signifies for the construction of the mythical world emerges perhaps most clearly if we seek it where it is still encountered in a completely pure, unmixed state, where it has not yet been imbued with other spiritual shadings of signification and value, in particular, with ethical determinations. For the original mythical feeling, the sense and the power of the “sacred” are limited to no special region, to no individual sphere of being, and to no individual sphere of value. Rather, this sense is imprinted on the whole fullness, the immediate concretion and immediate totality of existence and events. There is no sharp boundary spatially dividing the world, as it were, into a “this world” [Diesseits] and a “beyond” [Jenseits], into a merely “empirical” sphere and a “transcendent” one. The isolation [Absonderung] that is performed in consciousness of the sacred is rather purely qualitative. Thus, even the most everyday content of existence can acquire the distinguishing character of the sacred, provided only that it fall under the specific mythical-­religious perspective [Blickrichtung] – provided that, instead of remaining restrained within the habitual ambit of events and effective action, it seizes mythical “interest” from one angle or another and arouses strength in particular. The characteristic trait of the “sacred” is therefore by no means limited from the beginning to certain objects [Objekte] or groups of objects [Objekte] – rather, even the most “indifferent” content can suddenly acquire this

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distinctive trait. It designates a certain ideal relatedness rather than a certain objective constitution. Myth also begins by introducing certain differences [Differenzen] into undistinguished “indifferent” being, by laying it out into diverse circles of significance. It also proves to be form-­bestowing and sense-­bestowing, by interrupting the dreary monotony [Einerlei] and homogeneity of the contents of consciousness – by introducing certain differences of the “valence of value” [Wertigkeit] into this dreary monotony. All being and all events are projected into the basic opposition of the “sacred” and the “profane,” and in this very projection, they acquire a new content [Gehalt] – one that they do not simply “have” from the beginning but that they acquire in this form of contemplation, in this, as it were, mythical “illumination.” These general considerations throw considerable light on certain basic phenomena of mythical thinking, on certain differences and stratifications that have been disclosed in the last decades: in particular, by the purely empirical research into myth and by comparative mythology. Ever since Codrington, in his well-­known work on the Melanesians, pointed to the “mana” as a core concept of primitive-­mythical thinking, the problems grouped around this concept have attracted increasing interest among ethnologists, ethnopsychologists, and sociologists. First, it became evident that from the standpoint of the pure content, the representation expressed in the “mana” of the Melanesians and Polynesians has its exact correlate in other mythical concepts distributed over the whole earth in diverse variants. The manitou of the Algonquin tribes of North America, the orenda of the Iroquois, and the wafynda of the Sioux all disclose such consistent and striking parallels with the mana representation that, indeed, a genuine “elementary thought” of myth seemed to have been seized here.2 The phenomenology of mythical thinking alone would seem to indicate that in this representation, it is not so much the mere content of mythical consciousness but rather its typical form, perhaps indeed its most original form, that exhibits itself. Thus, various researchers have gone so far as to treat the mana representation almost as a category of mythical-­ religious thinking, even as “the” originary-­category of religion.3 This representation has been associated with the closely related, negative tendency of the corresponding representation of “taboo” – and with



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these two polar concepts, so to speak, an originary stratum of mythical-­ religious consciousness would seem to have been laid bare. The mana-­ taboo formula was looked on as a “minimum definition of religion,” as one of its primary constitutive conditions.4 However, the more the framework [Rahmen] of the mana representation spanned, the more difficult it was at the same time to establish its sharp and clear determination. The attempts to grasp its sense by situating it among the various hypotheses concerning the “origin” of mythical thinking proved more and more inadequate. Codrington took the mana essentially as a “spiritual power,”5 which he further qualified as a magical-­supernatural power.6 This attempt to reduce the mana concept ultimately to the soul-­concept and thus to interpret and illuminate it through the presuppositions of animism did not, however, stand up under criticism. The more closely scholars defined the signification of the word “mana” and the content of its representation, the more evident it became that both belonged to another stratum, to a “pre-­animistic” tendency of mythical thinking. The use of the word mana seemed to have its proper place in a sphere precisely where there can be no discussion of a highly developed concept of the soul or personality, or at least where there is no clear dividing line between physical and psychic, between spiritual-­ personal being and impersonal being.7 And this usage is preserved in a distinctive indifference as compared with other oppositions of either developed logical or mythical thinking. Thus, in particular, nowhere in it is there a sharp difference between the representation of stuff and that of force drawn. Neither the “substantial” theory that takes the mana sim- 92 ply as a magical substance nor the “dynamistic” theory that places the emphasis on the concept of power, on ability and effectuating, seems to arrive at the proper significance of the concept of mana. This significance lies, rather, in its distinctive “fluidity” – in its flowing and transitioning into one another of determinations that seem from our view to be clearly separated. Even here, where what is discussed is the semblance of “spiritual” being and “spiritual” forces, both are still permeated with substantial representations. At this stage, the “spirits” are “of a certain indeterminate type, possessing no difference between natural and supernatural, real and ideal, between persons and other existences and essential beings.”8 Thus, what seems to remain as the only relatively solid core of the mana

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representation is in general simply the impression of the extraordinary, the in-­habitual, the “uncommon.” The essential is not what bears this determination but precisely this determination, this character of the uncommon. The mana representation, like its negatively corresponding taboo representation, opposes the layer of everyday existence [alltäglichen Daseins] and the event of running, in the customary beaten path, along another layer that clearly stands out from it. Here, other measures are valid: here, other possibilities, other forces and modes of efficacy than those manifested in the everyday common course of things. At the same time, however, this realm is filled with constant threats, with unknown dangers that surround humans on all sides. Thus, it is clear that the contents of the mana representation as well as the taboo representation can never be fully apprehended through a pure examination of their objects. The mana and taboo representations do not serve the designation of certain classes of objects, but to a certain degree, they constitute in them the distinctive accent that magical-­mythical consciousness places on objects. This accent divides the whole of being and events into a mythically significant and mythically irrelevant sphere, into what arouses mythical interest and what leaves it relatively indifferent. Thus, there is neither more nor less justification for regarding the taboo-­ mana-­formula as the “ground” of myth and religion than for regarding interjections as the ground of language. Indeed, in both concepts, it is a question of the primary interjections, as it were, of mythical consciousness. They still have no independent function of signification and presentation; they are rather like simple sounds of the arousal of mythical emotion [Affekt].9 They designate that amazement, that θαυμάζειν [wondering] with which myth as well as scientific cognition and “philosophy” begin. When sheer animal terror becomes wonder moving in a twofold direction, composed of opposite tendencies [Züge] – fear and hope, awe and admiration – when sensible agitation thus seeks for the first time an outlet and an expression, the human stands on the threshold of a new spirituality. This properly human spirituality shows itself, as it were, reflected in the thought of the “sacred.” For the sacred always appears at once as the distant and the near, as the familiar and the protective as well as absolutely inaccessible, as the mysterium tremendum [fearful mystery] and the mysterium fascinosum [fascinating mystery].10 The consequence of this



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twofold character is that while certainly isolating itself from the empirical “profane” existence, the sacred does not expel it per se but progressively permeates it: even in its opposition, it still retains the ability for the config­ uration of the oppositions itself. The general concept of “taboo” and the concrete abundance of taboo regulations mark the first steps on the way to this configuration. In a purely negative sense, they constitute the first limitation that the will and the immediate sensible impulse impose on themselves; this negative limit, however, already contains the germs and the first precondition for a positive positing of boundaries, a positive bestowing of form. The direction in which this primary mythical bestowing of form moves, however, remains sharply separated from other basic directions 94 of spiritual consciousness. There are differences proper to mythical “valence,” just as there are similar original differences [Differenzen] of logical or ethical valence of value [Wertigkeit]. The original mythical concept of “holiness” coincides so little with that of ethical “purity” that both can find themselves opposed to each other in a remarkable opposition, in a distinctive tension. That which is hallowed in a mythical and religious sense has thereby become forbidden, an object of awe – hence “unclean.” This ambiguity [Doppelsinn], this distinctive “ambivalence” of significations, is still expressed in the Latin sacer and the Greek ἅγιος [devoted to the gods] and ἅςεσθαι [cursed] – for these terms designate both the holy and the accursed – the forbidden – but, in both cases, something “consecrated” and set apart.11 It is now important, however, to track how this basic tendency of mythical consciousness, how, as it were, this originary-­division [Ur-­ Teilung] between the sacred and profane, the consecrated and the unconsecrated, does not simply remain limited to particular, eminently “primitive” formations but asserts itself and establishes itself in even its highest shapes [Gestalten]. It is as though everything that myth seizes were drawn into this separation – as if, so to speak, it pervaded and impregnated the whole of the world [das Ganze der Welt], insofar as it constituted itself as a mythically formed whole. All the derived and mediated forms of the mythical worldview, regardless of their complexity and spiritual elevation, remain in some part conditioned by this primary division. The entire wealth and dynamism of the mythical life-­forms are based on the full affect of the “accentuation” of existence, which is expressed in

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the concept of the sacred, and on its progressively seizing new domains and contents of consciousness. When we study this progression, an unmistakable analogy between the construction of the mythical object [Objekt] world and the construction of the empirical object [Objekt] world becomes clear. In both, it is a question of overcoming the isolation of the immediately given – to comprehend how all individuals and particulars are “woven into a whole.” The basic forms of space and time, to which number is added as a third, form in both cases the concrete expressions of this “wholeness,” its intuitive schemata, in which the elements that appear separate in space and time, the element of “togetherness” and that of “succession,” permeate each other. Every interconnection, which is gradually acquired by the contents of mythical consciousness as well as those of empirical consciousness, is accessible only in and through these forms of space, time, and number. However, the basic separation between logical and mythical “synthesis” manifests itself once again in the mode of this combination [Zusammenfassung]. In empirical cognition, the intuitive construction of experienced reality is mediately determined and guided by the general goal that it sets itself – by its theoretical concept of truth and reality. The configuration of the concepts of space, time, and number takes place here according to the general logical ideal toward which pure cognition aims more and more determinately and consciously. Space, time, and number stand out as the intellectual media by virtue of which a mere “aggregate” of perceptions is gradually formed into a “system” of experience. The representations of order in togetherness, of order in succession, and of a stable numerical, quantitative order of all empirical contents form the presupposition required for all these contents to be combined [zusammen­ fassen] into a lawfulness, into a causal order of the world. In this respect, space, time, and number are, for theoretical cognition, nothing other than the vehicles of the “principle of sufficient reason” [Grund]. They form the basic constants [Grundkonstanten] to which all variables are referred; they are the universal systems of positions in which every individual must in some way be fitted in and assigned its fixed “place” [Platz] and thus its unambiguous determinacy guaranteed. Thus, in the progress of theoretical cognition, the purely intuitive features of space, time, and number recede more and more into the background. They appear less as the concrete contents of consciousness than as its universal forms of ordering.



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Leibniz, the logician and philosopher of the “principle of sufficient reason” [Grund], first expressed this relationship in full clarity in that he determined space as the ideal condition of “order in togetherness” and time as the ideal condition of “order in succession,” and apprehended them, on the basis of this purely ideal character, not as contents of being but as “eternal truths.” And for Kant, too, the true grounding, the “transcendental deduction” of space, time, and number consists in showing them to be pure principles of mathematical cognition, hence mediately of all empirical cognition. As the conditions of possibility of experience, they are at the same time the conditions of possibility of the objects of experience. The space of pure geometry, the number of pure arithmetic, and the time of pure mechanics are, in a sense, the originary gestalts of theoretical consciousness; they form the intellectual “schemata” by virtue of which the mediation between the sensible-­individual and the general lawfulness of thinking, of the pure understanding is established. Mythical thinking also reveals the same process of “schematization” – here too, the more it progresses, the more it endeavors to integrate [ein­ fügen] all existence into a common spatial order, all events into a common order of time and fate. This striving finds its completion, its highest fulfillment, which is possible at all within the ambit of myth, in the construction of the worldview of astrology; its true root, however, goes deeper, extending down into the ultimate basic and originary stratum of mythical consciousness. Even in the progress of linguistic concept formation, it clearly emerges how the sharp and clear elaboration of spatial determinations in general form here the precondition for the designation of general-­intellectual determinations. We have seen how the simplest spatial terms of language, the designations for here and there, for near and distant, contain a fruitful germ, which with the progress of language unfolds into a surprising wealth of linguistic-­intellectual formations. Through the mediation of spatial terms, the two ends of all language formation seem, in a sense, to be truly connected to one another for the first time – a purely spiritual element seems to be disclosed in a sensible expression of language just as a sensible element seems to be disclosed in a spiritual expression of language.12 Space, and moreover time, proves to be such a medium of spiritualization in the mythical representation sphere. The first obvious and clear organizations that this representation

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sphere undergoes are linked to spatiotemporal differences. Here, however, it is not, as in theoretical consciousness, a question of obtaining certain constant originary measures by virtue of which variable events can be explained and grounded. This difference is replaced by another, which is conditioned and postulated by the distinctive “perspective” of the mythical. Mythical consciousness arrives at an organizing of space and time not by fixing the fluctuating and hovering of sensible appearances into durable thoughts but rather by introducing its specific opposition – the opposition of the “sacred” and “profane” – into spatial and temporal being. This basic and originary accent of mythical consciousness also dominates every particular division and connection within the whole of space and time. At the most primitive level of mythical consciousness, “power” and “holiness” still appear as a sort of a thing [Ding]: a sensible-­physical something that adheres to a certain person or thing [Sache] as their bearer. In a further progress, however, this character of holiness gradually transitions from individual persons or things [Sachen] to other, in our sense, purely ideal determinations. Now, there are holy places and sites, holy landmarks and periods [Termini und Zeiten], and eventually sacred numbers in which this character especially appears. And thus, the opposition between the sacred and profane is no longer viewed as a particular but as a truly universal opposition. Because all existence is rigidly secured in the form of space and all events in the rhythm and periodicity of time, every determination that adheres to a certain spatiotemporal position is immediately transferred to the content that is given in it, whereas the particular character of the content gives a distinguishing character to the position in which it is situated. By virtue of this reciprocal determination, all being and all events are gradually spun into a network of the subtlest mythical relations. Just as space, time, and number can be shown from the standpoint of theoretical cognition to be the basic means and stages [Stufen] in the process of objectivization, so too do they constitute the three essential phases in the process of mythical “apperception.” Here, a perspective is opened on a specific morphology [Formenlehre] of myth that complements our considerations into the general thought-­form on which it is based and fills it with concrete content [Gehalt].



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ENDNOTES 1 On the concept of the sacred as an originary religious category, cf. Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (Breslau: Trewendt und Granier, 1917). 2 The extensive literature on the concept of mana (up to 1920) has been carefully compiled and critically discussed in Friedrich Lehmann (see 72). On the manitou of the Algonquins, cf. William Jones, “The Algonkin Manitou,” Journal of American Folklore, 18 (1905), 183–190; on the orenda of the Iroquois, see John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, “Orenda and a Definition of Religion,” American Anthropologist, n.s., 4 (1902), 33–46; on the Wakanda, see William John McGee, “The Siouan Indians. A Preliminary Sketch,” Fifteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, 1893–94 (Washington, 1897), 157– 204. See also Karl Beth, Religion und magie bei den naturvölkern; ein religions-­ geschichtlicher beitrag zur frage nach den anfängen der religion (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1914), 211ff. 3 The concept of mana is, e.g., treated as a basic category of mythical thinking by Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie,” Année sociologique, 7 (1902–3), 1–146. 4 Cf. in particular Robert R. Marett, “The Taboo-­mana Formula as a Minimum Definition of Religion,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 12 (1909), 186–194; idem, “The Conception of Mana,” in Threshold of Religion (2nd ed., London: Methuen, 1914), 99ff. 5 [Originally in English.] 6 [“supernatural power” originally in English.] 7 Thus, e.g., mana can be ascribed to any physical thing whatsoever, even if it is not regarded as the seat of a “spirit” or daemon, provided that the thing is distinguished by any special characteristic trait, such as its size, from the sphere of the customary and “common.” On the other hand, all psychic [Seelisch] reality is by no means held to be endowed with mana. The souls [Seelen] of the dead usually have no mana: only the souls of those who were gifted with mana in their lifetime – who were distinguished by special powers that make them sought after or feared after their death. Cf. Robert H. Codrington, The Melanesians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), 253. 8 Alfred E. Crawley, The Idea of the Soul (London: A. and C. Black, 1909); quoted from Edvard Lehmann, Die Anfänge der Religion und die Religionen der primitiven Völker (Die Kultur der Gegenwart), vol. 1, part III (2nd ed., Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 15. 9 Particularly regarding the Algonquin manitou, the term is used wherever the imagination is aroused by something new and unusual. If, e.g., a fisherman catches a new variety of fish, the term “manitou” is immediately applied to it. Cf. Robert Ranulph Marett, “Pre-­Animistic Religion,” in Threshold of Religion (3rd ed., London: Methuen & Co., 1924), 31. Cf. also Nathan Söderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens. Untersuchungen über die Anfänge der Religion

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(Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1916), 95ff. The words “wakan” and “wakanda” among the Sioux also seem to go back etymologically to interjections of astonishment. See Daniel G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (London and New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 61. 10 This twofold character of the “sacred” has been particularly stressed by Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige. Cf. 89, n. 1. 11 Cf. Nathan Söderblom, “Holiness (General and Primitive)” in Hastings’ Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 6, 376ff. For the Greek ἅγιος [saint] cf. Eduard Williger, Hagios, Untersuchungen zur Terminology des Heiligen in den hellenisch-­ hellenistischen Religionen (Giessen: Verlag von Alfred Töpelmann, 1922). 12 See for more details, see Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 136ff.

II THE BASIC FEATURES OF A MORPHOLOGY OF MYTH: SPACE, TIME, AND NUMBER 1.  THE ORGANIZATION OF SPACE IN MYTHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS To provisionally describe the particular nature of the mythical intuition of space and provide a general outline, we can begin from the observation that mythical space occupies a distinctive middle position between the space of sense perception and the space of pure cognition, that is, the space of geometrical intuition. The space of perception – the space of vision and touch – does not coincide with the space of pure mathematics, but rather there consists a thoroughgoing divergence between the two. The determinations of mathematical space do not follow simply from those of sensible space that are not easily read or even derived in an unbroken sequence of thinking; rather, they require a distinctive reversal of perspective, a sublation of what seems immediately given in sensible intuition, in order to advance to the “thought space” of pure mathematics. In particular, a comparison between “physiological” space and the “metric” space on which Euclidean geometry bases its constructions shows this antithetical

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relationship in every detail. What is posited in the one seems negated and reversed in the other. Euclidean space is indicated by the three basic attributes of continuity, infinity, and thoroughgoing uniformity. All these elements, however, contradict the character of sensible perception. Perception does not know the concept of infinity; rather, it is bound from the outset to certain boundaries of the faculty of perception and thus to a certain delimited domain of the spatial. And the homogeneity of perceptual space can no more be spoken of than can its infinity. Ultimately, the homogeneity of geometric space is based on the fact that all its elements [Elemente], the “points,” which are affiliated in it, are nothing more than the simple determinations of location [Lage], which possess, however, no independent content of their own beyond this relation [Relation], this “location” [Lage] in which they find themselves in relation to each other. Their being merges in their reciprocal relationship: it is a purely functional and not a substantial being. Because, in general, these points are basically devoid of all content, because they have become mere expressions of ideal relations, there can be no question of a diversity in content. Their homogeneity implies nothing other than this similarity of their structure, which is grounded in their common logical task, their ideal determination and signification. Homogeneous space is therefore never a given but a constructed and produced space – and indeed, the geometrical concept of homogeneity can be expressed by the postulate that the same constructions can be carried out from every point in space to every place and in all directions.1 Nowhere in the space of immediate perception can this postulate be fulfilled. There is here no strict homogeneity of place and direction; rather, each place has its own mode and its own value. Visual space and tactile space are both “anisotropic” and “unhomogeneous” in contrast to the metric space of Euclidean geometry: “the main directions of organization – before-­behind, above-­below, right-­left – are dissimilar in both physiological spaces.”2 If we begin from this standard of comparison, there would seem to be little doubt that mythical space is closely related to the space of perception and strictly opposed, on the other hand, to the thought space of geometry. Both mythical space as well as perceptive space are thoroughly concrete formations [Gebilde] of consciousness. The separation here between “position” and “content” that underlies the construction of the “pure” space of geometry is neither complete nor applicable. Position is nothing



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that can be detached from the content, that can be contrasted as an element [Element] with its own signification; rather, it “is” only as long as it is filled with a certain individual-­sensible or intuitive content. Thus, in sensible space as in mythical space, no “here” and “there” is a mere here and there, a mere term for a general relation that can recur identically in the most diverse contents; rather, every point, every element [Element] possesses here, as it were, a “tonality” of its own. A particular distinguishing character adheres to it that cannot be described in more general concepts, which, however, is immediately lived as such. This characteristic difference also adheres to the individual directions in space as it does to individual places in space. We have seen that “physiological” space differs from “metric” space in that here right and left, before and behind, above and below are not interchangeable, since movement in any of these directions involves specific organic sensations – thus, mythical feeling values are, as it were, connected with each of these directions. In contrast to the homogeneity that prevails in the conceptual space of geometry, every place and direction in the mythical intuition of space is endowed, as it were, with a particular accent – and this accent always goes back to the actual basic mythical accent, to the separation of the profane and the sacred. The boundaries that mythical consciousness posits and through which it spatially and intellectually organizes the world are not, as in geometry, based on the discovery of a realm of fixed gestalts amid the flux of sensible impressions but instead are delimited based on the human’s immediate position [Stellung] vis-­à-­vis reality, as a willer and actor – on the fact that in confronting this reality, the human sets up certain barriers to which its feeling and its will attach themselves. The primary spatial difference, which in the more complex mythical formations is only ever repeated a new and increasingly sublimated, is this difference between two precincts of being: an everyday, generally accessible precinct and another that, as the sacred precinct, appears to be raised out of its surroundings, separated off, enclosed, and guarded against them. Although the mythical intuition of space distinguishes itself from the “abstract” space of pure cognition through this foundation of individual feeling on which it rests and from which it seems inseparable, even here, however, a general tendency and a general function are manifested. In the whole of the mythical view of the world, space carries out an analogous performance [Leistung], not in terms of identical content but

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in terms of form, to the one undertaken in geometrical space in the construction of the empirical, objective “nature.” It also operates [wirken] as a schema through whose application and mediation the most diverse elements [Elemente], which at first sight seem utterly incommensurate, can be brought into a relation with one another. The progress of “objective” cognition is essentially based on the fact that all the merely sensible differences [Unterschiede] that are provided by immediate sensation are ultimately reduced to pure differences [Unterschiede] of space and magnitude and representatively depicted in them. Thus, the mythical view of the world also knows of a similar presentation, a “picturing” [Abbildung] of the in itself non-­spatial in space. To a certain extent, every qualitative difference [Differenz] here possesses an aspect according to which it likewise appears as spatial – while every spatial difference [Differenz] always is and remains a qualitative difference [Differenz]. Between the two domains, there is a kind of exchange, a perpetual transition from one to the other. The consideration of language has already demonstrated the form of this transition: it has shown us that a wealth of relations of the most diverse kind, particularly qualitative and modal relations, serve language only indirectly, by way of spatial determinations. The simple spatial terms are thus a kind of spiritual originary-­ terms [Urworten]. The objective world became intelligible and transparent for language only to the degree to which language was able to return it to space, to translate, as it were, back into space.3 And a similar translation, a similar transference of perceived and felt qualities into spatial images and intuitions, also constantly occurs in mythical thinking. Here too, that distinctive “schematism” of space operates by virtue of which space is able to adapt the most dissimilar elements and so able to render them mutually comparable and, in some way, “similar.” The further back we go in the series of specifically mythical configurations and the closer we come to the truly authentic mythical originary-­configurations and originary-­organizations, the more distinct this relationship seems to become. In the totemism sphere of intuition, we see an originary-­organization of this sort, a first primitive separation and division of all existence into rigidly determined classes and groups. Not only do human beings, individuals, and groups appear here sharply delimited from one another by their membership in a specific totem, but the whole world is grasped and permeated by this



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form of classification [Einteilung]. Each thing, each occurrence is “under­ stood” in that it joined [eingereiht] to the system of totemic classes, in that it is endowed with some characteristic totemic “emblem” [Abzeichen]. And, as everywhere in all mythical thinking, this emblem is no mere sign [Zeichen] but rather the expression of the interconnections that are intended and felt as thoroughly real. However, the entire vast complex that results from this, the integration of all that is individual and social, of all spiritual and physical-­cosmic being, into the most multifarious relations of totemic kinship, becomes relatively transparent as soon as mythical thinking begins to give it a spatial expression. This very elaborate division of classes now seems to break down according to the main directions and dividing lines of space and thus acquires intuitive clarity. In, for example, the “mythical-­sociological worldview” of the Zunis – which Cushing has described in detail – the sevenfold form of the totemic organization, which runs through the whole world, is above all reflected in the apprehension of space. The whole of space is divided into seven regions: north and south, east and west, the upper and the lower world, and finally the middle or center of the world, and every being occupies its unequivocal position within this general classification, taking up a fixed prescribed place [Platz] within it. The elements [Elemente] of nature, the corporal stuff, as well as the individual phases of events, are separated according to the point of view of this division. To the north belongs air, to the south fire, to the east earth, to the west water; the north is the home of winter, the south of summer, the east of autumn, the west of spring, etc. And the various human status groups, occupations, and performances enter into the same basic schema: war and warriors belong to the north, the hunt and the hunter to the west, medicine and agriculture to the south, magic and religion to the east. Strange and “peculiar” as these organizations may appear at first glance, it is nevertheless obvious that they did not arise by chance but are the expression of a specific, typical fundamental intuition. For the Jorubas, who like the Zunis are totemistically organized, this organization is likewise characteristically expressed in the apprehension of space. Here too, a specific color, a specific day of the five-­day week, and a specific element [Element] is assigned to each region in space; here too, the sequence of prayers, the order in which the cult implements are employed, and the seasonal sacrifices performed – in short, the whole

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sacral system – goes back to certain basic spatial differences, particularly the basic difference between “right” and “left.” Similarly, the construction of their city and its demarcation into precincts is, one might say, nothing more than a spatial projection of their general totemic view.4 In Chinese thought, we again encounter in another form, but developed with the greatest subtlety and precision, the view that all qualitative differences [Differenzen] and oppositions possess some sort of spatial “correspondence.” All being and all events are in some way also distributed here among the diverse cardinal points. Each of them possesses a certain color, a certain element [Element], a certain season, and a certain sign of the zodiac, a certain organ of the human lived body, a certain basic soulish [seelisch] affection, etc., which belong in and to it [an-­und zugehören] specifically. And through this common relation to a certain position in space, the most heterogeneous elements enter, as it were, into contact with one another. All species and genera of being have their “home” somewhere in space, and their absolute mutual strangeness is thereby sublated: local [örtlich] “mediation” leads to spiritual mediation between them, to a merging of all differences [Differenzen] in a great whole, into a mythical ground plan of the world.5 Thus, the universality of spatial intuition becomes once again a vehicle for the “universalism” of the view of the world. Here too, however, myth distinguishes itself from cognition by the form of the “whole” toward which it strives. The whole of the scientific cosmos is a whole of laws, i.e. of relations and functions. Even “the” space and “the” time, though at first taken as substances, as things existing in themselves, are, as scientific thinking develops, more and more recognized as an ideal ensemble, as a system of relations. Their “objective” being signifies nothing other than that they first render empirical intuition possible, that as their principles they “underlie” empirical intuition. And all being, every spatial and temporal mode of appearance, is ultimately based on this function of the foundation [Grundlegung]. The intuition of pure geometric space is also governed by the law formulated in the “principle of sufficient reason” [Grund]. It serves as an instrument and organ for an explanation of the world that consists in nothing other than the fact that a merely sensible content is poured into a spatial form in which it is, as it were, reshaped [umprägen] and through which it is comprehended in accordance with the generally valid laws of geometry. Thus, space as a single ideal factor



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integrates [fügen] into the general task of cognition, and this systematic position also determines its own character. In the space of pure cognition, the relation of the spatial whole to the spatial part is comprehended not tangibly but basically in purely functional terms: the whole of space is not assembled “together” out of elements [Elemente] but is constructed from them as constitutive conditions. The line is “generated” from the point, the surface from the line, the body from the surface, in that thought lets one formation [Gebilde] emerge from another in accordance with a determinate law. The complex spatial shapes [Gestalten] are comprehended in their “genetic definition,” which expresses the manner and the rule of their production. Accordingly, here an understanding of the spatial whole requires a return to the producing elements [Elemente], to points and to the motions of points. In contrast to this functional space of pure mathematics, the space of myth proves to be a thoroughly structural space. Here the whole does not “become” by growing genetically from its elements [Elemente] according to a determinate rule; rather, there exists a purely static relationship of inward-­being [Innesein] and indwelling. Regardless of how far we divide, we find in each part the form and structure of the whole. This form is thus not, as in the mathematical analysis of space, broken down into homogeneous and therefore formless [gestaltlose] elements [Elemente]; rather, it endures in itself, irrespective of any division and unaffected by them. The whole spatial world, and with it the cosmos in general, appears to be built according to a certain model, which may manifest itself to us on an enlarged or a reduced scale but which, large or small, remains the same. All interconnection in mythical space is ultimately based on this original identity [Identität]; it goes back not to a similarity [Gleichartigkeit: homogeneity] of effective action, not to a dynamic law, but to an original equality [Gleichheit] of essence. This basic view has found its classical expression in the worldview of astrology. For astrology, every event in the world, every new formation and new emergence is fundamentally a semblance [Schein] – what is expressed in this event, what lies behind it, is a predetermined fate, a uniform determinacy of being that asserts itself as identical with itself through the individual temporal moment. Thus, the whole of a person’s life is contained and decided in its beginning, in the constellation of the hour of their birth; in general, all becoming constitutes not so much an emergence as a simple, consistent existence and an explanation of

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this consistent existence. The form of existence and life is not created from the most diverse elements [Elemente], from an interweaving of the most multifarious causal conditions; rather, it is from the outset given as a stamped [geprägt] form that need only be explained, which, for us onlookers, seems to unfold in time. This law of the whole is repeated in each of its parts. The predetermination of being is as valid for the individual as it is for the universe. The formulas of astrology often speak of this relationship in an unambiguous way in that they express the effectiveness of the planet, which forms the basic principle of astrological contemplation, by transforming it into a kind of substantial indwelling [Innewohnens]. In each of us, there is a certain planet: ἐστὶ δ᾿ ἐν ἡμῖν Μήνη Ζεὺς ῎Αρης Παφίη Κρόνος Ἥλιος Ἑρμῆς.6 We can recognize here how the astrological intuition of effective action is ultimately grounded in that mythical view of space that astrology developed to its supreme, one might say, “systematic” consequence. In accordance with the basic principle that governs all mythical thinking, astrology can interpret this “togetherness” in space only as a thoroughly concrete togetherness, as a determinate position and situation of bodies in space. There is here no detached, no merely abstract, form of space – rather, all intuition of form is melted down into the intuition of content, into the aspects of the planetary world. These are, however, themselves not unique and singular; they are not mere individuals; rather, in them, the structural law of the whole, the form of the universe, emerges in intuitive clarity and determinacy. Regardless of how far we advance toward the individual, regardless of how much we split this form, its proper being [Wesen] remains untouched; it remains an indivisible unity. Because space possesses a certain structure in itself, which recurs in all its individual formations [Gebilde], no individual being or event can depart or, as it were, fall away from the determinacy, the fatality, of the whole. We may contemplate the order of the natural elements [Elemente] or the order of the seasons, the mixtures in bodies or the typical “temperaments” of human beings, but we always find in them one and the same originary-­schema of organizing, one and the same “articulation,” by virtue of which the seal of the whole is imprinted on every particular.7 Of course, this intuition of the spatial-­physical cosmos, as astrology arranges it for us in the greatest perfection and cohesion, does not form the beginning of mythical thinking but rather is one of its late spiritual



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achievements. The mythical view of the world also begins from the most restricted ambit of sensible-­spatial existence, which is extended only bit by bit and only gradually. It was seen in the consideration of language that the expressions of spatial “orientation,” the words for “before” and “behind” and for “above” and “below” are usually taken from the intuition of one’s own body: the living-­body of the human being and its limbs are the system of reference to which all other spatial differentiations are indirectly transferred.8 Myth travels the same road: wherever it grasps [erfassen] an organically organized whole and strives to “comprehend” [begreifen] with its means of thinking, it tends to see this whole in the image of the human body and its organization. The objective world becomes transparent for myth and divides into determinate precincts of existence only in that in this way myth analogically “pictured” [abbildet] it in terms of the living body. It is often the form of this picturing [Abbildung] that is actually thought to contain the answer to the mythical question of origins and that hence dominates all mythical cosmographies and cosmologies. Because the world is formed from parts, be they of a human or superhuman nature [Wesen], it retains the character of a mythical organic unity, however much it may seem to break asunder into nothing but individual beings [Wesen]. One of the hymns of the Rigveda describes how the world emerged from the living body of the human being, the Purusha. The world is the Purusha, because it arose when the gods offered him up as a sacrifice and brought forth into being the individual creatures from the parts of its body, which was dismembered in accordance with the technique of sacrifice. Thus, the parts of the world are nothing other than the organs of the lived human body: The Brahmin was his mouth, his arms were made the Rajanya (warrior), his two thighs the Vaisya (trader and agriculturist), from his feet the Sudra (servile class) was born. The moon was born from his spirit (manas), from his eye was born the sun, from his mouth Indra and Agni, from his breath Vayu (wind) was born. From his navel arose the middle sky, from his head the heaven originated, from his feet the earth, the quarters from his ear. Thus, did they fashion the worlds.9

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Thus, here, in the early age of mythical thinking, the unity of microcosm and macrocosm appears to be grasped such that it is not so much the human who is formed from the parts of the world as the world from the parts of the human. We find this same point of view, though in the reverse direction, in, for example, the Christian-­Germanic view that Adam’s lived body was formed of eight parts, so that his flesh resembles the earth, his bones the rocks, his blood the sea, his hair the plants, his thoughts the clouds.10 In both cases, myth begins from a spatial-­physical correspondence between the world and the human and from this correspondence infers a unity of origin. And this transposition is not limited to this particular relationship between the world and the human with all its significance; rather, it recurs more generally in the application to the most diverse spheres of existence. Consequently, mythical thinking in general knows of no pure ideal “similarities” but rather looks upon any kind of similarity as an indication of an original community, as an essential identity.11 This is particularly true above all for similarities or analogies of spatial structure. The mere possibility of assigning [zuordnen] each one, member for member, to a determinate spatial whole is for mythical intuition the immediate inducement to let them merge together with each other. From this point on, they are only different forms of expression of one and the same essential being, which can appear in entirely different dimensions. By virtue of this distinctive principle of mythical thinking, spatial distance is constantly negated and sublated by it. The distant comes together with what is nearest, insofar as it is somehow “pictured” [abbilden] in it. We see how deeply rooted this feature is, for example, in that despite all the progress of pure cognition and the “exact” view of space, it has never been fully overcome. As late as the eighteenth century, Swedenborg, in his Arcana coelestia, attempted to construct a system of the intelligible world according to this category of universal correspondence.12 All spatial barriers ultimately drop here – for, as the human is picturable [abbildbar] in the world and thus is essentially the same with it, so too is the smallest picturable [abbildbar] in the largest and thus is essentially the same with it and likewise with most distant and the nearest. Thus, just as there is a “magical anatomy” in which specific parts of the human body become equated with specific parts of the world, there is also a mythical geography and



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cosmography in which the structure of the earth is described and determined in accordance with the same basic intuition. Often the two, magical anatomy as well as mythical geography, merge into one. In the Hippocratic book on the number seven, the seven-­part map of the world represents the earth as a human lived body: the Peloponnesus is its head, the Isthmus is its spinal cord, and Ionia appears as the diaphragm, i.e. the true center, the “navel of the world.” And all the intellectual and moral qualities of the peoples who dwell in these regions are, in some way, thought of as dependent on this form of “localization.”13 Here, on the threshold of classical Greek philosophy, we encounter a view that can be understood only through its widespread mythical parallels. We need only compare the schema of the earth and space in general, as it is projected here, with the universal spatial schematism of the Zunis in order to perceive the basic kinship between the two.14 For mythical thinking, there never exists between what a thing “is” and the position in which it is situated a merely “external” and accidental relationship; rather, the position is itself a part of its being through which the thing appears subjected to specific inner bonds. In the totemic sphere of representations, for example, the members of a specific clan stand in such a relationship of the bond, of originary-­kingship, not only to one another but also, for the most part, to specific regions of space. To each clan there belongs above all an often precisely determinate and specific direction in space and a determinate sector, an extract from the whole of space.15 When a member of a clan dies, care is taken to bury him in the spatial position and direction distinctive and essential to his clan.16 In all this, we see the two basic features of the mythical feeling of space – the thorough qualification and particularization from which it starts and the systematization toward which it nevertheless strives. The systematization has found its clearest expression in that form of “mythical geography” that has grown out of astrology. As early as the old Babylonian period, the terrestrial world was divided, according to its affiliation with the heavens, into four different realms: Akkad, i.e. south Babylonia – was governed and guarded by Jupiter; Amurru, the west country, was governed by Mars; Subartu and Elam in the north and east were ruled by the Pleiades and Perseus.17 Later, the schema of the seven planets seems to have led to a sevenfold organization of the whole world, such as what we encounter in Babylonia, India, and Persia. We seem far

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removed here from those primitive divisions that project all being on the human body and pictured [abbildet] it in them; the narrow sensible view seems to be overcome here by something truly cosmic and universal; however, the principle of correlation has remained the same. Mythical thinking seizes upon a specific concrete-­spatial structure in order to carry through its whole “orientation” of the world. In “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” – an article that despite its brevity is highly characteristic of his manner of thinking – Kant attempted to determine the origin of the concept of “orientation” and to follow its development: However exalted the application of our concepts, and however far up from sensibility we may abstract them, still they will always be appended to pictural [bildlich] representations. . . . For how would we procure sense and significance for our concepts if we did not underpin them with some intuition.18

Kant then goes onto show how all orientation begins with a sensibly felt difference – namely, with the feeling of the difference between the right hand and the left hand – and how it then rises to the sphere of pure mathematical intuition and ultimately to the orientation in thinking in general, in pure reason. If we examine the particular nature of mythical space and compare it with the space of sensible intuition and that of the “thought space” of mathematics, we can follow these stages of orientation down to a still deeper spiritual level. And we can clearly identify the point of transition at which an opposition intrinsically rooted in mythical-­religious feeling begins to configure itself, to give itself an “objective” form, through which the general process of objectivization, the intuitive-­objective apprehension and interpretation of the world of sense impressions, assumes a new direction.

2.  SPACE AND LIGHT: THE PROBLEM OF “ORIENTATION” Thus far, the intuition of space has proven to be a basic element in mythical thinking, as this showed itself dominantly by the tendency to transform all the differences that it posited and apprehended into spatial



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differences and to make them immediately present [vergegenwärtigen] in this form. Thus far, we have in the previous consideration essentially considered the differences as directly given, i.e. it was assumed that the separations and divisions of spatial regions and spatial directions, the separation of right and left, above and below, etc. to be effected in the primary sense impressions without the need of a particular spiritual labor, a specific “energy” of consciousness. It is, however, precisely this presupposition that now requires a correction – for, on closer scrutiny, it contradicts what we have recognized as a basic feature of the process of symbolic forming [Formung]. We have seen that the essential and distinctive achievement of each symbolic form – the form of language as well as the form of myth or the form of pure cognition – does not consist simply in receiving a given material from impressions – which in themselves already possess a fixed determinacy, a given quality and structure – in order to then graft it, as it were, as though from outside, onto another form originating in an independent energy of consciousness. Rather, the characteristic achievement of spirit begins much earlier than this. On sharper analysis, even the apparently “given” proves to have passed through a certain act, be it that of linguistic, mythical, or logical-­theoretical “apperception.” Only what is made in these acts “is”; even in its seemingly simple and immediate consistent existence, what is thus made proves to be conditioned and determined by some primary significance-­bestowing function. And it is in this primary, not in that secondary, forming [Formung] that the true mystery of all symbolic form is located and that must forever awaken new philosophical astonishment. Here too, the fundamental philosophical problem does not consist in understanding by means of what spiritual mechanism mythical thinking succeeds in relating purely qualitative differences to spatial differences, into which it transposes them, as it were, but rather, the question concerns the basic motive by which mythical thinking is guided in its original positing of these spatial differences. How, in the whole of mythical space, do individual “regions” and directions come to be singled out? How does it come about that one region and direction is opposed to the others, “stressed” over against them, and endowed with a certain distinguishing mark? These are not idle questions, as becomes evident once we consider that in this isolation, mythical thinking proceeds according to

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entirely different distinguishing traits and criteria from those employed by theoretical-­scientific thinking in tackling the same task. The latter arrives at the fixation of a certain spatial order by relating the sensible manifold of impressions to a system of purely thought, purely ideal formations [Gebilde]. The empirical straight line, the empirical circle, and the empirical sphere are determined and understood in “reference” to the ideal world of purely geometrical figures [Gestalten], in reference to, as the Platonic expression reads, the straight line “in itself,” the circle “in itself,” and the sphere “in itself.” An ensemble of geometrical relations and laws is set up which supplies the norm and fixed guiding principles for all apprehension and interpretation of the empirical-­spatial. The theoretical view of physical space shows itself to be governed by the same motive of thinking. To be sure, not only sensible intuition but also immediate sense sensation seems to play a part here – individual “regions” and directions in space seem to be distinguishable here only in that we connect them with some material differences of our corporeal organization, our physical lived body. If, however, the physical view of space cannot dispense with this dependence, then it strives more and more to free itself from it. All progress in the “exact,” in the strict sense, scientific physics is directed toward eradicating the merely “anthropomorphic” component of the physical worldview. Thus, in particular, the sensible opposition of “above” and “below” loses its significance in the cosmic space of physics. “Above” and “below” are no longer absolute opposites; rather, they are valid only in relation to the empirical phenomenon of gravity and the empirical lawfulness of this phenomenon. Physical space is, in general, characterized as a space of force; however, the concept of force, in its purely mathematical framing [Fassung], goes back to the concept of law, thus to the concept of function. In the structural space of myth, however, we see entirely different guidelines. The general validity is not divorced here from the particular and accidental, the constant from the variable, through the basic concept of law; rather, we find here the one accent of mythical value expressed in the opposition between the sacred and profane. There are here no purely geometrical or purely geographical, no purely ideal thought or merely empirically perceived differences; rather, all thinking as well as all sensible intuiting and perceiving rest on an original ground of feeling [Gefühlsgrund]. However particularized and refined its structure may



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become, mythical space as a whole remains embedded – or, one might say, embedded and immersed – in this feeling. In this space, the positing of certain demarcations and differences are thus not arrived at by 113 way of a progressive intellectual determination, by way of an intellectual analysis and synthesis; rather, the differentiations of space go back to differentiations already in effect in this ground of feeling [Gefühlsgrund]. The places and directions in space stand out from one another because and insofar as a different accent of significance is connected with them, because and insofar as they are mythically evaluated in different and opposite senses. In this valuation [Wertung], a spontaneous act of the mythical-­religious consciousness is performed; however, objectively considered, it is also connected to a certain basic physical fact. The unfolding of the mythical feeling of space always begins from the opposition of day and night, light and darkness. The dominant power that this opposition exerts on mythical-­ religious consciousness can be followed down to the most highly developed cultural religions. A few of these religions, particularly that of the Iranians, may even be designated as complete developments, as thoroughgoing systematizations of this one opposition. However, even where this difference and conflict does not present itself in this intellectual determination, in this almost dialectical intensification, it may be recognized as one of the latent motives in the religious construction of the cosmos. As regards the religion of “primitive peoples,” such as the religion of the Cora Indians described in detail by Preuss, it is entirely dominated and permeated by this opposition of light and darkness. Around it unfolds the mythical feeling and the whole mythical apprehension of the world that is distinctive to the Coras.19 In the creation legends of nearly all peoples and religions, however, the process of creation immediately merges with the dawning of the light. In the Babylonian creation legend, the world emerges from the struggle waged by Marduk, god of the morning sun and the spring sun, against chaos and darkness that is depicted in the monster Tiamat. The victory of the light is the origin of the world and of the world order. The Egyptian story of creation has also been interpreted as an imitation of the phenomenon of the daily sunrise. The first act of creation begins here with the formation of an egg, which rises out of the primal water; from the egg issues forth Ra, the god of light, whose genesis is described

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in the most diverse versions, all of which, however, go back to the one originary-­phenomenon – the bursting forth of light from the darkness of night.20 How the living intuition of this originary-­phenomenon gives the Mosaic account of creation its full concrete “sense” requires no further exposition since Herder first pointed out this interconnection and presented it with sensitive eloquence. Perhaps Herder’s gift of not seeing all spiritual phenomena as mere formations [Gebilde] but of situating himself immediately in the creative process of forming [Bilden] from which they spring is nowhere so brilliantly revealed as in this interpretation of the first chapter of Mosaic Genesis. For Herder, the presentation of the creation of the world is nothing other than the account [Erzählung] of the birth of light – as experienced by the mythical spirit in the becoming of every new day, in the coming of every new dawn. This becoming is for mythical intuition no mere event; rather, it is a genuine abiogenesis – not a periodically recurring natural process following a determinate rule but something absolutely individual and unique. Heraclitus’ saying, “The sun is new each day,” is spoken in a truly mythical spirit. We have here before us, as it were, the first characteristic emergence of mythical thinking; and in all its further progress, the opposition of light and darkness, day and night, proves to be a living enduring motive. In his fine and moving book, Troels-­Lund followed the becoming and growth of this motif from its first primitive beginnings to that universal formation [Durchbildung] that it underwent in an astrological mode of thinking. As Troels-­Lund writes: We begin from the assumption that the predisposition for the impressions of light and the feeling of place are the two most original and deep-­seated forms of the manifestation of human intelligence. It is by these two paths that the individual and the race achieve their most essential spiritual development. It is from this perspective that the three great questions have been answered with which existence itself confronts each one of us: Who are you? What are you? What should you do? . . . For each dweller of the earth, this sphere which is itself not luminous, the interchange of light and darkness, day and night, is the earliest impulse and the ultimate end of their ability to think. Not only our earth but ourselves, our own spiritual I, from our first blinking



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at the light to our highest religious and moral feelings, are born and nurtured of the sun. . . . The progressive apprehension of the difference between day and night, light, and darkness, is the innermost nerve of all human cultural development.21

And every separation of the individual regions of space and with it every mode of organizing the whole of mythical space is connected with this difference. The characteristic mythical accent of the “holy” [Heilige] and “unholy” [Unheilige] is distributed in different ways among the individual directions and regions and lends each of them a specifically mythical-­ religious imprint. East and west, and north and south, are not differences that serve in essentially the same way for orientation within the world of empirical perception; rather, each of them has a specific being and specific significance of its own, an inherent mythical life. Each particular direction is not taken as an abstract-­ideal relationship but rather as an independent “formation” [Gebilde] endowed with its own life – as can be seen, for example, from the fact that they often undergo the highest degree of concrete configuration and independentization [Verselbständigung] of which myth is capable, i.e. they are raised to the level of a particular god. Even at relatively low stages of mythical thinking, we encounter these gods of direction: the gods of the east and north, of the west and south, of the “lower” and “upper” world.22 And perhaps there is no cosmology, however “primitive,” in which the opposition of the four main directions of the heavens [Himmel] do not in some way emerge as the cardinal points of its apprehension and explanation of the world.23 Thus, one of Goethe’s sayings – “To God belongs the Orient,/To God belongs the Occident;/The Northern and the Southern lands/Reseting, tranquil, in His hands”24 – applies in the strictest sense to mythical thinking. However, before it could arrive at this unity of a universal feeling of space and of a universal feeling of god in which all particular opposi- 116 tions seem dissolved, mythical thinking had to pass through these same oppositions and set them off against one another. Each individual spatial determination thus obtains a certain divine or daemonic, friendly or hostile, holy or unholy “character.” The east as the origin of all light is also the source and origin of all life – the west as the place of the setting sun is filled with all the terrors of death. Wherever the thought of a realm proper to the dead arises in contrast to the spatially separate and

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isolated realm of the living, it is situated in the west of the world. And this opposition of day and night, light, and darkness, birth and death, is also reflected in the most varied mediations and in the most diverse refractions in the mythical apprehensions of the individual, concrete relationships of life. They all receive, as it were, a different illumination, according to the relationship in which they stand to the phenomenon of the rising or setting sun. Usener writes the following in his Götternamen:

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The worship of light is woven into the whole of human existence. Its basic features are the same for all the members of the Indo-­European family of peoples; indeed, they extend much farther; even today, often unconsciously, we are dominated by it. Out of the half-­death of sleep the light of day awakens us to life: “to come to the light,” to be born; “to depart from the light” means to die. . . . As early as the Homeric epics, light is the redeeming and saving. . . . Euripides calls the light of the day “pure”: the cloudless blue heavens with its unobstructed light is the divine archetype [Urbild] of purity as it became the basis for the representation of the land of the gods and the sojourn of the blessed. . . . And this intuition was directly transposed into the supreme moral concepts of truth and justice. . . . From this basic view it followed . . . that sacred actions, for which the gods of heaven could be invoked as helpers or witnesses, could be performed only under the open daytime heavens. . . . The oath, whose sanctity is based on the invocation of the all-­seeing, all-­knowing, punishing gods as witnesses, could originally be taken only under the open heavens. The genuine thing that combined the free men of a community who dwelt in houses in counsel and judgment took place “in the sacred ring” under the open sky. . . . All these are simple, involuntary representations; they arise under the irresistible forceful power of sense impressions to which we have not yet grown impervious and which form a closed circle of their own. In them springs up an original and inexhaustible well of religiosity and morality.25

In all these transitions, we are once again immediately aware of that dynamic that belongs to the nature [Wesen] of every true spiritual form of expression. It is the decisive achievement of every such form that in them the rigid boundary between “inner” and “outer,” the “subjective”



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and the “objective,” does not subsist as such but begins, as it were, to grow fluid. Inner does not stand alongside the outer, the outer alongside the inner, as if each were its own separate precinct; rather, both are reflected in the other, and only in this reciprocal reflection does each disclose its own content [Gehalt]. Thus, in the spatial form that mythical thinking sketches out, the whole mythical life-­form is imprinted and can, in a certain sense, be read from it. This reciprocal relationship found its classical expression in the Roman sacral order that appeared to be literally characterized by this constant transposition. In his seminal work, Nissen has elucidated the process of this transposition from all sides. He has shown how the basic mythical-­ religious feeling of the sacred found its first objectivization by turning outward, by presenting itself in the intuition of spatial relationships. Hallowing begins when a specific domain is detached from the whole of space, when it is distinguished from other domains and one might say religiously enclosed and cared for. This concept of a religious hallowing, which likewise presents itself as a spatial delimitation, has found its linguistic sedimentation in the expression of templum (Greek τέμενος), which goes back to the root τεμ, “to cut,” and thus signifies that which is cut out, delimited. In this sense, it first designates the sacred precinct belonging to the god and consecrated to the god and then, by extension, every marked-­off piece of land, every bounded field or orchard, whether it belongs to a god, king, or hero. However, the space of the heavens as a whole appears, according to an ancient religious intuition, as just such an enclosed and consecrated domain, as a temple in which one divine being dwells and which is governed by one divine will. And a sacral organization of this unity sets in. The whole of the heavens breaks down into four parts that determine the regions of the world: an anterior in the south, a posterior in the 118 north, a left in the east, and a right in the west. From this first original, purely local [örtlich] division, the entire system of Roman “theology” developed. When the augur observed the heavens in order to read from it the symbol [Wahrzeichen] of earthly doing, each such observation began by dividing the heavens up into determinate sections. The east-­west line, which is designated and established by the course of the sun, was bisected by another vertical line, the north-­south line. With this cutting and intersection of the two lines – the decumanus [east–west

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way] and the cardo [south road], as they were called in the language of the priests – religious thinking created its first fundamental schema of coordinates. Nissen has shown in detail how this schema was transferred from the domain of religious life to every sector of juridical, social, and political life and how in this transference it became more precisely and subtly differentiated. It formed the basis for the development of the concept of property and the symbolism by which property was designated and safeguarded as such. For the act of positing a boundary, the basic act of “limitation” through which a fixed property was first established in the juridical-­religious sense, is everywhere related to the sacral order of space. In the books of the Roman agrimensores [gromatic writers], the introduction of limitation was attributed to Jupiter and related directly to the act of world creation. It is as though the demarcation prevailing in the universe had thus been transferred to the earth and to all individual earthly relationships. Limitation is also based on the world regions, on the separation [Scheidung] of the world, which is designated by the east-­ west line and the north-­south line, the decumanus and the cardo. It begins with the simplest natural division, with the division into a day and night, followed by a second division into morning and evening: the waxing and waning day. Roman political law is closely interconnected with this form of limitation; upon it is based the separation between ager publicus and ager divisus et adsignatus, between public and private property. For only land enclosed in fixed boundaries, in immutable mathematical lines, passes as private property. Like the god before them, the state, the community, and the individual now acquired a definite space through the mediation of the idea of the “templum,” a determinate space in which they made themselves at home:

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it is not a matter of indifference how the augur limits the heavens; for although the will of Jupiter extends over the whole of the extent, just as the paterfamilias [owner of the family estate] governs the whole household, other gods dwell nevertheless in the various regions, and the lines are drawn according as one interprets the will of this one or that one. The immediate result of this constitution is that the harbored space is immediately taken into possession by a spirit . . . not only the city but also the compitum [cross-­roads] and house, not only the fields as a whole but every agricultural field and vineyard, not only the house



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as a whole but every room within it, has its own god. The godhead is recognized by its workings and surroundings. Consequently, every spirit which is confined within a given space obtains an individuality and a specific name by which the human can invoke him.26

In this system – which also dominated the structure of the Italic cities, the grouping and order within the Roman camp, and the ground plan and inner arrangement of the Roman house – it immediately becomes clear how the progressive spatial delimitation, like every new landmark posited in space by mythical thinking and mythical-­religious feeling, became at the same time a landmark of spiritual and moral [sittlich] culture. Indeed, this interconnection can be followed down to the beginnings of theoretical science. Moritz Cantor’s book has shown how the beginnings of scientific mathematics in Rome went back to the books of the Roman agrimensores and their basic system of spatial orientation.27 In the classical founding [Begründung] of mathematics by the Greeks, we can also hear everywhere the echo of the basic ancient mythical representation; we can still feel the breath of that awe surrounding the spatial “boundary” from its inception. The form of logical-­mathematical determination developed through the thought of spatial boundary. In the Pythagoreans and Plato, boundary and the unbounded, πέρας [limit] and άπειρον [unlimited] are set off against each other as the determinant and the indeterminate, form and formless, good and evil. Thus, the purely intellectual orientation of the cosmos grew from this incipient mythical-­spatial orientation. Language has in many instances preserved the traces of this interconnection – for example, the Latin expression for pure theoretical contemplating [Betrachten] and vision [Schauen], contem­ plari, which etymologically and substantially goes back to the idea of the “templum,” the marked-­off space in which the augur carried out his observation of the heavens.28 And from the ancient world, the same theoretical and religious “orientation” entered into Christianity and the system of Christian-­medieval dogmatics. The ground plan and the structure of the medieval church show the characteristic features of that symbolism of the cardinal points that is essential to the mythical feeling of space. Sun and light are no longer the godhead itself; however, they still serve as the nearest and most immediate emblems [Wahrzeichen] of the divine, of the divine will

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to salvation and the divine power of salvation. The historical effectiveness and triumph of Christianity were indeed closely bound up with its ability to assimilate and refashion the basic intuition of the pagan cults of the sun and the light. The cult of sol invictus [Unconquered Sun] was now replaced by the faith in Christ as the “sun of righteousness.”29 Early Christianity also retained the eastward orientation of the church [Gotteshaus: house of God] and altar, while the south became the symbol of the Holy Spirit and the north conversely the image of the estrangement [Abkehr: turn­ ing away] from God, from the aberration of the light, from faith. Before baptism, the novice was turned toward the west to renounce the devil and his works, and then toward the east, toward paradise, that he might profess faith in Christ. The four ends of the Cross were also identified with the four regions of the heavens and the world. This simple ground plan was constructed on the increasingly subtle and profound symbolism in which the whole of inner faith turned outward, as it were, objectifying itself in elementary spatial relationships.30 If we look back over all these examples, we cannot fail to recognize that although they belong to the most diverse cultures and stages in the development of mythical-­religious thinking, they all reveal the same particular nature and basic tendency of the mythical consciousness of space. This consciousness is comparable to a fine ether that pervades the most diverse modes of manifestation of mythical spirit and connects them to one another. When Cushing writes that thanks to the sevenfold organization of their space, the whole worldview of the Zunis and their entire life and all their impulses [Treiben] are completely systematized, so that, for example, when they occupy a new campsite the position of the individual groups and clans is determined and prescribed in advance, then the structure and the order of the Roman camp provide a perfect analogy. Whereas the plan of the camp was drawn up according to that of the city, the city in turn corresponded in its structure to the general plan of the world and the different spatial regions of the world. Polybius tells us that when the Roman army entered the place [Platz] selected for their camp, it was as though citizens, returning to their native city, each sought out his own house.31 In both cases, the local [örtlich] grouping of the individual associations is not looked on as something merely outward and accidental; rather, it is required and demanded by certain basic sacral intuitions.



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And everywhere such sacral intuitions are bound up with the general apprehension of space and certain spatial boundaries. A proper mythical-­religious originary-­feeling is connected with the fact of the spatial “threshold.” The veneration of the threshold and the awe of its holiness are expressed almost everywhere in the most mysterious customs. Even among the Romans, the Terminus appears as a unique god, and at the festival of the Terminalia, the boundary stone was crowned with a garland and sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificial animal.32 From the veneration of the temple threshold, which separates the space of the house of the god from the outside, profane world, the concept of property, as a basic religious-­juridical concept, appears to have developed along similar lines in totally different circles of life and culture. The holiness of the threshold, as it originally shelters [schützen] the dwelling [Behausung] of god – even in the form of land and field markers – shelters the land, field, and house from every enemy encroachment or attack.33 Often the designations that language coins for the expression of religious awe and veneration go back to a basic sensible-­spatial representation, the representation of shrinking back from [vor: before] a specific spatial precinct.34 And this spatial symbolism is transferred to the intuition and expression of those living relationships that bear only the most indirect relation, if any, to space. Wherever mythical thinking and mythical-­religious feeling endow a content with a particular accent of value, wherever they mark it off from others and lend it a distinctive significance, this qualitative marking off tends to be presented in the image of spatial separation. Every mythically significant content, every living relationship that is raised out of the sphere of the indifferent and the everyday forms, as it were, its own ring of existence, an enclosed and cared for [umhegen] region of being that is separated from its surroundings by fixed barriers, and only in this separation does it achieve its own individual religious shape [Gestalt]. Entering this ring and leaving it are governed by specific sacral regulations. The transition [Übergang] from one mythical-­religious precinct to another is always bound to carefully observed rites of passage [Übergangsriten]. These rites govern passage from one city to another, from one land to another; changes from one phase of life to another; and the transition from childhood to puberty, from celibacy to marriage, from childlessness to motherhood, etc.35 Here again, we find confirmed that general norm that is

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recognizable in the development of all spiritual forms of expression. If the purely inward must be objectified, must be transformed into something outward, then, on the other hand, all intuition of the outward remains penetrated and interwoven with inward determinations. Even where contemplation seems to move entirely into the sphere of the “outward,” the pulsation of an inner life can be felt in it. The barriers that the human posits in the basic feeling of the sacred are the starting point from which the positing of limits in space arises and from which, by a progressive process of organization [Organisation] and structuring [Gliederung], the process spreads over the whole of the physical cosmos.

3.  THE MYTHICAL CONCEPT OF TIME As significant as the basic form of space may prove to be for the construction of the mythical object-­world, it nevertheless seems that if we stop here, we will not be able to enter into the actual being, the true “interior” of this world. Even the linguistic expression that we employ to designate this world indicates this for us: in its basic signification, “myth” contains not a spatial but a purely temporal view; it designates a determinate temporal “aspect,” under which the totality [Gesamtheit] of the world is moved. Genuine myth begins not only when the intuition of the universe and its individual parts and forces is formed into certain images, into the figures [Gestalten] of daemons and gods but also when an emergence, a becoming, a life in time, is attributed to these figures [Gestalten]. Only where it does not rest with a static contemplation of the divine, but where the divine explains its existence and its nature in time, where it advances from the figure [Gestalt] of the gods to the history of the gods, and on to the narrative of the gods, does it involve “myths” in the restricted and specific meaning of the word. And if we break down the concept of “the history of the gods” into its elements [Momente], the emphasis lies not on the second, but on the first component. The intuition of the temporal proves its primacy in that it turns out to be one of the conditions for the full working out [Ausbildung] of the concept of the divine. Only by its history is the god constituted – only by its history is it singled out from all the abundance of impersonal forceful powers of nature and set over against them as its own being [Wesen]. Only when the mythical world begins, as it were, to flow, proving itself to be a world not



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of mere being but of events, can we distinguish their specific, singular configurations from their independent and individual imprint [Prägung]. The particularity of becoming, of doing and being acted on, creates here the foundation for delimitation and determination. The first step that is presupposed here is that the separation underlying all mythical-­ religious consciousness in general, the opposition between a world of the “sacred” and the world of the “profane,” has emerged in its univer- 124 sality. However, within this universality, which already finds its expression in purely spatial separations and the positing of boundaries, a true particularization, a proper organizing of the mythical world is achieved only when the dimension of depth, so to speak, is opened up with the form of time. The true character of mythical being is first unveiled only when it appears as the being of origins. All the holiness of mythical being goes back ultimately to the holiness of the origin. It does not adhere immediately to the content of the given but to its source [Herkunft] – not to its qualities and properties but to its having-­become-­to-­be [Gewordensein]. Only in that a certain content is moved into temporal distance, in that it is situated back into the depths of the past, that it is posited not only as something sacred, as something mythically and religiously significant, but also as justified as such. Time is the first originary-­form of this spiritual justification. Not only the usages, customs, social norms, and bonds of specifically human existence undergo this hallowing in which they are taken back to statutes of the mythical before-­time and originary-­time [Vor-­und Urzeit] – but also existence itself, the “nature” of things, becomes truly understandable for mythical feeling and thinking only from this perspective. Any outstanding feature in the image of nature, any specific characteristic of a thing or a species, is considered to be “explained” as soon as it is connected with a unique event of the past, and thus, its mythical emergence [Entstehung] is demonstrated. The mythical tales of all times and all peoples are rich in concrete examples of this kind of explanation.36 A stage [Stufe] has been reached here at which thought no longer contents itself with the mere givenness, be it of things, of customs and ordinances, with their simple existence and simple presence [Gegenwart], while, on the other hand, it does not rest until it has been able somehow to transpose this presence into the form of the past. The past itself no longer has a “why”: it is the 125 why of things.

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What distinguishes the mythical contemplation of time from the historical contemplation of time is that for myth there exists an absolute past that neither requires nor is susceptible to any further explanation. If history dissolves being into the continuous sequence of becoming, in which no outstanding point is singled out but every point indicates the way to one further back, so that regression into the past becomes a regres­ sus in infinitum – then myth, to be sure, also makes an incision between being and having-­become-­to-­be, between the present [Gegenwart] and the past. However, once this past is attained, myth remains in it as if in something permanent and unquestionable. For myth, time does not take the form of a mere relation [Relation], in which the moments of present, past, and future are constantly shifting and transforming into one another [verschieben und ineinander umsetzen]; rather, here a rigid barrier separates the empirical present from the mythical origin and gives to each its own inalienable “character.” In this sense, it is understandable that mythical consciousness – despite the fundamental and truly constitutive significance which the general intuition of time possesses for it – has sometimes been called a “timeless” consciousness. For compared with objective-­cosmic and objective-­historical time, there does not exist here such a timelessness. In its early phases, mythical consciousness retains the same indifference toward relative stages of time that characterizes certain phases of linguistic consciousness.37 There still prevails in it, to speak with Schelling: an absolutely prehistoric time, which is according to its nature the indivisible, absolutely identical time; which therefore, whatever duration one ascribes it, can only be regarded as a moment, i.e. as time in which the end is like the beginning and the beginning like the end, a kind of eternity, because it is itself not a sequence of times but only one time, which is not in itself an actual time, i.e. a sequence of times, but only becomes time (that is, the past) relative to the time that time follows it.38

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If we now seek to trace the process of how this mythical “originary-­ time” gradually transitions into “actual” [eigentlich] time, into the consciousness of a sequence, we find confirmed that basic relationship that our consideration of language has already called to our attention. Here again, the expression of the individual temporal relationships develops only



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through that of spatial relationships. Between the two there exists at first no sharp isolation [Absonderung]. All orientation in time presupposes an orientation in space – and only insofar as the latter succeeds and creates certain spiritual means of expression do the individual determinations of time also separate from one another for immediate feeling and thinking consciousness. It is one and the same basic concrete intuition, the interplay of light and darkness, day and night, that underlies both the primary intuition of space as well as the primary organization of time. And the same schema of orientation, the same at first purely felt differences between the regions of the heavens and the cardinal directions of the heavens, governs the division both of space as well as time into determinate individual sections. The simplest spatial relationships, such as left and right as well as forward and backward, are separated in that the course of the sun determines a baseline, the east-­west line, and this then is bisected by a second baseline, by a north-­south line, and all apperception of temporal sections goes back to this separation and intersection. Among the peoples who developed this system to the greatest clarity and spiritual perfection, this relation is often echoed in the most common linguistic expressions they have coined for time. The Latin tempus, to which corresponds the Greek τέμενος [the holy tempus] and *τέμπος [tempo] (preserved in the plural, τέμπεα), grew out of the idea and designation of the “templum.” The basic words τέμενος (tempus), templum signified nothing other than bisection, intersection: according to the terminology of later carpenters two crossing rafters or beams still constituted a templum; hence, the signification of the space thus divided was a natural development; in tempus the quarter of the heavens (e.g. the east) passed into the time of day (e.g. morning) and thence into time in general.39

The separation of space into individual directions and regions runs parallel to the separation of time into individual phases – both present only two different moments in that process of gradual illumination of spirit that begins from the intuition of the physical originary-­phenomenon of light. By virtue of this interconnection, a unique mythical-­religious “character,” a particular accent of “holiness,” is given here to time as a whole

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and to every segment of time [Zeitabschnitt] in particular. For mythical feeling, a place in space and direction in space is not the expression of a mere relation but of a particular being [Wesen], a god or daemon, and this is equally true of time and its individual subdivisions. Even highly developed cultural religions have preserved this basic intuition and this belief. In the Persian religion, the cult of time and the individual segments of time – of the centuries, the years, the four seasons, the twelve months, as well as particular days and hours – developed from the general worship of light. Particularly in the development of the Mithraic religion, this cult achieved a great significance.40 In general, the mythical intuition of time, like the mythical intuition of space, is altogether qualitative and concrete and not quantitative and abstract. For myth, there is no time “in itself,” no perpetual duration and no regular recurrence or succession “in itself”; rather, there are only configurations of determinate content that in turn reveal determinate “temporal gestalts,” a coming and going, a rhythmical existence and becoming.41 Thus, the whole of time is divided by certain boundary points and, as it were, certain musical bars; however, these segments are initially only objectively present as immediately felt, not as measured or counted. In particular, all religious doing of the human shows a rhythmic organizing of this sort. The ritual is careful to cautiously assign specific sacred acts to specific times and temporal segments – which if undertaken outside of these segments would lose all sacral force. All religious conduct is organized according to determinate epochs, e.g. according to periods of seven or nine days, weeks, or months. The “holy times,” the times of the festival, interrupt the uniform course of events and introduce into it certain lines of demarcation. It is in particular the phases of the moon that determine the sequence of “critical dates.” According to Caesar, Ariovistus postponed hostilities until the new moon; the Lacedaemonians waited until the full moon before taking to the field. Underlying all this, quite analogously to space, is the intuition that in the positing of temporal boundary lines and lines of separation it is not a question of mere conventional distinguishing marks of thinking but that the individual temporal segments possess in themselves a qualitative form and particular nature, a nature [Wesen] and efficacy of their own. They do not form a simple, uniform, purely extensive series; to each of them, rather, there belongs an intensive performance by virtue



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of which they are similar or dissimilar to, corresponding or contrasting with, friendly or hostile to one another.42 Indeed, it seems that long before human consciousness forms its first fixed concepts concerning the basic objective differentiations of number, time, and space, a consciousness of the subtlest sensitivity to the peculiar periodicity and rhythm prevails in human life. Even at the lowest stages of culture, even among natural peoples who have barely arrived at the first beginnings of enumeration and who consequently cannot possibly have any exact quantitative apprehension of temporal relationships, we often find this subjective feeling for the living dynamic of the temporal events developed in astonishing subtlety and precision. To a certain extent, a unique mythical-­religious “feeling of phases” connects them to all the occurrences of life, particularly to all the most important periods, all the crucial transformations and transitions. Even at the lowest levels these transitions, the most important turning points [Einschnitt] in the life of the species as well as in the life of the individual are in some way distinguished by the cult, are somehow lifted out of the uniform course of events. Any number of carefully observed rites safeguard their beginning and end. Through these rites, the fluid same series of existence, the mere “course” of time, is, as it were, religiously divided; through them, each particular phase of life acquires a particular religious impact and is given its own specific sense. Birth and death, pregnancy and motherhood, and puberty and marriage are marked by specific rites of passage [Übergangs­ riten] and initiation.43 The religious separation of the individual stage of life [Lebensabschnitte] that are brought about by these rituals is often so sharp that the continuity of life is sublated by them. It is a widespread representation, recurring in various forms, that in transitioning from one circle of life to another a person acquires a new I – that the child, for example, dies with the coming of puberty in order to be reborn as a youth and as a man. In general, two significant epochs of life are separated by a “critical phase” of greater or lesser duration, which tends to be marked off by an abundance of positive prescriptions and negative prohibitions and taboos.44 We can see from this that, before it works out the intuition of a properly cosmic time, there is for the mythical view of the world and for mythical feeling, a biological time of sorts, a rhythmic ebb and flow of life. Indeed, cosmic time itself, where it is apprehended by myth, is first lived

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by myth in no other way than in this distinctive biological configuration and transformation. Even the regularity of natural events, the periodicity in the circulations of the planets and the changing of the seasons, appears to myth entirely as the process of life. At first, mythical consciousness apprehends the change of day into night, the flowering and fading of plants, and the cyclical sequence of the seasons only by projecting these phenomena into the existence of the human being, where it perceives them as in a mirror. In this reciprocal relatedness, a mythical feeling of time arises that creates a bridge between the subjective life-­form and the objective intuition of nature. Even at the stage of the magical view of the world, both forms are immediately interwoven and bound together. This bondage explains how objective events can be determined by magic. The path of the sun and the course of the seasons are not regulated by an immutable law; rather, they are subject to daemonic influences and open to magical effects. The most diverse forms of “analogy magic” serve to influence, sustain, or subdue the forces that are at work here. The popular customs, which even today are associated with the crucial turning points in the rise and fall of the year, particularly with the winter and summer solstices, still disclose this original view, obscured only by the lightest of veils. The imitative games and rites that are connected with the various festivals – the Maypole dances, the crowning with wreaths, the fires lighted in the nights of May Day and Christmas, Easter, and the summer solstice – are based on the intuition that the life-­giving power of the sun and the vegetative forces of nature must be aided and be guarded against hostile forceful powers, by human doing. The general distribution of these customs – Wilhelm Mannhardt has compiled copious material for the Greek and Roman worlds as well as the Slavic and Germanic worlds, while Hillebrandt has given a detailed description of the solstice festivals of ancient India45 – proves that we are dealing here with intuitions that go back to a basic form of mythical consciousness. The primary mythical “feeling of phases” can apprehend time only in the image of life – and, consequently, it must immediately transpose and dissolve everything that moves in time, everything that comes and goes in a set rhythm, into the form of life. Thus, myth knows nothing of that kind of “objectivity” expressed in the mathematical-­physical concept of Newton’s “absolute time,” which “flows in and for itself, without regard to any outward object.”46 It



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knows “historical” [historisch] time no more than it knows mathematical-­ physical time. For even the historical [geschichtlich] consciousness of time contains definite “objective” elements [Momente]. It is based on a fixed “chronology,” a strict differentiation of the earlier and later, and the observation of a determinate, unequivocal order in the sequence of individual temporal moments [Momente]. Such a separation of the individual stages of time and an establishment of these stages into a single 131 tightly knit system in which each event belongs to one and only one position is completely foreign to myth. It belongs as such to the nature [Wesen] of the mythical thought-­form that wherever it posits a relation, it allows the members of this relation to flow together and merge [inein­ ander übergehen]; this rule of “concrescence,” this growing together of the members of a relation,47 prevails also in the mode of the mythical consciousness of time. Here too, the separation of time into clearly separated stages, into the past, present, and future is not stationary; rather, consciousness repeatedly succumbs to the tendency and temptation to level down the differences, even allowing them to ultimately transform into pure identity. It is characteristic of magic, in particular, that it extends its general principle, the principle of pars pro toto, from space to time. Just as in the physical-­ spatial sense, each part not only stands for the whole but is the whole, so too does the magical interconnection of effect pass over all temporal differences [Differenzen] and dividing lines. The magical “now” is by no means a mere now, a simple and more isolated point of the present; rather, it is, to employ Leibniz’s expression, “chargé du passé et gros de l’avenir” – laden with the past and pregnant with the future. In this sense, divination, in which this peculiar qualitative “interpenetration” of all temporal moments is most clearly presented, belongs to the integral existence [Bestand] of mythical consciousness. This consciousness, however, rises to a new level as soon as it is no longer fixated, as in magic, on the attainment of an individual effect and no longer contents itself with it and closes itself off in it, but instead directs itself toward the whole of being and events and is more and more imbued with the intuition of this whole. It now gradually frees itself from its immediate confinement in sense impressions and momentary sensible emotions. Instead of living in the individual point of the present or in a mere series of such points of the present, in a simple sequence of

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individual phases of events, it turns more and more to the contemplation of the eternal cycle of events. Even this cycle is still immediately felt more than it is thought; however, even in this feeling, mythical consciousness rises to the certainty of a general, universal order of the world. The now is no longer, as in the mythical animation of nature, an individual thing, a particular physical existence, filled with particular emotional [seelisch] contents, with individual-­personal forces; rather, it is an everywhere-­ recurring measure that is felt in the whole of the world events. The stronger this sensation becomes, the more it awakens mythical thinking and sets this thinking before a new problem. For now, contemplation is no longer directed toward the mere content of events but toward their pure form. Here again, the time motif operates as a mediation: although time is apprehended by myth only concretely, only as a definite physical event, particularly through the changes of the stars, it nevertheless contains within it an element that belongs to a different, purely ideal “dimension.” It is a different matter whether the individual powers of nature are in their particularity made the object of mythical interpretation and religious veneration or whether they are looked on only as the bearers, as it were, of a general temporal order. In the first case, we are still entirely within the ambit of the substantial view: sun, moon, and stars are animated divine beings [Wesen]; however, they are nevertheless individual singular things that are endowed with specific individual forces. In this respect, these divine beings [Wesen] are distinguished only in degree but not in kind from the subordinate daemonic forces that prevail in nature. However, a different view, a new sense of the divine, matures when the mythical-­religious feeling is no longer directed solely toward the immediate existence of the individual objects [Objekt] of nature and the immediate effective action of the individual forces of nature but when both of these are provided, as it were, with a characteristic significance of expression in addition to their direct significance of being, when they become a medium through which the idea of a thoroughgoing lawful order governing and permeating the universe is apprehended. Consciousness is now no longer oriented toward any individual phenomenon of nature – be it the most powerful and violent; rather, every phenomenon of nature serves only as a sign for something else, something more comprehensive, that reveals itself to it and in it. Where the sun and the moon are not considered solely according to their physical being and physical



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effects – where they are not venerated for the sake of their radiance or as the producers of light and warmth, moisture and rain, but instead are taken as the constant measures of time from which the course and the rule of the whole of events are read – we stand here at the threshold of a fundamentally shifting and deepening of the spiritual view. From the rhythm and periodicity that can already be felt in all immediate existence 133 and life, thought now rises to the idea of the temporal order as a universal order of fate, governing all being and becoming. Only in this framing as fate does mythical time become a truly cosmic potency – a power that binds not only the human but also the daemons and gods, because only in it, and by virtue of its inviolable measures and norms, is all life and effective action of humans and even of the gods possible. At lower stages, the representation of such a bond can still clothe itself in entirely naïve, sensible images and expressions. The Maoris of New Zealand have a mythical tale [Erzählung] relating how Maui, their tribal ancestor and cultural hero, once trapped the sun, which had previously moved through the heavens with no fixed rule, and compelled it to take a regular course.48 However, as development progressed and the more sharply the separation of the actual religious view of the world from the magical view of the world was undertaken, this basic relationship obtained a purer spiritual expression. This turn from the sensible-­ individual to the general, from the deification [Vergötterung] of individual natural powers to a universal time-­mythology, can be followed with particular clarity in Babylonia and Assyria, the home and source of all “astral” religion. The beginnings of the Babylonian-­Assyrian religion points back to the sphere of a primitive animism. Once again, the basic stratum forms here the belief in daemons, the belief in friendly and hostile powers that intervene arbitrarily and capriciously in events. The daemons of the heavens and those of the storm and the daemons of the meadow and field and those of the mountain and spring stand here next to hybrid creatures [Mischwesen] that still bear the traces of animal worship and older totemistic views. However, insofar as Babylonian thinking was more and more concentrated on the contemplation of the world of the stars, the total form of this thinking changed. The primitive mythology of daemons was not eliminated; however, it now belonged to a lower stratum of popular beliefs. The religion of the initiated, of the priests, became the religion

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of the “sacred times” and “sacred numbers.” The actual basic phenomenon of the divine is constituted in the determinacy of the astronomical events, in the temporal rule that holds sway over the course of the sun, the moon, and the planets. It is not so much a single star that is thought and venerated as a godhead in its immediate corporeity: rather, in the star, a partial revelation of the universal divine power is apprehended, one that works according to consistent norms in the whole as in the individual, in the greatest as in the smallest sphere of events. From the heavens, where we see its clearest manifestation, this divine constitution may be followed in constant gradations down to the order of the earthly, to the specifically human, to political and social beings. It is one and the same basic form that realizes itself in the most diverse circles of existence.49 Thus, the movements of the stars as the visible image of time expressed the new unity of sense in which mythical-­religious thinking now begins to encompass the totality [Gesamtheit] of being and events. The creation myth of the Babylonians depicts the emergence of the world order from the formless [gestaltlosen] originary-­ground [Urgrund] in the image of the struggle waged by the sun god Marduk against the monster Tiamat. After his victory, Marduk established the stars as the seats of the great gods and determined their course; he introduced the signs of the zodiac, the year, and the twelve months; he provided fixed barriers lest any of the days deviate or lose their way. Thus, all movement and with it all life began when the luminous gestalt of time penetrated absolutely formless [formlose] existence, its differentiation and its separating into individual phases. And this consistency [Beständigkeit] of the external events was immediately connected here – in accordance with the interweaving of the two moments in mythical feeling and thinking – to the internal events, the thought of an inviolable rule and norm that is posited over the doing of human beings: “Marduk’s word is constant [beständig], his command is not changed, what issues from his mouth no god can transform.” Thus, he has become the supreme protector and guardian of justice, “who looks into that which is innermost, who does not let the malefactor escape, who bends the recalcitrant and causes justice to prosper.”50 The same interconnection between the universal order of time, which prevails over all events, and the eternal order of justice, under which these events stand, the same connection between the astronomical and ethical



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cosmos, can be found in nearly all the great cultural religions. In the Egyp­ tian pantheon, the moon god Thoth, as the measurer, the divider of time, is also lord over just measurement. The sacred cubit used in drawing up the plan of temples and in surveying the land is consecrated to him. He is the scribe of the gods and the judge of the heavens, who has bestowed language and writing on humanity and who, through the arts of counting and reckoning, has given the gods and humans to know what is their due. Here too, the name for the absolutely exact and unchanging measure (maât) becomes the name for the eternal immutable order that reigns in nature as in ethical life. This concept of “measure” in its twofold signification has indeed been designated as the foundation of the whole system of Egyptian religion.51 The religion of China was equally rooted in that basic feature of thinking and feeling that De Groot has called “universism”: the conviction that all the norms of human doing are grounded in the original law of the world and the heavens and can be directly derived from it. Only those who know the course of the heavens, who understand the course of time and who orders their work [wirken] accordingly – only those who know to connect their work to fixed dates, months, and days – can properly accomplish their human career. “What the heavens determine, that is human nature; . . . to follow human nature that is Tao (the human); the cultivation of this Tao is called instruction.” Once again, the ethical bonds of doing merge here with the temporal, in fact with the calendrical regulation of these acts, and the individual segments of time – the “great year,” the year, the seasons, and the months – are accordingly venerated as divine. Human duty and virtue consist in nothing less and nothing more than knowing and observing the “way” that the macrocosm imposes on the microcosm.52 The same characteristic transition can be followed in the religious intuitions of the Indo-­Germanic peoples; here again, the particularization and individuation of the divine, prevailing in the polytheistic religion of nature, is replaced by the thought of a universal order of nature, which appears at the same time as a spiritual-­ethical order. And once again, it is the intuition of time that enters between these two basic significations and ultimately brings about their merging. In the Vedas, this process of religious development is depicted by the concept of the Rita, in the Avesta by the substantially and etymologically corresponding concept of the Asha.

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Both are expressions of the regular “course,” the prescribed providence of events, apprehended equally from the standpoint of being as well as from the standpoint of ought – an order of events that is likewise an order of justice. “According to the Rita, the rivers flow,” in a song of the Rigveda, and “according to the Rita, the dawn rises.” “The Rita follows the path of order; knowing, it does not miss the directions of the heavens.”53 And the same order watches and prevails over the progress of the year. Around the heavens runs the twelve-­spoked chariot wheel of the Rita which never grows old: the year. In a well-­known song of the Atharvaveda, time itself, Kala, runs like a horse with many reins: With seven wheels does this Time ride, seven naves has he, immortality is his axle. He carries hither all these beings (worlds). Time, the first god, now hastens onward. He carries away all these beings (worlds); they call him Time in the highest heaven. He surely did bring hither all the beings (worlds), he surely did encompass all the beings (worlds). Being their father, he became their son; there is, verily, no other force, higher than he.54 137

In this intuition of time, we can discern the struggle between two originary religious motifs: the struggle between the motif of fate and that of creation. There exists a distinctive dialectical opposition between fate, which appears in time but its being [Wesen] is following a trans-­temporal power, and creation, which must always be thought of as an individual act in time. In the later Vedic literature, we find the idea of Prajapati as the creator of the worlds; the creator of the gods and humans is comprehended; but his relationship to time is twofold and contradictory. On the one hand, Prajapati, from whom all things have emerged, is identified with the year, or more generally with time; he is the year, because he has created it in his own image.55 However, in other passages, as in the recently mentioned song of the Atharvaveda, the relationship is reversed. It is not Prajapati who created time but time that created Prajapati. Time is the first of the gods, who has brought forth all being [Wesen] and who will survive them all. We can recognize here how time, as a divine power, begins to become in a certain sense supra-­divine, because it begins to become supra-­personal. Like Goethe’s Prometheus, wherever almighty time and eternal fate enter



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the stage, they dethrone the polytheistic gods, even the supreme creator god. Insofar as the polytheistic gods remain, they are no longer venerated for themselves but as guardians and administrators of the universal order of fate, into which they fit and to which they are subordinated. The gods are no longer the unconditional legislators of the physical and ethical world; rather, their doing and effective actions are conditioned by a higher law. Thus, the Homeric Zeus stands under the impersonal power of Moira; and in the sphere of Germanic mythology, the power of the fate of becoming (Wurd) appears at once as the fabric of the Norns, the women of fate, and as originary-­law (urlagu, OHG urlag, Old Saxon, orlag). Here too, time is the measuring power – in the Nordic theology of creation, for example, the world ash tree, Yggdrasil, is depicted as the tree with the right measure, as the tree that gives the measure.56 In the Avesta, where the pure creation motif is most sharply carried out, Ahura Mazda, the supreme ruler, is venerated as the creator 138 and lord of all things, but at the same time, he is comprehended as the executor of a supra-­personal order of the Asha, which is both a natural and an ethical order. Although the Asha is created by Ahura Mazda, it appears as an independent originary-­power that stands by the god of light in his struggle against the forceful powers of darkness and falsehood and jointly settles this struggle with him. As helpers in his strife against Ahriman, the god of goodness has created the six archangels, the Amesha Spenta, headed by the “good disposition,” Asha Vahishta, and “good mind” (Vohu Manah). In the positing and designation of these spiritual potencies – which in Plutarch’s Greek translations are rendered as εὔνοια [benevolence] and ἀλήθεια [aletheia: truth] – we are already in a sphere of religious thought that exceeds the boundaries of a mere image-­ world of the mythical, that indeed is shot through with truly dialectical and speculative motifs. Once again, the impact of these motifs is most clearly depicted in the framing and determining of the concept of time. Here the tension between the thought of eternity and the thought of creation becomes strongest – so that it gradually seems to transform the whole religious system from within and imprint on it a new character. Even the Avesta distinguishes two basic forms of time: limitless time, or eternity, and the “prevailing time of the long period,”57 which Ahura Mazda has appointed as the temporal segment for the history of the world, as the epoch of his struggle against the spirit of darkness. This

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epoch of the “long time, subordinated to its own law,”58 organizes itself further into four main segments. With the creation begins the first segment of three millennia – a “time before time,” in which the world, though already luminous, is not yet discernible but exists only spiritually; then an “originary-­time,” in which the world is transformed into a perceptible figure on the basis [Grund] of its already available forms; then a “time of struggle,” in which Ahriman and his comrades invade the pure creation of Ormazd and in which the history of humanity on earth begins – until finally, in the “time of the end,” the power of the evil spirit is broken and the “prevailing time of the long period” is again taken up into endless time and the time of the world into eternity. In the system of Zeruvanism – which is given literary expression only in relatively late times, but which seems merely to have revived certain originary-­motifs of the Iranian faith that had been submerged by the Zoroastrian reform – Endless Time (Zruvan Akarano) is created as the ultimate and supreme principle, as the originary-­ground [Urgrund] from which all things as well as the two opposing potencies of good and evil emerged. Endless time divides itself within itself, thus creating the powers of good and evil as its two sons, who, as twin brothers, belong to each other but must continuously struggle against each other. This system, in which “time” and “fate” are expressly equated – the Greek reports render Zruvan by τύχη [fortune] – shows the distinctive twofold character of concept formation, which at certain positions rises to the most difficult and subtle abstractions but which on others still fully bears the color of the specifically mythical feeling of time. Here time as the time of the world and time as the time of fate is never what it is for theoretical, particularly mathematical cognition: a purely ideal form of order, a system of references and positions. Rather, it is the basic power of becoming itself, which is endowed with divine and daemonic, creative and destructive forces.59 To be sure, its order is apprehended in its universality and inviolability, but, on the other hand, this order appears as prescribed. The law of time, to which all events are subjected, appears as a law ordained by a half-­personal, half-­impersonal power. Myth cannot pass beyond this last barrier, because of the conditionality of its form and its spiritual means of expression. However, within this form, an extensive differentiation of the concept and feeling of time is possible, insofar as mythical-­religious intuition can emphasize different individual moments of time; it can



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provide them with entirely different values and thereby imprint a different “gestalt” on the whole of time.

4.  THE CONFIGURATION OF TIME IN MYTHICAL AND RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS It is characteristic of the approach taken by theoretical cognition, mathematics, and mathematical physics that in them the thought of the homo­ geneity of time is more and more sharply worked out and developed. Only by virtue of this thought can the goal of mathematical-­physical contemplation, the progressive quantification of time, be achieved. Time, in all its individual determinations, not only is taken up into the concept of pure number but ultimately appears to be entirely absorbed by it. In the modern development of mathematical-­physical thinking, in the working out of the general theory of relativity, this is expressed in the fact that here time has indeed cast off all its specific particularity. Every point of the world is determined by its space-­time coordinates, x1, x2, x3, x4; however, these signify only numerical values, which are no longer distinguished from one another by any special characteristic traits and which are accordingly interchangeable with each other. For the mythical-­religious view of the world, however, time never becomes a uniform quantum of this sort; rather, as universal as its concept may ultimately be configured, it is and remains given as a distinctive “quale.” In precisely this qualification of time do the various epochs and cultures, as well as the various basic directions of religious development, distinguish themselves from one another in highly characteristic ways. What we have found to be true of mythical space is also valid for mythical time – its form depends on the distinctive mythical-­religious accentuation, on the type of distribution of the accent of the “holy” and “unholy.” Religiously considered, time is never a simple and uniform course of events; rather, it obtains its sense only through the contrasting and differentiation of its individual phases. The whole of time acquires a different gestalt depending on how religious consciousness distributes the light and shadow, on whether it dwells on and immerses itself in one temporal determination or in another on which it sets a particular mark of value. The present, past, and future are of course basic features of any image of time – however, the mode and the lighting of this image

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vary according to the energy with which consciousness turns now to the one, now to the other element. For mythical-­religious apprehension is not concerned with a purely logical synthesis, with the combination [Zusammenfassung] of the “now” with the “earlier” and the “later” into the “transcendental unity of apperception”; rather, everything depends here on which direction of temporal consciousness obtains predominance over the others. In the concrete mythical-­religious consciousness of time, there always lives a specific dynamic of feeling – a varying intensity with which the I devotes itself to the present, past, or future and in the act of this devotion and by it places them in a definite relationship of affinity or subordinate position vis-­à-­vis one another. It would be an interesting task to trace and point out these diversities and transformations in the feeling of time through the whole of the history of religion and to show how this changing aspect of time, this changing apprehension of its consistent existence, its duration, and its transformation [Wandel], constitutes one of the most profound differences [Differenzen] in the character of individual religions. We shall not follow this difference in detail here but only demonstrate a few of its most typical examples. The emergence of the idea of pure monotheism forms an important turning point in the configuration and apprehension of the problem of time in religious thinking. For in monotheism, the actual revelation of the divine does not occur in the form of time that nature discloses before us in the transformation [Wandel] and periodic recurrence of its shapes [Gestalten]. This form of becoming can provide no image of God’s imperishable being. Particularly in the religious consciousness of the Prophets, there is, consequently, a sharp turn away from nature and from the temporal orders of the events of nature. While the Psalms praise God as the creator of nature, as he to whom day and night belong, who assigns a fixed course to the sun and the heavenly bodies, who has made the moon to divide the year by, the Prophetic view, although these great images appear in it, takes an entirely different path. The divine will has created no sign of itself in nature; thus, the purely ethical-­religious pathos of the Prophets is indifferent to nature. Belief in God is seen as superstition if, whether in hope or in fear, it clings to nature. “Learn not the way of the heathen,” says Jeremiah, “and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them” (Jeremiah 10:2). And for Prophetic consciousness,



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the whole of cosmic, astronomical time disappears along with nature – in its place arises a new intuition of time that refers solely to the history of humanity. Even this history, however, is not comprehended as the history of the past but as a religious history of the future. It has been pointed out, for example, that the legend of the patriarchs was removed from the center of religious interest by the new Prophetic self-­consciousness and consciousness of God.60 All true consciousness of time now becomes a consciousness of the future. “Remember not the former things, neither consider the things of old!” is now expressly required.61 Hermann Cohen, who of all modern thinkers has most profoundly felt this foundational and originary thought of the Prophetic religion most deeply and renewed it in the greatest purity, writes the following of “time”:

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Time becomes the future and only the future. The past and present are submerged in this time of the future. This return to time is the purest idealization. All existence vanishes before this perspective of the idea. The existence of humans sublated itself into this being of the future. . . . What Greek intellectualism could not bring forth, was brought forth by Prophetic monotheism. History [Historie] in Greek consciousness is synonymous with knowledge as such. Thus, for the Greeks, history [Geschichte] is and remains directed entirely toward the past. The Prophet, however, is a seer, not a scholar. . . . The Prophets are the idealists of history. Their vision [Sehertum] created the concept of history as the being of the future.62

The whole present [Gegenwart], which reshapes the human as well as things, must be reborn out of this thought of the future. Nature, as it is and exists, can offer no support to Prophetic consciousness. Just as a new heart is required of the human, so too must there be a “new heavens and a new earth” – a natural substratum, as it were, of the new spirit in which all time and events are seen here as a whole. The theogony as well as the cosmogony of myth and of the mere nature religions are thus surpassed by a spiritual principle of an entirely different form and origin. Even the actual thought of creation disappears almost entirely, at least in the pre-­exilic Prophets.63 Their God stands not so much at the beginning of time as at its end; he is not so much the origin of all events as their ethical-­religious fulfillment.

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The temporal consciousness of the Persian religion also stands under the sign of this pure religious idea of the future. Dualism, the opposition between the powers of good and evil, forms here the great fundamental ethical-­religious theme; however, this dualism is not ultimate, insofar as it is expressly limited to a certain span of time, to the “prevailing time of the long period.” At the end of this epoch, the power of Ahriman is broken and the spirit of the good is alone victorious. Thus, here again, religious feeling is not rooted in the intuition of the given but is entirely directed toward the accomplishment of a new being and a new time. However, compared with the prophetic thought of the “end of times,”64 the willing of the future in Persian religion seems at first sight more limited, more earthbound. The willing toward culture and an optimistic cultural consciousness have been given their full religious sanction here. Whoever tills and waters the fields, whoever plants a tree, whoever destroys harmful animals and cares for the preservation and support of useful animals, is fulfilling the will of god. These “good deeds of the countryman” are praised over and over again in the Avesta.65 The man of right, the preserver and helper of the Asha, is he who brings forth the grain, the source of life from the earth – he who cultivates the grain observes the law of Ahura Mazda. This is the religion that Goethe described in the “Legacy of Ancient Persian Faith” in his West-­Eastern Divan: “Heavy service everyday maintained – No more revelation need be framed.”66 For humanity as a whole and the human being as an individual do not stand aside from the great cosmic struggle. They do not feel and experience [erleben] it as a mere outward fate; rather, they are determined to intervene in it through their own actions. Only through their constant collaboration can the Asha, the order of the good and right, be led to victory. Only by virtue of the communion with the will and doing of right-­thinking men, the men of the Asha, does Ormazd ultimately succeed in his work of liberation and redemption. Every good deed, every good thought of human beings, increases the force of the good spirit, just as every evil thought multiplies the realm of evil. So with all the directions toward an outward configuration of culture, it is ultimately from the “inner universe” that the thought of god draws its true force. The accent of religious feeling rests on the aim of action – on its telos, in which the mere course of time is surpassed by being concentrated in a single supreme summit. Again, all light falls on



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the final act in the great world drama, in the end of times, in which the spirit of light will have conquered the spirit of darkness. For redemption is accomplished not only through god but also through humans and with the help of humans. All humans are in unison and accord loud praises to Ormazd: “The renovation takes place in the worlds according to his will, and the world is immortal forever and everlasting.”67 If we compare this basic view to the image of time and becoming as it emerges in the philosophical and religious speculation of India, the contrast is immediately discernible. Once again, a sublation of time and becoming is sought here – however, it is not the energy of the will that ultimately concentrates all conditioned doing on a single, supreme goal; rather, it is from the clarity and depth of thinking that this sublation is expected. Once the first natural form of the early Vedic religions was overcome, religion more and more assumed the color of thought. When reflection penetrates the semblance of the multiplicity of things, when it obtains the certainty of the absolute-­One beyond all multiplicity, then the form of time, along with the form of the world, also vanishes for it. We can perhaps best perceive the contrast between the basic Indian and Iranian intuitions in one characteristic feature: the religious position and evaluation of sleep. In the Avesta, sleep appears as an evil daemon because it paralyzes the activity of people. Here, waking and sleeping are opposed, like light and darkness, good and evil.68 Even in the older Upanishads, however, older Indian thinking feels attached, as though by a mysterious magic, to the representation of the deep, dreamless sleep, which it reshapes more and more into a religious ideal. Here, where all the determinate boundaries of being pass into each other, all torments of the heart are overcome. Here the mortal becomes immortal and attains to the Brahman: As a man, when in the embrace of a beloved wife, knows nothing within or without, so this person, when in the embrace of the intelligent Soul, knows nothing within or without. Verily, that is his . . . form, in which his desire is satisfied, in which . . . he is without desire and without sorrow.69

Here lies the germ of that characteristic feeling of time that emerges in full clarity and extreme intensity in the Buddhist sources. With regard to the intuition of time, the teachings of Buddha retain only the moment of coming-­ into-­ being and passing away: all coming-­ into-­ being and

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passing away is, however, above all and essentially anguish. The source of suffering is the threefold thirst: the thirst for pleasure, the thirst for becoming, and the thirst for transitoriness [Vergänglichkeit]. Here, therefore, the endlessness of becoming, as it is immediately enacted in the temporal form of all empirical events, reveals in one stroke all its senselessness and hopelessness. In becoming itself, there can be no conclusion, and thus, it can provide no aim, no telos. As long as we are fastened to the wheel of becoming, it spins us around unremittingly and inexorably, without rest and without purpose. In the “Questions of Milinda,” King Milinda asks Saint Nagasena for a metaphor for the transmigration of souls. Nagasena draws a circle on the ground and asks, “Has this circle an end, great king?” “No, my lord, it does not.” “So moves the cycle of births.” “Is there then no end to this chain?” “No, there is none, my lord.”70 The essential religious and intellectual method of Buddhism can almost be characterized by the fact that wherever the ordinary empirical worldview believes to behold being, permanence, or consistent existence, that it demonstrates in this semblance of being the moment of coming-­into-­being and ceasing-­to-­be, and that it even immediately feels this mere form of succession as such – independently of the content that moves and is shaped in it – as suffering. For Buddhism, all knowing [Wissen] and all nonknowingness [Unwissenheit] are rooted in this one point. As Buddha instructs a monk: Here, bhikkhu, the uninstructed worldling does not understand form subject to arising as it really is thus: “Form is subject to arising.” He does not understand form subject to vanishing as it really is thus: “Form is subject to vanishing.” He does not understand form subject to arising and vanishing as it really is thus: “Form is subject to arising and vanishing.” He does not understand feeling . . . perception . . . volitional formations, . . . consciousness subject to arising . . . subject to vanishing . . . subject to arising and vanishing as it really is thus: “Consciousness is subject to arising and vanishing.” This is called ignorance, bhikkhu, and in this way one is immersed in ignorance.71

Thus, in sharp contrast with the active feeling of time and the future in the Prophetic religion, it is activity [Betätigungen], sankhara, our very doing itself that is the source and root of suffering. Our own deeds as



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well as our sufferings inhibit the way of the true, inward life, because they drag this life down and entangle it in the form of time. Since all doing moves in time and possesses reality [Realität] only in it and through it, its difference from suffering is leveled down and sublated. Redemption from both occurs only if we succeed in sublating this temporal foundation, this substratum of all suffering and doing, in that we see through it as essenceless [wesenlos]. The overcoming of suffering as well as the overcoming of doing occurs through the destruction of the form of time, after which spirit enters into the true eternity of Nirvana. Here the aim consists not in the “end of time,” as for Zarathustra or the Israelite prophets, but in the disappearance for the religious view of time as a whole, with everything that is in it and everything that acquires “figure [Gestalt] and name” in it. The flame of life is extinguished before the pure gaze of cognition. “He has cut the round and won desirelessness; The dried-­up river flows no more; the severed round does revolve – Just this is the end of suffering.”72 And another completely different but no less significant way of considering time is disclosed when we consider the configuration of Chinese religion. As varied as the threads may be that connect India with China, in particular as close as certain individual forms of Indian mysticism are that touch on those of Chinese mysticism, the two cultures would appear far apart in their characteristic feeling of time and in their intellectual and emotional attitude toward temporal existence. The ethics of Taoists also culminates in a doctrine of immobility and inactivity [Nichtstun]: immobility and silence are the basic attributes of the Tao. Human beings, when they want to participate in the Tao, the fixed course and permanent order of the heavens, must above all generate the “emptiness” of the Tao in themselves. The Tao engenders all beings [Wesen] and yet renounces their possession; it makes them and yet relinquishes them. That is its mysterious virtue: to create through renunciation, through relinquishing. Thus, inactivity becomes a principle of Chinese mysticism: “Practice stillness, busy yourself with inaction”73 is its supreme rule. However, as soon as we penetrate to the sense and heart of this mysticism, we learn that it is antithetical to the religious tendency that prevails in Buddhism. It is significant that in the teaching of Buddha, redemption from life, from the endless cycle of birth, is the true goal, whereas in Taoist mysticism, it is the prolongation of life that is promised

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and sought after. Thus, in a Taoist text, the Emperor Huang is taught by an ascetic that The refinement that belongs to the Tao of the highest order confers, is the loneliest solitude and darkest darkness . . . nothing is there to be seen, nothing to be heard; it envelops the soul in silence, and the material body is thereby set to the correct state. So be still, and you are sure to become pure by it; do not exert your body and do not be preoccupied with your refinement – in this way, your life can be extended.74

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Whereas Buddhist nothingness [Nichts], Nirvana, aims at the effacement of time, the doing nothing [Nichtstun] of Taoist mysticism aims to preserve it, to perpetuate the endless duration not only of being in general but ultimately of the body and its individual form. “When your eyes see nothing more, when your ears hear nothing more, when your heart feels nothing more, then your soul will preserve your body and your body will live forever.”75 What is negated here, what should be overcome, is not time as such – as we see – but rather alteration in time. It is just through this sublation of alteration that the pure duration, the same endless continued existence, an unlimited repetition of sameness [Sel­ big] should be achieved and secured. Being is grasped as a simple and immutable continued existence in time; however, for Chinese speculation, in sharp contrast to the basic intuition of Indian thinking, precisely this consistent existence becomes the aim of religious desire and the expression of a positive religious value. “Time, . . . in which all changes of appearances are to be thought,” Kant once said, “endures and never changes; because it is that in which succession and coexistence can only be presented as determinations of themselves.”76 This unchanging time that forms the substratum of all change is apprehended by Chinese thinking and concretely viewed in the image of the heavens and their eternally recurrent shapes. The heavens govern without effectively acting – they determine all being without departing from themselves, from their always identical forms and rule. All earthly dominion and government should reproduce them. Because the Tao [of the heavens] is without stirring [Regung] and nothing is that it does not create. If princes and kings can preserve the



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stillness [Regungslosigkeit], then traces of the development of the ten thousand beings [Wesen] takes place by itself.77

Thus, instead of the element of variability, instead of emergence and passing away, the element of pure substantiality is attributed here to time and to the heavens and at the same time is raised to the supreme ethical-­ religious norm. Pure, uniform persisting in being is the rule that time and the heavens posit for the human. Just as the heavens and time are not created but have been from all eternity and will remain and be for all eternity, so too must human action renounce the illusion of effect and creation and direct itself toward the preservation and maintenance of the existing order [Bestehenden]. A determinate and specific cultural feeling is expressed in this religious configuration of the concept of time. The ethics of Confucius is permeated with this feeling, in that what it stresses above all is the “immovability” of the celestial and the human Tao. Thus, ethical theory becomes the doctrine of the four immutable properties of the human, 149 which are the same as those of the heavens, which are as eternal and unchanging as the heavens themselves. This basic presupposition enables us to comprehend the strict traditionalism that is imprinted on this ethics. Confucius said of himself that he was a transmitter and not a creator, that he believed in and loved antiquity. And in the Tao Teh King, it is written that one dominates the being of the present by holding to the Tao of antiquity: “To be able to recognize the beginnings of antiquity, that is called parting the threads of the Tao.”78 There is no demand here for a “new heaven” and a “new earth.” The future has its religious justification only insofar as it can legitimize itself as a simple continuation, an exact and faithful picture [Abbild] of the past. If the speculative thinking of the Upanishads and Buddhism seeks a being beyond all multiplicity, all alteration, and all temporal form, and if in the Messianic religions, the pure will toward the future determines the form of belief, then here the given order of things, just as it is, is perpetuated and sanctified. This hallowing extends even to the individual details of the spatial arrangement and organization of things.79 In the intuition of the one unmoved order of the All, spirit attains silence and time itself, as it were, stands still: for now, the remotest future seems connected to the past by unbreakable threads. Ancestor cult and filial piety thus form the basic

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requirements of Chinese ethics and the foundation of Chinese religion. De Groot writes thus in describing the Chinese ancestor cult:

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While the tribe constantly obtains new members by childbirth, it gradually dies out at its summit. However, the dead do not separate from it. Even in the afterlife, they continue . . . to exercise their dominion and their beatific will. . . . Their souls, made present by wooden tablets with their names, find their place on the house altar and in the temple of the ancestors, where they are faithfully venerated and consulted for advice, and respectfully nourished with sacrifices of food. And thus, the living and the dead form together a larger tribe. . . . As in their lifetime, the ancestors are the natural guardians of their descendants, whom they protect against the harmful influences of evil spirits and thus assure them of happiness, prosperity, and rich progeny.80

In this form of ancestral belief and ancestor cult, we have again a clear example of a feeling of time in which the religious-­ethical accent is neither on the future nor on the present in its pure immediacy but above all on the past and in which the succession of the individual moments of time is transformed into a consistent being-­together and interpenetration [Ineinandersein]. This religious tendency [Zug] toward perseverance in existence is determined in yet another way in the basic intuition that determines the form of the Egyptian religion. Once again, religious feeling and thought hold fast here to the world with clutching organs; here again, there is no returning back beyond the given into its metaphysical originary-­ground [Urgrund], nor is there any thought of another, ethical order beyond it to which it is constantly approaching and through which it wants to obtain a new shape [Gestalt]. What is sought and desired is rather simple continuity – a continuity that refers above all to the individual being and individual form of the human. The preservation of this form, immortality, seems entirely bound up with the preservation of the physical substratum of life, of the human lived body in all its particularity. It is as if the pure thought of the future could assert itself in no other way than through the immediate presence of this substratum, as if it could establish itself only in the constant concrete intuition of this immediate presence.



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Accordingly, the greatest care must be taken to protect not only the lived body as a whole from destruction but the preservation of each of its individual members. Through certain material methods of embalming as well as through certain magical ceremonies, each part of the body, each organ, must be transferred from its ephemeral [vergänglich] being into a state of immortality [Unvergänglichkeit]: only this guarantees the eternity of the continuity of the soul.81 And thus here in general, the representation of “life after death” can be achieved in no other way than through the representation of a simple prolongation of empirical existence that is to be preserved in all its individual features, in its immediate physical concretion. Similarly, in the ethical, there prevails the thought of an order to which not only are their guardians, the gods governed, but in which the human must also consistently collaborate. However, it is not a question here, as in the Iranian religion, of being transported to a new being of the future, but only of the simple continuation of the currently existing [Bestehend]. The spirit of evil is never definitively defeated; rather, since the beginning of the world, there has been the same balance of forces, the same periodic rise and fall in the phases of the struggle.82 Due to this basic intuition, all temporal dynamics are ultimately sublated into a kind of spatial statics. This sublation has received its clearest expression in Egyptian art, in which this tendency [Zug] toward stabilization is most magnificently and consistently depicted – in which all being, all life, and all movement seem spellbound within eternal geometric forms. What is sought in India by way of speculative thinking and in China by way of a state religious order of life is the eradication of the merely temporal, which is achieved here through means of artistic configuration, through the immersion in the purely intuitive, plastic, and architectonic forms of things. This form triumphs in its clarity, determinacy, and eternity over all mere succession, over the ceaseless flux and transience of all temporal configurations. The Egyptian pyramid is the visible sign of this triumph and for this reason the symbol of the aesthetic as well as the basic religious intuition of Egyptian culture. However, if in all the typical manifestations of the concept of time that we have considered up to now, pure thinking, as well as feeling and intuition, can master time only by abstracting or negating it into some type of form; another approach to time, quite apart from this mere abstraction

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and negation, ultimately still remains. A true overcoming of time and fate can basically be spoken of only where the basic characteristic moments of the temporal are not merely disregarded or overlooked but where precisely these moments are held onto, where they are posited and positively affirmed. Only in this affirmation is their actual overcoming possible, not so much outwardly as inwardly, not so much transcendently as immanently. As soon as this path has been taken, the development of the consciousness and feeling of time enters a new phase of development. The intuition of time and fate now begins to break loose from its mythical originary-­ground [Urgrund]: the concept of time enters into a new form, the form of philosophical thinking. It was the philosophy of the Greeks that prepared the ground [Boden] and created the basic presuppositions for this great transformation – perhaps one of the most significant and momentous in the history of human spirit. In its inception, Greek thinking reveals close connections with speculative-­ religious doctrines of time emanating from the orient. Regardless of whether it is possible or not to demonstrate a direct historical connection between Zeruvanite speculation and the Orphic cosmogonies and cosmologies,83 the factual similarity between certain basic motifs is in any case unmistakable. In the theogony of Pherecydes of Syros, which is now assigned roughly to the middle of the sixth century bc, the threshold of the great intellectual creations of Greek philosophy, Time, Zeus, and Chthonia are the originary-­gods, from which all being has descended: Ζὰς μὲν καὶ Χρόνος ἦσαν αεὶ καὶ Χθονίη· . . . τὸν δὲ Χρόνον ποιῆσαι ἐκ τοῦ γόνου ἑαυτοῦ . . . πῦρ καὶ πνεῦμὶ καὶ ὕδωρ” [Zeus and Chronos [Time] and Chthonie [Earth] always existed, and that Chronos made out from his own seed fire and air and water.]84

Here, creation, and all that is contained in it, is the product of time, while in other Orphic poems night and chaos appear as its origin. And much later, at the summit of Greek speculation, we sometimes feel echoes of such basic mythical thought and moods. In Empedocles’ doctrine of the transmigration of the soul and redemption, time and fate, χρόνος [time] and ἀνάγκη [necessity], are again immediately grasped as one:



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There is an oracle of fate, an ancient decree of the gods, eternal, sealed fast with broad oaths, that when one of the divine spirits whose portion is long life sinfully stains his own limbs with bloodshed and following Hate has sworn a false oath – these must wander for thrice ten thousand seasons far from the company of the blessed, being born throughout the period into all kinds of mortal shapes, which exchange one hard way of life for another.85

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Objective becoming and the oppositions, as they unfold within the one world order, within the sphairos, are subject here to inviolable laws and measures of time; to each antagonism, a specific “epoch” is assigned, in which it is completed. When time has been fulfilled (τελειομένοιο χρόνοιο [completed time]), one opposition must cede to the other: love to hate or hate to love.86 And yet in Empedocles, this old concept of time and fate seems merely to echo a remote world that had vanished for philosophical thinking. For where Empedocles speaks not as a seer and priest of atonement but as a philosopher and researcher, his theory is based on that of Parmenides. In Parmenides, however, Greek thinking took an entirely new position in regard to the problem of time. It is his great achievement that with him for the first time thinking made logos the measure of being, from which the final decision, the κρίσις [critique], concerning being and nonbeing is expected. And for him, the power of time and becoming dissolves into a mere mirage [Trugbild]. Only for myth is there a temporal origin, a “genesis” of being – whereas for logos itself the very question of an origin loses its sense. There is only one other description, one way remaining, (namely) that (what is) is. To this way there are very many sign-­posts: that being has no coming-­into-­being and no destruction, for it is whole of limb, without motion and without end. And it never was, nor will be, because it is now, a whole all together. One, continuous; for what creation of it will you look for? How, whence (could it have) sprung? . . . what necessity impelled it, if it did spring from nothing, to be produced later or earlier? Thus, it must be absolutely, or not at all. . . . Justice has never released being in its fetters and set it free either to come into being or to perish but holds it fast.87

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Thus, in the mythical language, which the didactic poem of Parmenides still speaks throughout, the consistent existence of being [Bestand des Sein] is again linked to the commandment and order of fate, of Αίκη. However, this fate, which is the expression no longer of a foreign power but rather of the expression of the necessity of thought itself, has now become timeless – timeless as the truth in whose name Parmenides pronounces his verdict on the world of becoming as a world of semblance. In this exclusion of all temporal determinations, the mythical concept of fate passes for the first time into the logical concept of necessity: Δίκη becomes ἀνάγκη. The measurement [Gemessenheit] and rigidity of the archaic style in which Parmenides’ didactic poem is written prevents any expression of a subjective, personal emotion – nevertheless, in the verses of this poem, we sometimes hear the triumph of logos over the mythical powers of fate, the triumph of pure thought and its unassailable consistent existence over the temporal world of appearances. Thus coming-­into-­being is quenched and destruction also into the unseen. . . . But being is motionless in the limits of mighty bonds, without beginning, without ceasing, since coming-­into-­being and destruction have been driven far away, and true conviction has rejected them. And remaining the same in the same place, it rests by itself and thus remains there fixed; for a powerful necessity holds it in the bonds of a limit, which constrains it round about . . . therefore all things that mortals have established, believing in their truth, are just a name: becoming and perishing, being and not-­being, and change of place, and alteration of bright color.88 155

It is immediately declared here that the force of philosophical thought, the force of true conviction, rejects becoming as a mythical originary-­ power as well as an empirical-­sensible form (“ἐπεὶ γένεσις καὶ ὄλεθρος/ τῆλε μάλ’ ἐπλάχθησαν, ἀπῶσε δὲ πίστις ἀληθής”) [“it is motionless in the limits of mighty bonds, without beginning, without ceasing, since Becoming and Destruction have been driven very far away, and true conviction has rejected them”].89 The power of time is broken as long as time, considered from the standpoint of philosophical thought, dialectically dissolves itself, as long as it reveals its own inner contradiction. If religious feeling, particularly in India, senses in time above all the



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burden of suffering, then for philosophical thinking, here where it first appears in full independence and consciousness, time is grounded in [zugrunde an] the burden of contradiction. And in the progress of Greek philosophy, this basic thought established itself, regardless of the multiple transfigurations it undergoes, as a permanently enduring effective force. Democritus and Plato follow the path that Parmenides had indicated as the only path of “true conviction” – the path of logos, which for them too became the highest authority in the decision concerning being and nonbeing. However, while Parmenides believed that he had intellectually destroyed [vernichtet] becoming, they demanded its intellectual penetration – they called for a theory of becoming. The world of alteration was not to be denied but rather “saved”; however, this salvation could be achieved only if a solid intellectual substratum could be provided for the world of sensible phenomena. It was in answer to this demand that Democritus comprehended the world of atoms and Plato the world of Ideas. To the temporal coming-­into-­being and ceasing-­to-­be, the one side opposed the consistent existence of immutable natural laws that govern all physical events, while the other side opposed a realm of pure timeless forms in which all temporal existence participates. Democritus was the first to state the concept of natural law in a truly sharp and universal form and by virtue of the new standard thus established to disparage all mythical thinking as merely subjective and anthropomorphic: “People have fashioned a mirage [Trugbild] of Chance as an excuse for their own stupidity.”90 To this human idol, 156 he opposed the eternal necessity of logos, which knows no chance, no exception to the universal rule of the world events: “οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτην γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε | καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης [Nothing happens at random; everything happens out of reason and by necessity].”91 And in addition to this new logical concept of Ananke, a new ethical concept of it arose more and more clearly and consciously in Greek thinking. Although this unfolded above all in Greek poetry, it was in the tragedy that a new sense and force [Kraft] of the I, of the moral self as opposed to an omnipotence [Allgewalt] of fate was first discovered. Greek thinking not only accompanied this process, this gradual detachment from the mythical-­ religious originary-­grounds in which the drama was originally rooted, but it gave it its own foundation. Like the oriental religions, from its

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beginnings Greek philosophy apprehended the temporal order at once as a physical and as a moral order. It looked upon time as the fulfillment and enforcement of an ethical lawful order. “The source from which existing things derive their existence,” says Anaximander, “is also that to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity; for they give justice and make reparation to one another for their injustice, according to the arrangement of time.” Theophrastus, who handed down these words, felt and emphasized with their mythical-­poetic tone.92 More and more, however, the ethical side of the mythical concept of time, which is at the same time fate, undergoes a new spiritual deepening and internalization. In Heraclitus, we find the profound saying that a person’s character is his fate and his daemon: ἦθος ἀνθρώπωι δαίμων.93 And in Plato, this thought is completed in that presentation of the judgment of the dead which, perhaps deriving from motifs of Iranian belief concerning death and the soul, gives new expression and significance to these motifs. In the tenth book of the Republic, we find the image of the “spindle of necessity” (’Ανάγκης ἅτρακτον) by which all the spheres are set in motion:

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These were the Fates, the daughters of Necessity: Lachesis, Clotho, and Atropos. They were dressed in white, with garlands on their heads, and they sang to the music of the Sirens. Lachesis sang of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atropos of the future. . . . There a Speaker arranged them in order, took from the lap of Lachesis a number of lots and a number of models of lives, mounted a high pulpit, and spoke to them: “Here is the message of Lachesis, the maiden daughter of Necessity: ‘Ephemeral souls, this is the beginning of another cycle that will end in death. Your daemon or guardian spirit will not be assigned to you by lot; you will choose him. . . . Virtue knows no master; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none.’ ”94

In this magnificent vision [Vision], in which once again the entire force of mythical configuration is condensed, which was proper to the Greeks and above all to Plato, we nevertheless no longer stand on the ground [Boden] of myth. For opposed to the idea of mythical guilt [Schuld] and mythical undoing, we find here the basic Socratic idea of ethical responsibility for



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oneself. The sense and core of the life of the human, their true destiny, is placed within them – as with Parmenides’ pure thought, here time and fate are overcome by the ethical will. This inner process of spiritual liberation explains the characteristic feeling of time that attained its first true maturity among the Greeks. We might say that here for the first time, thought and feeling become free to gain a pure and full consciousness of the temporal present [Gegen­ wart]. “Being present” [Gegenwärtig] should and can be thought of only as the being of Parmenides: it has never been and never will be, because it is all together only present [vorhanden] in the now, one and indivisible (“οὐδέ ποτ’ ἦν οὐδ’ ἔσται, ἐπεὶ νῦν ἕστιν ὁμοῦ πᾶν, / ἕν, συνεχές”).95 The Platonic Idea has the character of pure presence [Gegenwart] – for only as always-­being [Immerseiend], never becoming, can it stand firm to thinking and meet its demands for identity, for constant selfsame determinacy. And for Plato, the philosopher is the one who by virtue of the force of argument is always responsible [obliegt] for this always-­being [Immerseiend].96 Even that thinker, the one who is commonly regarded as the true “philosopher of becoming” is only a seeming exception to this basic character of Greek philosophical thought. For we ignore and misunderstand the teachings of Heraclitus if we take his thesis of the “flux of things” simply in a negative significance.97 Of course, he spoke in unforgettable images of the intuition of the “stream of time” – of that stream that irresistibly sweeps away all being [Seiende] along with it and in which no one could step twice. His gaze, however, is by no means focused on this mere factum of the flowing and passing, rather it is directed toward the eternal measures that he apprehends in it. These measures are the truly one and immutable logos of the world. “This order of the world that is the same for all,” he therefore proclaimed, “was not created by any one of the gods or the human, but it was ever and is and shall be ever-­living fire, kindled in measure and quenched in measure.”98 And again, in the figure of Dike, the directing undoing, this thought of the necessary immanent measure in all events is mythically personified. “The sun will not transgress his measures – otherwise the Erinyes, ministers of Dike, will find him out.”99 On this certainty of a metron, a secure and necessary rhythm that is maintained in all change, rests the certainty of an “invisible harmony that is better than the visible harmony.”100

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It is only in order to assure himself of this hidden harmony that Heraclitus turns back again and again to the intuition of becoming. What seizes and captivates him is not, therefore, the naked facticity of becoming but rather its sense. “Wisdom is one thing. It is to know the sense by which all things are steered through all things.”101 This twofold position – this attachment to temporal intuition and this overcoming it through the thought of a unity of law, indwelling and immediately grasped in it – most precisely expresses the particular nature of Heraclitus as a Greek thinker. Oldenberg has pointed to numerous parallels between the Heraclitean teaching of becoming and the soul, on one hand, and the Buddhist teaching of the same oppositions, on the other: The creations of the West and the East in many respects are very similar in the way they correspond to each other, which indeed may excite our astonishment, in fundamental aspects as in secondary matters, even down to the form of the maxims to which religious consciousness is so devoted, or to the comparisons that are intended to introduce the great orders of events of fantasy. . . . It is obviously not by chance that precisely in the period of development we are speaking about here that the agreement between the ideas of two peoples who are far removed from each other both outwardly and inwardly are stronger in many respects than in the preceding period. The myth-­forming fantasy that operate in the time scepter goes its ways without plan and aimlessly; it is driven by chance; it connects what is far remote according to its whims; it playfully spills out new shapes, rich in sense or baroque, from its cornucopia. However, as soon as a reflection, which rapidly grows into inquiring thought, begins to devote itself more and more purposively to the problems of the world and to those of human existence, the leeway [Spielraum: room to play] is reduced. What almost inevitably appears as reality to the attentive – though less experienced in the art of seeing – eye of those days confines the stream of representations in a set channel and thus imprints the most diverse and striking features of similarity upon the analogous thought processes of Greek and Indian minds.102

And, nevertheless, on the other hand, precisely when we pursue these similarities, typical oppositions between the modes of thinking and



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general-­intellectual attitudes become clearer and more concise. In Buddhism, the finite form to which all existence is bound must above all be shattered, the illusion of the intrinsically limited figure must be sublated, so that the religious sense of events can be disclosed. Form (rupa) is the first of the five elements [Elemente] of existence that bare within them the source and ground of all suffering. In one of his sermons, Buddha says: Bhikkhus, I will teach you the burden, the taking up [Aufheben] of the burden, and laying down of the burden. . . . And what, bhikkhus, is the burden? It should be said: the five aggregates subject to clinging. What five? That the form aggregate subject clinging, the feeling aggregate subject to clinging; the perception aggregate subject to clinging, the volitional formations aggregate subject to clinging, the consciousness aggregate subject to clinging. This is called the burden. . . . Friends, form is impermanent; what is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering has ceased and passed away . . . what is impermanent is suffering; what is suffering has ceased and passed away.103

No one stressed the changeability of what the common view calls the “form” of things more sharply than Heraclitus. However, he draws from it the exact opposite consequence to the one drawn in Buddha’s sermon: it leads him not to a rejection of existence but rather to its passionate affirmation. While in the Buddhist legend, Siddhattha the king’s son flees from his first sight of old age, sickness, and death to become an ascetic and penitent, Heraclitus seeks all this and dwells on it, because he needs it as a means of grasping the mystery of logos, which is only in that it constantly breaks apart [auseinandergehen] into oppositions. While the mystic feels in temporal becoming only the torment of impermanence [Unbe­ stand], Heraclitus delights in the intuition of the great One, which must split itself in two in order to find itself again. “The oppositions unite themselves and from opposites is created the most beautiful harmony,” “a unification of opposing tensions, like that of the bow and the lyre.”104 For Heraclitus, the intuition of “harmony of opposing tensions” solves the riddle of form and takes from us the burden of becoming. Now, the temporal no longer appears as a deficiency pure and simple, as limitation and suffering; in it, rather, is disclosed the innermost life of the divine. There is no peace and beatitude in the ceasing of becoming,

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in oppositionless perfection; rather, “disease makes health pleasant and good, hunger satisfaction, weariness rest.”105 Now, even the opposition of life and death becomes relative. “It is always one and the same that dwells in us: living and dead, awake and sleeping, as well as young and old. If it changes, this becomes that, and that becomes this.”106 As with Buddha, Heraclitus has a fondness for the image of the circle to express the content of his theory. In the circumference, reads one of the fragments, the beginning and the end are one.107 However, whereas for Buddha, the circle serves as a symbol [Sinnbild] of the endlessness and hence aimlessness and senselessness of becoming, for Heraclitus, it serves as a symbol [Sinnbild] of perfection. The line returning to itself indicates the uniformity of form, the figure as the basic determining law of the universe – and similarly, Plato and Aristotle made use of the figure of the circle to ground and form their intellectual image of the cosmos. Thus, while Indian thinking is oriented essentially toward the transience of the temporal and Chinese thinking toward the intuition of its consistent existence – while the first one-­sidedly emphasizes the element of becoming and the second that of duration – here the two elements are placed in a pure internal balance. The thought of variability and that of substantiality merge with one another. And from this merging together arises a new feeling that might be called the purely speculative feeling of time and presence. Here, there is no longer, as in myth, a return to the temporal beginning of things, or as in the prophetic, religious-­ethical feeling, an orientation toward its ultimate goal, its telos; rather here thinking dwells in the pure contemplation of the eternally unchanging fundamental law of the all. In this feeling of the present, the I gives itself to the moment [Augenblick] without being confined to it: it seems to hover free in the moment, without being touched by its immediate content, without being captured by the burden or adversely affected by its suffering. In this speculative “now,” the differences of the empirical form of time are thus sublated. In a fragment preserved by Seneca, Heraclitus says that each day is the same as another, unus dies par omni est.108 This does not signify some sameness in the content of events, which, on the contrary, changes not only from day to day but from hour to hour and from moment [Augenblick] to moment [Augenblick], but refers to the always identical form of the world process that emerges just as definitely in little things as in big, in the simplest point of the present as in the infinite



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duration of time. Among the moderns, Goethe is the one who has deeply felt this Heraclitian, this truly Greek feeling of time and life, and has revived it with the greatest intensity: “Today is today, tomorrow tomorrow,/and what ensued and what has past by/is neither carried away nor left behind.”109 Indeed, the basic speculative view of time bears a feature that would seem to relate it closely to the artistic view. For in both, we are relieved of the burden of becoming that finds so moving an expression in the teaching of Buddha. For whoever, in the intuition of time, no longer clings to the content of events but apprehends their pure form, this content is ultimately sublated into form; the substance of being and events is sublated into pure play. It is perhaps possible to understand the strangely profound saying of Heraclitus in this way: “αἰὼν παῖς ἐστι παίζων, πεττέυων παιδὸς ἡ βασιληίη,” “Time is a child playing a game of draughts; the kingship is in the hands of the child.”110 At this point, we cannot follow how the speculative apprehension of time, whose ground is set down here, unfolded further and how it ultimately came to decisively intervene in the sphere of empirical-­ scientific cognition. Here too, the philosophy of the Greeks, particularly Platonic philosophy, forms the connecting middle link. For even Plato’s teaching, as sharply as it drew the boundary between the pure being of the Idea and the world of becoming, did not stop at a merely negative evaluation of time and becoming. In Plato’s later work, the concept of “movement” finds its way into the presentation of the realm of pure ideas; there is a movement of the pure forms, a κίνησις τῶν ἐιδῶν. And yet the new significance that the concept of time receives for the overall construction of Plato’s teaching becomes clearer and more determined in the configuration of his natural philosophy. In the Timaeus, time is the intermediary between the worlds of the visible and the invisible and explains how the visible world can participate in the eternity of the pure forms. The physical-­corporeal world arises with the creation of time. 163 The demiurge [Weltbildner], looking to the always-­being [Immerseiend], to the ideas as the eternal mode images [Musterbilder], wanted to make the sensible world as much like them as possible. The nature of the eternal archetypes [Urbilder], however, could not be wholly transferred to what has become, so the demiurge decided to create a moving picture [Abbild] of eternity. This moving picture [Abbild] of eternity persisting in unity is what we call “time” and thus, the days and nights, the months and years

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appeared, which were linked with the structure of the whole by the will of the demiurge. Time, by moving in a circle according to number, is therefore the first and most complete imitation of the eternal insofar as it is possible to grasp such an imitation in what has become.111 With this, however, time – which, as an expression of that which merely becomes and never is [Seiend], had until now seemed to constitute a fundamental barrier to thinking – has become a basic concept for the cognition of the cosmos. This intermediary concept of a temporal order undertakes, as it were, a “cosmodicy” within Plato’s philosophical system, as it ensures the ensouling of the cosmos and its elevation into a spiritual totality [Ganz].112 Plato still consciously speaks here in the language of myth; however, at the same time, he points out a path that has led, in strict historical continuity, to the grounding [Begründung] of the modern scientific worldview. Kepler shows himself to be thoroughly imbued with the basic ideas of the Timaeus: they guided him unremittingly from his first work, the Mysterium cosmographicum [The Cosmographic Mystery] to the mature exposition of the Harmonices mundi [The Harmony of the World]. And here, for the first time, a new concept of time appears in full clarity: the concept of time of the mathematical science of nature. In the formulation of Kepler’s three laws, time appears as the fundamental variable – that uniformly changing magnitude to which all non-­uniform alteration and motion are referred and by which the measure of this alteration is determined and read off. This is henceforth its ideal, its purely intellectual significance, as it was immediately established by Leibniz in general philosophical concepts from the standpoint of the new shape of mathematical physics.113 The concept of time has thus been imbued with the concept of function, in that it now appears as one of the most important applications and manifestations [Äußerungen] of functional thinking; it is thereby raised to an entirely new level of signification. The Platonic concept of time has now been confirmed: only by being ordered in the continuum of time, only by being related to this “moving picture [Abbild] of eternity,” have phenomena become ripe for knowledge and gained their share in the idea. That this insight into the problem of planetary motion is achieved, however, also points us to a historical intellectual interconnection of typical



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significance. The planets, “the moving and wandering stars,” have from the earliest times aroused mythical and religious interest. Along with the sun and moon, they are worshiped as divinities. In the astral religion of the Babylonians, Venus in particular, as the morning star and the evening star, was thus venerated and, in the image of the goddess Ishtar, became a leading figure in the Babylonian pantheon. And we find this cult of the planets in far distant cultures, as for example, among the Aztecs. In the course of religious development, particularly in the transition to the basic intuition of monotheism, belief in these ancient deities long remained alive – they now appeared, however, degraded to daemons that interfered in the order and lawfulness of the all in a hostile and disruptive manner. In the Iranian religion, the planets are looked upon as evil powers who resist the Asha, the world order of the good. As servants of Ahriman, they plunge into the celestial sphere and in the freedom of their course disturb its regular constitution.114 This demonization of the planets recurs later, particularly in Gnosticism: the daemonic planetary powers are the true enemies of the Gnostic, in them is embodied the power of fate, εἱμαρμένη, from which the Gnostic seeks redemption.115 And this representation of the irregularity of the planets continues to have an effect in modern philosophy, as it did in the Renaissance speculation on the philosophy of nature. In antiquity, Eudoxus of Cnidus, the mathematician and astronomer of the Platonic Academy, worked out a strictly mathematical theory of planetary motion, in which he furnished proof that the planets were not errant stars but moved according to fixed laws. Kepler, however, was still confronted by the objection of Patrizzi, who declared that every endeavor of mathematical astronomy to determine the course of the planets by interlocking orbits, cycles, and epicycles was vain because in truth the planets were nothing other than animate beings [Wesen], endowed with reason, who, just as appearance indicates, present us with the most diverse, strangely tortuous paths through the liquid ether. It is characteristic of Kepler’s manner of thinking that he countered this view primarily by a methodological argument – an argument that he described as “philosophical.” To resolve any seeming disorder into order, to detect the hidden rule in every seeming irregularity: precisely this – he stressed in opposing Patrizzi – is the basic principle of “philosophical astronomy”:

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Among the adherents of a sound philosophy, there is none who is not of this opinion, who would not congratulate himself and astronomy if he succeeded in disclosing the causes of error and distinguishing the true motion of the planets from their accidental orbits which rest only on sensible illusion, and in thus proving the simplicity and ordered regularity of their orbits.116

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In these simple and profound words from Kepler’s pamphlet in defense of Tycho de Brahe, and in the concrete confirmation that they soon received through Kepler’s treatise on the movement of Mars, the planets were dethroned as the ancient gods of time and fate, and the overall intuition of time and temporal events was transferred from the image-­world of the mythical-­religious imagination [Phantasie] to the exact conceptual world of scientific cognition.

5.  MYTHICAL NUMBER AND THE SYSTEM OF “SACRED NUMBERS” Alongside space and time, number is the third great formal motif that dominates the construction of the mythical world. Here again, if we want to understand the mythical function of number as such, we must sharply distinguish it from the theoretical significance and achievement of number. In the system of theoretical cognition, number signifies the great connecting link that is able to embrace the most dissimilar contents and transform them into the unity of the concept. By virtue of this resolution of all multiplicity and diversity into the unity of knowledge, number appears here as the expression of the highest and most basic theoretical aim of cognition itself, as an expression of “truth” as such. Since its first philosophical-­systematic determination, this basic character has been awarded to it. It is said in the fragments of Philolaus that The nature of number is the cause of recognition, able to give guidance and teaching to every man in what is puzzling and unknown. For none of existing things would be clear to anyone, either in themselves or in their relationship to one another, unless there existed number and its essence. But in fact, number, fitting all things into the soul through sense-­perception, makes them recognizable and correspond with one



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another, in that number gives them body and divides the different relationships of things, whether they be non-­limited or limiting, into their separate groups.117

In this connection and separation, in this positing of fixed boundaries and relations, the strictly logical force of number is contained. By it, the sensible itself, the “matter” of perception, is increasingly divested of its specific nature and recast in a basic general-­intellectual form. Measured by the “true” nature of the actual, the immediate sensible constitution of the impression – its visibility, audibility, tactility, etc. – appears only as a “secondary property,” whose true source, whose primary ground, is to be sought in the pure determinations of magnitude, thus ultimately in purely numerical relationships. The development of the modern theoretical cognition of nature has guided this ideal of knowledge toward its fulfillment by reducing not only the specific constitution of sense perception but also the specific nature of the pure forms of intuition, the nature of space and time, to that of pure number.118 Just as number here serves as the true intellectual means for setting forth the “homogeneity” of the contents of consciousness, so too does number develop more and more into an absolutely homogeneous and uniform entity. The single individual numbers disclose no differences over against one another, other than those arising from their position in the total system. They have no other being, no other constitution and nature, than that which comes to them through this position: through the relations within an ideal ensemble. Accordingly, it is possible to “define,” i.e. constructively produce, specific numbers that, though they directly correspond to no assignable sensible or intuitive substratum, are unequivocally characterized by these relations, such as in the well-­known explanation of irrational numbers that has become dominant since Dedekind, where the irrational numbers appear as “cuts” within the system of rational numbers (i.e. as complete divisions of this system into two classes, effected by a definite conceptual regulation). The pure thinking of mathematics can apprehend “individual” number, any individual number basically only in this form: for mathematical thinking, numbers are nothing but an expression of conceptual relations [Relationen] that only in their totality constitute the self-­enclosed and unitary framework [Gefüge] of “number” as such and of the realm of number in general.

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Number takes on a very different character, however, as soon as we abandon the “modality” of thinking and pure theoretical cognition in order to consider the configuration that it undergoes in other domains of spiritual forming [Formung]. The consideration of language has already shown that there is a phase of number formation in which every particular number, instead of signifying merely a link in a system, possesses a very individual imprint – a phase in which the representation of number does not possess abstract general validity but is always grounded in some concrete-­individual intuition from which it cannot be detached. Here, numbers are not yet general determinations applicable to any content whatever; there are no numbers “in themselves” [an sich]; rather, the apprehension and denomination of number grow out of an individual numerable thing and remain bound to the intuition of this thing. By virtue of the objective diversity of numerable things and by virtue of the particular intuitive content [Gehalt] and the particular feeling tone attached to certain quantities, the diverse numbers do not appear here as an absolutely uniform formation [Gebilde] but as highly differentiated, each having, as it were, its own tonality.119 This distinctive emotional tonality of number and its opposition to the purely conceptual, abstract-­logical determination, emerges still more clearly and sharply as soon as we turn to the domain of mythical representing. Just as myth knows absolutely nothing of the merely ideal, just as for myth all likeness [Gleichheit] or similarity of contents appears not as a mere relation between them but as a real bond that connects and attaches them to one another, so too is this particularly true of the determination of numerical equality [Gleichheit]. Whenever two quantities appear as “numerically equal,” i.e. wherever it is evident that they can be coordinated member for member, myth “explains” this possibility of a coordination, which in cognition appears as a purely ideal relationship, by imputing an objective community of their mythical “nature.” However, they may differ in their sensible look, and things bearing the same number are mythically “the same” [dasselbe]: it is one being [Wesen] that merely cloaks and conceals itself under different forms of appearance. This elevation of number to an independent existence and independent force is only a particularly important and characteristic example of the basic form of mythical “hypostatization.”120 And from this it follows that the mythical apprehension of number – like space and



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time – likewise contains an element of universality and an element of thoroughgoing particularity. Here number is never a mere ordinal number, a mere designation of a position within a comprehensive total system: rather, each number has its own being [Wesen], its own individual nature and force.121 This individual nature, however, is itself universal insofar as it is able to permeate the most diverse, for mere empirical perception, heterogeneous being of consistent existences [Seinsbestände] and by virtue of this penetration allow them to take part in one another. Thus, in mythical thinking, number serves as a basic primary form of relation – here this relation is never taken merely as such but appears as something immediately actual and efficacious, as a mythical object with its own attributes and forces. For logical thinking, number possesses a universal function, a general validity of signification, whereas for mythical thinking, it appears always as an original “entity” that communicates its being [Wesen] and force to everything that is concerned with it. As a result, however, the development that the concept of number undergoes in the two different spheres of theoretical and mythical thinking clearly does not possess the same sense. In both, it is true, we can follow how the concept of number gradually expands over ever wider circles of sensation, intuition, and thinking and finally draws almost the whole domain of consciousness into its influence. We are confronted here, however, by two entirely different aims and basic spiritual attitudes. In the system of pure cognition, number – like space and time – primarily and essentially serves the purpose of reducing the concrete multiplicity of appearances to the abstract-­ideal unity of their “grounds.” Through the unity of number, the sensible is first formed into something intellectual and combined into a self-­contained cosmos, into the unity of a purely intellectual state. All appearing being is referred to number and expressed in it, because this relation and this reduction to number proves to be the only way to establish a thoroughgoing and unequivocal lawfulness between appearances. Ultimately, everything that cognition, that science, comprehends under the name of “nature” is constructed out of purely numerical elements [Elemente] and determinations that serve here as the actual intermediary by which to recast all merely accidental existence into the form of thinking, into the form of lawful necessity. In mythical thinking, number also emerges as such as a medium of spiritualization – here, however, the process of this spiritualization

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takes another direction. In scientific thinking, number appears as the great instrument of reasoning [Begründung], whereas in mythical thinking, it appears as a vehicle of religious sense-­bestowing. In the one case, it serves to prepare and develop [reif zu machen] all empirical existing [Existierend] to be taken up into a world of purely ideal interconnections and purely ideal laws; in the other, it serves to draw all existing [Daseiend], everything that is immediately given, everything that is merely “profane,” into the mythical-­religious process of “hallowing.” For whatever in any way partakes of number, whatever reveals in itself the gestalt and force of a definite number, no longer leads for the mythical-­religious consciousness to a mere irrelevant existence but has precisely thereby obtained an entirely new significance. Not only number as a whole but each individual number is, as it were, shrouded by an air of magic, which communicates itself to everything connected with it, however seemingly irrelevant. We feel this awe of the sacred surrounding number down to the lowest sphere of mythical thinking, down to the domain of the magical view of the world and the most primitive magical practice: all magic is in large part number magic. In the development of theoretical science, too, the transition from the magical to the mathematical apprehension of number was effected only gradually. Just as astronomy goes back to astrology and chemistry to alchemy, so too do arithmetic and algebra go back to an older magical form of number theory, to a science of almacabala.122 And not only do the founders of actual theoretical mathematics, the Pythagoreans, stand between the two views of number, but we also encounter the same spiritually mixed and intermediary forms in the transition to modern times, in the era of the Renaissance. Side by side with Fermat and Descartes stand Giordano Bruno and Reuchlin, who in their own works treat the miraculous magical-­mythical charism of number. Often the two features are united in a single individual: Cardanus, for example, represents a highly distinctive and historically interesting example of this twofold type of thinking. In all these cases, such a historical mixture of forms could not have come about if they did not also agree systematically and in terms of their content, in at least one characteristic motif, one basic spiritual tendency. Mythical number already stands at a spiritual turning point – it, too, strives to escape from the narrowness and restraint of the immediate, of



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the sensible-­tangible view of the world to a freer, more universal total outlook. Spirit, however, is not able to grasp and penetrate the new universality that arises here as its own creation but encounters it as a foreign, daemonic power. Thus, Philolaus still seeks “the nature of number and its force” not only in all human works and words, not only in every kind of artistic ability and in music, but also in “daemonic and divine things”123 – so that it becomes, like Plato’s Eros, the “great intermediary,”124 by which the earthly and divine, the mortal and immortal, commune [verkehren] with each other and are combined into the unity of a world order. To trace this process of the deification [Vergöttlichung] and hallowing of number in detail and to seek to uncover its individual intellectual and religious motives would seem, to be sure, a futile undertaking. For at first sight, only the free play of the mythical fantasy that mocks every fixed rule prevails here. It would seem futile to inquire further after a principle of selection, after the ground to which the individual numbers owe their particular character of “holiness,” because every number without difference can become an object of mythical apprehension and veneration. When we run through the series of elementary numbers, we encounter at every step such a mythical-­religious hypostasis. For one, two, and three, we find everywhere examples of such hypostases, not only in the thinking of primitive peoples but also in the great cultural religions. The problem of the unity that emerges from itself, that becomes “another,” and second, in order then to be ultimately reunited with itself in a third nature – this problem must belong to the common spiritual heritage of humanity. While it emerges in this purely intellectual framing only in the speculative philosophy of religion, the general distribution of the idea of a “triune God” shows that this idea must be based on some ultimate, concrete foundations of feeling, to which it points back and from which it continually arises anew.125 The first three numbers are joined by the four, whose general religious-­cosmic significance is attested above all in the religions of North America.126 The same dignity is accorded in still higher degree to the number seven, which radiates in all directions from the oldest culture sites of humanity in Mesopotamia, which, however, comes to us as a specifically “sacred” number even where no influence from the Babylonian-­Assyrian religion and culture is demonstrable or probable.127

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This basic mystical-­religious character still adheres to it in Greek philosophy; in a fragment attributed to Philolaus, it is likened to the motherless virgin Athene as “leader and ruler of all things, as god, united, eternal, persistent, unmoving, the self-­same, different from everything else.”128 In the Christian Middle Ages, the church fathers thought of seven as fullness and perfection, as the truly universal and “absolute” number: “septenarius numerus est perfectionis.”129 In this respect, however, from an early period the number nine vied with it; in Greek myths and cults, as well as in the sphere of Germanic beliefs, enneadic intervals and weeks occupy a place similar to that of the hebdomadic periods.130 If we further consider that this basic character, which is suited to “simple” numbers, is transmitted from them to the composite numbers – that therefore not only three, seven, nine, and twelve but their products as well have particular mythical-­religious forces – then in the end there clearly remains hardly any numerical determination that cannot be drawn into this circle of intuition and this process of “hallowing.” Here the mythical configuring drive [Gestaltungstrieb] opens an unlimited latitude [Spielraum] in which it can freely indulge itself, independently of any fixed logical norm and of any regard for the laws of “objective” experience. If number becomes for science a criterion of truth, a condition and preparation for all strictly “rational” cognition, then here it imprints on everything that enters its sphere and is touched and permeated by it a character of mystery – a mystery whose depths reason can no longer fathom. And yet as in other domains of mythical thinking, a determinate spiritual route can be recognized and designated in the seemingly impenetrable maze of the mythical-­mystical doctrines of number. Here too, though the unlimited drive of mere “association” prevails, the main and secondary paths of configuration separate themselves; here too, we can gradually discern certain typical guidelines by which the process of the hallowing of number and thus of the hallowing of the world is determined. We already possess a solid clue for the cognition of these guidelines if we look back at the development that the concept of number undergoes in linguistic thinking. Given what was shown there – namely that all spiritual apprehension and designation of numerical relationships always goes back to a concrete-­intuitive foundation and that spatial, temporal, and “personal” intuition make up the principal spheres in which the consciousness of number and its significance developed131 – we may



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presume a similar organization in the progress of the mythical doctrine of number. If we trace the emotional value that is connected to the individual “sacred” numbers back to its origins and attempt to lay bare its true roots, it almost appears to always be grounded in the particular nature of the mythical feeling of space, time, or the I. As far as space is concerned, not only are the individual regions and directions as such imbued in the mythical apprehension with determinate religious accents of value, but such accents also adhere to the totality of these directions, to the whole in which they are comprehended as belonging. Where north, south, east, and west are distinguished as the “cardinal points” of the world, this specific difference usually becomes the model and prototype [Vorbild] for the organizing of all the contents and events of the world. Four now becomes the authentic “sacred number”: this interconnection of every particular being with the basic form [Grundform] of the universe is expressed in it. Whatever exhibits a factual fourfold organization – whether it is an immediately known “reality” that imposes itself on sensible observation, or whether it is conditioned in a purely ideal way by a determinate mode of mythical “apperception” – seems attached, as though by inner magical bonds, to certain parts of space. What takes place here for mythical thinking is not only a mediated trans­ ference. Rather, it beholds with intuitive evidence the one in the other – in every particular fourness [Vierheit], it seizes the universal form of the cosmic fourness. We encounter the four in this function not only in most North American religions132 but also in Chinese thinking. In the Chinese system, a specific season, color, element, animal species, organ of the human body, etc. corresponds to each one of the directions of the heavens – west, south, east, and north – so that ultimately, by virtue of this relation, the entire diversity of existence is in some way distributed and, as it were, fixated and established in a particular intuitive precinct.133 We find this symbolism of the number four among the Cherokees, where likewise each of the four cardinal points of the world is associated with a particular color, a particular performance, or a particular state of fortune, such as victory or defeat, sickness or death.134 And, in accordance with its distinctive particular nature, mythical thinking cannot content itself with apprehending all these relations and correlations as such, with considering them, as it were, in abstracto, but rather, it must, in order to affirm their truth, combine them into an intuitive figure [Gestalt]

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and sensibly and pictorially [bildhaft] set them forth in this form. Thus, the veneration of the four is expressed in the veneration of the form of the Cross, which is attested as one of the oldest religious symbols. We can follow a common basic tendency of all religious thinking from the earliest forms of the four-­cross, from the form of the swastika, down to the medieval speculation that infuses the whole content [Gehalt] of the Christian doctrine into the intuition of the cross. When in the Middle Ages, the four ends of the Cross were identified with the four zones of the regions of the heavens or those of the world, when the east, west, north, and south were equated with certain phases of the Christian story of salvation, it was a revival of certain originary cosmic-­religious motifs.135 Like the veneration of the number four, that of the numbers five and seven can develop from the cult of the cardinal points: along with the four principal directions, east, west, north, and south, the “middle” of the world is counted as the place [Platz] in which the tribe or people has its appointed seat, and the above and below, the zenith and nadir, are also accorded a particular mythical-­religious distinction. Such a spatial-­ numerical organization gives rise, among the Zunis, for example, to that form of “septuarchy” that theoretically and practically determines the entire worldview in terms of its intellectual and sociological scope.136 And elsewhere as well, the magical-­mythical significance of the number seven reveals an interconnection with certain basic cosmic phenomena and representations. It is, however, at once evident how the mythical feeling of space is inseparably bound up here with the mythical feeling of time and how, together, the two form the starting point for the mythical apprehension of number. As we have seen, a basic characteristic of the mythical feeling of time is that in it the elements of “subjective” and “objective” still lie undifferentiated alongside one another and merge into each other. There exists here only that distinctive “feeling of phases,” that sensation of the division of events as such; without that, these events split into two different halves, into an “inside” and “outside.” Hence, mythical time is always thought of at once as the time of the occurrences of nature and as the time of the occurrences of human life: it is a biological-­cosmic time.137 And this duality is imparted to the mythical apprehension of number. Every mythical number points back to a certain circle of objective intuition, in which it is rooted and from which it continuously draws new force.



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This objectivity [Gegenständlich], however, is never something only factual-­tangible [Sachlich-­Dinglich]; rather, it is filled with an inner life of its own that moves in specific rhythms. This rhythmicity continues in all particular becoming – it is able to play out in very different forms and in widely separated points of the mythical space of the world. Above all, this universal period of the cosmic events exhibits itself in the phases of the moon. The moon – as its very name in most Indo-­European languages and in the Semitic and Hamitic languages indicates138 – appears everywhere as the true divider and “measurer” [Messer: knife] 177 of time. It is, however, still more than this: all becoming in nature and in human existence is not only correlated [zugeordnet] with it in some way but also goes back to it as its “origin,” as a qualitatively originary-­ ground. This ancient [uralt] mythical intuition has been preserved and continued right up into modern biological theories, and with this, the number seven arrives at its universal significance as the ruler over all life.139 Only in relatively late times, in the era of Greco-­Roman astrology, does the veneration of the number seven appear linked with the cult of the seven planets, whereas originally, the seven-­day periods and weeks exhibited no such relation but followed from the natural and, one might almost say, spontaneous division of the twenty-­eight-­day month into four parts.140 The foundation for the hallowing of the number seven and for its apprehension as a “full-­number,” as the number of “fullness and wholeness,” proves to be an entirely determinate intuitive sphere – which, however, becomes truly effective only when, by virtue of the form and particular nature of mythical, “structural” thinking, it is progressively expanded until it ultimately extends over all being and all events. In this sense, for example, we encounter the number seven as the true member of cosmic structure in the pseudo-­Hippocratic book on the number seven: It works and weaves the seven spheres of the all; it determines the number of the winds, the seasons, and the periods of life; upon it is based the natural organization of the organs of the human body, as well as the distribution of forces in the human soul.141 From Greek medicine, the belief in the “vital force” of the number seven passed into medieval and modern medicine: every seventh year used to be regarded as a “climacteric” year that brings with it a decisive turn in the mixture of the vital humors, in the temperament of body and soul.142

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However, if, in the cases thus far considered, a specific objective circle of intuition has proven to be the starting point and foundation for the hallowing of specific numbers, then we are reminded by looking back at the linguistic expression of numerical relationships that this objective element is not the sole determinant. It is not exclusively through the perception of external things or the observation of course of external events that the consciousness of number matures – rather, one of its strongest roots is found in that basic differentiation that leads to subjective-­ personal existence, to the relationship between I, you, and he. In the example of the dual and trial, as well as the forms of the “inclusive” and “exclusive” plural, language shows how the numbers two and three, in particular, refer back to this sphere and are thereby determined in their expression.143 And our observations in the domain of mythical thinking are completely analogous. In Usener’s work on threeness, in which he attempts to lay the ground for a mythical theory of number, he has argued that there are two groups of typical numbers, one of which goes back to the apprehension and organization of time, while the other, to which particularly two and three belong, has a different origin. If, in addition, he sees the holiness of three and its specifically mystical character as being grounded in the fact that in times of primitive culture three constituted the end of the numerical series and was, therefore, an expression of perfection, of absolute totality [Totalität] as such, then grave objections can of course already be raised against this theory from an ethnological standpoint, because in the final analysis, the connection it assumes between the concept of the trial and that of infinity is purely intellectual and speculative.144 However, the separation between two different groups of “sacred” numbers and the indication of their different spiritual-­religious sources nevertheless persists. As concerns the three, in particular, the history of the basic representations of religion suggests that the purely “intelligible” significance, which it almost everywhere achieves in the development of religious speculation, is only a late and indirect consequence following from a relationship of a different kind, which one might call “naïve.” If the philosophy of religion immerses itself in the mysteries of the divine Trinity, if it determines this unity through the triad of Father, Son, and Spirit, then the history of religion teaches that this triad itself was originally grasped and felt



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very concretely – that definite “natural forms of human life” find their expression in it. Often the natural triad of father, mother, and child still glimmers underneath the thin veneer of the speculative triad of Father, Son, and Spirit. In particular, this basic intuition is still clearly discernible in the configuration of the divine Trinity in the sphere of Semitic religions.145 All these examples confirm that distinctive magic of number, which it demonstrates as being a basic power in the realm of spirit and in the construction of the self-­consciousness of humanity. It proves itself to be the means of binding by which the different basic forces of consciousness are joined together, that locks together the spheres of sensation, intuition, and feeling into a unity. Number thus fulfills the function that the Pythagoreans awarded to harmony. It is “an agreement of motley things and a miscellaneously tuned harmony” (“ἔστι γὰρ ἁρμονὶα πολυμιγέων ἓνωσις καὶ δίχα φρονεόντων συμφηρόνησις”).146 It effectively acts as the magic bond that not so much connects things together but rather “brings them into harmony within the soul.”

ENDNOTES 1 Cf. Hermann Grassmann, “Die Ausdehnungslehre von 1844,” Gesammelte mathematische und physikalische Werke (3 vols., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1894– 1911), 1, 65. 2 Ernst Mach, Erkenntnis und Irrtum: Skizzen zur Psychologie der Forschung (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1905), 334. 3 See Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 136ff. 4 For details, see Leo Frobenius, Und Africa Sprach (Berlin-­Charlottenburg: Vita, 1912), 198ff., 280ff. From the 4 × 4–part “system” that underlies the religion of the Jorubas Frobenius attempts to derive a kind of originary relationship between them and the Etruscans, among whom he assumes this system to have first developed. However, the considerations here show the problematic character of such an inference. The fact that similar “systems” are found all over the world shows that what we have here is not an isolated offshoot of mythical thinking but one of its typical and fundamental intuitions – not a mere content of mythical thinking but one of its determining factors. 5 For a more detailed treatment, cf. my Begriffsform im mythischen Denken, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 1 (Leipzig and Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1922), with fuller documentation drawn from ethnological literature; see especially 16ff., 54ff. [Ernst Cassirer, “The form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology,

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trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 14ff., 50ff.] 6 Cf. Franz Boll, Die Lebensalter. Ihre ethische und pädagogische Bedeutung (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 37ff. 7 Concerning this form of astrology, cf. Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken, 25ff. [Cassirer, “The form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking,” 22ff.] 8 See Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 149ff. 9 Rigveda, x, 90. by Thomas, 122. Cf. Paul Deussen, “Allgemeine Einleitung und Philosophie des Veda bis auf die Upanishad’s,” Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Religionen (7 vols., Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1894–1920), vol. 1, part I, 150ff. 10 See Wolfgang Golther, Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895), 518. 11 See 85ff. 12 That even in modern and the most modern thinking this manner of thinking has not lost its attraction and significance is shown by Wilhelm Müller-­Walbaum’s remarkable and instructive work, Die Welt als Schuld und Gleichnis. Gedanken zu einem System universeller Entsprechungen (Wien: W. Braunmüller, 1920). 13 For details, see Wilhelm H. Roscher, Über Alter, Ursprung und Bedeutung der hippokratischen Schrift von der Siebenzahl. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der ältesten griechischen Philosophie und Prosaliteratur (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1911); idem, Abhandlungen der philosophisch-­historischen Klasse der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 28 (Leipzig, 1911), 5ff., 107ff. 14 For a detailed presentation of the spatial schematism of the Zunis, see Frank H. Cushing, “Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths” Thirteenth Annual Report of the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology, 1891–92, (Washington, 1896), 367ff. 15 Above all, cf. the typical documents and examples that Alfred William Howitt has given from the sphere of the Australian aboriginal tribes: Howitt, “Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 18 (1889), 62ff. 16 Ibid. 17 For details, see Morris Jastrow, Aspects of Religious Belief and Practice in Babylonia and Assyria (London and New York: B. Blom, 1911), 217ff., 234ff. 18 [Kant, “What does it mean to orient oneself irnaturalin thinking?” in Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen W. Wood (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 8: 133 – trans. amended.] 19 Cf. Preuss and Volksbildung, Die Nayarit-­Expedition. Textaufnahmen und Beobachtungen unter mexikanischen Indianern (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1912), 1, xxiiiff. 20 Cf. Heinrich K. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter: nach den Denkmälern (Leipzig: J. L. Hinrichs’sche Buchhdlg, 1888), 102; Franz Lukas, Die Grundbegriffe in den Kosmogonien der alten Völker (Leipzig: W. Friedrich, 1893), 48ff. 21 Troelsf. Troels-­Lund, Himmelsbild und Weltanschauung im Wandel der Zeiten (3rd ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1908), 5.



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22 Such gods of direction are found for example among the Cora. See Preuss, Die Nayarit-­Expedition, 1, lxxivff. 23 Cf., for example, Daniel G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (London and New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 118ff. 24 [Goethe, “Talisman” West-­East Divan. The Poems, trans. Martin Bidney (New York: State University of New York Press, 2010), xxii.] 25 Hermann K. Usener, Götternamen. Versuch einer Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung (Bonn: Cohen, 1896), 178ff. 26 Heinrich Nissen, Das Templum. Antiquarische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Weidmann, 1869), 8; idem, Orientation. Studien zur Geschichte der Religion (Berlin: Weidmann, 1906), part I. 27 Moritz Cantor, Die Römischen Agrimensoren Und Ihre Stellung in Der Geschichte Der Feldmesskunst: Eine Historisch-­ Mathematische Untersuchung (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1875). Cf. Cantor’s Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik (2nd ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1894), 1, 496ff. 28 For further details on this, see Franz Boll’s fine lecture, “Vita Contemplativa” (Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, 1920). 29 For details, see Usener, Götternamen, 184; cf. especially Franz Cumont, “La Théologie solaire du paganisme romain,” Mémoires présentés par divers savants à l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-­ lettres de l’Institut de France, 12, part II (1913), 449. 30 Cf. Joseph Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters: mit Berücksichtigung von Honorius Augustodunensis Sicardus und Durandus (Freiburg: Herder, 1902). 31 Polybius, De castris Romanorum, book 6, chap. 41, line 9. Cf. Nissen, Das Templum, 49ff. 32 Ovid, Fasti, book II, lines 641ff. Cf. Georg Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1912), 136ff. 33 Cf. the copious material assembled by H. C. Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant; or, the Beginning of Religious Rites (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1896). 34 Thus, for example, the Greek σέβεσθαι [worship] is derived etymologically from a root represented in Sanskrit at tyaj (to leave, to thrust back). Cf. Eduard Williger, Hagios, Untersuchungen zur Terminology des Heiligen in den hellenisch-­ hellenistischen Religionen (Giessen: Verlag von Alfred Töpelmann, 1922), 10. 35 A summary of such rites of passage may be found in Van Gennep, Rites de passage. 36 For examples of this form of “explicative” mythical tale, relating especially to the origin of particular species of plants and animals and their peculiarities, see Graebner, Das Weltbild der Primitiven, 21: Red spots in the plumage of the black cockatoo and of a certain hawk originated in a great fire, the spout hole of the whale in a spear thrust which he once – while still a man – received in the back of his head. The sandpiper came by his strange gait – alternately running and standing still – when

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myth as form of intuition he attempted to follow the guardian of the waters unobserved and was compelled to stand still each time the guardian turned around.

37 Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 162ff. 38 Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, “Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie,” in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. Verlag, 1856), 182. [Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Marcus Zisselsberger (New York: SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2007), 127.] 39 Usener, Götternamen, 192. 40 Cf. Franz Cumont, ed., Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1899), 1, 18ff., 78ff., 294ff.; idem, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (New York and London: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1912), 110. 41 For this concept of “temporal shape,” cf. the corresponding remarks on language in Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 165. 42 Cf. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, “Étude sommaire de la représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie,” in Mélanges d’histoire des religions (Paris: F. Alcan, 1909), 189ff. 43 Concerning these “rites of initiation,” see the abundant material offered on the Australian aborigines in Baldwin Spencer and Francis J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London and New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899), 212ff.; idem, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia (London and New York: The Macmillan Company, 1904), 382ff. Cf. also Van Gennep, Les Rites de passage and Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 191ff. For the South Sea peoples, cf. Walter W. Skeat, Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula (London: Macmillan, 1900), 320ff. 44 Cf. Robert Marett, The Birth of Humility, in Threshold of Religion (3rd ed., London: Methuen, 1914), 194ff. 45 Wilhelm Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme. Mythologische Untersuchungen (Wald-­und Feldkulte, vol. 1), (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1875). For the Indian solstice rites, see Alfred Hillebrandt, “Die Sonnwendfeste in Alt-­Indien,” Romanische Forschungen, 5 (1890), 299–340. A compilation of these rites for the Aryan world as a whole is given by Leopold von Schroder, Arische Religion, vol. 2 (2 vols., Leipzig, 1914–16). 46 [Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. Bernard Cohen (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2016), 410 – trans. modified.] 47 On the mythical “concrescence of members of a relation,” cf. 78ff. 48 Georg Gerland, “Die Völker der Südsee: Die Polynesier, Melanesier, Australier und Tasmanier: ethnographisch und culturhistorisch dargestellt,” part 5, issue 3, Anthropologie der Naturvölker (Leipzig: F. Fleischer, 1872), 256; William W. Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific (London: Henry S. King, 1876), 70. 49 Cf. Morris Jastrow, Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens (2 vols. in one, Giessen: Ricker, 1905); Hugo Winkler, Himmels-­und Weltbild der Babylonier als



50

51

52

53 54 55

56

57 58

59

60

61 62

63 64

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Grundlage der Weltanschauung und Mythologie aller Völker (2nd ed., Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903). On the Babylonian legend of the creation, cf. Peter Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier. Studien und Materialien (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1890), 279ff. For a German translation of the above quotation, see Hermann Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit: eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Gen 1 und Ap Joh 12 (Göttingen: Vandcnhoeck and Ruprecht, 1895), 401ff. Cf. Peter Le Page Renouf, Vorlesungen über Ursprung und Entwickelung der Religion der Alten Ägypter (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1882), 233; Alexandre Moret, “Le mystère du verbe créateur,” in Mystères égyptiens (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1913), 132ff. Cf. Jan J. M. de Groot, Universismus: Die Grundlage der Religion und Ethik, des Staatswesens und der Wissenschaften Chinas (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1918), 25. See also James Legge, “The Sacred Books of China: Texts of Taoism,” The Sacred Books of the East, trans. James Legge, Vols. 39 (London, Oxford University Press, 1891), 40. Rigveda, 1, 124, 3. Atharvaveda, xix, 53. A survey of the passages in which this identification is made may be found in Deussen, Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie: mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Religionen, vol. 1, 1; idem, Allgemeine Einleitung und Philosophie des Veda bis auf die Upanishad’s (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1894), 208. Cf. Eugen Mogk, “Mythologie,” in Grundriss der germanischen Philologie, ed. Hermann Paul (2nd ed., 4 vols., Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1900–9), 1, 281ff.; Golther, Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie, 104ff., 529. [Alfred Jeremias, Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (Berlin und Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1929), 201.] [Heinrich Junker, Über iranische Quellen der hellenistischen Aion-­Vorstellung, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, ed. Fritz Saxl, vol. I, Vorträge (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1923), 127.] On the concept of time in the Iranian religion and the system of “Zruvanism,” see particularly Heinrichf Junker’s lecture, Über iranische Quellen der hellenistischen Aion-Vorstellung (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1923), 125ff. Cf. James Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman. Leurs origines et leur histoire (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1877), 316ff., 78ff., 294ff. Cf. Ignaz Goldziher, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und Seine Geschichtliche Entwickelung: Untersuchungen zur Mythologie und Religionswissenschaft (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1876), 370f. Isaiah 43:18. Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, in Der Grundriss der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 8 (Leipzig: G. Fock, 1919), 293ff., 308. Cf. Gunkel, Schöpfung Und Chaos in Urzeit Und Endzeit: Eine Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung Über Gen 1 Und Ap Joh 12, 160. [Cf. Corinthians 10:11.]

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65 See Yasna, XII, LI, etc. by L. H. Mills, The Zend-­Avesta. The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Müller, vol. 31 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1887). 66 [Goethe, West-­East Divan, 146.] 67 Bundahishn, 30, 23, 32. by E. W. West, Pahlavi Texts, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Müller, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1880), 126, 129. 68 Cf. Yasna, xliv, 5. For details concerning the daemon of sleep (Busyansta), see Abraham Valentine Williams Jackson, “Die iranische Religion,” in Grundriss der iranischen Philologie unter Mitwirkung, ed. Wilhelm Geiger (3 vols., Strassburg: K.J. Trübner, 1895–1904), 2, 660. 69 The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, iv, 3, 21ff. by Robert E. Hume, The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (2nd ed., Madras: Geoffrey Cumberlege, 1949), 136. 70 Cf. Hermann Oldenberg, “Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus,” in Aus Indien und Iran. Gesammelte Aufsätze (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1899), 91. 71 Samyutta-­Nikaya, xxii, 12. [The Connected Discourses of Buddha. A New Translation of the Samyutta-­Nikaya, trans. Bhikkhu Bodhi (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000), 126 (972f.)] On the doctrine of the Saṅkhāra cf. Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha. Sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde (4th ed., Berlin: W. Hertz, 1881), 279ff. [English translation: William Hoey, Buddha: His Life, His Doctrine, His Order (London, Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1882).] 72 Udana, vii, 2 and viii, 3 (Moritz Winternitz, Buddhismus, in Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch, 274 f., 272 f.). [“Udana” and the “Itivuttaka”: Two Classics from the Pali Canon, trans. John Ireland (Sri Lanka: Buddhist Publication Society, Kandy, 1997), 90.] 73 [De Groot, Universismus, 49.] 74 See Ibid., 104; cf. 43ff., 128ff. 75 Ibid., 104. 76 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 224f. 77 De Groot, Universismus, 49. Cf. Wilhelm Grube, Religion und Kultus der Chinesen (Leipzig: R. Haupt, 1910), 86ff. 78 Lao-­Tse, Tao Teh King, xiv. 79 Cf., for example, the presentation of the Fung-­shui system in De Groot, The Religious System of China, 3, 1041: The repairing of a house, the building of a wall or dwelling . . . the planting of a pole or cutting down of a tree, in short, any change in the ordinary position of objects may disturb the Fung-­shui of the houses and temples in the vicinity and of the whole quarter, and cause the people to be visited by disasters, misery and death. Should anyone suddenly fall ill or die, his kindred are immediately ready to impute the cause to somebody who has ventured to make a change in the established order of things or has made an improvement in his own property. . . . Instances are by no means rare of their having stormed his house, demolished his furniture, assailed his person. 80 De Groot, Universismus, 128ff. 81 Concerning these methods, see, e.g., Budge, Egyptian Magic, 190ff.



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82 Cf. the remarks of George B. Foucart, Histoire des religions et méthode comparative (Paris: A. Picard, 1912), 363ff. 83 A direct interconnection is, in particular, assumed by Robert Eisler, who sees in Zruvanism the direct prototype of the Indian doctrine of Kâla and the Orphic doctrines of Χρόνος ἀγήρατος [time ageless]. See Eisler’s Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt; religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes (München: C. H. Beck, 1910), 2, 411ff., 499ff. Cf. the above-­cited lecture of Junker, 138. 84 Pherecydes, Fragment 1, ed. Diels. Cf. Damascus, 1246, Diels 71 A, 8. 85 Empedocles, Fragment 115, ed. Diels. [Ancilla to Pre-­Socratic Philosophers: A Complete Translation of the Fragments in Diels, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 65.] 86 Empedocles, Fragment 30, ed. Diels. 87 Parmenides, Fragment 8, ed. Diels. [Ancilla to the pre-­Socratic philosophers, 43.] 88 Fragment 8, ed. Diels. [Ancilla to the pre-­Socratic philosophers, 45.] 89 [Ibid.] 90 Democritus, Fragment 119, ed. Diels. [Ancilla to the pre-­Socratic philosophers, 103.] 91 [Leucippus, Fragment 2. Ancilla to the pre-­Socratic philosophers, 91.] 92 Anaximander cited from Theophrastus, Physikon doxai, Fragment 2, ed. Diels: “ἐξ ὦν ἡ γένεσίς ἐστι τοῖς οἰσι, καὶ τὴν φθορὰν εἰς ταῦτα γίνεσθαι κατὰ τὸ χρεὼν διδόναι γὰρ αὐτὰ δίκην καὶ τἰσιν αλλήλοις τὴς ἀδικίας κατὰ τὴν τοὺ χρόνου τάξιν, ποιητικωτέροις ὅυτως ὀνόμασιν αὐτὰ λέγων.” 93 Heraclitus, Fragment 119, ed. Diels. 94 Plato, Republic, 616 Cff. [Plato, Complete Works, 616 Cff. 1220] 95 [Parmenides, Fragment 8.] 96 Plato, The Sophist, 254 A. 97 In this view, I agree particularly with Karl Reinhardt, Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1916) 206ff. I refer the reader to his arguments. 98 Heraclitus, Fragment 30, ed. Diels. 99 Heraclitus, Fragment 94, ed. Diels. 100 [Heraclitus, Fragment 54, ed. Diels.] 101 Heraclitus, Fragment 41. 102 Oldenberg, “Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus,” 75ff. 103 Samyutta-­Nikaya, xxii, 22, 85. [The Connected Discourses of Buddha. A New Translation of the Sam . yutta Níkā ya, 22 (871), 85 (933)] Cf. Die Reden Gotamo Buddhos aus der mittleren Sammlung Majjhimanikâyo des Pâli-­Kanons (2nd ed., Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1921), 3, 384. 104 Heraclitus, Fragment 8 and 51, ed. Diels. 105 [Heraclitus, Fragment 111.] 106 Heraclitus, Fragment 88. 107 Heraclitus, Fragment 103. 108 Heraclitus, Fragment 106. 109 [“Heut ist heute, morgen morgen, / Und was folgt und was vergangen / Reißt nicht hin und bleibt nicht hangen.”]

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110 Heraclitus, Fragment 52. 111 Plato, Timaeus, 37 Dff. 112 For details, cf. my presentation of the Platonic philosophy in “Die Philosophie der Griechen,” in Dessoir, Lehrbuch, I, IIIff. 113 Une suite de perceptions réveille en nous l’idée de la durée, mais elle ne la fait point. Nos perceptions n’ont jamais une suite assez constante et régulière pour répondre à celle du temps qui est un continu uniforme et simple, comme une ligne droite. Le changement des perceptions nous donne occasion de penser au temps, et on le mesure par des changements uniformes: mais quand il n’y auroit rien d’uniforme dans la nature, le temps ne laisseroit pas d’être déterminé, comme le lieu ne laisseroit pas d’être déterminé, aussi quand il n’y auroit aucun corps fixe ou immobile. C’est que connoissant les règles des mouvements on peut toujours les rapporter à des mouvements uniformes intelligiblcs et prévoir par ce moyen ce qui arrivera par des diiférents mouvements joints ensemble. Et dans ce sens le temps est la mesure du mouvement, c’est-­à-­dire le mouvement uniforme est la mesure du mouvement difforme.

[A succession of perceptions awakes in us the idea of duration, but it does not make it. Our perceptions never have a succession sufficiently constant and regular to correspond to that of time, which is a conthmum uniform and simple, like a straight line. Changing perceptions furnish us the occasion for thinking of time, and we measure it by uniform changes. But were there nothing uniform in nature, time could not be determined, as space likewise could not be determined if there were no fixed or immovable body. So that knowing the rules of different motions, we can always refer them to the uniform intelligible motions and see beforehand by this means what will happen through the different motions taken together. And in this sense time is the measure of motion, i.e. uniform motion is the measure of non-­uniform motion.] G. W. Leibniz, Nouveaux Essais, book 2, chap.14, sec. 16.

114 Bundahish, II, xxv. Cf. Jackson, Grundriß der iranischen Philologie, 2, 666, 672 and Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, 277. 115 For more details, cf. Wilhelm Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1907), 38ff.; idem, Kyrios Christos (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1926), 185ff. 116 Johann Kepler, Apologia Tychonis contra Ursum, in Joannis Kepleri astronomi opera omnia, ed. C. Frisch (8 vols., Frankfurt: Heyder and Zimmer, 1858–71), 1, 247. 117 Philolaus, Fragment 11, ed. Diels, 32B, 11. [Ancilla to the pre-­Socratic philosophers, 75.] 118 Cf. my Zur Einstein’schen Relativitätstheorie: Erkenntnistheoretische Betrachtungen (Berlin: B. Cassirer, 1921), 119ff. [Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Swabey (New York: Dover, 1953), xx.] 119 Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 174ff.



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120 Cf. 65ff. 121 Cf. especially examples of this “Individual Physiognomy” of Numbers in Mythical Thinking in Lévy-­Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker, 178ff. 122 Cf. the remarks of William John McGee, “Primitive Numbers,” Nineteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1897–98, (Washington, 1900), 825–851. 123 Philolaus, Fragment xi. 124 [Plato, Symposium, 202 Eff.] 125 That the idea of “threeness” [Dreieinigkeit] is found at primitive levels of religious development is emphasized by Brinton, 118ff. However, he attempts to abstract an explanation of this fact in that he wants to reduce it to purely logical facts, to the form and particularity of the fundamental “laws of thought.” Cf. below, 176ff. 126 See below, 173. 127 On the significance and distribution of seven as a “sacred number,” cf. Franz Boll, “Hebdomas,” in Paulys Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1912), 2547–2578. 128 Philolaus, Fragment 20, ed. Diels, 32 B. 129 Examples in Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters, 76; Boll, Die Lebensalter. Ihre ethische und pädagogische Bedeutung, 24ff. 130 See Wilhelm H. Roscher, Die enneadischen und hebdomadischen Fristen und Wochen der ältesten Griechen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Chronologie und Zahlenmystik, Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 21 (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1903); and Die Sieben-­und Neunzahl im Kultus und Mythus der Griechen, vol. 24 (1904). For the Germanic religions see Weinhold, Die mystische Neunzahl bei den Deutschen. Regarding seven-­ and nine-­day periods in astrology, see Auguste Bouché-­Leclercq, L’astrologie grecque (Paris: Leroux, 1899), 458ff., 476ff. 131 See Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 170ff., 183ff. 132 For examples, see Anne Walbank Buckland, “Four as a Sacred Number,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 25 (1896), 96–102; McGee, “Primitive Numbers,” 834. 133 Cf. De Groot, Unversismus, 119; idem, The Religious System of China, 1, 316ff.; and cf. my Die Begriffsform im Mythischen Denken, 26, 60ff. [Cassirer, “The Concept of Form in Mythical Thinking,” 24, 53.] 134 Cf. James Mooney, “Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees,” Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1885 – ’86, (Washington, 1891), 342. 135 Cf. “Symbolik der Himmelsrichtungen” in Sauer, Symbolik des Kirchengebäudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auffassung des Mittelalters, 87ff. (See 120.) With regard to the signification and distribution of the swastika, cf. Thomas Wilson, “The Swastika,” Report of the US. National Museum, 1894, (Washington, 1896), 757–1030. 136 See Cushing, Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths. Cf. 108.

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137 Cf. 132ff. 138 On the designation of the moon as the “measurer” of time in Indo-­European languages and in Egyptian, cf. Roscher, Die Enneadischen Und Hebdomadischen Fristen Und Wochen Der Altesten Griechen, 5. For the Semitic languages, see Johannes Hehn, Siebenzahl und Sabbat bei den Babyloniern und im Alten Testament: eine religionsgeschichtliche Studie (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1907), 59ff. 139 Cf. Wilhelm Fliess, Der Ablauf des Lebens: Grundlegung zur exakten Biologie (Leipzig and Vienna: Deuticke, 1906); Hermann Swoboda, Das Siebenjahr, Untersuchungen über die zeitliche Gesetzmäßigkeit des Menschenlebens (Leipzig and Vienna: Orion-­Verl, 1917). 140 The material for a decision on this question is completely compiled in Boll, “Hebdomas.” See also Roscher, Die Enneadischen Und Hebdomadischen Fristen Und Wochen Der Altesten Griechen, 71ff.; Hehn, 44ff. 141 Cf. for more details Roscher, Über Alter, Ursprung und Bedeutung der hippokratischen Schrift von der Siebenzahl, 43ff. 142 On the theory of “climacteric years” in ancient medicine and its subsequent development, see Boll, Die Lebensalter. Ihre ethische und pädagogische Bedeutung, 29ff. Cf. Bouché-­Leclercq, 526. The distinctive mythical “phase feeling” that we have recognized as a basic component of the mythical intuition of time does not limit itself to a structuring of life into characteristic, sharply distinct segments but often carries it back to the time preceding birth. Even the becoming of the fetus is governed by the same rhythmic rule that follows the human being, once born, through the whole of their life. Such views on the development of the fetus in the womb seem, e.g., to be the basis for the veneration accorded to the number forty, particularly in the Semitic religions. Roscher makes it seem likely that this number owes its significance to the division of the period of pregnancy, set at 280 days, into seven equal segments of forty days, to each of which is attributed a special characteristic function in the total process of fetal growth. Cf. Wilhelm H. Roscher, Die Zahl 40 im Glauben, Brauch und Schrifttum der Semiten: ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft, Volkskunde und Zahlenmystik, Abhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 27 (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1909), 100ff. 143 Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 183ff. 144 See Hermann K. Usener, “Dreiheit,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 3rd ser., 58 (1903), 1–45, 161–208, 321–362. For the ethnological critique of Usener’s theory, see, e.g., Lévy-­Bruhl, Das Denken der Natutvölker, 180ff. 145 Documentation of this thesis has been compiled in Ditlef Nielsen’s monograph, Der dreieinige Gott in religionshistorischer Beleuchtung, vol. 1 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1922). 146 Philolaus, Fragment 10.

Part Three Myth as Life-­Form: The Discovery and Determination of Subjective Reality in Mythical Consciousness

I THE I AND THE SOUL It would not be possible to speak of a discovery of subjective reality in myth if the generally held view that the I-­concept and soul-­concept formed the beginning of all mythical thinking were justified. Ever since Tylor advocated for this theory of the “animistic” origin of myth formation in his seminal work, it seems to have been increasingly accepted as the secure empirical core and rule of research in mythology. Even Wundt’s ethnic psychology is entirely grounded in this view; he also sees all mythical concepts and representations only as variants of the representation of the soul, which thus form not so much a specific goal as rather the given presupposition of the mythical apprehension of the world. And even the reaction against this view, which was initiated by the so-­called “pre-­animistic” theories, has only added to the factual inventory [Bestand] of the mythical world some new features that had remained unnoticed in the animistic interpretation without alternating the principle of explanation as such. For although the concept of the soul and personality is not considered to be the necessary condition and true constituent of a certain originary-­strata of mythical thinking and representing, particularly of the most primitive magical usages, the importance of this concept is in general recognized for all the contents and forms of mythical thinking that go beyond this primitive originary-­strata. Even if we should accept the pre-­animistic variations of

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Tylor’s theory, myth would remain, in its general structure and its whole function, nothing other than an attempt to fold the “objective” world of events, as it were, back into the “subjective” world and to interpret it according to the categories of the subjective world. Against this uncontested presupposition, which still remains generally unopposed among ethnologists and ethnopsychologists, a grave objection, however, arises as soon as we consider it in the context of our basic general problem. For a glance at the development of each individual symbolic form shows us everywhere that their essential achievement does not consist in the fact that they reproduce the outward world in the inward world or that they simply project a finished inner world outward but rather that the two elements of “inside” and “outside,” of “I” and “reality,” first receive their determination and their mutual demarcation in and through their mediation. If each of these forms includes in itself a spiritual “confrontation” [Auseinandersetzung] of the I with reality, then this is by no means to be understood in the sense that the two, the I and reality, are to be taken as given quantities, as finished, existing for themselves as “halves” of being that are only subsequently taken up together into a whole. Rather, the crucial achievement of each symbolic form lies precisely in the fact that it does not have the boundary between I and reality as fixed once and for all but rather first posits this boundary itself, and each basic form posits it differently. Already from these general systematic considerations, we may suspect that myth, too, does not begin from a finished concept of the I or the soul as if from a fixed picture [Bild] of objective being and events, but rather that to acquire both it has had to form them from out of itself.1 Indeed, the phenomenology of mythical consciousness provides thoroughgoing confirmation of this systematic assumption. The further we extend the framework [Rahmen] of this phenomenology and the deeper we penetrate its basic and originary-­strata, the clearer it becomes that for myth the concept of the soul is no finished and fixed pattern [Schablone] into which it arranges everything that comes into its grasp but rather that for myth the concept of the soul signifies an element [Element] that is fluid and malleable, versatile and open to configuration, that changes, as it were, in its hands as it makes use of it. If metaphysics and “rational psychology” operate with the concept of the soul as a given possession, if they take it as a “substance” with



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determinate immutable “properties,” mythical consciousness exhibits precisely the opposite behavior. For myth, none of the properties and peculiarities that metaphysics tends to regard as analytical characteristic traits of the concept of “soul,” neither its unity nor its indivisibility, neither its immateriality nor its permanence, proves to be linked with it and necessary for it from the very beginning. All of these only designate certain elements that must be acquired very gradually in the process of mythical representing and thinking, and the acquisition of which passes through very different phases. In this sense, the concept of the soul may, with equal justice, be designated as the end as well as the beginning of mythical thinking. The content [Gehalt] of this concept and its spiritual scope lie precisely in its being at once beginning and end. It leads us in a continuous progress, in an uninterrupted interconnection of configurations from one extreme of mythical consciousness to the other: it appears at once as that which is most immediate and that which is most mediated. In the beginnings of mythical thinking, the “soul” can appear as a thing, as familiar and close enough to touch as any physical existence. In this thingliness, however, a transmutation takes place by which it gradually accrues a richer spiritual meaning-­content [Bedeutungsgehalt] until finally the soul becomes the distinctive “principle” of spirituality as such. Not immediately but only gradually and by all manner of detours does the new category of the I, the thought of the “person” and of personality, grow from the mythical category of the “soul”; however, the distinctive content [Gehalt] of this thought is fully revealed only through the resistance that it must overcome. Admittedly, in this process, it is not a question of a mere reflective process – it is not a result that is obtained from pure contemplation. For the human, the spiritual organization of reality begins not from mere contemplating but from doing [Tun]. Here a separation begins to take place between the circles of the subjective and objective, between the world of the I and the world of things. The further the consciousness of doing progresses, the more sharply this separation is expressed, the more clearly the boundaries between the “I” and the “not-­I” emerge. Even the mythical world of representation, especially in its first and most immediate forms, appears closely bound up with the world of effective action. Here lies the core of the magical view of the world, which is completely saturated

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with this atmosphere of effective action, which is indeed itself nothing more than a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensible, objective existence. The first energy by which the human as a unique and independent being opposes things is the force of desire. In desire, the human no longer simply accepts the world, no longer accepts the reality of things but constructs them within itself, for itself. The first, most primitive consciousness of the faculty of configuration of being stirs in desire. And in that this consciousness permeates all “inner” as well as “outer” intuition, all being now appears as such subjected to it. There is no existence and no event that does not ultimately submit to the “omnipotence [Allmacht] of thought” and the omnipotence of desire.2 Thus, in the magical view of the world, the I exerts an almost unlimited dominance over reality: it takes all reality back into itself. However, precisely this immediate positing-­ in-­ one [In-­eins-­Setzung: identification] now includes in itself a distinctive dialectic in which the original relationship is reversed. The enhanced feeling of self that seems to express itself in the magical view of the world indicates, on the other hand, that at this stage there is as yet no true self. Through the magical omnipotence [Allgewalt] of the will, the I seeks to seize things and make them compliant; however, precisely in this attempt it shows itself still totally dominated, totally “possessed,” by things. Even its supposed doing now becomes a source of being acted on [Leiden: suffering]; all its ideal powers [Kräfte], the power of words and language, for example, are here also seen in the form of daemonic beings [Wesen] and projected outward as something foreign to the I. Thus, the expression of the I that is acquired here, and also the first magical-­mythical concept of the “soul,” are completely bound to this intuition. The soul itself also appears as a daemonic power externally determining and possessing the lived body of the person – and hence determining and possessing the individual themself with all their vital functions. Thus, precisely the increased intensity of the I-­feeling and the resulting hypertrophy of effective action produce only a simulacrum of effective action. For all true freedom of effective action presupposes an inner bond, presupposes a recognition of certain objective boundaries of effective action. The I comes to itself only in that it posits [setzen] these boundaries for itself, in that it, therefore, successively restricts the unconditional



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causality that it initially attributed toward the world of things. In that emotion and will no longer seek to grasp the desired object immediately and draw it into their sphere but rather interpolate always more and ever-­more clearly apprehend intermediary links between the sheer desire and its goal, do objects on the one side and the I on the other acquire an independent intrinsic value: the determination of both is achieved only by this form of mediation. Wherever this mediation is lacking, however, a distinctive indifference continues to adhere to the representation of effective action itself. All being and events, as a whole and individually, appear shot through with magical-­mythical effects; however, in the intuition of effective action, there is still no divorce between fundamentally different factors of effective action, still no separation between “material” and “spiritual,” between “physical” and “psychic.” There is only a single undivided sphere of effect, within which a continuous transition, a steady exchange, takes place between the two circles that we usually distinguish as the world of the “soul” and the world of “material stuff.” This indifference itself emerges most clearly just where the representation of effective action becomes the general all-­encompassing category of the world-­concept and the “explanation of the world.” The mana of the Polynesians, the manitou of the Algonquin tribes of North America, the orenda of the Iroquois, etc. have as their common core the concept and intuition of an enhanced effectiveness as such that goes beyond all mere “natural” boundaries, without there being any sharp demarcation between the individual potencies of this effective action, between its modes and forms. Mana is attributed equally to mere things and to certain persons, to “spiritual” and “material,” to “animate” and “inanimate” entities. Thus, when the adherents of pure animism as well as their opponents, the “pre-­animists,” invoked the mana representation in support of their view, it was rightly argued against them that the word mana “in itself is neither a pre-­animistic nor an animistic expression, but utterly neutral toward these theories.” Mana is powerful, effective, and productive without the specific determination of being conscious, “soulish” [Seelisch] or personal in the restricted sense.3 Elsewhere as well, we find without exception that as we return to the more “primitive” stage of mythical thinking, the sharpness, clarity, and the determinacy of subjective-­personal existence diminishes. Primitive

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thinking is simply characterized by the distinctive fluidity and fleetingness that the intuition and concept of personal existence still possess in it. There is here still no “soul” as an independent unitary “substance” detached from the corporeal; rather, the soul is nothing other than life itself, to which the body is immanently and necessarily bound. In accordance with the particular nature of “complex” mythical thinking, this immanence reveals no sharp spatial determination and delimitation. Just as life, as an undivided whole, dwells in the whole of the lived body, so too is it present in each of its parts. Not only are certain vital organs, such as the heart, the diaphragm, and the kidneys, regarded in this sense as the “seat” of life, but each and every component of the body, even if it no longer stands in any “organic” combination with the totality of the lived body, can be thought of as a bearer of the life inherent in it. A person’s spittle, their excrement, their nails, and cuttings of their hair are and remain in this sense bearers of life and the soul:4 every effect that is exerted on them immediately affects and endangers the whole of life. Once again, we see here the reversal, namely that the “soul,” in that it is seemingly accorded with a forceful power over physical beings and events, is in truth only even more captivated by material being and tightly interwoven in its fate. Even the phenomenon of death does not dissolve this interconnection. The way death is grasped in original mythical thinking in no way signifies a sharp divorce, a “separation” of the soul from the lived body. It has already been shown that such a separating boundary, such a determinate opposition [Entgegensetzung] of the conditions under which life and death stand, is contrary to the mythical mode of thinking, that for myth the boundary between the two continues to be a thoroughly fluid one.5 Thus, even death is for myth never an annihilation of existence but only a transition into another form of existence – and that, at the basic and orginary-­strata of mythical thinking, this form itself can be thought of only in thoroughgoing sensible concretion. Even the dead still “is,” and this being can be only physically apprehended and only physically delineated. Even if, compared to the living, the dead appear as a forceless shadow, this shadow itself still has full reality; it resembles the dead not only in shape [Gestalt] and feature but also in its sensible and physical needs. In the Iliad, the shadow of Patroclus appears to Achilles as “like the man to the life, every feature, the same tall build and the fine eyes and voice and the very robes that used to clothe his body.”6



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Likewise, in Egyptian monuments, a person’s Ka, which survives them at their death, is formed as their physical doppelgänger, which is likely to be confused with them.7 If, therefore, the soul as an “image,” an εἵδωλον [eidolon], seems on the one hand to have cast off all coarse materiality, if it seems woven of more delicate stuff than the world of material things, on the other hand, from the standpoint of mythical thinking, the image itself is never purely ideal but is endowed with a certain real being and with real forces of effective action.8 Even the “shadow” has, therefore, a kind of physical reality and formation [Formung]. According to the representation of the Huron, the soul has a head and body, arms and legs; in short, it is in every way an exact imitation of the “actual” lived body and its organization. Often all intuitive-­physical relationships appear in it as if preserved in a miniature and only reduced into a smaller space. If, as among the Malay, the soul is thought of in the form of a little man living inside the lived body, then this basic sensible-­ naïve representation is sometimes preserved in a sphere in which the transition to a totally different, purely spiritual intuition of the “I” has already taken place. In the midst of the speculations of the Upanishad on the pure being [Wesen] of the self, the atman, the soul, is once again designated as the purusha, the man the size of a thumb: “The Purusha (Self), of the size of a thumb, resides in the middle of the body as the lord of the past and the future, (he who knows him) fears no more.”9 In all this, we see the same endeavor that aims to transpose the soul as 188 image and shadow in another dimension of being, as it were; also, on the other hand, precisely because it remains an image and a shadow, it possesses no independent features of its own but borrows everything it is and has from the material determinations of the body. Even the form of life, which is attributed to it beyond the existence [Dasein] of the body out there, signified nothing more than a simple continuation of its sensible-­ earthly mode of existence [Existenz]. The soul with its whole being, with its drives and needs, remains turned toward and rooted within the material world. For its survival [Fortdauer] and well-­being, it needs its physical possessions, which are sent along with it in the form of food and drink, clothes and weapons, household implements and ornaments. If in later forms of the soul cult, such gifts often appear as purely symbolic,10 they were, nevertheless, originally thought of as real and intended for the real use of the dead.

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Thus, likewise in this respect, the world “beyond” first appears as a mere doubling, a simple sensible duplicate of this world of the here and now. And even if an attempt is undertaken to distinguish the two by accentuating and describing in broad strokes their oppositions in regard to their content, this configuration by contrast is no less apparent than by similarity as the “here and now” and “hereafter” are grasped here only as different sides of one and the same intrinsically homogeneous sensible form of existence [Existenzform].11 And the social order of this world here continues to find its simple continuation in the order of the realm of the dead: in the realm of ghosts, everyone takes up the same rank and performs the same occupation and function as in their earthly existence.12 Precisely where myth seems to go beyond the world of the immediately given, sensible-­empirical existence [Existenz], where it in principle “transcends” it, myth holds fast to this world with clutching organs. In Egyptian texts, the preservation and survival [Fortdauer] of the soul appears bound to the fact that it regains the use of its individual sensible functions and sensible organs through the practice of magical means. The ceremony of the “opening of the mouth,” the opening of the ear, the nose, etc., by which the dead come into possession of sensation, into possession of seeing and hearing, smelling and tasting, are described and prescribed down to their smallest details.13 It has been said that these prescriptions are not so much the development [Ausbildung] of a represen­ tation of the realm of the dead as they are a passionate protest against it.14 Thus, in Egyptian grave inscriptions, the departed is repeatedly designated as “the living” – just as in China, one speaks of coffins as “living coffins,” of the bodies of the dead as “corpses buried alive.”15 Even the I of a person, even the unity of their self-­consciousness and their feeling of self, is by no means constituted at this stage by the “soul” as an independent principle separated from the body. As long as a person lives, as long as he or she is present in concrete corporeity and sensible efficacy, their personality is included in the totality [Gesamtheit] of their existence [Dasein]. Their material existence [Existenz] and their “psychic” functions and accomplishments, their feeling, their sensation, and their will form one in itself unseparated and undifferentiated whole. Accordingly, even after the separation between the two seems to have taken place and become visible – even after life, sensation, and perception



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have all fled the body – the “self” of the person remains, as it were, split between the two elements [Elemente] that formerly made up this whole. In Homer, when a psyche of the person has left them, the person themself, i.e. their corpse, remains to be eaten by the dogs; however, we also encounter another view and another linguistic usage, according to which their “self” lives on as a shadow and specter in Hades. Even the Vedic texts show the same characteristic vacillation: sometimes it is the lived body of the dead and sometimes the soul that is thought of as the true “he himself,” the bearer of his personality.16 Attached to different but equally real forms of existence, this “he” cannot yet develop its purely ideal, its functional unity.17 If, therefore, in the theoretical working out and elaboration of the concept of the soul, the unity and simplicity of the soul becomes its essential, truly constitutive characteristic trait, then for myth, originally, the opposite was rather the case. Even in the history of speculative thinking, we can follow how this unity and simplicity was established and secured only gradually: even in Plato, the logical-­metaphysical motif of unity, the ἕν τι ψυχῆς, had to assert itself against its counter-­motif, the multiplicity of the “parts of the soul.” In myth, however, not only in its elementary forms but often also in relatively advanced formations, the motif of the splitting of the soul far outweighs that of the unity of the soul. According to Ellis, the Tshi believe in two souls; according to Mary Kingsley, the West Africans believe in four; and according to Skeat, the Malay assume the existence of seven independent souls. Among the Yoruba, each individual possesses three souls, one dwelling in the head, the second in the stomach, and the third in the big toe.18 The same intuition can, however, also express itself in a far subtler form, an almost intellectually differentiated and intellectually systematized form.This systematic differentiation of individual “souls” and their functions seems to be most sharply developed in the Egyptian religion. Alongside the elements [Elemente] that form the body – the flesh, bones, blood, muscles – are other, subtler, but still materially thought elements [Elemente], from which the different souls of a person are constructed. Alongside the ka, which during a person’s lifetime dwells in their lived body as their spiritual doppelgänger and which does not forsake the person in death but remains with their corpse as a kind of guardian spirit, there consists a second “soul,” the ba, different in significance and in

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existential form, which flies at the moment of death from their body in the shape of a bird, which then wanders about freely in space and which only from time to time visits the ka and the corpse in the tomb. In addition, however, the texts speak of a third “soul,” the khu, which is depicted as immutable, indestructible, and immortal, whose significance seems consequently to come closest to our concept of “spirit.”19 An attempt is made here to determine the particular nature of soulish [seelisch] being as opposed to corporeal being in three different ways; however, this diversity of approaches proves that a specific principle of “personality” had not yet been elaborated.20 It was not only a negative element but also a highly important positive one whose neglect impeded for a long time the discovery of this principle. We find here not only an intellectual incapacity of mythical consciousness, but also a principle deeply rooted in the particularity of the mythical feeling of life itself. We have seen how this feeling of life is manifested primarily in a “phase feeling,” so that it takes the whole of life, not as an absolutely uniform and constant process but as interrupted by very specific caesuras, by critical points and times. As these interruptions divide the continuum of life into sharply opposing delimited segments, it thus divides in the same way the unity of the self. The ideal “unity of self-­consciousness” does not work here as an abstract principle that encompasses the manifold of contents and constitutes itself as the pure “form” of the I – rather, this formal synthesis finds in the contents themselves and in their concrete constitution very determinate limits. Where a tension in the diversity of contents becomes so extreme that it turns into a complete polarity of opposition, the discrepancy sublates the interconnection of life and with it the unity of the self. It is a new self that begins with every characteristically new phase of life. Precisely in the primitive strata of mythical consciousness, we repeatedly encounter this basic intuition. Thus, it is a widespread idea that the transition from boyhood to manhood, which is generally regarded as a mythical occurrence with its own imprint in its own right and which is singled out from life as a whole by particular magical-­mythical usages, does not take place in the form of a “development,” of an evolution, but signifies the acquisition of a new I, a new “soul.” A tribe in the hinterland of Liberia is reported to believe that once a boy enters the sacred



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grove where the initiation takes place, he is killed by a wood spirit but then is awakened to new life and “reanimated.”21 Among the Kurnai of Southeastern Australia, the boy in the initiation rite is cast into a kind of magical sleep, unlike ordinary sleep, from which he awakens as another, as a spitting image and a reincarnation of the totemic tribal progenitor and originary-­father [Urvater].22 In both these cases, we see that the “I” as a purely functional unity does not yet possess the force to encompass and join together that which appears detached and separated by certain “critical” phases and turning points. The immediate concrete feeling of life triumphs here over the abstract feeling of the I and the self, just as it does not only in the mythical representing but also in purely intuitive artistic natures. It is no accident that Dante depicted the lived-­experience of his love for Beatrice, through which he grew from youth to manhood, under the image of a “vita nuova.” And it is a constant feature in Goethe’s life that he felt precisely the most significant phases in his inner development to be “a sloughing off of passing and past states,” that he felt his own poetic works to be nothing more than a “castoff snake skin abandoned along the way.”23 For mythical thinking, the same process of splitting can take place successively as well as simultaneously: just as mythically different “souls” can exist and dwell peacefully, simultaneously together with one another in one and the same person, in the same empirical individual, so too can the empirical succession of the events of life be distributed among wholly different “subjects,” each of which is not only mythically thought in the form of a particular being [Wesen], but also mythically felt and intuited as an immediately living daemonic power that takes possession of the person.24 If the intuition of the I itself is to be freed from this confinement, if the I is to be apprehended in an ideal freedom and as an ideal unity, this can be achieved only by using a different approach. The decisive turn occurs when the accent of the soul-­concept shifts – when, rather than being thought of as the mere bearer or cause [Ursache] of the life phenomena, the soul is taken rather as the subject of ethical consciousness. Only when the regard passes beyond the sphere of life to that of ethical doing, beyond the biological to the ethical sphere, does the unity of the I take precedence over the material or semi-­material representation of the soul.

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This transformation can already be traced within the ambit of mythical thinking itself. The oldest historical evidence of this transition seems to be provided by the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, in which we can clearly follow how the new ethical form of the self that is gradually forged here passed through a series of preliminary stages in which the self was in every way still sensually grasped. It is the first, self-­evident presupposition of Egyptian belief in the soul that any survival of the soul after death requires the continuance [Fortdauer] of its material substratum. All care for the “soul” of the dead must therefore primarily imply the preservation of the mummy. The soul itself, however, is not only a corporeal soul but also an image soul and a shadow soul, and this element is also expressed in the form of its cult. From the material, concrete lived-­corporeity with which the veneration is originally concerned, religious thought and intuition rise more and more to the pure image form [Bildform]. The guarantee and security of the preservation of the self now comes to be seen in the statue, and in it above all, the statue now takes its place alongside the mummy as an equally effective instrument of immortality. It is from this basic religious intuition that the plastic arts [bildende Kunst] grow, in particularly the sculptures of the Egyptians. The tombs of the Pharaohs, the pyramids, become the most powerful symbols of this basic spiritual tendency, which aims at the temporal eternity, the unlimited duration of the I, which, however, can be attained and achieved only in architectural and plastic embodiment, in the intuitive visibility of space. We can, however, reach even further beyond this whole circle of visibility and visualization, in that the ethical motif of the “self” expresses itself even more sharply in the belief and cult of the dead. The survival [Fortdauer] and fate of the soul no longer depend exclusively on the material aids that are given to the dead to take with them or on the performance of certain ritual prescriptions by which the soul is magically supported and furthered, but it is now bound to its ethical being and ethical doing. The favor of Osiris, the god of the dead, which in the early Egyptian texts is gained by magical practices, is replaced, in later texts, by the judgment [Gericht] of Osirie over good and evil. In the narration contained in the “Book of Gates,” the dead appear before Osiris to confess their sins and justify themselves. Only after their heart has been weighed in the scales that stand before the god and has been found guiltless can



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the dead enter the realm of the blessed. It is not their power and rank on earth, not their magical art, but their righteousness and freedom from guilt that now decide whether they will triumph in death. “You awaken in beauty at daybreak,” reads one of the texts, “all evil has fallen away from you. You pass joyously through eternity with the praise of the god who is in you. Your heart is with you; it does not leave you.” Here the heart, the ethical self of the person, has become one with the god in them: “the heart of a person is their proper god.” Thus, we see in typical clarity the progress from the mythical to the ethical self. The human rises from the level of magic to that of religion, from the fear of daemons to the religious beliefs and the veneration of gods, and this apotheosis is not so much outward as inward. The human now apprehends not only the world but above all itself, in a new spiritual shape [Gestalt]. In the Persian beliefs about death, the soul lingers near the corpse for three days after it has been separated from the lived body; on the fourth day, however, it goes to the place of judgment, to the Bridge of Chinvat that passes over hell. From here, the soul of the righteous rises through good thoughts, good words, and good deeds to the place of light, while the soul of the unrighteous descends through the stairs of bad thoughts, words, and deeds into the “house of the lie.”25 The mythical image appears here almost exclusively as a transparent veil, behind which certain basic forms of ethical self-­consciousness clearly and purely begin to emerge. In this way, the inversion from mythos to ethos has its prehistory within the phenomenology of mythical consciousness itself. At the lowest stage of primitive belief in the spirits and souls [Seele], the soulish [seelisch] being opposes the person as a mere thing [Sache]; it is a foreign external power that is manifested in a person as a daemonic forceful power, to which a person succumbs unless they succeed in warding it off by magical means of protection. However, once the soul is grasped, not as a nature spirit but as a guardian spirit, the ground is prepared for a new relationship. For the guardian spirit stands, as it were, in a closer, more internal relation to the person [Person] with whom it is joined. It not only dominates that person but protects and guides them; it is no longer something purely external and foreign but something belonging specifically to the individual [Individuum], something familiar and close to them.

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Thus, in the Roman belief of the soul, the lares are distinguished from the larvae – the latter are wandering phantoms that spread terror and evil, whereas the former are friendly spirits that bear a certain individual character [Gepräge], that are bound up with an individual person or individual place, to the house or the field, and that protect it from harmful influences.26 The representation of such personal guardian spirits seems to recur in the mythology of almost all peoples: it has been found in the religions of the Greeks and Romans, in Native American religions as well as among the religions of the Finns and the Old Celts.27 True, the guardian spirit is not for the most part thought of as the “I” of a person, as the “subject” of their inner life, but rather as something in itself still objective, which all the same dwells “in” the person and is thus spatially bound with them and hence can also be spatially separated from them. Among the Uitotos, e.g., the guardian spirits seem to be the souls of various objects [Objekte], such as animals that one has taken possession of by a forceful power, and they not only abide with their possessor but can be dispatched to perform some charge.28 And even where there exists the closest conceivable union between the guardian spirit and the person in whom it dwells, even where the guardian spirit determines the whole being and destiny of the person, it nevertheless appears as something existing for itself, something separated and strange [Abgesondertes und Absonderliches]. Thus, the Batak’s view of the soul is grounded, for example, in the idea that a person before their birth, before their sensible-­lived-­ corporeal existence, is chosen by their soul, their tondi, and that everything that concerns the person, all their fortune or misfortune, depends on this choice. Whatever the person encounters, whatever happens to them, does because their tondi willed it so. Their physical condition, their soulish [seelisch] temperament, their fate, and their character are wholly determined by the particular nature of their guardian spirit. This guardian spirit is, therefore, a kind of person in the person, but does not coincide with the personality [Persönlichkeit] of the person [Mensch] and is often in conflict with the I of the person; it is a special being [Wesen] in the person, having its own will and its own desires, which it is able to gratify against the person’s will and to the person’s discomfiture.29



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The motive of fear before one’s own daemon still outweighs the sense of intimacy, that inner necessary attachment and affiliation with the daemon. From this first “daemonic” form, however, the soul gradually begins to transition into another, more “spiritual” significance. Usener has followed this spiritual change of significance through the gradual change in linguistic signification that the terms δαίμων [daemon] and genius gradually undergo in Greek and Latin. The daemon is at first a typical expression for what Usener designates as a “momentary or special god.” Any representational content, any object, insofar as it awakens mythical-­ religious interest, be it ever so fleetingly, can be raised to the level of a distinct god, a daemon.30 However, there is in addition another movement that aims to transform the outward daemons into inward daemons and the momentary and accidental gods into fateful beings [Wesen] and figures. A person’s daemon constitutes not what outwardly befalls the person but what a person fundamentally is. It is given to the person from birth, to accompany them through life and to guide their desires and their doing. In the sharper form [Durchbildung] that this basic idea assumes in the Italic concept of “genius,” the genius appears, as the name already expresses, as the actual “creator” of the person and not only their physical but also their spiritual creator, the origin and expression of their personal, particular nature. Thus, everything that possesses a truly spiritual “form” has such a genius. It is attributed not only to the individual, but also to the family and 199 the household, the state, the people, and in fact generally every form of human community. Similarly, in the Germanic sphere of representations, the individual as well as the entire clan and the whole tribe possess their guardian spirit: in the Nordic saga, the guardians spirit of the individual, the mannsfylgja, are differentiated from the guardians of the house, the kynfylgja.31 It seems that this idea takes on sharper outlines and assumes a more significant role as the mythical-­religious thinking of this representation advances from the purely natural sphere to the intuition of a spiritual “kingdom of ends.” Thus, for example, in the Persian religion, which is oriented entirely toward the one basic opposition of good and evil, the fravashi, the guardian spirits of good assume a central position in the hierarchical organization of the world. They are the ones who aided

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the supreme ruler Ahura Mazda in the creation of the world and who in the end will decide in his favor the struggle that he is waging against the spirit of darkness and falsehoods. As Ahura Mazda proclaims to Zoroaster: Through their power and glory, I founded . . . those heavens that there above, shining shimmering, and encompassing the earth and enclosing all around like a home. . . . Through their power and glory, I founded . . . the god-­created earth, the great and extensive, the bearers so much beauty, that bearers of the whole physical life, the living and the dead, and the high mountains, the pastures and the waters. . . . Had not the awful fravashi of the faithful given help unto me, those animals and humans of mine, of which there are such excellent kinds, would not subsist; strength would belong to the falsehood, the dominion would belong to the falsehood, the material world would belong to the falsehood.32

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Thus, the idea of the need for protection is extended to the supreme ruler, the true creator god: according to the basic view of the Mazdean religion, as a prophetic-­ethical religion, the true creator god is what he is not so much through his own overwhelming physical power but rather by virtue of the sacred order whose executor he is. This eternal order of justice and truth is embodied in the fravashi and by their mediation descends from the world of the invisible into the world of the visible. According to a passage in the Bundahish, Ormazd gave the guardian spirits, when they were still disembodied pure spirits, the choice of remaining in this state of pure bliss or of being provided with bodies and supporting him in his battle against Ahriman. They elected the ­latter – they entered into the material world to free it from the power of the hostile principle, the power of evil. This idea is, in its basic tendency, reminiscent of the climax of speculative-­religious idealism. For the sensible and material appears here as a barrier to the “intelligible.” However, it is a barrier that is nonetheless necessary, because only through it, only by progressively overcoming it, can the power of the spiritual be confirmed and visibly manifested. Thus, the sphere of the “spiritual” coincides here with the sphere of the “good”: evil has no fravashi. We can recognize in this development how the mythical concept of the soul has been ethically sharpened and narrowed, how, however, at the same time, this very narrowing implies a wholly new concentration on a specifically



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spiritual content [Gehalt]. For the soul, as a merely biological principle of movement and life, no longer coincides with the spiritual principle in the human. An authority on Persian religion writes: If the concept of the fravashi, most probably grew out of the vibrant Indo-­European ancestor cult, it has, nevertheless, undergone a spiritualization noticeably different from the concept of the Manes – the Hindu or Roman worship the soul of the departed ancestors, the Mazdean reveres his own fravashi and that of all other people, whether dead or alive or to be born in the future.33

Indeed, the new feeling of personality that breaks through here is combined with the new feeling of time that prevails in the religion of Zarathustra. Out of the ethical-­prophetic thought of the future grows a true discovery of individuality, of the personal self of the human being – primitive-­mythical representations of the soul serve as a foundation for this discovery, but on this material, an entirely new form is ultimately imprinted. Thus, at this point, a development takes place within the sphere of mythical consciousness that is destined to lead it beyond its limits. This gradual detachment of the speculative thought of the “self” from its native mythical soil can still be followed in all its individual phases in the history of Greek philosophy. The Pythagorean theory of the soul is still penetrated through with an ancient [uralt] mythical genetic constitution: Rohde has said that its central notions merely reflect phantasms of archaic popular psychology – in the improvement and reconfiguring execution that they underwent by theologians and hieratic purification and finally by the Orphics.34 And yet these features do not exhaust the essential particular nature of the Pythagorean psychology, which is rooted in the same element that gives the Pythagorean world-­concept its specific imprint [Gepräge]. The soul is neither something material-­like nor, despite all the representations of the mythical migration of souls, a mere breath or shadow; rather, it is determined, in the depths of its being and in its ultimate ground, as harmony and number. In Plato’s Phaedo, this basic view of the soul as the “harmony of the lived body”35 is developed by Simmias and Cebes, pupils of Philolaus. And with this, the soul thus first acquires a share in the thought of measure

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as the expression of boundary and form as such, of the logical as well as the ethical order. Thus, number becomes the ruler over not only all cosmic being but also everything divine and daemonic.36 And this theoretical overcoming of the mythical-­daemonic world, this subordination of it to a certain law that expresses itself in number, now finds its supplement and correspondence through the development that the basic problem of ethics undergoes in Greek philosophy. From the principle [Satz] of Heraclitus that a daemon is the sense of a person, this development continues to Democritus and Socrates.37 In this context, we can perhaps fully empathize with the particular sense and resonance that adhere to the Socratic daimon and the Socratic concept of eudaemonia. Eudaemonia is based on the new form of knowledge that is worked out by Socrates. It is achieved when the soul ceases to be a mere natural potency – in that it apprehends itself as an ethical subject. Only now is the human free from fear of the unknown, from the fear of daemons, because the human no longer feels that its self, its innermost being, is dominated by a dark mythical power but knows itself capable of molding this self from clear insight, through a principle of knowledge and will. Thus, in opposition to myth, a new consciousness of inner freedom awakens. At the primitive stages of animism, we encounter even today the view that a person is chosen by their soul daemon. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, before being embodied by the originary-­father of the gods, the soul is presented with different lifeless human beings – and with a choice that it makes, the fate of the person into which it will enter, their particular nature and their being [Wesen], as well as the whole course of their life, is determined.38 This basic mythical motif is taken up by Plato in the tenth book of the Republic – however, the consequence that he derives from it is opposed to the mythical manner of thinking and feeling. “Your daemon or guardian spirit will not be assigned to you by lot; you will choose your daemon” says Lachesis to the souls. “Virtue knows no master; each will possess it to a greater or less degree, depending on whether he values or disdains it. The responsibility lies with the one who makes the choice; the god has none.”39 These words are spoken to the souls in the name of necessity, in the name of Ananke, when their daughter Lachesis appears. However, since mythical necessity is replaced by ethical necessity, its law coincides with that of the highest ethical freedom. In the thought of self-­responsibility, the person is now allotted their true



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I: it is initially conquered and secured for them. However, the further development of the concept of the soul in Greek philosophy shows, of course, how difficult it was even for the philosophical consciousness to preserve the new content [Gehalt] that is embedded in this concept in its specific particular nature. If we trace the path from Plato to the Stoics 203 and onto Neoplatonism, we can see how the old basic mythical intuition of the soul daemon gradually recovered its preponderance: among the works of Plotinus, there is a treatise that again speaks expressly “of the daemon that is allotted to us.”40 Another aspect of the discovery of subjectivity, not so much ethical as rather purely theoretical, took place in mythical-­religious consciousness before it took place in theoretical-­philosophical consciousness. Even mythical-­religious consciousness advances to the thought of the “I” that is itself no longer thing-­like nor determined by analogy to anything tangible, an I for which, rather, the objective is available [vorhanden] as mere “appearance.” The classical example of such a version of the I-­concept that adheres to the boundary between mythical intuition and speculative contemplation is to be found in the development of Indian thinking. In the speculation of the Upanishads, the individual stages of the path traversed here are most clearly distinguished from one another. We see here how religious thought seeks ever new images [Bildern] for the self, for the subject as intangible and incomprehensible – and how in the end it is able to determine this self only by dropping all these pictorial [bildlich] expressions as inadequate and unsuitable. The I is the smallest and the largest: the Atman in the heart is smaller than a grain of rice or millet and yet greater than the air, greater than the heavens, greater than all these worlds. It is bound neither to spatial barriers, to a “here” and “there,” nor to the law of temporality, to a coming-­ into-­being and a passing away, to a doing and a being acted upon; rather, it is all-­embracing and all-­governing. For everything that is and everything that happens, it stands as a mere spectator [Zuschauer], who is not involved in what it looks at [schaut]. In this act of pure vision [Schauen], it differs from everything that has objective form, that has “figure [Gestalt] and name.” For it, there remains only the simple determination “it is,” without any closer specification and qualification. Thus, the self is opposed [entgegengesetzt] to everything knowable [Wißbaren], and yet at the same time it is the heart of everything 204

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knowable [Wißbaren]. Only whoever does not know [erkennen] it knows [kennen] it – who knows [wissen] it knows [wissen] it not. It is not known [erkennen] by the knowing [Erkennend] and is known by the nonknowing [Nichterkennend].41 All the intensity of the drive to knowing [Wissen] turns toward it – however, at the same time, the problem of knowing [Wissen] is contained in it. It is not things that are to be rendered visible through cognition [Erkenntnis] but the self that should be seen, heard, understood [verstehen] and known [erkennen] – who has seen it, heard it, understood [verstanden] it, and known it knows [wissen] by it the whole world. And yet precisely this all-­knowing [Allwissend] is itself unknowable [unwißbar]: From where there is a duality . . . there one sees another; there one smells another; there one hears another; there one speaks to another; there one thinks of another; there one understands another. . . . [But] whereby would one know [erkennen] the one through whom one knows [erkennen] this All? Lo, whereby would one know [erkennen] the knower [Erkenner]?42

It cannot be stated more clearly that here a new certainty has opened up to spirit but that this certainty, as a principle of knowing, is comparable with none of its objects or formations [Gebilde], and accordingly it remains inaccessible to all those modes and means of cognition that are decisive precisely for these objective formations [Gebilde]. And yet it would be premature to infer an inner affinity, let alone an identity, between the I-­concept of the Upanishads and that of modern philosophical idealism.43 For the method by which religious mysticism seeks to apprehend pure subjectivity and determine its content [Gehalt] is clearly distinguished from the critical analysis of knowledge and its inventory [Bestand]. The general direction of the movement itself, the direction from the “objective” to the “subjective,” continues to exist, despite all differences in the ultimate aims of this movement, as a coherent element [Moment]. As great as the gulf is that separates the self of mythical-­ religious consciousness from the I of “transcendental apperception,” it is no greater than the distance within mythical consciousness between the first primitive representations of the soul daemon and the advanced view in which the I is apprehended with a new form of “spirituality” as the subject of willing and cognizing.



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ENDNOTES 1 Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 21ff. 2 This term, the “omnipotence of thought” [die Allmacht des Gedankens], was first used by Sigmund Freud in characterizing the magical world view to whose remarks I refer the reader. See “Animismus, Magie und Allmacht der Gedanken,” in Totem und Taboo (2nd ed., Vienna: Hugo Heller, 1920), 100ff. [Sigmund Freud, “Animism, Magic and the Omnipotence of Thought,” in Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (London: W. W. Norton, 1989), 98ff.] 3 Cf. Friedrich Lehmann, Mana. Der Begriff des “außerordentlich Wirkungsvollen” bei Südseevölkern (Leipzig: O. Spamer, 1922), 35, 54, 76, etc. (see 57). Similarly, for the orenda of the Iroquois, Hewitt showed that it is solely an expression for “power in general” and that this power is not yet defined “as a . . . biotic or psychic faculty.” Cf. John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, “Orenda and a Definition of Religion,” American Anthropologist, (1902), 44ff. 4 For more details, cf. Konrad T. Preuss, “Der Ursprung der Religion und Kunst,” Globus, 355ff. Cf. 62ff. 5 See 46f. 6 [Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 561 – book 23, line 65, “Funeral Games for Patroclus.”] 7 Cf., e.g., the bas-­relief from the temple of Luxor reproduced in Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (London: Warner, 1911), 2, 119. See also Adolf Erman, Die ägyptische religion (2nd ed., Berlin: G. Reimer, 1909), 102. 8 See 52ff. 9 The Upanishad, iv, 12. On the ethnological material, see James G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. 3, (London: Macmillan and Co., 1911–1915), part II, 27, 80, etc. 10 Thus, e.g., in the Chinese sacrifices to the dead, great quantities of paper clothes or imitations of clothes were burned, along with real clothing and thus sent to the deceased in the other world. See Johann Jakob Maria de Groot, The Religious System of China, Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect. Manners, Customs and Social Institutions Connected Therewith (Leyden: E. J. Brill, 1901), 2, 474ff. 11 The religion of the Bataks of Sumatra and their picture of the realm of the dead may serve as a characteristic example of this. Warneck writes of these representations: The ways of the begu (the spirits of the dead), are the opposite of those of the living. When they go downstairs, they climb head foremost. When several carry a burden, they look forward but walk backward. They also hold markets but only at night. Their council meetings and all their activities take place at night. Johannes G. Warneck, Die Religion der Batak. Ein Paradigma für die animistischen Religionen des indischen Archipels (Göttingen and Leipzig: T. Weicher, 1909), 74.

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12 In particular, this representation seems to find its sharpest expression in China and Egypt. Cf. De Groot, The Religious System of China, 1, 348ff.; James H. Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (New York: Scribner’s, 1912), 49ff. According to the texts of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the deceased retain the use of their limbs; they eat the food prepared for them by the gods; they possess lands and fields that they themself cultivate. Ovid describes in a well-­known passage how the shades move about without blood, bodies, or bones; some gather in the forum and others go about their affairs, each imitating the previous form of his life (Metamorphoses, book IV, lines 443ff). Recent penetrating investigations have shown that Roman mortuary beliefs were astonishingly close to those of “primitive” peoples, not only in details but also in the general intuition underlying them. Cf. Otto, Die Manen; Franz V. M. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1922), 3ff., 45ff., etc. 13 Cf. Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, 1, 74, 101ff., etc. 14 Cf. Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought, 91, on the oldest Pyramid Texts: The chief and dominant note throughout is insistent, even passionate, protest against death. They may be said to be the record of humanity’s earliest supreme revolt against the great darkness and silence from which none returns. The word death never occurs in the Pyramid Texts except in the negative or applied to a foe. Over and over again, we hear the indomitable assurance that the dead lives. 15 Cf. De Groot, The Religious System of China, 3, 924ff. 16 Cf. Hermann Oldenberg, Die religion des Veda (Berlin: Besser, 1894), 585ff., 530, n. 2; cf. Rohde, Psyche, I, 5ff. 17 Mythical thinking finds in this division of a “self” of the human between the corpse and the shadow all the more natural since the fluid and indeterminate character of the mythical concept of personality makes possible an analogous division during life. Here too, one and the same person can at the same time be in different bodies that they regard as “belonging” to them. Thus, for example, in the totemic systems of the Australian aborigines the belief prevails that certain objects of wood or stone, the so-­called tjurungas, into which the bodies of the totemic ancestors have been transformed, “belong” in this way to the members of the corresponding totem. “The relationship between the person and tjurunga,” Strehlow reports, “is expressed in the sentence: nana unta mburka nama – this (i.e., the tjurunga) this your body is. Thus, every man has two bodies, that of flesh and blood and that of stone or wood.” Cf. Carl Strehlow, Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stämme in Zentral-­Australien (5 vols., Frankfurt: Städtischen Völker-­Museum, 1907–20), vol. 1, no. 2, 77ff. 18 Cf. Alfred B. Ellis, The Yoruba-­Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa. Their Religion, Manners, Customs, Laws, Language, etc. With an Appendix containing a Comparison of the Tshi, Gã, Ew´, and Yoruba Languages (London:



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Chapman and Hall, 1894), 124ff.; Skeat, Malay Magic, 50. Further data is in Frazer, The Golden Bough, part I, 528; part II, 27. The same belief in a multiplicity of souls is found also among the Indigenous people of Australia, according to Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, 512ff.; idem, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 448ff. 19 On the three Egyptian “souls,” their function and significance, see Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, vol. 2, chap. 19, in which the ethnological parallels from other African religions also are treated in detail. Cf. Foucart in Hastings’ Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 2, “Body (Egyptian)”; Adolf Erman, Ägypten und ägyptisches Leben im Altertum (2 vols., Tübingen: Verlag der H. Lauppschen Buchhandlung, 1923), 2, 414ff. 20 Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought, 56, remarks in his presentation of the Egyptian beliefs regarding the soul: It is necessary to remember in dealing with such terms as soul among so early a people that they had no clearly defined notion of the exact nature of such an element of personality. It is evident that the Egyptian never wholly dissociated a person from the body as an instrument or vehicle of sensation, and they resorted to elaborate devices to restore to the body its various channels of sensibility after the ba, which comprehended these very things, had detached itself from the body. 21 See Heinrich Schurtz, Altersklassen und Männerbünde: Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1902), 102ff.; Boll, Die Lebensalter, 36ff. 22 See Howitt, The Native Tribes of South-­ East Australia; Wilhelm Schmidt, Die geheime Jugendweihe eines australischen Urstammes. Mit einem Abriß der soziologischen und religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung der südostaustralischen Stämme (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1923), 26ff. 23 See Goethe to Reimer, June 23, 1809; to Eckermann, January 12, 1827. Goethes Gesprache, ed. Flodoard W. von Biedermann (2nd ed., Leipzig: Biedermann, 1909–11), 2, 3, 42, 316. 24 It might appear at first sight as though the “splitting” that occurs again and again in the mythical I-­feeling and concept of the soul was incompatible with what has been designated in this chapter as the “complex,” non-­analytical character of mythical thinking (cf. 56ff.). On closer scrutiny, however, it becomes evident that we have to do with two elements that correspond to and complement one another. Whereas, as theoretical thinking progresses, it increasingly develops the form of “synthetic unity” as a “unity of different things, whereas it thus posits a correlative relationship between the one and the many, original mythical thinking sees only an alternative relation between the two. Thus, it must either negate the differences – in that it identifies the individual elements [Elemente] that it places in a spatial, temporal, or causal relation to one another, making them “concresce” into a single formation [Gebilde] (cf. 78ff.) – or, where this negation can no longer be effected, where

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the mere difference grows into an “opposition” and as such forces itself directly upon consciousness, it must distribute the diverse determinations among a multiplicity of separate beings. Here, then, the difference is either not posited or is hypostatized at the same time as it is posited. The functional unity of consciousness, toward which theoretical thinking strives, posits difference in order to bridge it, to dissolve it in the pure form of thought. The substantial, mythical mode of thought either makes the many into one or the one into many. Here there is only concrescence or divergence; there is not that characteristic union of different things which is effected in the purely intellectual syntheses of consciousness and in its specific logical form of unity, in the “transcendental unity of apperception.” 25 On the Persian beliefs on death and the other world, cf. Richard Reitzenstein, Das iranische Erlösungsmysterium. Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Bonn: A. Marcus & E. Weber, 1921). See also Jackson, Grundriß der iranischen Philologie, 2, 684ff. For the Egyptian view of the judgment of the dead, cf. the account and texts in Erman, Die ägyptische religion, 117ff.; Alfred Wiedemann, Die religion der alten Ägypter (Munster: Aschendorff, 1890), 47ff., 132ff. Cf. also Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection, 305ff., 331ff. 26 Cf. Cumont, After Life in Roman Paganism, 61ff. See also Georg Wissowa, “Die Anfänge des römischen Larenkultes,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 7 (1904), 42–57. 27 For details, cf. Daniel G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (London and New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 192. 28 Cf. Preuss, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto, vol. 1, 43ff. 29 Warneck, Die Religion der Batak. Ein Paradigma für die animistischen Religionen des indischen Archipels, 8. 30 Usener, Göttemamen, 291ff. On the history of the word δάιμων [daemon], see also Albrecht Dicterich, Nekyia. Beiträge zur Erklärung der neuentdeckten Petrusapokalypse (2nd ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 59. 31 See Wolfgang Golther, Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895), 98ff. For Roman linguistic usage and concepts, see in addition to Usener (Götternamen, 297) as well as Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer (München C.H. Beck 1902), 175ff. Cf. Walter Otto, “Genius,” in Paulys Real-­Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, vol. XIII (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzlersche Buchhandlung, 1910), 1155-­1170. 32 Yasht 13.1, 13.12, and 13.13 (Karl Friedrich Geldner, Die zoroastrische Religion das Avesta (Tübingen: Mohr, 1926), 341). [The Zend-­Avesta, trans. James Darmesteter, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1883) reprinted as vol. 23, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. F. Max Muller, (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972), 180, 182, 183 – trans. amended.] 33 Victor Henry, Le Parsisme (Paris: Dujarric, 1905), 53ff. On the teachings of the Fravashi, cf. Nathan Söderblom, Les fravashis. Étude sur les traces dans le mazdéisme d’une ancienne conception sur la survivance des morts (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1899); James Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman. Leurs origines et leur histoire (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1877), 118, 130ff.



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34 Rohde, Psyche, 2, 167. 35 [Plato, Phaedo, 92A.] 36 Philolaus, Fragment 11, ed. Diels, 32B. [Ancilla to the pre-­Socratic philosophers, 75.] 37 For Democritus, see especially Fragments 170, 171, ed. Diels. 38 Cf. the characteristic myths communicated by Warneck, Die Religion der Batak. Ein Paradigma für die animistischen Religionen des indischen Archipels, 46ff. 39 Plato, Republic, 617D. 40 Plato, Enneades, treatise 3, sec. 4. For the position of the “personal tutelary daemon” among the Stoics and Neoplatonists, cf. Theodor Hopfner, Griechisch-­ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber. Mit einer eingehenden Darstellung des griechisch-­synkretistischen Daemonenglaubens und der Voraussetzungen und Mittel des Zaubers überhaupt und der magischen Divination im besonderen, vol. I (Leipzig: H. Haessel, 1921), 10ff., 27ff. 41 See The Kena Upanishad, 11; The Katha Upanishad, vi, 12. 42 The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 4 (5), (14). 43 Cf. the critical remarks of Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus, 73ff., 196ff., with Deussen’s conception and exposition.

II THE FORMING EMERGENCE OF THE FEELING OF SELF FROM THE MYTHICAL FEELING OF UNITY AND LIFE 1.  THE COMMUNITY OF THE LIVING AND MYTHICAL CLASS FORMATION: TOTEMISM 205

The opposition between “subject” and “object,” the differentiation of the I from all tangible givenness and determinacy, is not the only form in which progress is made from a general, still-­undifferentiated life-­feeling to the concept and consciousness of the “self.” Whereas in the sphere of pure knowledge, the progress consists above all in separating the principle of knowledge from its content, of the cognizing from the cognized, mythical consciousness and religious feeling still harbor [bergen] within themselves another, more fundamental opposition. The I is not immediately oriented here toward the outside world; rather, it refers originally to a personal existence and life similar to it. Subjectivity has as its correlate not some outward thing but rather a “you” or a “he,” from which on the one hand it distinguishes itself but with which on the other hand it groups itself. This “you” or “he” forms the true opposite pole that the I requires in order to find and determine itself.



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For here again the individual feeling of self and individual self-­ consciousness stand not at the beginning but at the end of the development. In the earliest stages to which we can trace back this development, we find the feeling of self immediately fused with a certain mythical-­religious feeling of community. The I feels and knows itself only insofar as it grasps itself as a member of a community, insofar as it sees itself joined together with others into the unity of a clan, a tribe, a social group. Only in and through this unity does it possess itself; in each of its expressions, its own personal existence and life is bound, as though by invisible magic ties, to the life of the surrounding whole. This bond can loosen and dissolve only gradually; only gradually can it lead to an I independent [Selbständigkeit] of the surrounding circles of life. Here again, myth not only accompanies this process but mediates and con­ ditions it: it forms one of its most significant and effective impetus. In that every new position the I takes toward the community, its expression in mythical consciousness is found; in that it is above all mythically objec- 206 tified primarily in the form of a belief in souls, the development of the concept of the soul not only comes to presentation but becomes a spiritual instrument for the act of “subjectivization,” for the acquisition and apprehension of the individual self. Even an examination of the mere contents of mythical consciousness indicates that these contents are in no way exclusively or even predominantly derived from the sphere of an immediate intuition of nature. Even if we do not, in line with the “manistic” theory as it has been championed and developed principally by Herbert Spencer, regard ances­ tor belief and ancestor cult as the actual origin [Ursprung] of mythical thinking, a crucial involvement would seem to be detected wherever it has come in general to a clear formation of the representation of the soul, to a certain mythical “theory” of the homeland [Heimat] and origin [Herkunft] of the soul. Of the great cultural religions, it is especially the Chinese religion that is rooted in a belief in ancestry and that seems to have preserved its original features with the greatest purity. Where this belief dominates, the individual not only feels themself bound to their tribal elders by the continuous process of procreation but knows themself to be identical with them. The souls of the ancestors are not dead: they exist and are to be reincarnated in their grandchildren, to renew themselves

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in the newborn of the same gender. And even when this primary circle of mythical-­social intuition broadens, when the intuition of the family progresses to that of the tribe and from the intuition of the tribe to that of the nation, every single phase of this progress proves, as it were, to possess its mythical “exponent.” Every change in social consciousness is imprinted on the form and figure [Gestalt] of the gods. Among the Greeks, the family gods of a family, the θεοὶ πατρῷοι, are subordinated to the gods of the phratry and tribe, the θεοὶ φράτριοι and φύλιοι, and these in turn to the gods of the city-­state and the universal national deities. Thus, the “state of the gods” becomes a faithful picture [Abbild] of the organism of social life.1 Yet Schelling by anticipation made a decisive argument against the attempt to derive the form and the content of mythical consciousness from the relevant empirical relationships of human society and in this way to make social being into the foundation [Grundlage] of religion, sociology into the foundation of a science of religion. In his lectures in the Philosophy of Mythology, Schelling notes: However, it seems to me that one thing would still remain presupposed: namely, that mythology is able to emerge in or among one people. However, whether it is indeed at all thinkable that mythology could emerge from or among one people – a question that has yet to shock someone – appears to me very much in need of investigation. For, first of all, what is a people, or what makes it into a people? Undoubtedly, not the mere spatial coexistence of a greater or lesser number of physically similar individuals, but rather the community of consciousness between them. This community has only its immediate expression in the common language. But in what are we supposed to find this community itself, or its ground, if not in a common world-­view; and then this common world-­view – in what can it could have been originally contained and given to a people, if not in its mythology? For this reason, it appears impossible that a mythology would be added to an already present people, whether it be through invention by individuals among it, or whether it be that it emerges by a collective, instinctual production. This state of affairs also appears impossible because it is unthinkable that a people – would be [sey] without mythology. One would perhaps consider replying that a people is held together by the



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common industry of some sort of commerce – for example, agriculture, trade – or through common customary morés [Sitten], legislation, government, and so forth. Certainly, all of this belongs to the concept of a people, but it seems almost unnecessary to recall how with all peoples authoritative power [Gewalt], legislation, customary morés, and even occupations are immanently connected with the representation of the gods. The question is, then, if all of this, which is being presupposed, and which is certainly given with one people, could be comprehended of without all the religious representations, which nowhere exist without mythology.2

Methodologically speaking, these words remain in force even if we replace “people” with some more primitive social community to derive the ideal form of religious consciousness from it as a truly original form [Grundform]. For here again, we are compelled to reverse the view at a certain point: mythical-­religious consciousness does not simply follow from the consistent factual existence of the form of the community but rather appears as one of the conditions of the communal structure, as one of the most important factors of the feeling and life of a community. Myth is one of those spiritual syntheses through which a connection between “I” and “you” is rendered possible, through which a definite unity and a certain opposition, a relationship of belonging-­togetherness [Zusammengehörigkeit: cohesiveness, solidarity, shared identity] and a relationship of tension, are created between the individual and the community. Indeed, we cannot understand the mythical and religious world in its true depth so long as we see in it only an expression, i.e. a mere replica [Abdruck: imprint] of some already available divisions, whether they belong to the natural being or to the social being. In it, we must rather recognize a means of the “crisis,” a means of the great process of spiritual separation by virtue of which certain originary-­forms of social and individual consciousness first emerge from the chaos of the first indeterminate life-­feeling. In this process, the elements [Elemente] of social existence as well as physical existence form only the material stuff that first receives its actual configuration through certain fundamental spiritual categories that are not located in it nor derivable from it. For here, it is above all characteristic of the tendency of myth that the boundary it draws between “inside” and “outside” is of an

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entirely different mode and quite differently placed from those drawn by the form of empirical-­causal cognition. The two elements of objective intuition and subjective feeling of the self and life enter here into a completely other relationship than is the case in the construction of theoretical cognition, altering by virtue of this spiritual accent all the basic measures of being and events. The various spheres and dimensions of the actual merge together and separate according to entirely different perspectives than the ones that are valid for the purely empirical order and organization of the world of perception, for the construction of pure experience and its object. The task of a specialized sociology of religion has today become a particular science with its own problems and methods, to describe in detail the interconnections between the form of religion and the form of society [Gesellschaftsform]. We, for our part, are concerned only with the demonstration of the most general religious categories that prove effective not so much in this or that particular form of social organization, but rather in the constitution of the basic forms of community-­consciousness [Gemein­ schaftsbewußtsein] in general. The “apriority” of these categories may be asserted in no other way [Sinn] than that which critical idealism assumes and allows for the basic forms of cognition. Once again, there can be no question here of isolating a fixed sphere of religious representations that recur always and everywhere and produce a similar effect on the construction of community-­consciousness [Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein] – rather, we can only ascertain a certain direction of the question, a unity of “perspective,” by which mythical-­religious intuition takes place in the organization of the world, including the organization of the community. This perspective can be more closely determined only by attending to the particular conditions of life under which the individual concrete community stands and develops; however, this does not prevent us from recognizing that here again certain general and continuous spiritual motifs of forming [Formung] are operating. First of all, the development of myth shows one thing very clearly: even the most general form of the human consciousness of genus, even the way in which the human separates itself vis-­à-­vis the totality of life-­forms so as to merge its genus into its own natural “species,” is not given from the beginning as a starting point of the mythical-­religious view of the world but is to be understood rather as a mediated product, as a result of this view of the world.



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For mythical-­religious consciousness, the boundaries of the species “the human” are not rigid but thoroughly fluid. Only through a progressive concentration, only through a gradual narrowing of that general life-­feeling in which myth originates, does it gradually arrive at the specifically human feeling of community. In the early stages of the mythical apprehension of the world, no sharp cut that separates the human from the totality of living, from the world of animals and plants, yet exists. Thus, particularly in the representational sphere of totemism, the “kinship” between human and animal and above all the kinship between a certain clan and its totem animal or plant, is taken by no means in a figurative but in a strictly literal sense. In their actions and performances, in their whole form and manner of life, human beings feel themselves in no way isolated from animals. Even today, the Bushmen, when asked, cannot define a single point of difference between the human and the animal.3 Among the Malays, there is a belief that the tigers and elephants have a city of their own in the jungle, where they live in houses and behave in every respect like human beings [Wesen].4 No matter what specific explanation is adopted for the significance and emergence of totemism, the fact that such a mixing of “species” of the living and the complete flowing into one another of their natural and spiritual limits is possible in primitive-­mythical consciousness – which otherwise is characterized precisely by the sharpness with which it apprehends all sensible-­concrete differences, every difference [Differen­ zen] of perceptual shape [Gestalt]. This must be grounded in some general features of the “logic” of mythical thinking, in the form and tendency of its concept and class formation. Mythical class formation differs from the one that is employed in our empirical-­theoretical worldview, especially in that it lacks the actual intellectual instrument that the latter possesses and of which it constantly makes use. When empirical and rational cognition divides the being of things into species and classes, it employs the form of causal reasoning and inference as a vehicle and as a consistent guideline for consideration. Objects are grouped into genera and species, based not on their purely sensible similarities or differences but rather on their causal dependency. We order them not according to what they give to outward or inward perception but rather according to how they “belong together” in keeping with the rules of our causal thinking. Thus, for example, the whole

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organization of our empirical perception of space is determined by these rules of thinking: how we single out individual shapes [Gestalten] in this space and set them off against one another and how we determine their position and distance from one another derive not from simple sensation, from the material content of our visual and tactile impressions, but from the form of their causal coordination and connection – hence from acts of causal inference. And our classification and delimitation of the morphological forms, of the genera and species of the living, follows the same principle, since it is essentially based on criteria that we extract from the rules of lineage and from our insight into the order and causal interconnection of procreation and birth. When we speak of a certain “genus” of living being, the underlying idea is that it is engendered according to certain natural laws: the thought of the unity of the “genus” arises from how we can always bring it forth anew through a continuous series of procreations. Kant writes in his treatise “On the Different Human Races”: In the animal kingdom the natural classification into genera and species is based on the common law of reproduction, and the unity of the genera is nothing other than a unity of the generative power, which is valid for a certain variety of animals. . . . The scholastic classification begins from classes that divide the animals based on similarities, whereas the natural classification begins from roots [Stämme] and classifies the animals according to kinships in respect to procreation. The former creates a school system for the memory; the latter a natural system for the understanding; the former only has the intention to bring the creatures under rubrics, the second to bring them under laws.5

Such a “natural system for the understanding,” such a reduction of the species to stocks and to the physiological laws of procreation, is unknown to mythical thinking. For mythical thinking, procreation and birth are not purely “natural” occurrences subject to general and fixed rules but rather essentially magical occurrences. The act of copulation and the act of birth are not related to one another as “cause” and “effect”; they are not two temporally discrete stages of a unitary causal connection.6 Among the Australian Indigenous tribes, who seem to have preserved certain basic forms of totemism in their greatest purity, there is the belief



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that the conception of the women is connected with specific places, to certain totemic centers, where the ancestral spirits reside – if a woman lingers in these places, the ancestral spirit enters into her lived body in 212 order to be reborn.7 Frazer has attempted to explain the source [Herkunft] and content of the whole totemic system on the basis of this basic representation.8 Regardless of whether such an explanation is admissible and adequate, the representation as such throws, however, a bright light on the form in which the formation of mythical concepts of genus and species is accomplished in general. In a sense, mythical intuition does not constitute a species by grasping together certain elements [Elemente] into a unity based on their immediate sensible “similarity” or based on their mediated causal “belonging-­togetherness” [Zusammengehörigkeit]; rather, their unity is of another, more original-­magical origin. That those elements [Elemente], which as a link [Glied] belong to one and the same magical circle of efficacy, fulfill a certain magical function in common with each other consistently shows a tendency to fuse, to become mere forms of appearance of a mythical identity that is situated behind them. In our previous analysis of the mythical thought-­form, we attempted to explain the fusion by reference to the nature [Wesen] of this thought-­ form itself. Whereas the links [Glied] of a synthetic connection undertaken by theoretical thought are preserved as independent elements [Elemente] within this connection, whereas theoretical thought correlates them while at the same time separating and distinguishing between them, in mythical thinking, whatever is related to one another, that which is united by a magical bond, flows together into one undifferentiated figure [Gestalt].9 Thus, that which is totally dissimilar from the standpoint of immediate perception or the most unlike from the standpoint of our “rational” concepts may appear as “similar” or “alike” as long as they enter as a link [Glied] into one and the same magical complex totality [Gesamtkomplex].10 The application of the category of equality [Gleich­ heit] is not based on an agreement in any characteristic sensible traits or 213 abstract-­conceptual elements but rather conditioned by the law of magical interconnection, of magical “sympathy.” Whatever is united through this sympathy, which magically “corresponds” [sich entsprechen], supports, and fosters each other: this merges into the unity of a magical genus.11 If we apply this principle of mythical “concept formation” to the rela­ tionship between the human and the animal, a path opens by which we may arrive

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at an understanding of at least the general basic form of totemism, if not of its special branches and forks. For, from the beginning, an essential element, a main condition of the mythical positing of unity is realized in this relationship. The original relation between the human and the animal that is valid in primitive thinking is neither an exclusively practical one nor an empirical-­causal one; rather, it is a purely magical relation. For the intuition of the “primitive,” animals seem more than any other beings [Wesen] to be endowed with special magical forces. Even Mohammedanism has been unable to eradicate the Malays’ deep-­rooted awe and reverence of animals: supernatural, “daemonic” forces are ascribed particularly to the larger ones, to the elephant, the tiger, the rhinoceros.12 For primitive intuition, animals that appear at a certain season are the makers, the bringers of this season: in mythical thinking, the swallow “makes” the summer.13 And just as the effect exerted by the animal on nature and on the human is entirely understood in this magical sense, so is the same true of every form of active-­practical behavior of the human against the animal. The hunt is not just a technique for the tracking and killing of wild game whose success is uniquely bound to the observance of certain practical rules; rather, it assumes a magical relation that the human establishes between itself and its prey. It has been observed among all the North American Indians that the “real” hunt must be preceded by its magical execution, which often lasts for days and weeks and which is bound to definite magical safeguards, with a wealth of taboo regulations. Thus, for example, the bison hunt is preceded by the bison dance, in which the capture and the slaying of the wild game are mimetically depicted in every detail.14 This mythical ritual is not a mere game or masquerade but an integral part of the “actual” hunting trip, whose success depends essentially on its precise observance. A similar, rigorously crafted ritual applies equally to the detection and culling of the prey as for the preparation and consumption of the meal. In all this, for primitive intuition, the human and the animal are fixed in a thoroughgoing magical interconnection, and their magical effectiveness continuously passes over into one another and arises out of one another.15 From the standpoint of mythical thinking, however, this unity of effective action would not be possible if it were not based on a unity of being [Wesen]. Here too, the relationship that is valid in our theoretical



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classification of nature into determinate, opposing, separate forms of life, into “species” and “classes,” undergoes a reversal. The determination of species is not based on the empirical-­causal rules of procreation; the representation of the “genus” does not depend on the empirical interconnection between gignere [begetting] and gigni [begotten]; rather, the conviction of the identity of the genus, as it arises from the ground of the reciprocal magical conduct of the human and the animal, is primary, and the idea of common “descent” indirectly follows.16 The identity here is by no means merely “disclosed”; rather, it is mythically believed, because it is a magically lived and felt identity.17 Wherever totemic representations have retained their proper intensity and vital force, we still find the belief that the members of the different clans have not only descended from different animal ancestors but are really these varieties of animals: aquatic creatures, jaguars, or red parrots, for example.18 Even if one of the basic preconditions of totemism can be understood by way of the general tendency of mythical thinking, even if it can be understood that for this thinking, the “species” of the living must be delimited differently vis-­à-­vis one another than they are for empirical perception and empirical-­causal inquiry, this still does not solve the real problem presented by totemism. For the specific particular nature of the phenomena that we tend to group together under the general concept of totemism lies not in certain connections, certain mythical identities, being posited here between the human in general and certain animal species but rather in each particular group possessing its own particular totem animal to which it stands in a special relation, to which in the strict sense it appears “related” and “belongs.” Only this differentiation, together with its social consequences and companion phenomena – above all the principle of exogamy, the prohibition of marriage between members of the same totemic group – constitutes the basic form of totemism. We would seem to move closer to an understanding of this differentiation when we hold fast to the idea that how the intuition of objective being and the organization of this being into individual “classes” takes place for human beings can ultimately be traced back to differences in the mode and tendency of effective action. How this principle dominates the whole construction of the world of mythical intuition, how the world of mythical objects proves almost everywhere to be a mere objective projection of human doing, will be considered later in detail.19 It suffices here

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to point out that the first germs of such a development is given already at the lowest stages of mythical thinking, even within the “magical” view of the world, since the magical forces on which all events depend do not extend equally to all spheres of being but may be distributed in very different ways. Even where the intuition of “subjective” doing has been so little individualized that the whole world seems filled with an indeterminate magical force, that the atmosphere seems charged, as it were, with spiritual electricity: the individual subjects share in varying degrees in this general distributed, inherently impersonal force. In many individuals and in individual classes and states, the magical potency that permeates and dominates all that appears in a particular climax, in a more intense and more concentrated form – the power as such, the general mana – is broken apart into the particular forms: into the mana of the warriors, the mana of the chieftains, the mana of priests or doctors.20 However, in addition to this quantitative particularization, in which the magical force still appears as a common and transferable possession, which is merely accumulated, as it were, in individual places and persons, a qualitative particularization can and must be added at an early stage. For, it is not possible to think of a community, however “primitive,” simply as a mere collective being [Kollektivwesen] in which there is only an intuition of the being and effective action of the whole but no consciousness of the effective action of the parts. Rather, early on there must be at least the first attempts at a differentiation, be it individual or social; a manifold division and stratification of human effectiveness must develop that is then also in some way expressed and reflected in mythical consciousness. Not every individual, not every association or group, is capable of everything – to each, rather, is reserved a particular ambit of effective action in which it must prove itself and beyond which it becomes powerless. Beginning from these boundaries of ability, the mythical intuition gradually determines the boundaries of being and its different classes and kinds. If an essential feature of pure cognition, of pure “theory,” is that for it the sphere of vision [Schauen] is broader than the sphere of effective action, then mythical intuition initially begins in the domain that it is magically practically facing and dominates. To it the words of Goethe’s Prometheus apply: for it, only the circle that it fills with its effectiveness is; there is nothing above it and nothing below it. From this, it directly follows, however, that a particular aspect of being



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and an interconnection of the elements of being must correspond to each particular mode and tendency of effective action. The human grasps itself together with all this in a unity of being [Wesen], from which the human immediately undergoes effects and on which the human exerts immediately effects. Even the human attitude toward the animal must also be determined by and, in particular, be in accordance with this basic view. The hunter, the shepherd, and the farmer all feel connected with the animal in their immediate activity. They feel dependent on the animal and thus, in accordance with a basic rule that dominates all mythical concept formation, “akin” to it: for each of them, however, this community extends to entirely different circles of life, to different animal genera and species. Based on this, we can perhaps understand how the original, inherently indeterminate unity of the life-­feeling, through which the human feels an equal bond with all living things, gradually transitions into that more specialized relation that binds particular groups of human beings with certain animal classes. And indeed, those totemic systems that have been most accurately observed and studied offer numerous indications that originally the choice of a totem animal was by no means purely outward and accidental, that the totem does not signify a mere “heraldry,” but rather, in it a specific life and spiritual attitude is depicted and objectified. Even contemporary relationships – which clearly cannot be regarded as “primitive” but in which the original picture [Bild] of totemism has been so covered over by a wealth of accidental determinations that it has become unrecognizable – often still allow this basic feature to stand out clearly. In the mythical-­sociological worldview of the Zufii, the totemic organization largely coincides with the caste organization, so that warriors, hunters, farmers, and shamans all belong to a particular group designated by specific totem animals.21 And sometimes the relationship between the clan itself and its totem animal is so close that it is difficult to decide whether the individual clan chooses a certain totem animal according to its own particular nature or whether it has not rather shaped and formed itself according to the character of the animal; warlike clans and occupations correspond to wild, powerful animals and peaceful clans and occupations to tame animals.22 It is as if the individual clan saw itself, as it were, objectively in its totem animal, as if it recognized its being [Wesen], its particular nature, its basic tendency of

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doing in the animal. And since in the highly developed totemic systems, the organization does not end with any individual social groups but extends concentrically to all being and all events,23 the entire universe is divided according to such “affinities”; it is separated into sharply distinguished mythical genera and species.24 However sharp these separations may gradually become, for mythical consciousness and feeling, the idea of the unity of life is nevertheless preserved in undiminished strength in all of them. The dynamic and rhythm of life is felt as one and the same – no matter in which of the various objective configurations it reveals itself. It is the same not only in humans and animals but also in humans and the plant world. In the development of totemism, the animal and the plant are also never sharply separated. A clan holds the same veneration for its totem plant as it does for its totem animal; the same taboos that prohibit the killing of the totem animal, or permit it only if certain conditions, certain magic ceremonies, are observed, apply equally to the eating of the totem plant.25 The “descent” of the human from a certain plant variety as well as the representation of the transformations of the human gestalt into the gestalt of plants forms a continuous motif of myth and the mythical tale. Once again, the outward form and the particular physical gestalt and the particular constitution can easily degenerate here into a mere mask, because from the beginning, the feeling of the community of all living things effaces all visible differences and all differences that can be postulated in analytical-­causal thinking, or it acknowledges them as merely incidental, as accidental differences. This feeling finds its strongest support in the particular nature of the mythical intuition of time, for which all life is set out into specific phases that always and everywhere recur in the same way.26 All these phases are not mere measures, according to which we artificially and arbitrarily section off events; rather, they depict in them the nature [Wesen] and basic constitution of life itself as a continuous qualitative unity. Thus, in becoming and growth, in the withering and decay of the plant world, the human not only finds a merely mediated and reflected expression of its own being but also immediately grasps and knows itself, experiences its own fate in them. “From the winter, verily,” a Vedic saying goes, “the renascent spring arises. For from the former the latter returns to existence. Thus, whoever knows this, verily returns to existence in this world.”27



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Of all the great cultural religions, it is in particular that of the Phoeni- 221 cian that has preserved this basic mythical feeling in the greatest purity and developed it most intensively. The “idea of life” has indeed been designated as the central idea of this religion, from which everything else emanates. Whereas the Baalim seem to be a relatively late formation in the Phoenician pantheon, whereas they seem to be not so much personifications of natural forces as rather the lords of the tribe and rulers of the ground [Grund] and soil [Boden], no such national tie originally pertained to the goddess Astarte. She represents [repräsentieren] rather the mother goddess in general, who as such brings forth all life from her womb, who not only continuously bears anew the tribe but all physical-­ natural existence. And beside her as the eternal genetrix, as the image of inexhaustible fertility, stands the image of the youthful god, her son, who although subject to death frees himself from it over and over again and is resurrected into a new form of existence.28 This image of the dying and resurrected god not only runs through most of the historical religions but is also to be found in many variants, however, in essentially the same form even in the sphere of religious representations of primitive peoples. And everywhere the strongest cultic force originates from it. If we compare the vegetation cults of primitive peoples with the Babylonian cult of Tammuz, the Phrygian cult of Attis, and the Thracian cult of Dionysus, we find in them all one and the same basic line of development as well as one and the same source of specifically religious arousal. Nowhere here does the human stand still in the sheer intuition of the natural events; rather, everywhere this intuition prompts the human to burst through the barrier that separates itself from the all of living things, to heighten the intensity of the life-­feeling to the point that the human liberates itself from its generic or individual particularity. This liberation is achieved, the identity with the originary-­source of all life is restored, in and through wild, orgiastic dances. It is not a question here of a mere mythical-­religious interpretation of the natural events but an immediate becoming-­one [Einswerdung] with them, an authentic drama that the religious subject experiences in itself.29 The mythical narrative is for the most part only an outward reflec- 222 tion of this inner event, a light veil behind which this drama shines through. Thus, in the cult of Dionysus it is the form of the cult that

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gives rise to the narrative of Dionysus-­Zagreus, who is overpowered by the Titans, torn to pieces and devoured, so that the one divine being [Gotteswesen] disappears into the multiplicity of the shapes [Gestalten] of this world and into the plurality of human beings: from the ashes of the Titans, whom Zeus shatters with his thunderbolt, arises the human race.30 The Egyptian Osiris cult is also grounded in the identity assumed between god and the human. Here the dead themselves become Osiris: “As true as Osiris lives, he too will live; as true as Osiris did not die, he too will not die; as true as Osiris has not been destroyed, he too will not be destroyed.”31 For a highly developed metaphysical consciousness, the certainty of immortality is grounded above all in a sharp analytical separation that this consciousness carries out between “body” and “soul,” between the world of physical-­natural being and that of “spiritual” being. Mythical consciousness, however, originally does not know of such a separation, of such a dualism. The certainty of the continuation of life is rooted here in rather the reverse view: it is continuously reinforced here by the intuition of nature as a cycle of new births. For everything that grows and becomes is related to and magically intervenes into everything else that grows and becomes. In the festive customs with which the human accompanies certain decisive phases of the year, in particular the descent of the sun from the autumnal equinox or its rising and the return of light and life, it is everywhere evident that this is no mere reflection, no analogical picturing [Abbildung] of an outward event but rather that human doing and the cosmic becoming are immediately interwoven here. No more than the “complex” mythical representation originally dissects being into a multiplicity of sharply differentiated biological “species” does it differentiate the various life-­ giving and generative forces of nature. It is one and the same vital force to which the growth of plants and the birth and growth of the human is entrusted. In the interconnection of the magical view of the world and in magical activity [Betätigung], the one can therefore always replace the other. Just as, in the well-­known custom of the “marriage bed in the field,” the practice or presentation of the sexual act immediately results in the impregnation and fruitfulness of the earth, so, conversely, it is the mimetic presentation of the fertilization of the earth that enables souls to be reborn after death. The rain that fertilizes the ground of the earth has its corresponding magical “counterpart” in the human semen, the



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plow in the male member, the furrow in the female womb: with the one, the other is magically posited and given.32 Accordingly, the representation of “Mother Earth,” or the correspondingly that of the earth as father, constitutes a core and originary thought that has repeatedly shown its power, from the beliefs of primitive peoples down to the highest configurations of religious consciousness. The Uitotos believe that during the season when there is no fruit, the fruit goes down to the father under the earth: the “soul” of the fruit and of plants goes to the dwelling place of the father.33 That the earth is the common mother who brings human children to light and to whom they are given back after death to be resurrected to new life in the cycle [Kreislauf] of becoming is also a basic view of Greek belief that immediately expresses itself in the “Choephoroi” of Aeschylus in Electra’s prayer at the tomb of Agamemnon.34 Even in Plato’s Menexenus, we still find the proposition that it is not the earth that imitates childbearing and birth but women who imitate the earth. For the original mythical intuition, however, there is here as such no before or after, no first or second, but only the complete and indissoluble interpenetration of the two processes. The mystery cults apply this general belief to the individual. Through the practice of sacramental acts that represent the primordial mystery of becoming, death, and the rising from the dead the initiate seeks to obtain assurance of rebirth. In the Isis cult, the creator of the green seeds is, for her worshipers, the Mother of God, the Great Mother, the Queen, who gives life to all human beings.35 And here, as in other mystery cults, it is expressly taught that the mys­ tes [initiates], before achieving their new spiritual being, their spiritual “transfiguration,” must have gone through all the circles [Kreise] of nature and of physical life, that they must have been in all the elements [Ele­ mente] and formations [Gebilde] of life – in the earth, the water, and the air and in the animals and the plants – that they must have accomplished a journey and transformation through the zones of heaven and all the animal shapes.36 Thus, even where the basic tendency is directed toward a sharp separation of the spiritual from the corporeal, toward a dualism between the lived body and the soul, the original mythical feeling of unity continuously breaks through. At first, the fundamental categories of human communal life are taken and used both as “natural” as well as “spiritual.”

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In particular, the archetype [Urform] of the human family, the triad of father, mother, and child, is immediately introduced [hineinlegen] and read into the being of nature. In the Vedic religion as in the Germanic religion, “Mother Earth” is opposed to “Father Heaven.”37 Even within the sphere of the Polynesian, the origin of the human is traced back to heaven and earth as its first progenitors.38 The triad of father, mother, and son is depicted in Egyptian religion in the figures of Osiris, Isis, and Horus; it is found among almost all Semitic peoples, and its presence has been demonstrated among the Germanic peoples,39 the Italic and Celtic tribes, the Scythians, and the Mongols. In the representation of the divine trinity, Usener sees a basic category of mythical-­religious consciousness: “a deep-­rooted form of intuition, endowed with the forceful power of a natural drive.”40 In the development of Christianity, the religious-­ethical apprehension of the “divine filiation” also developed only gradually from determinate concrete-­physical intuitions of this relationship; here too, the hope of resurrection still appeals with predilection to the basic idea of the old primitive religion, that the pious individual is physically akin to God the Father, is the living-­corporeal child of God.41 Thus, in myth, all natural being expresses itself in the language of human-­social being, and all human-­social being expresses itself in the language of natural being. No reduction of the one element to the other is possible here, but rather, in their thoroughgoing correlation, both initially determine the distinctive structure and complexion of mythical consciousness. It is, therefore, hardly less one-­sided if we “explain” the formation [Gebilde] of myth in purely sociological terms than if we explain it in purely naturalistic terms. The most incisive and consistent attempt at such an explanation has been undertaken by the modern French school of sociologists, particularly by its founder, Émile Durkheim. Durkheim assumes that neither animism nor “naturism” can be the true root of religion; if they were, this would simply mean that all religious life is without solid foundation, an ensemble of mere delusions, a totality [Ganze] of phantasms. Religion cannot be based on such shaky ground: rather, if it can claim for itself any kind of inner truth, it must be possible to recognize it as an expression of an objective reality [Realität]. This reality [Realität] is not nature but society; it is not of a physical but of a social nature. The true object of religion, the sole and original object to which all religious formation [Gebilde] and all religious manifestations



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can be traced back, is the social association [Verband] to which the individual indissolubly belongs, which wholly and thoroughly conditions the individual’s being and consciousness. This societal association not only determines the form of mythology and religion but also provides the basic schema and model for all theoretical comprehension, for all cognition of reality. For all the categories in which we apprehend this reality – the concepts of space, time, substance, and causality – are products not of the individual but of social thinking and accordingly have their religious-­social prehistory. They lead back to this prehistory, and their seemingly purely logical structure can be traced back to determinate social structures: to explain these concepts and understand them in their true “apriority.” To the individual, everything must seem “a priori,” generally valid and necessary, a fact that arises not from their own activity but from the activity of the species. The real bond that links individuals with their tribe, their clan, and their family is, therefore, the ultimate demonstrable ground for the ideal unity of their world-­consciousness, for the religious and intellectual construction of the cosmos. We shall not take up here at any length the epistemological grounding that Durkheim has given his theory in an attempt to replace the “transcendental” deduction of the categories by their sociological deduction. We would, however, ask here whether the categories that Durkheim seeks to derive from the being of society are not rather the conditions for this being: whether it is not the pure thought-­forms as well as the pure intuition-­ forms that make possible and constitute both the consistent existence of society as well as that empirical lawfulness of the phenomena that 227 we call “nature.” Even if we exclude this question, even if we limit ourselves uniquely to the ambit of the phenomena of mythical-­religious consciousness, on closer examination, however, even here Durkheim’s theory clearly amounts to a ὕστερον πρότερον [latter before]. For the form of society is not absolutely and immediately given any more than is the form of the objective objects of nature, the lawfulness of our world of perception. Just as nature comes into being through a theoretical interpretation and elaboration of sensible contents, so too is the construction of society a mediated and ideally conditioned being. It is not so much the ultimate, ontologically real cause of the spiritual, and particularly religious, “categories,” as it is rather decisively determined by them. If we seek to explain these categories as mere repetitions

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and, as it were, as imprints of the actual shape of society, we forget that the processes and function of mythical-­religious configuration [Gestaltung] have entered precisely into this actual shape [Gestalt]. We know of no form of society, however primitive, that does not exhibit some kind of religious “imprint” [Prägung], and society can be regarded as a shaped [geprägte] form only if we tacitly presuppose the mode and tendency of this imprint.42 Durkheim’s explanation of totemism, which he regards as the true test of the correctness of his basic view, indirectly confirms this interconnection. For Durkheim, totemism is nothing other than the outward projection of certain inner social bonds. Because individuals know their own life only within an encompassing social association [Verband] and because within this association [Verband] they single out particular groups that they set off against each other as characteristic unities, objective existence can be intellectually apprehended only through this basic form of lived-­experience; it can be interpreted only through a single continuous organization of all being and all events into “species” and “classes.” Totemism does nothing more than transfer the belonging-­togethernesses [Zusammengehörigkeiten] and kinships that the human immediately experiences as a member of the social body to the whole of nature; it pictures [abbilden] the social microcosm onto the macrocosm. Thus, here too, society is for Durkheim effectively the proper object of religion, whereas the totem is regarded only as a sensible sign by which some object is stamped as socially significant and hence raised to the sphere of the religious.43 However, this nominalistic theory, which as it were considers the totem only as a kind of accidental, as a more or less arbitrary sign behind which stands an entirely different, mediated object of veneration, passes by the central problem of totemism. Granted, myth and religion everywhere require such images, such sensible present signs, but the particu­ larity of the individual mythical-­religious symbols remains a question that cannot be answered based on the general function of sign-­bestowing. Indeed, the relation of all the configurations of being to those of certain animals or plants would appear to be unexplained as long as we are unable to precisely understand their specific determinacy from a certain basic tendency of mythical thinking and its life-­feeling thereby providing the signs of totemism not, to be sure, with a fixed tangible correlate,



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a fundamentum in re, but rather with a foundation in mythical-­religious consciousness. The very existence and form of human society requires such a foundation: even where we suppose that we have society [Gesellschaft] before us in its empirically earliest and most primitive shape, it is not something originally given but something spiritually conditioned and mediated. All social [gesellschaftlich] existence is rooted in certain concrete forms of the community [Gemeinschaft] and in the feeling of community. And the more we succeed in laying bare this root, the more clearly it can be seen that the primary feeling of community never stops at the boundaries that we posit in our highly developed biological class concepts but rather goes beyond such boundaries toward the totality [Totalität] of the living. Long before the human knew itself as a determined, separated species distinguished by some specific force and singled out from the whole of nature by a specific primacy of value, the human knew itself as a link in the chain of life as a whole, within which each individual existence [Dasein] was magically connected with the whole, so that a continuous transition, a transformation of one being into another, appears not only as possible but also as necessary, as the “natural” form of life itself.44 From this, it becomes comprehensible that even in the image-figures [Bildgestalten] in which myth originally lives and is, in which it immediately and concretely embodies its essential nature, the features of the god, the human, and the animal never sharply stand out from one another. Only gradually does the preparing for a change occur, which is the unmistakable symptom of a spiritual change, of a crisis in the development of human self-­consciousness. As in the Egyptian religion where the gods generally take the shape [Gestalt] of animals, the heavens are shaped as a cow, the sun as a sparrowhawk, the moon as an ibis, the god of the dead as a jackal, and the water god as a crocodile; in the Vedas, we still clearly find in addition to the dominant anthropomorphism traces of an older theriomorphic outlook.45 And even where the gods stand before us in clearly human formation, their kinship with the animal nature is often expressed in an almost unlimited ability to transform. Thus, Odin in Germanic mythology is the great magician who transforms himself into any desired shape: a bird, a fish, a worm. Even the Greek primeval religion did not deny this interconnection. The great gods of the Arcadians were depicted in the shape of a horse, a bear, or a wolf; Demeter and

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Poseidon with the head of a horse, Pan in the shape of a goat. It was only Homeric poetry that displaced this view from Arcadia.46 And precisely this indicates that at this point, myth may never have arrived at a sharper division, which basically conflicts with its own essential nature, its “complex” intuition, if other motives and other spiritual forces had not been involved. Art, in that it helped the human find its own image, had initially discovered, as it were, the specific idea of the human as such. The development that takes place here can be followed almost step by step in the plastic presentations of the gods. In Egyptian art, the double and hybrid forms still consistently show the god in human formation but with the head of an animal or a snake, a frog or a sparrowhawk; in another, the lived body has an animal shape, and the face bears human features.47 Greek sculpture, however, carries out the sharp cut here: in the forming [Formung] of the pure figure [Gestalt] of the human, it arrives at a new form of the divine itself and its relationship to the human. And in this process of humanization and individualization, poetry plays a role almost equal to that of visual art. Once again, the poetic and mythical configuration do not stand here in a relationship of “cause” and “effect”; here again, one does not simply precede the other, but rather, the two are merely different exponents of one and the same spiritual development. As Schelling writes:

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The liberation that became the lot of consciousness through the cision of the representation of the gods gave poets to the Hellenics, and conversely only the age that gave them the poets also brought with itself the completely unfolded history of the gods. Poesy did not take the lead, at least not actual poesy; and properly speaking, poesy also did not produce the articulated history of the gods. Neither precedes the other. Rather, both are the mutual and simultaneous ending of an earlier state, a state of envelopment and silence. . . . The crisis through which the world of the gods unfolds into the history of the gods is not external to the poets. It takes place in the poets themselves, forms their poems . . . it is not them as persons who create the history of the gods but rather the crisis of the mythological consciousness within them.48

Of course, poetry does not only reflect this crisis but also intensified it and brought it to completion and decision [Entscheidung]. In this, there is



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established anew the basic rule that governs all spiritual development: spirit arrives at its true and complete inwardness only in its manifestation. The form that the inner gives itself also determines retrospectively its nature [Wesen] and its content [Gehalt]. In this sense, the Greek epic intervenes in the development of the history of Greek religion. It is not the technical form of the epic that is decisive here: the individualization forms only a light allegorical cloak that covers a general mythical content [Gehalt]. The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, for example, still bears an evident general-­astral character: beneath the image of the deeds and sufferings of the hero Gilgamesh, we recognize a solar myth, a presentation of the annual path of the sun, of its reversal at two turning points, etc. The twelve episodes of the Gilgamesh epic hold a relation to the twelve images of the zodiac, through which the sun passes in the course of a year.49 Although it has often been attempted, an astral interpretation of the figures of the Homeric poetry is however doomed to failure. It is no longer a question here of the fate of the sun and the moon but of the hero and of the discovery in the hero of the individual human being as an active and suffering subject. And only with this discovery does one of the last barriers between god and the human fall away; the hero enters between both and undertakes the mediation between them. Whereas the hero, the human personality, appears raised into the circle of the divine, the gods, on the other hand, are very closely interwoven in the circle of human events, in which they participate not as mere observers but as fellow warriors and comrades-­in-­arms. Through their relation to the hero, the gods are fully drawn into the sphere of personal existence and effective action, in which they now acquire a new shape and a new determinacy. And what began in the Greek epic finds its conclusion and completion in the drama. The Greek tragedy also grew out of a primordial stratum of mythical-­religious consciousness and never completely detached itself from its proper life-­ground [Lebensgrund]. It emerged immediately from the cultic action, from the Dionysian festival and chorus. The development that it takes, however, can be more clearly recognized because it does not remain confined within the basic orgiastic-­Dionysiac mood in which it is rooted but instead confronts an entirely new figure [Gestalt] of the human, an entirely new feeling of the I and of the self. Like all great

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vegetation cults, the cult of Dionysus feels the I only as a violent breaking away from the universal originary-­ground of life, and what it strives for is a return to that originary-­ground, the “ecstasy” by which the soul bursts the fetters of the lived body and of individuality, in order to unite again with the universal-­life [Alleben]. All that is apprehended here of individuality is the one moment, the moment of tragic individualization [Vere­ inzelung] as it is immediately depicted in the myth of Dionysius-­Zagreus, who is torn to pieces and devoured by the Titans. The artistic intuition, however, beholds in individual existence not so much this individualization as rather the particularization, the combination [Zusammenfassung] into a self-­contained figure [Gestalt]. For it, the specific plastic outline is only the guarantee of completion.50 And completion itself requires finitude; thus, in truth, it requires a fixed determination and delimitation. This requirement is accomplished in the Greek tragedy, as in the epic and in sculpture, in that initially the person of the coryphaeus emerges out from the whole of the chorus and is raised to a distinct spiritual individuality. The drama cannot, however, stop here: what it requires is not so much a person but persons, the relationship of the “I” to the “you” and the conflict between the two. Thus, the second actor, the “counter player” is initially introduced in Aeschylus, and then in Sophocles, a third player is added. And to this dramatic progress and gradation there corresponds the progressive deepening of the feeling and consciousness of personality – and, indeed, the word “person,” which serves us as an expression of this consciousness, initially meant nothing other than the actor’s mask. Even in the epic, the figure of the hero, the human subject, is set off from the circle of objective events; however, if the hero is differentiated from this circle, the hero nevertheless confronts it, though more passively than actively. The hero is engulfed in these events without that they immediately grow out from himself or herself and are necessarily conditioned by himself or herself; the hero is still the plaything of the friendly and hostile powers and divine and daemonic powers that determine and guide the course of events instead. In this respect, the Homeric epic, and particularly The Odyssey, still borders on myth and the mythical tale. The cunning, the strength, the wisdom of the hero, by which the hero seems to guide his or her destiny, are themselves daemonic-­divine gifts bestowed on him or her from outside.



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Greek tragedy was the first to discover, in contrast to this passive intuition, a new source of the I in that it takes the human being as self-­active and self-­responsible and thus configures the human being into a truly ethical-­dramatic subject. “Nobody can acquit you,” the chorus replies to Clytemnaestra in Agamemnon by Aeschylus when she seeks to shift the guilt for her husband’s murder from herself to the daemonic curse on the family. The same development that dramatically presents itself here is found in Greek philosophy in its purest expression in Heraclitus’ saying: ἦθος ἀνθρώπωι δαίμων [a man’s character is his daemon]51 and in the development of these words by Democritus, by Socrates and Plato.52 Even the gods are drawn into this development; they, too, are subject to the sentence of Dike, the supreme godhead of tragedy. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the Erinyes themselves, the ancient goddesses of vengeance, ultimately bow to the verdict of justice. In contrast to the epic, tragedy shifts the center of events from the outside to the inside, and thus, a new form of ethical self-­consciousness, by which the nature [Wesen] and shape of the gods are transformed, arises. At the same time, however, this crisis in religious consciousness, which manifests itself in the individual figures [Gestalten] of the gods, points to a crisis within community-­consciousness [Gemeinschaftsbewußtsein]. Just as there is no sharp separation between the human species and the animal species and the plants in the circles of thinking and feeling in which primitive religion, such as totemism, moves, there is no clear delimitation between the human group as a whole and the individual belonging to it. Individual consciousness remains bound to the tribal consciousness and merely with it [geht in ihm auf]. The god itself is first and foremost the god of the tribe, not the god of the individual. Individuals who leave the tribe or are expelled by it have thereby lost their god: “Go, serve other gods” are the words spoken to the outcast.53 In everything it thinks and feels, in all its effective actions and suffering, the individual knows itself bound to the community, just as the community feels itself attached to the individual. Every defilement with which an individual is afflicted, every bloody deed committed by the individual, passes by immediate physical contagion to the whole of the group. For the vengeance of the soul of the slain does not stop at the murderers but extends to all who are in direct or indirect contact with them.

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Once, however, religious consciousness rises to the thought and shapes of personal gods, this involvement of the individual in the whole begins to dissolve. Only now does the individual receive in opposition to the life of the genus their independent character [Gepräge] and, as it were, their personal face [Gesicht]. And this tendency toward the individual is connected with a new tendency toward the universal – which is only seemingly in conflict with it and in truth is correlative to it. For, above the restricted unity of the tribe or the group, more comprehensive social unities now arise. The personal gods of Homer are also the first national gods of the Greeks – and as such, they virtually become the creators of the general-­Hellenic consciousness. For they are the Olympians, the general gods of the heavens, who are bound neither to a single locality [Örtlichkeit] or countryside nor to a particular cult site. Thus, the liberation of personal consciousness and the raising up to national consciousness are carried out in one and the same basic act of religious configuration. We see here anew that the form of mythical and religious representation does not simply reflect certain facts of the social structure; they also belong to one of the factors by virtue of which every living community-­consciousness constructs itself. The same process of differentiation by which the human arrives to determine the spiritual boundaries of its species leads the human in further progress to draw more sharply the boundaries within this species and thus attain the specific consciousness of its I.

2.  THE CONCEPT OF PERSONALITY AND THE PERSONAL GODS: THE PHASES OF THE MYTHICAL CONCEPT OF THE I In the foregoing considerations, we have sought to show how the human being is able to discover the universum of its own interiority and to determine for itself its own consciousness only in that the human being thinks it in mythical concepts and intuits it in mythical images. This has, however, described only a single tendency in the development of mythical-­religious consciousness. Once again, the path inward finds here its completion only in that it is united with the seemingly opposite path, with the advance from the inside outward. For the most important factor in the construction of the consciousness of personality is and remains



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the factor of effective action: here, however, the law of equality of “action” and “reaction” is valid for effective action in a purely spiritual sense as well as in a physical sense. The effect that the human being exerts on the outside world does not simply consist in the fact that the I, as a finished thing, as a self-­contained “substance,” draws outside things into its circle and takes possession of them. Rather, all genuine effective action is such that it proves to be formative [bildend] in a twofold sense: the I does not simply impress its own form, a form given to it from the outset, onto objects but rather discovers and acquires this form only in the totality [Gesamtheit] of the effects that it exerts on objects and that it receives back from them. Accordingly, the boundaries of the inner world can be determined and its ideal configuration can become visible only if the ambit of being is circumscribed in doing. The larger the circle becomes that the self fills with its activity, the more clearly the constitution of objective reality as well as the significance and function of the I emerge. When we attempt to understand this process in the mode in which it is revealed in the reflection of mythical-­religious consciousness, it can be seen that at the first stages of this consciousness, “things” only “are” for the I if they are emotionally effective in it – if they trigger in it a certain stirring of hope or fear, desire or horror, satisfaction or disappointment. Long before nature can become an object of intuition, let alone an object of cognition, it, too, is given to the human only in this way.This fact already thwarts every theory that views the “personification” and veneration of certain natural objects or forces as the beginning of mythical consciousness. For “things” and “forces” are no more given to mythical consciousness from the beginning than they are to theoretical consciousness; they constitute, rather, a relatively advanced process of “objectivization.” Before this objectivization has begun, before the whole of the world has been split into determinate, enduring, and unitary shapes [Gestalten], there is a phase during which it exists for the human only in vague feeling. Only those individual impressions, which because of their special intensity and force stand out from the common background, are separated out from this indeterminacy of feeling. And to them there corresponds the first mythological “formations” [Gebilde]. They do not come into being as the products of a consideration that dwells on certain objects in order to ascertain their enduring characteristic traits, their constant essential features, but rather, they are the expression of a one-­time, perhaps never

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identically recurring state of consciousness, coming-­into-­being out of a momentary tension and release of consciousness. Usener has shown how this distinctive and original productivity of mythical consciousness asserts itself in far-­advanced stages and is continuously effective: how, even in a phase that is already characterized by the working out [Ausbildung] of clearly determined “special gods” and clearly defined figures of the personal gods, such “gods of the moment” can always be created anew. If this view is correct, we must think of the nature divinities and daemons not as personifications of universal forces or processes of nature but as mythical objectivizations of individual impressions. The more indeterminate and more inconceivable these impressions are, the less they seem to fit into the whole course of “natural” events, the more they suddenly and extemporaneously strike consciousness: the greater the elementary forceful power they exert on it. Folklore shows that even today, this originary-­force of mythical representing is immediately alive and effective. In it is rooted the belief in the immense wealth of nature daemons who dwell in the field and meadows, the thicket and the woods. In the rustling of the leaves, the murmuring and roaring of the wind, in a thousand indefinable voices and tones, in the play and sparkle of light: in all this, the life of the forest first becomes perceptible to mythical consciousness – perceptible as the immediate manifestation of the innumerable elemental spirits who inhabit the woods: woodmen and woodwomen, male and female elves, the tree spirits and wind spirits. However, the development that the wood and field cults take shows us step by step how myth gradually grows beyond these figures [Gestalten], how without ever entirely abandoning them it adds other spirits arising from different layers of thinking and feeling. The world of the merely elementary spirits gives way to a new world to the degree that the I passes from merely emotional reaction to the stage of action, as it comes to see its relationship to nature no longer through the medium of mere impression but now through the medium of its own doing. It is from the rule of this doing, from its changing and yet constantly cyclically repeating phases of its effective action, that the being of nature first acquires its true, consistent existence and its fixed configuration. In particular, the transition to agriculture, to a regulated tilling of the fields, signifies a crucial turning point in the development of the



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vegetation myths and cults. Admittedly, even here the human does not at once stand over against [gegenüberstehen: confront] nature as a free subject but rather feels itself internally growing together and fatefully one with it. Nature’s coming-­into-­being and passing away, its blooming and wilting possess a continual interconnection with the human’s own living and dying. All great vegetation rites rest on the feeling of this interconnection, which they express not only in mythical images but also in immediate doing: The withering and revival of the plant world is depicted as a drama, a δρώμενον [action].54 And this representation of a fate-­like boundedness lives on in other features. The family and the individual have their tree of birth and fate, the thriving and withering of which decides their health and sickness, life and death. However, beyond this mere belonging-­together [Zugehörigkeit], beyond this half-­ physical, half-­ mythical bond, a new form of community between the human and nature is likewise made. Human beings not only feel connected with some particular existence in nature or with nature as a whole in their state [Zustand] but also draw nature immediately into the circle of their labor. Just as a person’s “daemon” gradually becomes their guardian spirit, their “genius,” so too in nature are the elementary haunting spirits transformed into guardian spirits. Folklore has preserved these figures down to our own day. Mannhardt writes: The Holzfraulein in Thuringia and Franconia, the wilde Leute in Baden, and the Saligen in Tyrol help the laborers at harvest time. Holzweiber and Waldmännchen, Fanggen, Salinge . . . are forever serving human beings, caring for the cattle and conferring their blessings on the stable and storeroom.55

The fact that these still-­living figures derive from a typical and basic view of mythical thinking and feeling and that they necessarily belong to a certain phase of it is shown by a comparison with the “activity-­gods” that we can follow from the belief of “primitive peoples” down to the great cultural religions. Among the Yoruba, where a totemic organization prevails, each clan has its family god from whom it is descended and whose commands regulate the whole course of its life. However, in addition to this organization, and relatively independent of it, a kind of caste organization

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of the world of divinities exists. The warriors, the smiths, the hunters, and the woodworkers, regardless of what totem they may belong to, worship a common god, to whom they offer sacrifices. This technical differentiation, this “division of labor” within the mythical world, is carried through in detail: there is a god of the blacksmiths and brassfounders and a god of the tinsmiths who is said to have bequeathed a certain type of alloy to human beings.56 This idea of the activity-­gods, each of whom is assigned and in a manner of speaking confined to a particular sphere of activity, was developed with the greatest precision in the Roman belief in gods. Every performance, in particular every individual act necessary for the cultivation of the fields has its own god and its own organized priesthood. Moreover, the pontifices ensure that in each of these acts, the god who is regarded as its guardian is called by his right name and that the totality of gods are invoked in their proper order. Without this regulation in the invocation of the gods, the doing would itself remain random and consequently fruitless.

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For every action and state, special gods are . . . created and named with clear word-­coinage; and it is not merely actions and states as a whole that are deified in this way, but also any segments, acts, or moments of them that are in any way conspicuous. . . . In the agricultural sacrifice . . . the Flamines had to invoke twelve gods in addition to Tellus and Ceres, and these twelve gods corresponded to as many actions of the peasant: Veruactor for the first breaking of the fallow field (ueruactum), Reparator for the second ploughing, Inporcitor for the third and final ploughing in which the furrows (lirae) were drawn and the ridges (porcae) thrown up, Insitor for the sowing, Obcrator for the ploughing over after the sowing, Occator for the harrowing, Saritor for the weeding (sarire) with the hoe, Subruncinator for the pulling out of the weeds, Messor for the reaping, Conuector for the transportation of the grain from the fields, Conditor for the garnering, Promitor for the giving out of the grain from granary and barn.57

This construction and expansion of the world of gods from the individual impulses of relevant actions [Tuns] and their clearly separated tendencies discloses the same form of objectivization we found in language. Like the phonetic image, the mythical image serves not simply to designate



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differences already present but to first fix them for consciousness, to make them visible as such: it does not simply render these differences as preexisting but in the strict sense of the word evokes [hervorrufen] them.58 Consciousness arrives at a clear separation of the individual spheres of activity, as well as the divergent objective and subjective conditions, only by referring each of these spheres to a fixed center, to one determinate mythical figure [Gestalt]. The invocation of a particular god as a guardian or helper presiding over each singular activity would certainly appear to leave unrecognized the “spontaneity” of doing; all doing as such seems to be regarded as a mere “manifestation” [Äußerung] of the same god – hence as something coming from without rather than from within. On the other hand, it is through this medium of the activity-­god that doing, which might otherwise be in danger of being forgotten in favor of its mere result and product, is apprehended in its pure spirituality. Through its various mythical exponents, it gradually comes to be known and understood. In the multiplicity of the figures of their gods, human beings do not merely behold the outward manifold of the objects and forces of nature but behold in these figures themselves in the concrete manifold and particularity of their functions. The abundance of divine formations [Göttergebilde] that human beings create guide them not only through the circle of objective being and events but above all through the circle of their own will and accomplishment, which these divine formations illumine from within. Each concrete-­individual activity becomes truly conscious of its distinctive tendency and guiding principle only in that it is regarded objectively in the image of its respective special god. The clear subdivision of doing, its decomposition into independent acts explicitly separated from one another, does not take place by way of an abstract-­discursive concept formation, but rather, inversely, it results from each of these acts being apprehended as an intuitive whole and embodied in an independent mythical figure [Gestalt]. If we attempt to grasp this spiritual process from the side of its contents, it presents itself most clearly in the progress that mythical consciousness accomplishes in advancing from mere nature myths to culture myths. The question of origins [Ursprungsfrage] increasingly shifts here from the ambit of things to the specifically human circle: the form of mythical causality serves to explain not so much the emergence of the world or some of its objects [Objekte] but the origin [Herkunft] of human cultural

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goods. Of course, even this explanation, in accordance with the particular nature of mythical representing, supports the view that these goods are not created through the force and will of human beings but have been given to them. They are not considered to be indirectly produced by human beings but received by them as finished and immediate. The use of fire and the ability to fashion certain tools, the cultivation of fields or the initiation of hunting, the knowledge of certain medicaments, and the invention of writing appear as gifts from mythical powers. Once again, the human understands here its doing [Tuns] only by removing it from itself and projecting it outward: from this projection arises the figure [Gestalt] of the god, in which the god no longer appears as a mere power of nature but rather as a culture hero, a bringer of light and salvation.59 The figures [Gestalten] of these saviors are the first concrete-­mythical expressions of the awakening and advancing of the self-­consciousness of culture. In this sense, the cult becomes a vehicle and transitional point of all cultural development: it adheres to the element by which culture distinguishes itself from every purely technical mastery of nature and by which its specific, distinctive spiritual character takes shape [sich ausprägen]. Religious veneration does not simply follow practical usage; rather, it is this usage that frequently gave human beings their practical knowledge, such as the usage of fire.60 In all probability, the domestication of animals developed only on a religious foundation and on certain mythical-­religious presuppositions, especially on totemistic presuppositions. The mythical image-­world, like that of language or art, serves as one of the basic means by which the “setting apart” [Auseinandersetzung] of the I and the world takes place. In this setting apart [Auseinandersetzung], the figure [Gestalt] of the god or bringer of salvation enters, as it were, between the I and the world: at once differentiating them from one another and connecting them together. For the I, the proper “self” of the human being, finds itself only through the detour of the divine I. The transition of the god from the figure [Gestalt] of the mere special god, who remains confined to a certain narrowly delimited domain of activity, to the figure [Gestalt] of the personal god signifies a new step on the way to the intuition of free subjectivity as such. Usener writes: From the mass of the special gods, personal gods of more inclusive scope arise only when the old concept formation congealed into a



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proper name and has become a fixed nucleus around which mythical representations can cluster. . . . Only in the proper name does the fluid representation thicken into a hard core that can become the bearer of a personality. This proper name, like the forename of a person, makes it necessary to think of a specific personality to which it exclusively applies. With this the path is opened by which a flood of anthropomorphic representations can pour into an almost empty form. Only now does the concept acquire corporeity, flesh and blood as it were. It is able to act and to suffer like a human being. The representations that were self-­evident predicates for the transparent concept of the special god become myths for the bearer of a proper name.61

However, even if we accept its general methodic presupposition – namely, the thoroughgoing reciprocal relation between language formation and myth formation – this theory contains an unsolved difficulty and a peculiar paradox. For Usener, the way myth arises from the mere “special gods” to the intuition of personal gods is the same path that language takes in its progress from the representation and designation of the individual to that of the universal. According to him, in both cases, the same process of “abstraction,” the same progress from individual perceptions to generic concepts, takes place. How, however, are we to account for the fact that precisely this turn to the universal, this tendency of generalizing abstraction, should give us the individualization, the determination, of a “personal god”? How can a process that, on the objective side, manifests itself in a progressive turning away from spatial and temporal individuals lead rather, seen from the side of subjective life, to the working out of the individuality and uniqueness of the person? There must therefore be another element that contributes here whose mode of effectiveness is opposed to the tendency taken by generalizing concept formation. Indeed, the progress from the “particular” to the “universal” in the world of doing and in the construction of the world of “inner” experience is something different from what it is in the construction of “outward” being, in the configuration of the object-­world [Sachwelt] and the thing-­world. The more a specific circle of action expands as it is mythically apprehended and designated in the figures [Gestalten] of a special god, the greater the manifold of objects to which the doing applies becomes, the more purely

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and forcefully the pure energy of doing as such is emphasized, the more purely and more forcefully does the consciousness of the active subject stand out. To be sure, this consciousness of the active subject manifests itself while still remaining in particular modes and forms of effective action; it is, however, no longer bound to them and no longer simply absorbed in them. Thus, the feeling of the determinacy of the personality does not disappear with the gradual detachment from the particularity of the work but rather is increased and intensified by it. The I now knows and apprehends itself – not as a mere abstraction, not as an impersonal universal that stands above and behind all particular activities, but as a self-­identical concrete unity that links and holds together all the different directions of doing. In contrast to this self-­identical unity, as the constant originary-­ground of doing, the individual particular creation seems random and “accidental,” because it only ever forms a partial fulfillment of it. Thus, it can be understood that the more the “specialized god” rises above his original narrow sphere, it becomes a medium through which the element of personality more clearly takes shape [aus­ prägen] and more freely unfolds. According to the traditional theory of logic, in the circle of the mere intuition of things, any increase in the extension [Umfang] of a concept likewise brings about a corresponding impoverishment of its contents: the greater the circle of individual representations that the concept embraces, the lower its concrete determinacy. However, the extension to a larger domain signifies here at the same time an increase in the intensity and consciousness of the effective action itself. For the unity of personality can come to intuition in no other way than through its opposite, in how it expresses and asserts itself in a concrete multiplicity and diversity of forms of effective action. The further mythical feeling and thinking progress along this path, the more clearly the figure of a supreme creator god is singled out from among the mere specialized gods and from the throng of individual polytheistic gods. In the supreme creator god, all the multiplicity of doing seems, as it were, concentrated in a single summit: mythical-­religious consciousness is now oriented not toward the intuition of a totality of many indeterminable individual creative forces but toward the intuition of the pure act of creation itself, which just as it has grasped itself as one so is it pushed ever-­more emphatically toward the apprehension of a unified subject of creation.



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The thought of a creator belongs to those originary-­motifs of myth that as such would seem to neither require nor permit any further derivation or “explanation.” At times, it would seem to be encountered in surprising clarity even in primitive strata of religious representing. In particular, as here with the representation of the originary-­father to which the clan traces back its origin, the thought of a supreme being [Wesens], which remains clearly separate as such from the totemic ancestors, can often be followed within the totemistic circle of representation. The emergence of natural things and, on the other side, the establishment [Einsetzung] of the sacred rites, the cult ceremonies, and dances can be traced back to this being [Wesen]. Ordinarily, however, it itself no longer forms the object of the cult, nor does the human enter into a direct unmediated-­magic relationship with it as in the case of the individual daemonic forces that fill the world as a whole.62 Thus, it is as if – amid the motifs of emotion and those of the will that dominate every “primitive” religion and that give it its characteristic imprint [Gepräge] – we are suddenly confronted by a purely intellectual, “theoretical” motif already in the earliest stages. Admittedly, on closer consideration, however, we find that the seemingly abstract representation of “creation” and the “creator” is never apprehended here in true universality but that creation can be imagined [vorgestellt], if at all, only in the mode of some individual, concrete form of shaping and forming [Form des Bildens und Formens]. Thus, the Australian Baiamc (Bajami), who is often cited as a typical example of the configuration of the “originator-­thought” among “primitive” peoples, is thought of as the “carver” of things: he brings individual objects forth as a figure [Figur] would have been brought forth from bark or a shoe from the skin of an animal.63 The thought of creation is based wholly on the activity of the artisan [Handwerker], the creator of works [Werkbildner] – and even philosophy, even Plato, is able to apprehend the supreme creator god through no other image than through the mythical image of the “demiurge.” In Egypt, the god Ptah was venerated as the great god of the originary-­beginning, as the originary-­god; however, in his doing, he seems at the same time comparable to the human artist as he is considered as the real protector of artists and artisans. His attribute is the potter’s wheel, from which, as creator god [Gottbildner], he has modeled the majesty of the gods and the figure [Gestalt] of the human [Menschen].64 In this way, however, mythical-­religious thinking gradually advances further

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beyond the concrete particularizations of doing toward its universal apprehension. In the Vedic religion, alongside of the pure nature gods we find quite early other deities that depict certain spheres and types of action. Beside Agni as the god of fire or Indra as the storm god, there is, for example, an “instigator god” or “impeller” (Savitar) who awakens all movement in nature and human life, a “gatherer god” who helps with the harvest, a “retriever god” (Nivarta, Nivartana) who cares for the return of lost cattle, etc. Concerning such gods, Oldenberg remarks:

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In every epoch in the history of language, we find side by side with elements of word formation that are no longer effective and that have been preserved only in finished formations inherited from the past others which are in full vitality and which can be used by every speaker to the formation of new words; similarly, from the standpoint of the religio-­historical mode of the formation of gods, we must, for the Vedic period and that immediately preceding it, impute extreme vitality to the method of creating gods by means of the suffix tar. There is a god Tratar (“guardian”), a Dhatar (“maker”), a Netar (“leader”); and there are corresponding feminine forms, the goddesses Varutrit (“female guardians”) etc.65

The freedom with which, under the guidance of language, the suffix that includes in itself the core representation of the doing and the actor is used to create new names of gods involves the risk of an almost unlimited fragmentation in the intuition of the doing itself; on the other hand, however, formations of this kind point, by virtue of their linguistic similarity of form, to a general function of effective action itself, independent of any particular aim and object [Objekt] of effective action. And in the Vedic religion those formations, analogous to the above group, which designate a determinate god as the “lord” over a certain domain – thus, for example, the figures [Gestalten] of gods such as “Lord of Progeny” (Prajapati), “Lord of the Field,” “Lord of the Dwelling,” “Lord of Thinking” and of truth, etc. – progressively subordinate all these different spheres of domination to one single supreme ruler. In the Brahmana period, the “Lord of Progeny,” Prajapati, who at first was a specialized god like the others, became the true world creator. Now he is the “God in all the spaces of the world”: “At one stroke he has transformed earth and heaven,/



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transformed the worlds, the poles, and the realm of light;/he has unraveled the mesh of the world order:/He beheld it and became it, for he was it.”66 And in other respects as well, the Vedic texts permit us to recognize the multifarious mediations that mythical-­religious thought requires before it can advance to the conception of the creation of the world and the creator of the worlds. To posit being as a whole under the category of creation is at first an unenforceable requirement for myth. Wherever it speaks of the emergence of things, of the birth of the cosmos, it grasps this birth as a mere transformation. It always presupposes a specific sensibly imagined substratum from which becoming begins and in which it proceeds. At one moment, it is the cosmic egg [Weltei], at another the tree of the world; at one moment, it is the lotus blossom, at another the organs of the lived body of a human or animal from which the individual parts of the cosmos are brought forward and formed. In Egypt, an egg first comes forth from the originary-­water Nun, out of which is born the god of light, the sun god Ra: he came into being before any heavens had come into being and before any worm or vermin had been created; no one was with him in the place where he was, and he found no place on which he could stand.67 This already shows that, on the one hand, to emerge in a determinate form, the mythical thought of creation must always cling to some concrete substratum but that, on the other hand, it seeks more and more to negate this substratum, to tear itself away from it. We find a progressive series of such negations in the famous hymn of the Rigveda. The non-­being [Nichtsein] was not, the being was not then; air was not, nor the heavens that is beyond. What stirred? Where? Under whose shelter? Was the deep abyss [Abgrund] water? Death was not, immortality was not then; no difference was there of day and night. It breathed, windless, by itself, only that [Das]. Other than that there was nought beyond.68

An attempt is made here to grasp the origin [Ursprung] of being in a pure ἅπειρον [unlimited], an indeterminateless “that” [Das]. On the other hand, however, cosmogonic speculation cannot refrain from determining this “that” more closely in some respect and from inquiring after the

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concrete unifying ground [Untergrund], the “construction timber” [Bauholz] from which the all arose. The question about this ground on which the creator stood and which served him as a support repeatedly arises: What was the resting place, what was the point of support from which Vishvakarman, the all-­beholder, in creating the earth, revealed the heavens by his power? And how was it constituted? What kind of timber was it, what kind of tree, from which they carved heaven and earth? Inquire, ye wise men, in your minds whereon he supported himself when he held heaven and earth.69 247

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The later philosophical doctrine of the Upanishads attempted to solve this question of the “prima materia,” the πρώτη ὕλη of creation, by sublating its intellectual presuppositions. In the thought of the Brahma, as the all-­one, the opposition between “material” and “form,” like all other oppositions, disappears. Where, however, religious development takes a different path, where in place of this pantheistic dissolution of oppositions we find the thought of a creator worked out purely and clearly as such, the striving becomes more and more pronounced to transfer this thought to another dimension, as it were, to free it from the contact and clustering of the physical-­ material and give it a purely “spiritual” imprint. This progress can already be followed through the apprehension of the means that serves the creator to call the world into existence. The description of these means initially limits itself to certain sensible-­tangible analogies and comparisons. The oldest Egyptian texts tell us that Tum-­Ra, the creator god, formed the gods, who are the originary-­ancestors of all living beings [Wesen], in a human manner by an emission of sperm, or that he spat the first pair of gods from his mouth. However, another, more “spiritual” view emerges early in the Pyramid Texts. The act of creation is no longer designated by a single material image; rather, the creator now uses no organ other than the force of his will, which is concentrated on the force of his voice and his word. The word forms the power that brings forth the gods themselves, that brings forth the heavens and earth.70 As soon as language and word are as such conceived as spiritual [geistig] instruments of world creation, the act of creation itself acquires another purely “spiritual” [spirituel] significance.



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Between the world as the ensemble of physical-­material things and the divine force engaged and enclosed [befaßten und beschlossenen Kraft] in the creator’s word, an immediate transition is no longer possible: the two belong to separate regions of being. The relation that religious thought nevertheless demands between the two can be only an indirect one, dependent on definite mediating links and leading through them. To produce and express this relation, a new cut must be made through the whole of being; the physical existence [Existenz] of objects must be given as its foundation a new purely “ideal” form of being. This motif attained its truly spiritual formation [Durchbildung] and unfolding only in philosophical cognition, in the creation myth of Plato’s Timaeus. Independently of this, however, it also developed purely from the spiritual sources and problems of religion itself – and the history of religion provides us with a revealing and striking example. Of the great cultural religions – apart from Jewish monotheism – it was the Persian religion that developed the category of creation to its most complete determination and that has brought the personality of the creator as a spiritual-­ethical personality to pure manifestation. The statement of faith of the Iranian-­ Persian religion begins with an invocation of the supreme ruler, Ahura Mazda, who brought forth all being and all order in being, who brought forth humans as well as heaven and earth by virtue of his “holy spirit” and his “good thinking.” The creation that arises here from the originary-­ source of thinking and spirit remains, however, at first entirely confined within it. Not unexpectedly, the cosmos in its material-­tangible constitution does not emerge directly from the divine will; rather, what is first created is nothing more than its own purely spiritual form. Ahura Mazda’s first creative act does not concern the sensible but rather the “intelligible” world – and during the first great period, for a period of three thousand years, the world remains in this immaterial, luminous, spiritual state, and only then, on the basis [Grund] of its already existing forms, is it remade into a sensible and perceptible figure [Gestalt].71 If we were to survey the 249 whole series of mythical-­religious conceptions leading from the diverse “specialized gods,” all of whom are limited to a closely circumscribed ambit of effective action, down to the spiritual-­unconditioned activity of the one creator god, then we would find once again that the customary view that we normally have of the “anthropomorphic” character of this process is inadequate – that it demands a reversal in its decisive point.

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For the human does not simply transfer its own finished personality to the god or simply lend the god its own feeling and consciousness of self: it is, rather, through the figure [Gestalt] of their gods that the human first finds this self-­consciousness. Through the medium of the intuition of god [Gottesanschauung], the human succeeds in detaching itself as an active subject from the mere content and tangible product of doing. The thought of “creation from nothing,” to which pure monotheism ultimately rises and in which the category of creation first acquires its proper radical version may, seen from the standpoint of theoretical thinking, present a paradox, even an antinomy; from the religious perspective, it nevertheless signifies an ultimate and supreme achievement, because in it, the stupendously abstracting force of religious spirit, which must sublate and negate the being of things in order to arrive at the being of pure will and pure doing, comes to full and unlimited validity. And in yet another direction, it can be followed how the working out [Ausbildung] of the consciousness of doing demands that the mere objective product of doing recede, as it were, into the distance, that it increasingly loses its sensible immediacy. In the first stages of the magical view of the world, scarcely any tension is clearly felt to exist between simple desire and the object toward which it is directed. An immediate force inheres here in desire itself: it is enough to intensify its manifestation [Äußerung] to the extreme in order to discharge an efficacy [Wirksamkeit] that by itself leads to the attainment of the desired goal. All magic is permeated with this belief in the real, the realizing power of human desire, this belief in the “omnipotence of thought.”72 And this belief must constantly gain new nourishment from experiences that impose themselves on the human in the closest domain of effective action: in the influence that the human being exerts on its own body, on the movements of its lived body and limbs. For the theoretical analysis of the concept of causality, this influence – which would seem to be directly experienced and felt – will itself become a problem. As Hume states, [“]That my will is capable of moving my arm is no more comprehensible and ‘intelligible’ to me than if someone told me he could stop the moon in its orbit.[”] However, the magical view of the world reverses this relation: because my will moves my arm, there is an equally certain and equally intelligible interconnection between it and all other events in “outward” nature. For the mythical apprehension, which is



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characterized precisely by the fact that it makes no sharp separation of object [Objekt] spheres, no approach to a causal analysis of the elements of reality,73 this “inference” has compelling force. No middle links are needed here that lead from the beginning to the end of the process of effective action in a determined-­ordered sequence; rather, in the beginning, in the mere act of the will, consciousness likewise apprehends the end, the result, and the product of the willing, and it links the two together. Only to the degree that the two elements gradually move apart does a separating medium intervene between desire and fulfillment and awaken with it the consciousness of a certain necessary “means” that the desired purpose requires for its realization. Even where this intermediation to a large extent exists, however, it does not come at once to consciousness as such. Even after the human has transitioned from a magical relationship to nature to a technical one, even after the human has learned the necessity and the use of certain primitive tools, for a while these tools themselves retain for the human a magical character and efficacy. To the simplest human instrument is now attributed an independent form of effective action distinctive to it, a certain inherent daemonic forceful power. The Pangwe of Spanish Guinea believe that a part of human vital force enters into the tool manufactured by humans and that this vital force now expresses itself independently of and is capable of continuing effects.74 This belief in the magic inherent in certain implements, certain tools or weapons, is found all over the world. The activity performed by means of such implements and tools requires certain magical supports and reinforcements without which it cannot wholly succeed. When the Zuni women kneel beside their stone baking trough to prepare bread, they intone a song that contains many subtle imitations of the sound made by the milling stone; they believe that when this is done, the implement will do its work better.75 Accordingly, the veneration and cult of certain outstanding implements and tools forms an important element in the development of religious consciousness and technical culture. Still today at the annual festival of the yam harvest, the Eve offer sacrifices to all sorts of implements and tools: to the ax, the plane, the saw, and the bell.76 Although from a purely genetic standpoint, magic and technology cannot be separated from one another, and although it is not possible to indicate a specific temporal moment in the development of humanity when the transition took place

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from the magical to the technical mastery of nature, the use of the tool as such already constitutes a decisive turning point in the progress and construction of spiritual self-­consciousness. The opposition between the “inner” and “outer” worlds now begins to be more strongly accentuated: the boundary between the world of desire and the world of “reality” begins to stand out more clearly. One world no longer intervenes directly in the other and no longer transitions into it; rather, through the intuition of the mediating object [Objekt] that is given in the tool, a consciousness of mediated doing gradually unfolds. Hegel characterizes in his Philosophy of Religion the most general opposition between the form of magical action and that of technical effective action:

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This very first form of religion . . . is that for which we have the name “magic.” To be precise, it is the claim that the spiritual aspect is the power over nature; however, this spiritual aspect is not yet present as spirit, is not yet present in its universality; rather, the spiritual is at first only the singular, accidental empirical self-­consciousness of the human which, in spite of being only sheer desire, a self-­consciously knows itself to be nobler than nature, and knows that self-­consciousness is a power transcending nature. . . . This power is a direct power over nature in general and not to be compared with the indirect power that we exercise by tools upon natural objects in their individuality. Such power of cultured [gebildet] human being over individual natural things presupposes that the human has already withdrawn from the world, that the world has acquired externality in its eyes, that the human has accorded to it over against itself an independence, distinctive qualitative determination, and laws, that these things are also relative to one another in their qualitative determinacy and stand in a manifold of interconnections with one another. . . . This really entails that human beings are inherently free. For only free persons can allow the external world, other human beings, and natural things to confront them freely.77

This withdrawal of the human from objects [Objekte], which forms the presupposition of the human’s own inner freedom, does not, however, take place only in the “cultured,” [gebildet], in the purely theoretical consciousness; rather, the first germinal approach can already be discovered



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in the mythical view of the world. For in the moment [Augenblick] in which the human seeks to exert an influence on things not by mere image or name magic but through tools – even though initially this influence [Einwirkung] itself operates through the customary channels of magic – it undergoes a spiritual separation, an inner “crisis.” The omnipotence of mere desire is broken: doing is now subject to certain objective conditions from which it cannot deviate. For humans, the outward world first acquires its determinate existence and its determinate organization in the separation of these conditions, since for the human, nothing belongs to the world that has not in some way been touched by its will and its doing. In that a barrier is now erected between the “inner” and “outer” that prevents any immediate leap over from the sensible drive to its fulfillment, now that every new intermediary stage is interpolated between the drive and that which it aims, a true “distance” between subject and object is for the first time achieved. It separates off a fixed circle of “objects” that are designated precisely by the fact that they have a distinctive consistent existence by which they “oppose” [entgegen­ stehen] immediate longing and desire. The consciousness of the means are indispensable for the attainment of a certain purpose that first teaches the human to comprehend “inner” and “outer” as links in a causal frame­ work [Gefüges] and to assign to each of them its own unexchangeable position within this structure – and from this consciousness gradually grows the empirical-­concrete intuition of a thing-­world with real “properties” and states. Only from the mediacy of effective action does the mediacy of being result, by virtue of which being is laid out into individual, mutually related, and dependent elements [Elemente]. Thus, we see that even if we regard the tool purely in its technical aspect as the basic means for the construction of material culture, this achievement, if it is to be truly understood and appreciated in its profoundest content [Gehalt], may not be taken in isolation. To its mechanical function corresponds here again a purely spiritual function that not only develops from the former but conditions it from the beginning and is indissolubly correlated with it. The tool never serves simply for the domination and mastery of the outer world, which in this case would be regarded as a finished, simply given material”; rather, it is only through the use of the tool that the image of this outer world, its spiritual-­ideal form, is established for the human. The configuration of this image and the

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organization of its individual elements [Elemente] do not depend on mere passive sense impressions or mere “receptivity” of intuitions; rather, it issues from the mode and tendency of the influence that the human exerts on objects. Ernest Kapp coined the term “organ projection” in his Philosophy of Technology to describe and depict this process. By “organ projection,” he refers to all primitive tools and implements being nothing more than an extension of the efficacy that the human being exerts on things with its own organs or limbs. The hand in particular – according to Aristotle, the ὅργανον τῶν ὀργάνων [organ of organs] – as a natural tool becomes a model for most artificial tools. The form and function of primitive hand tools – such as the hammer, hatchet, ax, knife, chisel, drill, saw, and tongs – are nothing more than the continuations of the hand, whose force they strengthen, and hence are other appearances of what the organ as such accomplishes and signifies. From these primitive tools, however, the concept rises to the tools of the specialized trades, to the machines of industry, to weapons, to the instruments and apparatus of art and science, in short to all the artifacts that serve any particular need belonging to the realm of mechanical technology. In all of them, the technical analysis of their structure and the historical-­cultural consideration of their emergence can disclose certain elements by which they are interconnected with the “natural” organization of the lived human body. And now this mechanism, which in the beginning was formed quite unconsciously after the organic model, can in turn serve, by a reversal of the process, as a means of explaining and understanding the human organism. Through the implements and artifacts that the human forms, it learns to understand the constitution and construction of its own lived body. The human being grasps its own physiology only in the reflection of what it has affected [gewirkt] – the type of intermediary tools that the human has formed disclose to it a knowledge [Kenntnis] of the laws that govern the construction of its body and the physiological achievement of its individual organs. With this, however, the true and most profound significance of “organ projection” is not yet exhausted. It becomes rather apparent only when we consider that here, too, a spiritual process runs parallel to the increasing knowledge of the organization of the human lived body and that the human arrives at itself, at its self-­consciousness, only through this knowledge. Each new tool that the human finds signifies a new step, not only toward the



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forming [Formung] of the outside world but toward the formation [Form­ ierung] of its self-­consciousness: on the one hand, every tool in the wider sense of the word is, as a means of increasing sensible activity, the only possible way of getting beyond the immediate superficial perception of things, while on the other hand, as a work of the activity of brain and hand, it is so essentially and intimately related to the human itself that in the creation of its hand something of its own being is perceived, the human world of representations embodied in matter, a reflection and copy [Nachbild] of its inwardness, in short, a part of itself. . . . Such an integration of this domain of the outer world, which encompasses the totality of cultural means, is a self-­confession [Selbstbekenntniss] of human nature, and through the act of retrieving the picture from exterior and restoring it to the interior, it becomes self-­knowledge [Selbsterkenntniss].78

The foundation of the “philosophy of symbolic forms” has shown that inherent in the concept that the “philosophy of technology” has tried to designate and to distinguish here as “organ projection” is a significance that extends far beyond the domain of the technical mastery and technical knowledge of nature. While the philosophy of technology deals with the immediate and mediated sensible-­lived-­bodily organs by which the human gives the external world its determinate shape and imprint, the philosophy of symbolic forms is concerned with the question of the totality of the spiritual functions of expression. It sees them not in replicas or copies of being but in tendencies and modes of configuration, as “organs” not so much of mastery as of “sense-­bestowing.” And here again, the achievement of these organs takes at first a wholly unconscious form. Language, myth, and art separately bring forward from themselves their own world of formations [Gebilde], which can be understood only as expressions of the self-­activity, of the “spontaneity” of spirit. This self-­activity, however, does not take place in the form of a free reflection and remains hidden from itself. Spirit produces the series of linguistic, mythical, artistic gestalts without recognizing itself in them as a creative principle. Each of these series becomes for it an independent “outer” world. It is not so much the case that the I is reflected here in things, the microcosm in the macrocosm, but that the

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I creates for itself a kind of “opposite” in its own products that seems to it wholly objective. It is able to look at [anschauen] itself only in this kind of “projection.” In this sense, the divine figures of myth signify nothing other than successive self-­revelations of mythical consciousness. Where this consciousness is still wholly bound to and dominated by the moment [Augenblick], where it simply succumbs to every momentary impulse and stimulus, the gods, too, are enclosed in this merely sensible present [Gegenwart], in this one dimension of the moment [Augenblick]. And only gradually, as the circle of doing broadens, as the drive ceases to be absorbed in a single moment [Moment] and a single object [Objekt] and instead anticipatorily and retrospectively embraces a manifold of different motives and different actions, does the ambit of divine effective action acquire diversity, breadth, and depth. It is first of all the objects of nature which in this way step apart from one another – which are sharply separated against one another for consciousness by virtue of each of them being taken as an expression of a unique divine force, as the self-­revelation of a god or daemon. However, if the series of individual gods, which can arise in this way, is capable of indefinite expansion of its mere extension [Umfang], then it contains, on the other hand, the germ and beginnings of a limitation of content: all the diversity, all the particularization and fragmentation, of divine effective action ceases as soon as mythical consciousness considers this effective action no longer from the standpoint of the objects to which it extends but from the standpoint of its origin. The manifold of mere effective action now becomes a unity of creation, in which the ever-­more determinate unity of the creative principle becomes more and more clearly visible.79 And to this transformation in the concept of god corresponds a new view of the human being and its spiritual-­ethical personality. Thus, it has been repeatedly established that human beings can grasp and recognize their own being only insofar as they are able to make this being visible in the image of their gods. Just as the human learns to understand the structure [Gefüge] of its lived body and limbs only by becoming a creator of tools and products, so too does it draw from its spiritual formations – language, myth, and art – the objective standards by which to measure itself and learn to understand itself as an independent cosmos with its distinctive structural laws.



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ENDNOTES 1 As early a work as Aristotle’s Politics traces the idea of the “state of the gods” back to the social organism: καὶ τοὺς θεοὺς δὲ διά τοὺτο πάντες φασί βασιλεύεσθαι, ὅτι καὶ αὐτοι οἱ μὲν ἒτι καὶ νῦν, οἱ δὲ τὸ ἀρχαῖον ἐβασιλεύοντο. Politics, book 1, sec. 2, line 1252b. 2 Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, “Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie,” in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. Verlag, 1856), 62ff. [Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Marcus Zisselsberger (New York: SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2007), 47–48.] 3 Report by John Campbell, “Reisen in Süd-­ Afrika, auf Veranlassung der Missions-­Gesellschaft zu London, unternommen,” quoted in Leo Frobenius, Die Weltanschauung der Naturvölker (Weimar: E. Felber, 1898), 394. 4 Walter W. Skeat, Malay Magic: Being an Introduction to the Folklore and Popular Religion of the Malay Peninsula (London: Macmillan, 1900), 157. 5 [Kant, “Von den verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen (1755)” [“Of the Different Races of Humankind”], in Werke, vol. II, ed. Artur Buchenau (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1912), 445.] 6 Cf. Willy Foy, “Australian 1903/04,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 8 (1905), quoted in Albrecht Dieterich, Mutter Erde: Ein Versuch über Volksreligion (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1905), 32: “In the whole northeastern region (of Australia) as in Central Australia, motherhood has nothing to do with sexual intercourse. . . . The finished human embryos are introduced into the womb by a higher being.” Cf. Carl Strehlow, Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stämme in Zentral-­Australien (5 vols., Frankfurt: Städtischen Völker-­Museum, 1907– 20), 52ff. 7 For details, cf. Baldwin Spencer and Francis J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (London and New York: The Macmillan Company, 1899), 265; Ibid., 170; Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stamme in Zentral-­Australien, 51ff. 8 On James G. Frazer’s theory of “conceptional totemism,” cf. Totemism and Exogamy (4 vols., London: Macmillan and Co., 1910), 4, 57ff. 9 Cf. 78ff. 10 Here, even the interconnection between the “soul” and the “lived body” is not “organic and causal” but a purely “magical” one. Consequently, the soul does not “have” a single lived body that belongs to it and that it animates; rather, any “lifeless” thing is taken as its lived body, provided it belongs to the same totemic class. The tjurunga, an object of wood or stone into which a totemic ancestor has transformed himself, is regarded as the body of an individual named after the totem in question. A grandfather shows his grandchild the tjurunga with the following words: This is your body; you are the same. You should not take the place of the other, your pain – i.e. this is your body, this is your second I. . . . If you take this tjurunga to another place, you will feel pain. See Strehlow, Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stämme, 81. Cf. 190 n. 17.

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11 Highly characteristic examples of this process of magical “fusion” may be found in Lumholtz’s presentation of the “symbolism” of the Huichol people. In this “symbolism,” which, however, obviously amounts to more than mere symbolism, the deer, for example, is considered to be essentially the same as a certain species of cactus, the peyote, because both have the same “magical history” and because they occupy the same place in practical magic. These varieties that “inherently” – i.e., according to the laws of our empirical and rational concept formation – are utterly different appear here the “same,” because they correspond to one another in the magical-­mythical ritual of the Huichols, which dominates and determines their whole worldview. Cf. Carl Lumholtz, Symbolism of the Huichol Indians, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 3 (New York, 1900), 17ff.; Preuss, Die geistige Kultur der Naturvölker, 12ff. 12 See Skeat, Malay Magic, 149ff. 13 Cf. 55. 14 See the description of this dance in George Catlin, Illustration of the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians (8th ed., London: H. G. Bohn, 1851), 1, 128, 144ff. A compilation of further ethnographic material on the magical usages connected with hunting or fishing can be found in Lévy-­ Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker, 200ff. 15 Wherever the inhibitions created by conscious reflection, by our causal analysis and analytical classification, fall away, the intuition of this essential identity between human and animal tends to reappear. Psychiatric case reports are full of examples of this sort, as Schilder emphasizes in Wahn und Erkenntnis, 109. 16 This is particularly evident where the idea of the “conceptional totemism” prevails: here again, the unity of a certain totemic group does not rest on how the members of the group are reproduced, but rather, the process of generation presupposes this unity of the group. The totemic spirits enter into such women as they have recognized as “similar in nature” [wesensverwandt] to them: If a woman passes by a place where the lived body of a forefather is standing, a ratapa who has been on the lookout for her and has recognized in her a mother of his class, enters into her body through her hip . . . when the child is born, it belongs to the totem of the respective altjirangamitjina. Strehlow, Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stamme in Zentral-­Australien, 53. 17 It seems that this foundation in pure feeling of the totemic “systems” can be demonstrated even where the ideational components of totemism have been repressed and are recognizable only in isolated vestiges. Highly instructive material on this is presented in a dissertation by Bruno Gutmann, “Die Ehrerbietung der Dschagganeger gegen ihre Nutzpflanzen und Haustiere,” Archiv für die gesamte Psychologie, 48 (1924), 123–146. Here, as it were, the



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“life-­form” of totemism underlying its “thought-­form” is shown vividly and concretely. In Gutmann’s treatise, we gain an insight into a stratum of ideas where the “identity” between the human and animal and between the human and the plant is not postulated as a concept and logically thought but rather mythically experienced as an immediate unity and equivalence: The originary power . . . is the feeling of vital unity with animal and plant and the desire to shape them into a community which is dominated by man, which rounds them into a circle in which everything is fully completed and sealed off from outside. (124) Thus, even today, the Jagga identifies his life stages with the banana and molds them in its image. . . . In the rituals of adolescence and of marriage, the banana stalk plays a leading role. . . . Although the cult in it present form, which is determined by ancestor worship, conceals a good deal and lends their actions with the banana a purely symbolic character, it has not been able to conceal entirely the original immediate connection between the banana and the new human life. (133ff.) 18 Cf. Von Steinen’s account of the Bororos, 80. 19 See 238ff. 20 Cf. the presentation and documentation in Friedrich Lehmann, Mana. Der Begriff des “ausserordentlich Wirkungsvollen” bei Südseevölkern (Leipzig: O. Spamer, 1922), 8ff., 12ff., 27ff. 21 Cushing, Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths, 367ff. 22 Cf. Reports of the Cambridge Expedition to Torres Straits, 5, 184ff., quoted in Lévy-­Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker, 217ff. Cf. Thurnwald, “Das Problem des Totemismus.” 23 This concentric spread is particularly evident in the totemic system of the Marind-­anim, which has been described in detail by Paul Wirz, Die religiösen Vorstellungen und die Mythen der Marind-­anim, sowie die Herausbildung der totemistisch-­sozialen Gruppierungen (Hamburg: L. Friederichsen, 1922). Cf. my Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 1 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1922), 19ff., 56ff. [Ernst Cassirer, “The Form of the Concept in Mythical Thinking,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 52ff.] 24 To what extent this separation is conditioned by a basic general feature of mythical “structural thinking” becomes evident when we compare in this respect the totemic systems with other mythical classifications of totally different content, particularly the systems of astrology. Here again, the “genera” of existence

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30 31

myth as life-­f orm [Sein], the weaving together of all its individual elements [Elemente], is arrived at first of all by the differentiation of definite spheres of magical efficacy in which each is governed by one of the planets. The basic mythical feature of σύμπνοια πἁντα [all things conspire/harmony everywhere] thus undergoes a differentiation: one element of being cannot act immediately on every other but can act only on those elements that are essentially related to it, which stand within the same magical-­astrological “chain” of things and events. Thus, to single out one of these chains, Mars, according to the presentation in the Picatrix, is the source of attractive forces. It has under its protection natural science, veterinary medicine, surgery, tooth pulling, bleeding, and circumcision. Of languages, it is Persian that belongs to it; of the outer organs, the right nostril; within the body, the red gall; of materials, half-­silk and the fur of rabbits, panthers, and dogs; of the trades, blacksmithing; of tastes, hot and dry bitterness; of jewels, the carnelian; of metals, sulpharsenite, sulfur, naphtha, glass, and copper; of colors, dark red; etc. Cf. Hellmut Ritter, Picatrix, ein arabisches Handbuch hellenistischer Magic (Leipzig and Berlin: De Gruyter, 1921–22), 104ff. And here again, the magical genus that embraces the most diverse contents of being and composes them into a unity implies the idea of generation, of the begetter and the begotten: whatever stands under a certain planet, whatever belongs to its magical sphere of action, has this planet as its ancestor and is descended from it. Cf. the well-­known pictorial presentations of the “children of the planets”: Fritz Saxl, “Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Planeten-­darstellungen im Orient und im Okzident,” Der Islam, 3 (1912), 151–177. See, e.g., the table of the totem plants of the Arandas and Loritjas in Strehlow, Die Aranda-­und Loritja-­Stamme in Zentral-­Australien, 68ff. Cf. 132ff. See Hermann Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus, 29. For details, cf. Wolf Wilhelm Graf Baudissin, Adonis und Esmun. Eine Untersuchung zur Geschichte des Glaubens an Auferstehungsgötter und an Heilgötter (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1911). For the cults of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris and their “primitive” parallels, cf. the comprehensive presentation of James George Frazer, “Adonis, Attis, Osiris,” in The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, part IV (London: Macmillan, 1914). For the vegetation cults, see also Konrad T. Preuss, “Phallische Fruchtbarkeits-­Dämonen als Träger des altmexikanischen Dramas: Ein Beitrag zur Urgeschichte des mimischen Weltdramas,” Archiv für Anthropologie, 1 (1903), 158ff., 171ff. Recently, Gustav Neckel, Die Überlieferungen vom Gotte Balder (Dortmung: F. W. Ruhfus, 1920) has made it appear likely that the Germanic Balder myth belongs to the same sphere of intuition and, in fact, that there is a direct genetic connection between Balder and Adonis-­Tammuz. On the origin and significance of the legend of Dionysus-­Zagreus, see Erwin Rohde, Psyche (Leipzig, and Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1898), 116ff., 132. See Erman, Die ägyptische religion, 111ff.; Peter Le Page Renouf, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt.



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Delivered in May and June, 1879 (London/Edinburgh, 1880), 184ff. The same basic intuition and the same mythical formula occur in the Phrygian cult of Attis (θαρρεῖτε, μύσται, τοῦ θεοῦ σεσωσμένου· ἔσται γὰρ ἠμῖν ἐκ πόνων σωτηρία) [Rejoice, you of the mystery! For your god is saved! And we, too, shall be saved!]. Cf. Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Nach Ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen, 205ff. 32 On all this, see Wilhelm Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme; mythologische Untersuchungen (Wald-­und Feldkulte, vol. 1), (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1875), especially chs. 4–6; idem, Mythologische Forschungen (Strassburg and London: Trübner, 1884), chap. 6, 351ff. 33 Konrad Theodor Preuss, Religion und Mythologie der Uitoto: Textaufnahmen und Beobachtngen bei einem Indianerstamm in Kolumbien, Südamerika (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht; Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1921–23), 1, 29. Cf. idem, “Religionen der Naturvölker,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 7 (1904), 234. 34 Aischylos, Das Opfer am Grabe (Choephoren), verses 127ff. Cf. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-­Moellendorff, Introduction to the translation of “Die Versöhnung (Eumeniden) des Aischylos” in Griechische Tragödien (4 vols., Berlin: Weidmann, 1906–23), 2, 212. 35 For details, cf. Dieterich, Nekyia: Beiträge zur Erklärung der neuentdeckten Petrusapokalypse, 63ff.; idem, Eine Mithrasliturgie (2nd ed., Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1910), 134ff.; idem, Mutter Erde, 82ff. On the conception of Mother Earth in the Semitic sphere see Theodor Noldeke, “Mutter Erde und Verwandtes bei den Semiten,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 8 (1905), 161– 166; Baudissin, Adonis und Esmun, 18ff. 36 Cf. Richard Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Ihre Grundgedanken und Wirkungen (Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1910), 33ff. 37 Cf. Hermann Oldenberg, “Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus,” 244f. and 284; Leopold von Schroeder, Arische Religion, vol. I, Einleitung. Der altarische Himmelsgott, das höchste gute Wesen (Leipzig: Haessel, 1914), 295ff. and 445ff. 38 See the legend reported by George Grey, Polynesian Mythology and Ancient Traditional History of the New Zealand Race, as Furnished by Their Priests and Chiefs (2nd ed., Auckland: H. Brett, 1885), 1ff., under the title “The Children of Heaven and Earth.” 39 For the Germanic triad of gods, Balder, Frigg, and Odin, see Neckel, Die Überlieferungen vom Gotte Balder, 199ff. 40 See Usener, “Dreiheit.” For the triad of father, son, and mother in the Semitic sphere, see Ditlef Nielsen, Der dreieinige Gott in religionshistorischer Beleuchtung (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, Nordisk Forlag, 1922), 68ff. For Egypt, Babylonia, and Syria see Wilhelm Bousset, “Gnosis,” Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, ed. A. Pauly, G. Wissova, and W. Kroll, vol. 14 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1893-­1972). 41 Documentation in Nielsen, 217ff. Cf. the religio-­historical analysis of the term “living God” in Baudissin, 498ff.

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42 If we wish to find concrete-­historical examples for this process of “imprinting” – how the religious consciousness constructs and forms the being of society in its image – we need only read Max Weber’s seminal works on the “sociology of religion.” Here the specific form of the religious consciousness is shown to be not so much the product of a determinate social structure but rather as its condition; in other words, the same idea of the primacy of religion that we have seen expressed in Schelling (see 207) is stated in modern formulation and terminology. Cf. Weber’s own remarks on his approach to the sociology of religion: “Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen. Vergleichende religionssoziologische Versuche,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1920), I, 240ff. 43 For all this, see Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: F. Alcan, 1912), 50ff., 201ff., 623ff. by Joseph W. Swain, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (London: G. Allen & Unwin; New York: Macmillan, 1915). Cf. Durkheim and Marcel, Mauss, “De quelques formes primitives de classification. Contribution à l’étude des représentations collectives,” Année sociologique, 6 (1901–2), 47ff. 44 Although one is often tempted to regard totemism as the basic and originary phenomenon [Urphänomen] of mythical thinking, the ethnographical facts would seem to lead us to the opposite inference. Totemism seems everywhere embedded in a universal mythical view, which instead of splitting life from the outset into varieties and classes, regards it as a unitary force, as a whole prior to all divisions. And animal worship as such is a far more universal phenomenon than true totemism, which seems to have developed out of it only under special conditions. Thus, e.g., in Egypt, the classical land of animal worship, a totemistic basis of the animal cult is not demonstrable. Cf. Foucart’s critique from the standpoint of Egyptology and comparative religious history of the alleged universality of the “totemistic codex”: Histoire des religions et méthode comparative, liiff., 116ff. 45 Cf. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus, 67ff. 46 Cf. Wilamowitz-­Moellendorff, in the introduction to the translation of “Die Versöhnung (Eumeniden),” 227ff. 47 Cf. the illustrations in Erman, Ägyptische Religion, 10ff. 48 Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie, 18ff. [Schelling, Historical-­critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 18ff.] 49 For further details, cf. Das Gilgamesch-­Epos, German trans. Arthur Ungnad and Hugo Gressman (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1911); Peter Jensen, Das Gilgamesch-­Epos in der Weltliteratur (Strassburg: Trübner, 1906), especially 77ff. 50 [Vollendung: Fulfillment, perfection.] 51 [Heraclitus, Fragment 119.] 52 Cf. 205ff. 53 I Samuel 26:19. Cf. William R. Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (Edinburgh: Adam and Ch. Black, 1889), 36. German trans. Srübe, Die Religion der Semiten (Freiburg: Mohr, 1899), 19ff.



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54 Cf. 226ff. 55 Mannhardt, Wald-­und Feldkulte, 1, 153ff. 56 For further details, see Leo Frobenius, Und Afrika sprach: Wissenschaftlich erweiterte Ausgabe des Berichts über den Verlauf der dritten Reise-­Periode der Deutschen Inner-­Afrikanischen Forschungs-­Expedition in den Jahren 1910 bis 1912 (Berlin: Vita, Deutsches Verlagshaus, 1912-­1913), 154ff., 210ff. Such occupational gods are found elsewhere as well, among the Haida, e.g. Cf. John R. Swanton, Contribution to the Ethnology of the Haida, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 8, no. 1 (New York, 1905). 57 Usener, Göttemamen, 75ff. For the Roman gods of the indigitamenta, cf. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 24ff. 58 Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 240ff. 59 For the significance and the general distribution of this idea of the “salvation bringers,” cf. Kurt Breysig, Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heilbringer (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1905). 60 Cf. Wilhelm Bousset, Das Wesen der Religion dargestellt an ihrer Geschichte (Halle: Gebauer-­Schwetschke, 1904), 3, 13. 61 Usener, Götternamen, 323, 331ff. 62 For the distribution of the “creator belief” in the “primitive” religions, see the compilation of material in Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee. See also the excellent summary in Söderblom, Das Werden des Gottesglaubens, 114ff. For the American religions see Preuss, “Die höchste Gottheit bei den kulturarmen Völkern,” Psychologische Forschung, 2 (1922), 161–208. 63 Cf. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples, 74, 123. 64 For further details, see Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie, 113; Erman, Die ägyptische religion, 20. 65 Oldenberg, Die religion des Veda, 60ff.; cf. Oldenberg, Vedaforschung (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta, 1905), 78ff. 66 Cf. Vâjasaneyi-­samhitâ 32, 4 and 12 (Paul Deussen, Die Geheimlehre des Veda: ausgewählte Texte der Upanishad’s (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1907), 14ff.) On the history of the Prajapati see Deussen, “Allgemeine Einleitung und Philosophie des Veda bis auf die Upanishad’s,” 181ff. 67 Erman, Die ägyptische religion, 20, 32. 68 Rigveda, x, 129. 69 Ibid., 81. 70 Cf., for example, Moret, Mystères égyptiens, 114ff., 138ff.: A Héliopolis on enseignait, aux plus ancicnncs époques, que Torum-­Râ avait procréé les dieux, ancêtres de tous les êtres vivants, à la façon humaine, par une émission de sémence; ou qu’il s’était levé sur le site du temple du Phénix à Héliopolis et qu’il y avait craché le premier couple divin. D’autres dieux, qualifiés aussi démiurges, avaient employé ailleurs d’autres proédés: Phtah à Memphis, Hnoum à Eléphantine modelaient sur un tour les dieux et les hommes: Thot-­lbis couvait un oeuf à Hermopolis; Neith, la grande dècsse de Saïs, était le vautour, ou la vache,

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myth as life-­f orm qui enfanta le Soleil Râ alors que rien n’existait. Ce sont là sans doute les explications les plus anciennes et les plus populates de la création. Mais une façon plus subtile et moins materielle d’énoncer que le monde est une èmanation divine, apparaît dès les textes des Pyramides: la Voix du Démiurge y devient un des agents de la création des êtres et des choses. . . . Il résulte de cela que pour les Egyptiens cultivés de l’epoque pharaonique et des milliers d’années avant l’ère chrétienne, le Dieu était conçu comme une Intelligence et comme instrument de création. . . . Par la théorie du Verbe créateur et révélateur les écrits hermétiques n’ont fait que rajeunir une idée ancienne en Egypte, et qui fasait partie essentielle du vieux fonds de la culture intellectuelle, religieuse et morale.

Cf. also my study, Sprache und Mythos, 38ff. [Cf. Language and Myth, 170.] 71 For further details, see Junker, Über iranische Quellen der hellenistischen Aion-­ Vorstellung, 127ff.; James Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, leurs origines et leur histoire (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1877),19ff., 117ff. 72 Cf. 191f. 73 Cf. 53ff. 74 See Günther Tessmann, “Religionsformen der Pangwe,” Die Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 41 (1909) 1, 876. 75 Otis T. Mason, Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895), 176, quoted in Karl Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (2nd ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1909), 343ff. 76 Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-­Togo, 8. 77 Hegel, “Die Naturreligion,” part I of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, in Sämtliche Werke (26 vols., Stuttgart: Fr. Frommanns Verlag, 1927–40), 15, 283ff. [G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, The Lectures of 1827, trans. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 226ff. – trans. amended.] 78 Ernst Kapp, Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik (Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1877), 25ff., 29ff., 40ff. Cf. Ludwig Noiré, Das Werkzeug und seine Bedeutung für die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Menschheit (Mainz: Diemer, 1880), 53ff. 79 How this tendency is gradually realized even in the sphere of the polytheistic natural religions can be seen in that of the Egyptians. Amid the deifications of natural forces, as the Egyptian pantheon presents them, we find in an early period a trend toward the idea of the One god, who “was from the beginning” and who encompasses everything that is and that will be. (For details, see Renouf, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 89ff.; Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie, 99.) A conscious turn to the basic ideas of religious unity view is found in the well-­known reform of King Amcnophis IV (ca. 1500 bc), which to be sure represents only an episode in the history of Egyptian religion. Here all other divinities are suppressed, and the cult is restricted to the various sun gods, who are all conceived and worshiped merely as different presentations of the one sun god, Aton. In the inscriptions on the tombs at



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Tel el Amarna, the old sun gods Horus, Râ, and Turn appear accordingly as parts of the one godhead. Side by side with the old image of the sun god with the hawk’s head, there appears another, presenting the sun itself as a disk, sending out rays in all directions, with each ray ending in a hand that holds out the symbol of life. And in this symbolism of a new religious universalism, the expression of a new ethical universalism, of a new idea of “humanity,” can once again be discerned. Erman writes: If one compares the new hymn to the sun that arose in the cult of Aton with the hymns to the old sun god, one cannot fail to note the fundamental difference. Both praise the god as the creator and preserver of the world and of all life. But the new hymn knows nothing of the old names of the sun god, of his crowns, scepters, holy cities. It knows nothing of his ships and sailors and of the dragon Apophis, nothing of the journey through the realm of the dead and the joy of its inhabitants. It is a song which a Syrian or Ethiopian might equally well sing in praise of the sun. And indeed, these lands and their inhabitants are mentioned in the hymn as though to put an end to the arrogance of the Egyptians toward the wretched barbarians. All men are children of the god; he gave them different colors and languages and placed them in different lands, but he cares for them all alike. Erman, Die ägyptische Religion, 81. Cf. Wiedemann, Die religion der alten Ägypter, 20ff.

III CULT AND SACRIFICE 258

The reciprocal relation between the human and god that establishes itself in the progress of mythical and religious consciousness has thus far been regarded essentially in the form in which it presents itself in the mythical-­ religious representational world. However, we must now broaden the scope of our considerations: the content [Gehalt] of the religious has its proper and deepest root not in the world of representation but in the world of feeling and will. Consequently, every new spiritual relationship to reality that the human acquires does not express itself uniquely in human representing and “believing” but also in its willing and doing [Tun]. In this, more clearly than in the individual figures [Gestalten] and images that mythical fantasy projects, the position of human beings toward the supernatural forces that they venerate must inevitably be more clearly manifested. Consequently, we find the actual objectivization of the basic mythical-­religious sentiment not in the mere image of the gods but in the cult devoted to them. For the cult is the active relationship of human beings to their gods. In the cult, not only is the divine represented and presented mediately, but it also exerts an immediate influence on it. Therefore, in the forms of this influence, in the forms of ritual, the immanent progress of religious consciousness, in general, most clearly manifests itself. The mythical narrative is at most only a reflection of this immediate relationship. It can be clearly



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shown that a wealth of mythical motives originally arose not from the intuition of a natural process but from an intuition of cult process. They go back not to any physical existence or event but to an active behavior of the human being, and this behavior is explicitly depicted in them. A specific occurrence [Vorgang] that is continually repeated in the cult is mythically interpreted and mythically “comprehended” by being connected to a unique temporal event [Ereignis] and viewed as its reproduction and mirror image. In truth, however, the mirroring occurs here in the opposite direction. The doing is first, followed by the mythical explanation, the ἱερὸς λόγος [sacred account]. This explanation merely presents in the form of the report what is present [vorhanden] as immediate reality in the sacred action itself. Thus, this report offers no key to an understanding of the cult, but rather, it is the cult that forms the preliminary stage of myth and its “objective” foundation.1 Modern empirical research into myth has, in that it has exposed this interconnection in a great number of individual cases, only provided the confirmation of a thought that was first formulated in speculative universality in Hegel’s philosophy of religion. For Hegel, the cult and the particular forms of the cult are always the central point for the interpretation of the religious process. In the cult, Hegel finds immediate confirmation of his view regarding the general aim and sense of this process. For if this goal consists in overcoming [aufgegen] the standpoint of the separation of the I from the absolute, in positing this standpoint not as true but as one that knows itself as not true, then it is precisely the cult that progressively accomplishes this positing. It is this unity, reconciliation, restoration of the subject and its self-­ conscious being, the positive feeling of sharing and partaking in this absolute and actualizing one’s unity with it – in this sublation of the cleavage – which constitutes the sphere of the cultus.2

Thus, according to Hegel, this is to be taken not only in the restricted significance of a purely external action [Handeln] but as a doing that embraces the interiority as well as the external appearance. The cult is, “in general the eternal process of the subject positing itself as identical with its essence.”3 For, to be sure, in the cult, the god appears on the one side and the I, the religious subject, on the other side: the determination

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is, however, at once the concrete unity of the two by virtue of which the I [Ich] becomes conscious in god and the god becomes conscious in the I [mir]. In this sense, the Hegelian philosophy of religion sees the dialectical consequence according to which it developed the particular historical religion, and it affirmed especially in the unfolding of the universal essence of the cult and of its particular forms: the spiritual content [Gehalt] of each individual religion and what it signifies as a necessary moment in the whole of the religious process first constitutes itself entirely in its cult forms, in which this content [Gehalt] possesses its external appearance.4 To meet this condition, the interconnection that Hegel seeks to establish by virtue of a dialectical construction must also be demonstrable from the opposite side, from the side of purely phenomenological consideration. In the external, sensible forms of the cult itself, even if we initially seek to place them before ourselves in their empirical manifold and diversity, there is likewise disclosed a unitary spiritual “tendency,” a direction toward progressive “internalization.” Once again, we are entitled here to expect that the relationship between “inner” and “outer” that forms the guiding principle for the understanding of all spiritual forms of expression: the I finds and comprehends itself through its seeming alienation [Entäußerung] of the I. To elucidate this relation, we can connect it to a basic motif that we encounter wherever cult and religious ritual have developed to a certain level. The more determinate the form they assume, the more clearly the sacrifice [Opfer] appears at their center. It can appear in the most diverse shapes [Gestalten], such as a gift offering [Gabenopfer] or a purification offering, as an offering [Opfer] of intercession, thanks, or atonement: in all these forms of appearance, it constitutes a solid core around which the cult action clusters. Religious “belief” attains here its true visibility; it is transposed immediately into act. The manner of sacrificial service is bound to determinate objective rules, to a fixed consequence of words and works that must be observed with great care if the sacrifice is not to fail in its purpose. However, in the configuration and reconfiguration that these purely external determinations undergo, something else, namely the gradual unfolding and transformation of religious subjectivity, can at the same time be traced. In this point, the constancy of religious forms of language as well as the progress in them are expressed with equal clarity:



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here we have a general and typical originary-­form of religious conduct that can always be filled with ever new concrete content and that in this way is able to adapt itself to and express every transformation of religious sentiment. Every sacrifice encloses, according to its original sense, a negative element [Moment]: it signifies a limitation of sensible desire, a renunciation that the I imposes on itself. Here lies one of its essential motives by which it raises from the beginning above the stage [Stufe] of the magical view of the world. For the magical view of the world does not originally know such self-­limitation; rather, it is based on the belief in the omnipotence of human desire. Magic, as its basic form, is nothing more than a primitive “technique” of wish fulfillment. In magic, the I believes to possess the tool by which to subject all external being and draw it into its own circle. Objects have no independent being here; the lower and higher spiritual forces, the daemons and gods, have no will of their own that the human cannot make subservient to itself by the use of the right magical means. The magic spell is lord over nature, which it can divert from the fixed rule of its being and its course: “Carmina vel caclo possunt deducere lunam” [By songs and incantations even the moon can be dragged down from the heavens]. It also exerts, however, an unlimited forceful power over the gods; bending them and forcing their will.5 Thus, an empirical-­tangible boundary is posited. However, in principle, there is no boundary to the power of the human in this sphere of feeling and thinking; the I knows no barrier that it does not strive to leap and that on occasion it is able to leap. In contrast, in the first stages of sacrifice, we find another tendency of human will and doing. For the force that is awarded to the sacrifice is rooted in the self-­renunciation that sacrifice contains within itself. This interconnection can be pointed out even in elementary stages of religious development. The forms of asceticism that usually belong to the basic core [Grundbestand] of primitive belief and primitive religious activity are rooted in the intuition that any extension and intensification of the forces of the I are bound to a corresponding limitation. Every important undertaking must be preceded by abstinence from the satisfaction of certain natural drives. Even today, there prevails the belief among almost all natural peoples that no military campaign or hunting or fishing expedition can succeed if it is not preceded by such ascetic measures of protection, if they are not preceded by several days of

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fasting, deprivation of sleep, and prolonged sexual abstinence. And every crucial change, every “crisis” in the physical-­spiritual life of the human being, requires such measures of protection. Anyone about to undergo initiation rites, particularly the initiation into manhood, must previously undergo painful privations and trials.6 Nevertheless, all these forms of renunciation and “sacrifice” have initially a thoroughly egocentric sense: while the I subjects itself to certain physical privations, it does so only to strengthen its mana, its share of physical-­magical forceful power and efficacy. We, therefore, still stand here entirely within the world of magical thought and feeling; amid this, however, a new motive emerges. Sensible wishes and desires no longer flow equally in all directions; they no longer seek to transpose themselves immediately and unrestrictedly into reality; rather, they limit themselves at certain points in order to make the withheld and, one might say, stored-­up force free for other purposes. Through this narrowing of the extent of desire, which is expressed in the negative acts of asceticism and sacrifice, the content of desire is raised to its highest intensive condensation [Zusammenfassung] and thus to a new form of consciousness. It asserts a power [Macht] that opposes the apparent omnipotence [Allge­ walt] of the I; on the other hand, in that it is comprehended as such, the I also first posits its boundary and with this begins to give it a determinate “form.” For, only when the barrier is felt and known as such is the way clear to its progressive overcoming: only when the human recognizes the divine as a power superior to it that cannot be subjugated by magical means but that must be propitiated by prayer and sacrifice does the human being gradually gain a free feeling of self in confronting it. Once again, the self finds and constitutes itself here only in that it is projected outward: the growing independence of the gods is the condition for the human’s discovery in itself of a fixed center, a unity of will, over against the diffluencing manifold of individual sensible drives. This typical turn can be followed in all forms of sacrifice.7 A new and freer relationship of the human to the divinity has already announced itself in the gift offering [Gabenopfer], in so far as the gift [Gabe] appears as a free gift [Geschenk: present]. Once again, the human withdraws here, as it were, from the objects of immediate desire. They cease to be objects [Objekte] of immediate enjoyment [Genuss], instead becoming a kind of religious means of expression, the means of an association [Verbindung] that



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the human establishes between itself and the divine. The physical objects themselves thus enter into another light: behind what they are in their immediate appearance, behind what they are as an object [Objekt] of perception or as a means for the immediate satisfaction of certain drives, a general force of effective activity now becomes visible. Thus, in the vegetation rites, for example, the last ear of grain in the field is not harvested like the others but is spared, because in it the force of growth as such, the spirit of the harvest to come, is revered.8 On the other hand, of course, the gift offering can be followed back to a stage [Stufe] in which it is still closely interwoven with the magical view of the world and cannot as an empirical appearance be separated from it. Thus, for example, in the sacrifice of horses, which appears in the Vedas as the supreme sacral expression of royal power, the ancient [Uralt] magical elements [Elemente] that enter into it are still unmistakable. Only gradually does this magical sacrifice seem to have taken on other features that have converted it into the representational circle of gift offering.9 However, even where the form of the gift offering is purely developed, no decisive spiritual transformation seems at first to be executed, since the magical-­sensible idea of the compulsion of the gods is now replaced by the no less sensible idea of exchange: “Give me, I give you; lay down for me, I lay down for you. Present me offerings, I present you offerings.” In this way does the sacrificer speak to the god in a Vedic formula.10 In this act of giving and receiving, therefore, only the reciprocal need connects the human and god and links the two together in equal measure and in the same sense. For just as the human is dependent here on the god, so too is the god dependent on the human. The god is, in its power, indeed in its consistent existence, dependent on the offering of sacrifice. In Indian religion, the drink offering of soma is the life-­giving source from which springs the force of gods as well as that of the human.11 However, a sharper and clearer transformation arises precisely here that will lend the gift offering a totally new significance and depth. This transformation takes place as soon as religious contemplation no longer limits itself exclusively to the content of the gift but concentrates instead on the form of giving, the offering itself, and sees in it the real core of sacrifice. From the mere material execution of the sacrifice advances the thought [Gedanke] of its inner motive and ground of determination. Only this motive of “veneration” (upanishad) can lend the sacrifice its sense and

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value. It is this basic thought by which the speculation of the Upanishads and of Buddhism differs from the ritual-­liturgical literature of the earlier Vedas. Not only is the gift now internalized, but the interiority of the person [Mensch] now appears as the only religiously valuable and significant gift. The violent sacrifices of horses, goats, cattle, and sheep cannot be fruitful; rather, the desired sacrifice – as it says in a Buddhist text – is not that in which all sorts of living creatures perish but one that exists in a continuous giving: And why is that? Because? . . . to such violence of free sacrifice comes the holy [Heiligen] as those who have entered the path toward holiness [Heiligkeit]. . . . Whoever offers such sacrifice, salvation [Heil] and not evil is damnation [Unheil].12

With this complete concentration of the basic religious question on a single point, the way of salvation [Heilsweg] of the human soul is connected in Buddhism to a curious consequence. The pure turning back of everything exterior into the interior has the consequence that not only does the external being and doing vanish but even the spiritual-­religious opposite pole of the I, even the gods themselves, vanish from the center of religious consciousness. Buddhism allows the gods to exist – however, with regard to one basic, essential question, the question of salvation, they no longer signify or contribute anything. And thus, they have been excluded from the truly decisive religious process in general. Only pure immersion [Versenkung], which does not so much extend the I into a godhead as extinguish it in nothingness, brings true deliverance [Erlösung]. If the speculative force of thinking does not shrink back before the final conclusion, if it, in order to penetrate to the being [Wesen] of the self, annihilates its form, then still the basic character of the ethical-­monotheistic religions consists in their taking up the opposite path. In them, both the I of the human and the personality of god are developed to their highest pregnance [Prägnanz] and sharpness. The more clearly the two poles are designated and distinguished from one another, however, the more clearly does the opposition and the tension between them emerge. True monotheism does not seek to resolve this tension – for, it is the expression and condition of that distinctive dynamic in which, according to monotheism, the essence of religious life and self-­consciousness



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consists. Prophetic religion also becomes what it is through the same turning around of the concept of sacrifice that is carried out in the Upanishads and in Buddhism. This turning has another aim here: “To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me?” says God in Isaiah. “I am full of the burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts. . . . Learn to do well, seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.”13 This ethical-­social pathos of the prophetic preserves the I through the emphatic opposition of its counterpart, the “you,” through which alone the I truly finds and asserts itself. And it establishes itself as a purely ethical correlation between I and you, so that now an equally strict reciprocal relation between the human and God is established. In characterizing the basic thought of the prophetic, Hermann Cohen writes: It is not before the sacrifice or before the priest that the human stands to obtain purity. . . . The correlation is ordained and concluded between the human and God, and no other link may be interpolated in it. . . . Any participation by another destroys the uniqueness of God, which is more necessary for deliverance [Erlösung] than for creation.14

For this reason, however, in its highest religious transfiguration of which it is capable, the gift giving [Gabeopher] leads by itself into another basic motive of the sacrificial service [Opferdienst]. Mediation between the sphere of the divine and the human designates the general sense of sacrifice, which recurs in all its different forms in some way. Some have attempted to define the general “concept” of sacrifice, which can be acquired and abstracted from a survey of the totality of the empirical-­ historical forms of its appearance so that sacrifice aims, in each case, at producing a connection [Verbindung] between the world of the “sacred” [Heiligen] and that of the “profane” through the middle link of a consecrated thing [Sache] that is destroyed in the course of the sacred action.15 If sacrifice is indeed, however, always characterized by the striving for a connection of this sort, then the synthesis that takes place in it is capable of the most multifarious gradations. It is able to pass through all the stages and levels from mere material assimilation up to the highest forms of pure ideal community. And every new path likewise alters here the apprehension of the goal that stands at its end: for religious

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consciousness, it is always by means of the path itself that the intuition of the end is determined and formed. The most elementary form in which the opposition between the god and the human, and the overcoming of this opposition, can be apprehended is one in which both the separation as well as the restoration of community are understood analogouosly as basic physical relationships. And it is not enough to speak here of mere analogy; rather, in accordance with the basic feature of mythical thinking, this analogy shifts everywhere into an actual identity. What originally combines the human with the god is a real bond of the community of blood. Between the tribe and its god exists an immediate relationship of blood: the god is the common ancestor from whom the tribe has sprung. This basic outlook extends far beyond the circle of the actual totemistic mode of representation.16 And through it, the real sense of sacrifice is determined. A definite gradation seems to lead here from the basic forms of totemism up to the configurations of animal sacrifice in the highly developed cultural religions. In totemism, the totem animal must in general be spared as a religious duty [Pflicht] – there are, however, also cases where, though it is not eaten by individuals, it is consumed by the whole clan at a common sacral meal in which specific rites and usages must be observed. This common enjoyment [Genuß] of the totem animal is looked upon as a means of confirming and renewing the blood kinship that unites the individual members of the clan with one another and with their totem. This renewal of its physical-­religious originary-­force [Urkraft] is particularly necessary in times of urgency, when the community is endangered and its existence seems threatened. The true accent of the sacral act, however, rests on the performance by the community as a whole. In the enjoyment [Genuß] of the flesh of the totem animal, the unity of the clan and the interconnection with its totemic ancestor is restored as an immediate, sensible-­corporeal unity; in a sense, in this enjoyment [Genuß], the unity is always sealed anew. The seminal investigations of Robertson Smith seem to have demonstrated that this idea of reinforcing the community of life and community of the clan, the idea of the “communion” of the human with the god who passes as the father of the clan, is one of the original motives in animal sacrifice, particularly in the circle of Semitic religions.17 At first, this communion can be presented only as something purely material;



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it can be performed only through the eating and drinking in common, through a lived-­corporeal enjoyment [Genuß] of one and the same thing [Sache]. This very act, however, raises the thing [Sache] toward which it is directed likewise into a new ideal sphere. The sacrifice is the point at which the “profane” and the “sacred” not only touch but indissolubly permeate one another – whatever is present [vorhandend] in it, in a purely physical sense, and fulfills any function in it, has thereby entered the circle of the sacred, the consecrated. On the other hand, this means that sacrifice does not originally form a single doing, sharply distinguished from the everyday and profane tasks [Verrichtungen: performances] of the human, but rather, it means that every task [Verrichtung: performance], however sensible and practical its mere content may be, can become a sacrifice as soon as it enters into the specifically religious “perspective” and is determined by it. In addition to eating and drinking, the exercise of the sexual act, in particular, can take on a sacral significance, and even in advanced stages of religious development, we find prostitution as a “sacrifice,” as a surrender [Preisgabe] in the service of the god. The force of the religious proves itself here in the fact that it encompasses the still-­ undivided whole of being and doing, that it excludes no circle of physical-­ natural existence, and that it pervades this existence down to its basic and originary elements [Elemente]. In this reciprocal relation, Hegel sees a basic element of the pagan cult.18 However, research into the history of religion has taught us how this interplay [Ineinander], this interweaving 269 of sensible and spiritual motifs in the thought of sacrifice, asserts itself more and more strongly in the beginnings of Christianity and in its further development.19 And if religion gains its concrete-­historical efficacy in such an interweaving, then it of course finds its barrier at the same time. For the human and God, if there is to be any true unity between them, must in the final analysis be of the same flesh and blood. Thus, the spiritualization of the sensible by virtue of the act of sacrifice has the direct consequence of the sensibilization of the spiritual. The sensible is annihilated as far as its existence [Existenz], its physical existence [Dasein] is concerned, and only in this annihilation is its religious function fulfilled. Only by the killing and consumption of the sacrificial animal does this force acquire, as the “intermediary” between an individual and his or her clan and as the intermediary between the clan and its god. This force, however, is bound to the exercise of the sacramental act in its full,

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sensible determinacy and with all the details and particularities that the ritual prescribes – the slightest deviation and omission therein depriving the sacrifice of its sense and effectiveness. This is also evident in another important element of the cult, which almost everywhere accompanies sacrifice and which in conjunction with it constitutes the complete cult action. Prayer, like sacrifice, is also intended to fill the gulf between the god and the human. In prayer, however, it is the force of the word, not merely physical but symbolic-­ideal, by which the distance between the two is to be sublated. Nevertheless, here too, there does not exist at the beginnings of mythical-­religious consciousness any sharp boundary between the sphere of sensible exis­ tence [Existenz] and that of pure significance. The power that is inherent in prayer is of a magical source [Herkunft] and a magical nature: it exists in the compulsion that is exerted by the magical force of words on the will of the divinity. We encounter this sense of prayer in the fullest clarity in the beginnings and further development of the Vedic religion. The activity of sacrifice and prayer, when correctly executed, are always endowed here with an infallible and irresistible forceful power: the priest captivates the gods in the snare, the mesh and trap.20 The sacred hymns and sayings, as well as the songs and meters, form and rule being: the shape of the course of the world depends on their use, on their correct or false application. The priest who sacrifices before sunrise brings with them the sun god to appearance, to be born. All things and all forces are woven into the one force of the Brahman, the word of prayer, which not only surpasses the barriers between the human and the god but actually tears them down. The Vedic texts expressly state that in the activity of sacrifice and prayer itself, the priest becomes the god.21 And again, the same basic view can be traced back to the beginnings of Christianity: with the church fathers, the purpose of prayer also appears as the direct unification and fusion of the human with the god (“τὸ ἀνακπαθῆναι τῷ πνεύματι”).22 The further religious development progresses, however, the more and more prayer gradually passes beyond this magical circle. Taken in its purely religious sense, prayer now rises above the sphere of mere human wishing and desire. It is no longer directed toward a relative and particular good but toward an objective good that is equated with the will of the divinity. The “philosophical” prayer of Epictetus – who prays to the gods



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to grant him only what is in their own will, who feels and effaces the arbitrariness of the human as null [nichtig] in comparison to the will of the divinity – has its characteristic parallels in the history of religion.23 In all this, sacrifice as well as prayer prove to be typical forms of religious expression that do not carry over from a predetermined and strictly delimited sphere of the I to the sphere of the divine but rather determine both these spheres and draw progressively different boundaries between them. In what the religious process designates as the spheres of the divine and the human, it is not a question of two domains of being that are from the beginning rigidly demarcated over against one another by spatial as well as qualitative barriers; rather, it is a question of an originary-­form of the movement of religious spirit, of the permanent attraction and repulsion of its two opposite poles. Thus, what appears decisive in the development of prayer and sacrifice is not only that both appear as a medium through which the extremes of the divine and the human communicate with one another [miteinander vermitteln] but that they establish the content [Gehalt] of these two extremes and teach the human to find it. Each new form of sacrifice and prayer opens up a new content [Gehalt] of the divine as well as of the human and a new relation between them. The relationship of the reciprocal tension that arises between the human and the divine gives to each of them their character and sense. Thus, prayer and sacrifice do not merely bridge a gulf that existed for religious consciousness from the beginning; rather, consciousness creates this gulf in order to close it: it brings the opposition between the god and the human to increasingly sharper expression [Ausprägung] in order to find in this the means of its overcoming. This emerges above all in the fact that the movement that is taking place here almost always appears as a purely reversible one, that its “sense” [Sinn] always likewise corresponds to a determinate and in general equivalent “counter-­sense” [Gegensinn: opposite direction]. The unification, the ἕνωσις, between the god and the human that forms the aim of prayer and sacrifice, can from the beginning be grasped and delineated in two ways: it is not just that the human becomes the god but also that the god becomes the human. In the language of the sacrificial service, this presents a motif whose validity and effectiveness can be followed from the most “primitive” mythical representations and usages to the basic forms of our cultural religions. The sense of sacrifice is not exhausted by the

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sacrifice to the god: rather, it appears to stand out fully and reveal itself in its true religious and speculative depth where the god itself is offered as a sacrifice or offers itself as a sacrifice. In that the god suffers and dies, in that the god enters into physical finite existence and in it is consecrated to death, this existence is raised to the divine and freed from death. All the great mystery cults revolve around the originary-­mystery of this liberation and rebirth, brought about by the death of the god.24 This motif of the god’s sacrificial death is one of the truly “elementary mythical-­ religious thoughts” of humanity – this has, inter alia, been shown in the fact that it has been found again almost unmodified in the American originary-­religions discovered in the New World: an interconnection that is well-­known and the Spanish missionaries were able to explain it only by the fact that the ritual sacrifices of the Aztecs were a diabolical mockery and “parody” of the Christian mystery of the Eucharist.25 What distinguishes Christianity here from the other religions is not so much the content of the motif as the new, purely “spiritual” [spirituel] sense that is gained from it. On the other hand, even the abstract speculations of the medieval Christian doctrine of justification move for the most part in the realm of traditional, old mythical ideas. The doctrine of satisfaction that St. Anselm of Canterbury, for example, develops in his treatise Cur Deus homo, seeks to give this train of thought a purely conceptual, rational-­scholastic form by starting from the supposition that the infinite guilt of the human can be “satisfied” only by an infinite sacrifice, thus through the sacrifice of God himself. The mysticism of the Middle Ages, however, goes one step further. For the mystics, the question is no longer how the gulf between God and the human can be bridged, since they know [kennt] no such gulf; the entire conception is contrary to their basic religious attitude. For them, in the relationship of the human being to God, there is no mere apartness [Auseinander], rather only with-­ one-­another [Miteinander] and for-­one-­another [Füreinander]. Here God is just as necessarily and immediately referred [bezogen] to the human as the human is referred to God. In this respect, the mystics of all peoples and all times – for example, Djalal od-­din Rumi and Angelus Silesius – speak the same language. As Rumi writes, “I and you has ceased to exist between us. I am not I, you are not you, nor are you I. I am at once I and you, you are at once you and I.”26 The religious movement that expressed itself in the transformation and progressive spiritualization of



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the concept of sacrifice has arrived at its conclusion here – what previously seemed a purely physical or ideal mediation has now been raised to a pure correlation in which for the first time the specific sense of the divine as well as the human is determined.

ENDNOTES 1 Cf. 47ff. The idea of the “primacy” of cult over myth has been advocated, among modern historians and philosophers of religion, primarily by Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 17. German trans. Stube, 19ff. Since then, modern ethnological studies have essentially confirmed the basic outlook at which Smith arrived through a study of the Semitic religions. Marett goes so far as to call the theory that “rite” precedes “dogma” a “cardinal truth” of ethnology and social anthropology. “The Birth of Humility,” in The Threshold of Religion, 181. Cf. James, Primitive Ritual and Belief, 215: generally speaking, ritual is evolved long before belief, since primitive man is wont to “dance out his religion.” The savage does not find it easy to express his thoughts in words, and so he resorts to visual language. He thinks with his eyes rather than by articulate sounds, and therefore the root feeling of primitive religion is arrived at through an investigation of ritual. 2 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Werke, vol. 15, 67. [G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Introduction and The Concept of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 189ff.] 3 [Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 193.] 4 Ibid., 204ff., 299. 5 Regarding the “compelling names” (ἐπάναγκοι) of the gods in Greek-­Egyptian magic, cf. Hopfner, Griechisch-­ägyptischer Offenbarungszauber, 176ff. 6 See the compilation of ethnological material in Lévy-­Bruhl, Das Denken der Naturvölker, 200ff., 312ff.; Frazer, “The Dying God,” The Golden Bough, vol. 4, part III, 422ff. 7 Here we consider these different forms only according to their ideal significance, as diverse manifestations and elements of the unitary “idea” underlying sacrifice. The genetic question whether there is an originary form of sacrifice from which all others have developed can be disregarded in this framing of the problem. But different answers have been given to this question. While Spencer and Tylor regard the “gift offering” as this basic form, others, like Jevons and Smith, for example, have stressed “communion” between the god and the human as the original and decisive factor. The most recent penetrating investigation of the question is that of E. Washburn Hopkins (1923), who comes to the conclusion that a definitive decision in favor of one or the other

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15 16

17

18

myth as life-­f orm theory is not possible based on the available empirical material and that we must rather content ourselves with recognizing different, equally fundamental motives of sacrifice. Origin and Evolution of Religion, 151ff. In any case, the spiritual “stratification” of these motives here attempted has nothing to do with the question of their empirical-­historical origin: their temporal “earlier” or “later.” For further details, see Wilhelm Mannhardt, Der Baumkultus der Germanen und ihrer Nachbarstämme. Mythologische Untersuchungen (Wald-­und Feldkulte, vol. 1), (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1875), especially 1, 212ff. See the presentation of this Vedic sacrifice in Hermann Oldenberg, “Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus,” 317ff.; and E. Washburn Hopkins, The Religions of India (Boston and London: Ginn & Co., 1895), 191. Cf. Oldenberg, “Die Religion des Veda und der Buddhismus,” 176. Cf. Hermann Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus, 37, 155ff.; Hopkins, Religions of India, 217ff. An˙guttara Nika¯ya, II, n, 4, 39; Udana, I, 9. (Winternitz, Buddhismus, 263–293). Isaiah 1:11 and 17. Hermann Cohen, Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, Grandriss der Gesamtwissenschaft des Judentums, vol. 8 (Leipzig: G. Fock, 1919), 236. Cf. Hubert and Mauss, “Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice,” 124. For the Semitic sphere, this has been shown, e.g., by Baudissin. While the principal female deity (Ishtar, Astarte) has a definite natural foundation and while she represents the idea of the life that is continuously propagated and reborn from death, – according to Baudissin – the Baahm, though they also represent the power of fertility, are above all the fathers and hence the rulers of the tribe that is derived from them through a physical reproductive chain. Adonis und Esmun, 25, 39ff. Cf. particularly Smith, Die Religion der Semiten 212ff., 249ff. [Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 226f., 240.] The view of sacrifice here set forth is confirmed and amplified by Julius Wellhausen, with special reference to the sources of Arabic religion, in Reste arabischen Heidentums (2nd ed., Berlin: Reimer, 1897), 112ff. Cf. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Werke, vol. 15, 225ff.: In the pagan cult [Kultus], the cult [Cultus] is already what the human represents as the ordinary way of life; the human lives in this substantial unity; cult and life are not differentiated, and an absolutely finite world has not yet set itself over against a world of infinity. Thus, among the pagans there prevails a consciousness of their happiness, the consciousness that God is close to them as the god of the people, the city – a feeling that the gods are friendly to them and give them the enjoyment of the best. . . . Here, then, the cult is essentially the determinate that it constitutes not something distinctive and isolated from the rest of life, but a constant life in the luminous realm and in the good. This temporal



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life of neediness [Bedürftigkeit], this immediate life, is itself cult and the subject has not yet differentiated his essential life from the maintenance of his temporal life and from the performance he undertakes for immediate, finite existence [Existenz]. At this stage there must presumably be an express consciousness of their god as such, a rising to the idea of an absolute being [Wesen] and a worshiping of this being. But at first this is an abstract relationship for itself into which concrete life does not enter. As soon as the relationship of the cult becomes more concrete, it takes, the entire outward reality of the individual into itself; the entire scope of his common everyday life, eating, drinking, sleeping and all actions for the satisfaction of natural needs, enter into a relation to the cult, and the process of all these actions forms a sacred life. [Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 351: trans. amended.] 19 Instead of giving a series of different examples for this relationship, I refer the reader here to the concise summary and analysis by Hermann Usener, “Mythologie,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 7 (1904), 15ff. 20 Cf. Richard Pischel and Karlf Geldner, Vedische Studien (3 vols., Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1889–1901), 1, 144ff. 21 For further details, see Archibald E. Gough, The Philosophy of the Upanishads and Ancient Indian Metaphysics. As exhibited in a Series of Articles contributed to the Calcutta Review (London: Trübner & Co., 1882); Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus, especially 10ff. 22 Origen, περὶ εὐχῆς [On Prayer] chap. 10, sec. 2, quoted in Farnell, The Evolution of Religion (London: Williams & Norgate; New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1905), 228. 23 Cf. Robert Ranulph Marett, “From Spell to Prayer,” in The Threshold of Religion (London: Methuen, 1914), 29ff.; Farnell, The Evolution of Religion, 163ff. 24 Cf. 220ff. For the ethnological material and that drawn from the history of religions, cf. the compilation in Frazer, The Golden Bough, vol. 4, part III. 25 Cf. Daniel G. Brinton, Religions of Primitive Peoples (London and New York: G. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 190ff. A “substitute penitential sacrifice” is also found in the Babylonian inscriptions. See Heinrich Zimmern, Keilinschriften und Bibel nach ihrem religionsgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang. Ein Leitfaden zur Orientierung im sog. Babel-­Bibel-­Streit mit Einbeziehung auch der neutestamentlichen Probleme (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1903), 27ff. 26 Jalal ad-­din Rumi, Quatrain. German trans. Ignác Goldziher, Vorlesungen über Islam (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1910), 156.

Part Four The Dialectic of Mythical Consciousness In accordance with the general task of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the considerations in this volume sought to present myth as a unitary energy of spirit: as a self-­contained form of apprehension that asserts itself in all the diverse objective materials of representation. From this standpoint, we sought to demonstrate the basic categories of mythical thinking – not as though we were dealing with a rigid schema of spirit, fixed once and for all, but in the sense that we attempted to recognize in it certain original tendencies of forming [Formung]. Behind the incalculable wealth of mythical formations [Gebilde], we thus sought in this way to make visible a unitary force of forming [Bilden] and the law according to which this force operates. Myth, however, would be no truly spiritual form if its unity signified nothing else than an oppositionless simplicity. The unfolding of its basic

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form and its expression [Ausprägung] does not take place in new motifs and shapes in the manner of a simple natural process – it is not a kind of quiet growth of a seed that was present and preformed from the very beginning, which merely requires certain definite external conditions in order to unfold itself and to bring itself to clear appearance. The individual stages of its development do not simply follow one another but confront one another, often in a sharp, antithetical opposition. The process consists in the fact that certain basic features, certain spiritual determinations of earlier stages, are not only further formed and completed but also negated and totally annihilated. This dialectic can be demonstrated in the transformation of the contents of mythical consciousness, and it dominates its “inner form.” Through it, the function of mythical figures [Gestalten] as such is seized and transformed from within. This function can operate only by continuously producing ever new figures [Gestalten] – as the objective expressions of the inner and external universe as it presents itself to the regard [Blick] of myth. In advancing along this path, however, it reaches a turning point and a point of return [Wende-­und Rückkehrpunkt] – a point at which the law that governs it becomes a problem. At first glance, this certainly seems strange, for we do not usually believe the “naïve” mythical consciousness capable of such a separation. Indeed, it is not a question here of an act of conscious theoretical reflection, in which myth apprehends itself and in which it turns against its own fundamental principles and presuppositions. Rather, what is decisive in this turning back is that mythical consciousness also remains and is preserved within itself. It does not emerge out of its sphere, nor does it transition into a completely other “principle”; however, in that it has completely fulfilled its own sphere, it becomes apparent that it must finally demolish it. This fulfillment, which is at the same time an overcoming, results from the position that myth takes toward its own image-­world. Myth cannot but reveal and express itself in this image-­world; however, the further mythical consciousness progresses, the more this manifestation [Äußerung: externalization] becomes something “external” [Äußerlich] that is not wholly adequate to its own drive for expression. Here lies the ground of a conflict that gradually emerges ever-­more sharply, a conflict that, by splitting mythical consciousness in itself, at the same time truly uncovers in this split the ultimate ground and depths of myth.



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The positivistic philosophy of history and culture, as it was established by Comte in particular, assumes a hierarchy of spiritual development, by which humanity gradually rises from the “primitive” phases of consciousness up to theoretical cognition and with this a complete spiritual domination of reality. From the fictions, phantasms, and beliefs that imbue and characterize those first phases, the path leads more and more definitely to the scientific apprehension of reality as a reality of pure “facts.” Here, all the merely subjective ingredients of spirit should fall away – here, the human confronts reality [Realität] itself, which gives itself to the human as what it is, whereas previously the human being beheld it only through the deceptive medium of its own feelings and desires as well as its own images and representations. According to Comte, this progress takes place essentially in three stages: the “theological,” the “metaphysical,” and the “positive.” In the first, subjective desires and representations of the human are transformed from the human to daemons and divine beings. In the second, they are further transformed into abstract concepts. Only in the third phase is the clear separation [Scheidung] of “inside” and “outside” and the deciding on [Bescheidung] the given facts of inner and outer experience carried through. There is here, therefore, a power alien to mythical-­religious consciousness and external to it by which this consciousness is gradually 277 overcome and displaced. Once the higher stage has been reached, the earlier one, according to the positivistic schema, is no longer needed; its content [Gehalt] can and must die away. Comte did not draw this consequence; rather, his philosophy culminates not only in a system of positive knowledge but also in a positivist religion and indeed a positivist cult. This belated recognition, which religion and cult compel here, not only forms a significant and characteristic feature of Comte’s own spiritual development but more importantly constitutes an indirect admission of an objective [sachlich] lacuna in the positivist construction of history. The schema of the three stages, Comte’s law of the “trois états,” does not permit a purely immanent evaluation of the achievement of mythical-­ religious consciousness. The goal at which mythical-­ religious consciousness aims must be sought here outside of itself, in something fundamentally different. For this reason, however, the proper constitution and the purely inner movedness [Bewegtheit] of the mythical-­religious spirit cannot be grasped. Rather, this can truly come to light only if it can

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be shown that the mythical and religious itself has within itself its own “source [Ursprung] of movement [Bewegung],” that, from its beginnings just to its highest productions, it is determined by its own driving forces and nourished from its own wellsprings [Quellen]. Even where it passes far beyond these first beginnings, it does not abandon its spiritual native soil. Its positions do not abruptly and immediately flip over [umschlagen] into negations – rather, it can be shown that every step it takes already bears within itself a twofold ominous sign, as it were. To the continuous construction of the mythical image-­world corresponds a continuous drive to push out beyond it – to such an extent that both the position and the negation belong to the form of mythical-­religious consciousness and merge in it into a single indivisible act. Considered more deeply, the process of annihilation [Vernichtung] proves to be a process of self-­assertion, as the latter takes place only by virtue of the former: it is only in their constant working together that they manifest the true nature [Wesen] and true content [Gehalt] of the mythical-­religious form. In the development of linguistic forms, we distinguished three stages that we designated as mimetic, analogical, and symbolic expression. We found the first stage characterized by the fact that in it there is still no true tension between the linguistic “sign” and the intuitive content to which it refers, that instead both merge into one another and both strive to cover each other. The sign, as a mimetic sign, strives in its form toward an immediate rendering [wiedergeben] of the content; it strives, as it were, to take it in, to absorb it. Only gradually does a distance, a growing difference [Differenz] appear, and it is then that the basic characteristic phenomenon of language, the separation of sound and signification, is achieved.1 Only when this separation occurs is the sphere of linguistic “sense” constituted as such. In its beginnings, the word still belongs to the sphere of mere existence: what is apprehended in it is not a signification but rather a substantial being and force of its own. It does not point to a tangible content but posits [setzen] itself in the place of this content; it becomes a kind of “originary-­thing” [Ur-­sache2], a power that intervenes in empirical events and their causal concatenation.3 It requires the turning away from this first view if an insight into the symbolic function and hence into the pure ideality of the word is to occur. And what is true of the linguistic sign is true in the same sense of the written sign. The sign of writing is also not at once apprehended as such but



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viewed as a part of the object-­world, as an extract, as it were, of all the forces that are contained in it. All writing begins as mimetic signs, image-­ signs, where at first the image in no way infers in itself any significative or communicative character. Rather, it steps in for the object itself; it replaces [ersetzen] it and stands for it. In its initial emergence and in its primary configurations, writing also belongs to the magical sphere. It serves as a means for magical acquisition or as a means of magical defense: the sign impressed on the object draws it into the sphere of its own efficacy and protects it from foreign influences. The more writing resembles [gleicht] what it is intended to depict – the more it is also pure object writing – the more completely it has achieved this goal. Long before the written sign is comprehended as the expression of an object, it is feared as the substantial embodiment of effects, as it were, that emanate from it, as a kind of daemonic doppelgänger of the object.4 Only when this magical emotion has faded does contemplation 279 turn from the real to the ideal, the tangible to the functional. From immediate image-­writing there unfolds a syllabic writing and ultimately a word-­ writing and phonetic script in which the initial ideogram, the image-­sign, has become the pure meaning-­sign, or the symbol. We now see the same relationship in the image-­world of myth. Even the mythical image, where it first occurs, is by no means recognized as an image, as a spiritual expression. Rather, it is so thoroughly dissolved in the intuition of the world of things [Sachwelt], the intuition of “objective” reality and of objective events, that it appears as an integral component [Bestand] of it. Once again, there is here originally no separation between the real and the ideal, between the domain of “existence” and that of “signification.” The transition between the two domains is continuously at play, not only in the representing and believing but in the doing of the human.5 At the beginning of mythical doing stands the mime again: nowhere does this have a merely “aesthetic,” merely presentational, sense. The dancer who appears in the mask of the god or daemon does not merely imitate the god or daemon but assumes its nature: the dancer is transformed into the god or daemon and fuses with him. There is nowhere here a mere pictorial [Bildhaft], an empty representation [Repräsentation]; there is no mere thought, represented, “intended” that is not at the same time actual and effective. In the gradual progress of the mythical view of the world, however, a separation now inserts itself here, and this separation constitutes the

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real beginning of specifically religious consciousness. The further back we follow it toward its origins, the less the content of religious consciousness can be distinguished from that of mythical consciousness. The two are so interwoven and interlinked that nowhere in actual reciprocal determinacy can they be separated from each other and juxtaposed in opposition to each other. If we attempt to extract and eliminate the basic mythical components from the content of religious beliefs, then we would no longer have religion in its actual, objective-­historical appearance; rather, all that would remain would be a shadow image of it, an empty abstraction. Despite this insoluble interweaving of the contents of myth and religion, their form is not the same. And the particular nature of the religious “form” manifests itself in the changed taking-­of-­position [Stellungnahme] that consciousness assumes here toward the mythical image-­world. It cannot do without this world; it cannot immediately expel it from itself. However, seen through the medium of the religious framing of the question, this world gradually takes on a new sense. The new ideality, the new spiritual “dimension,” which is opened up [erschlossen] through religion, not only lends the mythical an altered “significance” [Bedeutung] but it literally introduces the opposition between “signification” and “existence” [“Bedeutung” und “Dasein”] into the domain of myth. Religion takes the decisive step that is essentially alien to myth: in its use of sensible images and signs it at the same time knows them as such – as the means of expression that, though they reveal a determinate sense, must necessarily at the same time remain inadequate to it, which “point to” this sense without ever fully grasping and exhausting it. In the course of its development, every religion is brought to a point at which it must pass through this “crisis” and in which it must break loose from its mythical ground [Grund] and soil [Boden]. In the manner of this disentanglement, however, the different religions do not proceed alike – rather, each one manifests its particular historical nature and particular spiritual nature precisely in this manner. We repeatedly find that religion, when it subsides into a new relationship to the mythical image-­ world, enters at the same time into a new relationship to the whole of “reality,” to the totality of empirical existence. It cannot complete its distinctive critique of this image-­world without at once implicating [einbeziehen: involve, include] actual existence into it. For it is precisely because there is here still no detached “objective” actuality in the sense



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given by analytic theoretical cognition, because rather the intuition of reality is dissolved [einschmelzen] into the world of mythical representation, feeling, and belief, every other position that consciousness acquires toward the mythical image-­world must have an effect on the comprehensive view of existence. As a consequence, the ideality of the religious does not merely degrade the totality [Ganz] of mythical configurations and forces to a lower order of being but also directs this form of negation toward the elements [Elemente] of sensible-­natural existence itself. To clarify this interconnection, we will reach back to a few pregnant examples, to some typical basic attitudes at which religious thinking has arrived in this struggle against its own mythical foundations and originary-­ beginnings. The truly classical example of the great turning around [Umkehr] and turning away [Abkehr] that takes place here will always be the form of religious consciousness in the prophetic books of the Old Testament. The entire ethical-­religious pathos of the prophets is summarized in this one point. It is based on the force and certainty of the religious will 281 that lives in the prophets – of a will that drives them beyond all intuition of the given, the merely existent. This existence must descend if the new world, the world of the Messianic future is to arise. The prophetic world, which is visible only in the religious idea, is to be grasped by no mere image that is oriented only toward the sensible present [Gegenwart] and in which it remains captive. Accordingly, the prohibition of idolatry [Bilderdienst], the prohibition against making any [“]picture [Abbild] or likeness of any thing that is in heaven above or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth[”]6 is therefore given an entirely new sense and a new force in prophetic consciousness; it indeed becomes the constituent factor of this consciousness itself. It is as if in one stroke, a gulf is torn open of which the unreflecting, “naïve” mythical consciousness knew nothing. The representational world of polytheism, the basic “pagan” view that is combated by the prophets, was not guilty of venerating a mere “picture” [Abbild] of the divine, since for this view, there exists no difference between the “archetype” [Urbild] and “picture” [Abbild] as such. In the images that it makes of the divine, this representational world still immediately possesses the divine itself – precisely because it took these images never as mere signs but always as concrete-­sensible revelations. In a purely formal sense, the prophetic critique of this intuition therefore rests, so to speak, on a petitio principii: it imputes to this intuition a view that

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is not inherent in it but brought to it only through the new consideration, through the perspective in which it is placed. With passionate zeal, Isaiah turns against the absurdity that the human worships its own formations [Gebilde: creations] as divine – ­something that it knows and recognizes as its own shoddy handiwork:

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Who fashions a god, or molds a graven image, that is profitable for nothing? . . . The blacksmith with the tongs works in the coals, and fashions it with hammers. . . . The carpenter stretches out his rule; he marks it out with a line; he fashions it with planes, and he marks it out with the compass. . . . He burns part of it in the fire. . . . And the rest of it he makes into a god, even his graven image: he falls down unto it, and worships it, and prays unto it, and says, Deliver me; for you are my god. They have not known nor understood: for he has shut their eyes, that they cannot see; and their hearts, that they cannot understand. And none considers in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say, I have burned part of it in the fire . . . and shall I make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down to a block of wood?7

We see here that a new foreign tension, an opposition that mythical consciousness neither knows nor can apprehend but must be transplanted into it so that it will decompose and ruin itself from within. Yet the truly positive factor consists not in this decomposition itself but rather in the spiritual motive from which this decomposition ensues: it lies in the fall [Rückgang] into the “heart” of the religious by virtue of which the image-­world of myth comes to be recognized as something merely external [Äußerlich] and tangible. Because in the basic prophetic view, there can be no other relationship between the human and the god than the spiritual-­ ethical relationship between the “I” and the “you”; everything that does not belong to this fundamental relation now loses its religious value. The moment [Augenblick] in which the religious functions because it has discovered the world of pure interiority, withdraws from the world of external, natural existence, this existence loses its soul, as it were, and is degraded to the level of a dead “thing” [Sache]. For this reason, every image taken from this sphere is no longer an expression of the spiritual and divine but quite simply its opposite. The sensible image and the whole sphere of the sensible world of appearance must be divested of their proper “sense-­content”



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[Sinngehalt]: for the deepening that pure religious subjectivity experiences in the thought and belief of the prophets, which can no longer be pictured [abbilden] by anything tangible, is possible only in this way. Another way to reach the properly religious sphere of meaning from the sphere of being, the imageless [Bildlosen] from the pictorial [Bildhaft], is taken by the Persian-­Iranian religion. Herodotus notes in his account of the Persian faith that the Persians did not erect statues [Bildsäulen], temples, and altars but rather called it folly to do so, since they did not, like the Hellenes, believe that their gods were of the human sort.8 As among the prophets, the same fundamental ethical-­religious tendency is at work here: like the god of the prophets, the Persian creator god, Ahura Mazda, is designated by no other predicate than those of pure being and ethical goodness. And yet a different attitude toward nature and the whole of concrete, objective existence arises based on this foundation. The veneration of various natural elements and natural forces in the religion of Zoroaster is well-­known. The care devoted here to fire and water, the awe [Scheu] with which they are protected from all contamination and the severity with which such contamination is punished as severely as the gravest ethical transgressions, proves that here the bond that links religion with nature has by no means been severed. Here too, if instead of considering the mere dogmatic and ritual facts, we turn our attention to the religious motives underlying them, we find that a different relationship manifests itself. It is not for their own sake that the elements [Elemente] of nature are venerated in the Persian fait; rather, what lends them their actual significance is the position that they are assigned in the great religious-­ethical decision [Entscheidung], in the struggle between the good spirit and evil spirit for world domination. In this struggle, every natural existence has its specific place [Platz] and its specific task. Just as the human had to decide [entscheiden] between the two basic powers, so too do the individual natural forces stand on one side or the other – serving the work of either preservation or destruction and annihilation. It is their function and not their mere physical figure [Gestalt] and their physical power that gives them their religious sanction. Thus, nature need not per se be unhallowed [entgöttern] here, for, although it may never be interpreted as an immediate picture [Abbild] of divine being, it does stand in an immediate relation to the divine will and its ultimate goal. It may be either a relationship of antagonism to the divine will, and

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thus descend into the merely daemonic, or a relationship of alliance with it. Nature in itself is neither good nor evil, “divine” nor “daemonic”; however, religious thinking makes it so, as long as it considers its contents not as mere elements [Elemente] and factors of being but as factors of culture and so draws them into the sphere of the ethical-­religious view of the world. They belong to the “heavenly hosts,” which Ormazd employs in his struggle against Ahriman and as such are worthy of veneration. To this realm of the venerable (the “Yazata”) belongs fire and water as conditions of all culture and human order and ethos. The transformation of their pure physical content [Gehalt] into a determinate teleological content [Gehalt] is clearly expressed, especially in the fact that the elaborate theological system of the Persian religion takes great care to expressly negate the indifference toward good and evil that seems to be intrinsic to anything merely naturalistic – by, for example, teaching that the harmful or fatal effects that arise from fire and water should not themselves be attributed to these elements directly but that at most they only come indirectly from them.9 Once again, we can clearly recognize here how the purely mythical elements [Elemente], which originally underlie the Iranian religion as they do every other religion, are not simply suppressed but are progressively transformed in their significance. This gives rise to a curious interpenetration, a distinctive coordination and correlation of natural and spiritual potencies, of tangible-­concrete being and abstract forces. In certain passages of the Avesta, Fire and “Good Thought” (Vohu Manah) appear side by side as salvation-­bringing forces. When the evil spirit attacked the creation of the good spirit – it is taught here – Vohu Manah and Fire intervened, protecting the good spirit and overcoming the evil spirit so that it could no longer obstruct the waters in their course and the plants in their growth.10 This interweaving [Ineinandergreifen] and blending together [Ineinanderübergehen] of the abstract and the pictorial [Bildhaft] constitutes one of the essential and specific features of the Persian religious doctrine. The thought of the highest god is here fundamentally monotheistic – since ultimately, he will overcome and destroy his adversaries. On the other hand, he is only the summit of a hierarchy to which belong natural as well as purely spiritual forces. Next to him stand the six “immortal saints” (Amesha Spenta), whose names (the “Good Thought” and the “Best Righteousness,” etc.) clearly show an abstract-­ethical imprint;



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these are followed by the Yazatas, the angels of the Mazdean religion, who personify on the one hand ethical forces, such as truth, uprightness, or obedience, and on the other hand natural elements [Elemente], such as fire and water. Thus, nature itself is given a twofold and religious-­ambiguous sense through the mediating concept of human culture, through the view of the cultural order as a religious order of salvation. For within a certain sphere, it is preserved; however, to be preserved, it must likewise be annihilated, i.e. divested of its mere tangible-­material determinacy and through its relation to the basic opposition of good and evil assigned to an entirely different dimension of reflection. To express such fine and fluid transitions in the religious consciousness of reality [Realität], the language of religion must and does possess a distinctive medium that is denied to the conceptual language of logic and pure theoretical cognition. For these latter, there is no middle term between “reality” [Wirklichkeit] and “semblance,” between “being” and “nonbeing.” Here, the alternative of Parmenides is valid: the decision ἔστιν ἢ οὐκ ἔστιν [is or is not]. In the religious sphere, particularly at the point where it begins to delimit itself from the sphere of the merely mythical, this alternative is not, however, unconditionally valid and binding. While certain mythical figures [Gestalten] by which consciousness was previously dominated are negated and rejected, this negation does not signify that they simply vanish into nothingness. After their being overcome, the mythical formations [Gebilde] have by no means lost all their content [Gehalt] and force. Rather, they continue in existence as lower daemonic powers, which appear trivial compared to the divine and yet which, even after they have in this sense been recognized as “semblance” [Schein], are still feared as a substantial and, in a certain sense, essential semblance. The development of religious language gives characteristic indications of this process in religious consciousness. In the language of the Avesta, for example, the old name for the Aryan gods of light and the heavens has undergone a decisive change in signification: the deivos or devas have become the daeva, which designate the evil powers, the daemons in Ahriman’s train. We see here how when religious thought rises above the elementary stratum of the mythical deification of nature, everything belonging to this stratum undergoes, as it were, a reversal of omen [Vorzeichen].11 However, notwithstanding this, it lives on afflicted with this altered omen

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[Vorzeichen]. The daemonic world, the world of Ahriman, is a world of deception, semblance, and illusion. Just as the Asha, truth and justice, stand beside Ormazd in his struggle, so is Ahriman ruler in the realm of the lie, and in some passages, he is even identified with it. This does not simply mean, however, that he employs lies and deception as his weapons but that he remains objectively banished into the sphere of semblance and untruth [Unwahrheit]. He is blind, and this blindness, this nonknowing [Nichtwissen], causes him to take up the struggle with Ormazd, in which, as Ormazd knows in advance, Ahriman will meet his doom. Thus, in the end he perishes in his own untruth; however, this decline [Untergang] is not accomplished in one stroke but only “at the end of times,” while in time, in the time of human history and human cultural development, in the “time of struggle,” he preserves his power beside and in opposition to Ormazd. Once again, the religious consciousness of the Jewish Prophets goes a step further here; it seeks to unmask the lower daemonic world as an absolute nothing [Nicht] – as a nothing [Nicht] to which, neither in representation and belief nor in the emotion of fear, any “reality” [Realität], however mediated, is to be attributed. “For the customs of the Gentiles are nothing,” says Jeremiah. “Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good . . . his molten image is falsehood, and there is no breath in them. They are vanity, and the work of errors.”12 The new divine life that is announced here cannot express itself without declaring what opposed it is absolutely unreal, delusion. And yet here too, the separation takes place in such radical sharpness only with the true religious geniuses, the great individuals, while the general religious-­historical development takes a different path. Again and again, the images of the mythical fantasy surge forward – even after they have lost their own life, after they have become a mere dream and shadow world. Just as in the mythical belief in the soul, the dead still are and have an effect as shades, so the mythical image-­world long continues to demonstrate its old power, even when its being and its essential being are contested in the name of religious truth.13 Once again, as in the development of every “symbolic form,” light and shadow belong together here. The light manifests and establishes itself only in the shadow it casts: the purely “intelligible” has the sensible as its opposite, but this opposite forms at the same time its necessary correlate.



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A third great example of how the mythical world gradually sinks into nothingness in the progress of religious thought and religious speculation and how this process spreads from the configurations of myth to those of empirical-­sensible existence may be found in the teachings of the Upanishads. It, too, achieves its final and highest goals by way of negation [Verneinung], which is for it, as it were, its basic religious category. The being [Seiende] of the Atman, which is called here “no, no” – beyond this “thus it is not [nicht],” there is nothing else higher.14 And it signifies a final step taken along this path when Buddhism extends the same process of negation [Negation] from the object [Objekt] to the subject. In the prophetic-­monotheistic religion, as religious thought and feeling are manifestly freed from everything tangible, the reciprocal relation between the I and God becomes purer and more energetic. Liberation from the image and from the objectivity of the image has no other goal than to let this reciprocal relation clearly and sharply emerge. Negation [Negation] ultimately finds here a fixed boundary: it leaves intact the center of the religious relationship, the person and their self-­consciousness. The more the objective declines – the less it appears to be a sufficient and adequate expression of the divine – the more clearly a new form of configuration arises: the configuration of will and action. Buddhism, however, passes beyond this last barrier; for Buddhism, the form of the “I” becomes just as accidental and external as any merely tangible form. For its religious “truth” strives to surpass not only the world of things but the world of will and effective action as well. For it is precisely effective action and willing that confine human beings to the circle of becoming, that chain them to the “wheel of births.” The act (Karman) determines the person’s path in the unceasing sequence of births and so becomes for them an inexhaustible source of suffering. Thus, true liberation lies not only beyond things but above all in doing and desiring. For whomever achieves it, it is not only the opposition between the I and the world that vanishes, but also the opposition between I and you; for whomever the personality is no longer the kernel but the husk, only the last remnant of the sphere of finiteness and imagery. It possesses no persistence, no proper “substantiality”; rather, it lives and is only in its immediate actuality – that is to say, in the coming and going, the appearing [Entstehen] and disappearing [Verschwinden], of diverse

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and forever new elements of existence [Daseinselemente]. As a consequence, even the I, even as a spiritual I, belongs to the world of diffluent and deliquescent configurations: the Samkhara, whose ultimate cause is to be sought in nonknowing [Nichtwissen]:15 Like an ape . . . who prowls around a thicket in the forest, who seizes a branch, lets it go, and seizes another, so that which is called spirit or thinking, and cognizing emerges and disappears, always changing day and night.

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Thus, the person, the self, is no more than a name that we give to a complex of transient contents of existence: just as the word “wagon” designates only the totality [Ganze] of a yoke and frame, shafts and wheels, but not, over and above these, a particular something consistently existing for itself. “Here, there is no being” [Wesen]. From this conclusion, a basic general tendency of religious thinking is once again demonstrated with particular pregnancy and clarity. It is characteristic of this thinking that all being, the being of things as well as the being of the I, that of the inner world as well as that of the outer world, has a continued existence and significance only insofar as it is related to the religious process and its center. Basically, this center alone is real: while everything else is either null [nichtig], as such, or, as a moment in this process, only possesses a derivative being, a second-­order being. Depending on how the intuition of the religious process takes shape in the various historical religions, depending on the shift in the accents of religious values, different elements [Elemente] are singled out and, to speak in Platonic terms, “endowed with the seal of being.” A religion of doing must therefore proceed differently from a religion of suffering [Leiden], a culture religion differently from a pure nature religion. For religious intuition and the religious mood of thought, only that content that receives light from its own center is called “being” [Seiend], while everything else, everything that is merely indifferent from the standpoint of the central religious decision, is an ἀδιάφορον [indifferent] that sinks down into the darkness of nothingness [Nichts]. For Buddhism, the I, the individual, and the individual “soul” must be assigned to this domain of nothingness because they do not enter into its framing of the basic religious problem. For although Buddhism, in its essential content [Gehalt]



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and aim, is a religion of pure salvation, the salvation that it seeks is not that of the individual I but the salvation from it. What we call the soul, what we call the person, is itself nothing real but rather only the ultimate illusion, the illusion that is hardest to see through and overcome, the illusion in which we are implicated by empirical representations that cling to “figure [Gestalt] and name.” For whoever has left this domain of the figure [Gestalt] and name totally behind, the semblance of an independent individuality has lost its power. And with the substantial soul, its religious correlate and counterpart, the substantial divinity, must likewise vanish. Buddha did not deny the gods of popular religions; for him, however, they are nothing more than individual beings [Wesen] who, like everything individual, are subject to the law of perishability. From them no help can come, no liberation from suffering [Leiden], because they are confined within the cycle of becoming and hence that of suffering. In this respect, Buddhism becomes a type of “atheistic religion”: not in the sense that it denies the existence of the gods but that, in a far more deep-­seated and radical sense, this existence is irrelevant and meaningless in the light of its central and main problem. If for this reason, however, one attempts to deny it the title of religion and instead see in it only a practical ethical teaching, this would be an arbitrary narrowing of the concept of religion. It is not the content of a teaching but its form alone that is decisive for its classification under this concept: what stamps a teaching as religious is not the assertion of any being but a specific “order,” a specific sense. Every element [Elemente] of being can be negated, and for this, Buddhism is one of the most significant examples – provided the general function of religious “sense-­bestowing” is maintained. The basic act of religious “synthesis” points here in one direction, in which ultimately only the event itself is apprehended and subjected to a certain interpretation, while every supposed substrate of this event dissolves more and more and finally completely sinks into nothing. In its whole development, Christianity also fights this battle: the struggle for its own appropriate and distinctive determination of religious “reality” [Realität]. The detachment from the mythical image-­world appears here all the more difficult because certain mythical intuitions are so deeply embedded in its own basic doctrines, in its consistent dogmatic existence [Bestand], that they cannot be removed without endangering

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this consistent existence [Bestand] itself. Schelling observed this historical [historisch] relationship and concluded that “natural religion” is and remains the necessary presupposition even for every “revealed religion.” It [the revealed religion] does not itself create the matter in which it takes effect; rather, it finds it as independent of itself. Its formal significance is to be the overcoming of the merely natural, unfree religion; but for just this reason it has this religion in itself, like that which sublates has the sublated in itself. . . . If it was permitted to see in heathendom distortions of revealed truths, then conversely it is impossible not to permit viewing in Christianity the heathendom that has been set in the right place. . . . After all, the affinity of [mythology and revelation] showed itself already in their common external fate so that one sought to rationalize both (mythology and revelation) through a totally equal differentiation of form and content, of what is essential and what is merely time appropriate raiment – that is, one sought to bring both back to a reasonable sense, or what appears to most as a reasonable sense. But precisely with the excised heathen meaning would also all reality be taken from Christianity.16

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Subsequent research into the history of religions has, to an extent and in a way that Schelling could scarcely have foreseen, confirmed his statement here. Today, based on this research, it can be said that there is scarcely a single feature in the world of Christian belief and representations, scarcely an allegory [Sinnbild] or symbol, for which mythical-­ pagan parallels might not be shown.17 The entire development of the history of dogmas, from its earliest beginnings down to Luther and Zwingli, indicates a constant struggle between the historical originary-­ sense [Ursinn] of “symbols,” according to which they still appear simply as “sacraments” and “mysteries,” and their derived, purely “spiritual” sense. Once again, the “ideal” only gradually works itself out [herau­ sarbeiten] from the sphere of the tangible, of the real-­actual. In particular, baptism and the Eucharist are at first evaluated entirely in this real sense, according to their immediate efficacy. “For that epoch,” Harnack remarks, speaking of the early Christian period, “the symbolic is not to be thought as the opposite of the objective, the real; rather, it is the mysterious, the God-­wrought (μυστήριον [mystery]) that is opposed to the



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natural, profanely clear.”18 A differentiation is expressed here that goes back to the ultimate roots of mythical thinking.19 And precisely in this barrier of Christianity lies a large part of its historical force. It might have succumbed in the contest with the oriental religions for world domination that characterized late antiquity if it had not possessed this mythical “rootedness” [Bodenständigkeit] that it repeatedly asserted over and over again despite all the attempts at reformation. This interconnection can be followed and demonstrated in detail in the various elements [Elemente] of the Christian liturgy.20 Thus, the new religious tendency that characterizes Christianity, the new sense-­bestowing that is expressed in its demand for μετάνοια [repentance], could not be directly presented and implemented; rather, this new form could only bring to expression and maturity the mythical material matter that played, as it were, the role of a psychological-­historical “givenness.” The development of “dogma” was at every step determined by these two sets of conditions: after all, every dogma is nothing more than the framing that is assumed by the pure content of religious sense [der reine religiöse Sinngehalt] when one attempts to express it as the content of a representation and being [einen Vorstellungs-­ und Seinsgehalt]. Mysticism, however, undertakes here the attempt to obtain the pure sense of religion as such, independently of all encumbrance [Behaftung] with the “otherness” of empirical-­sensible existence and the sensible world of the image and representation. In mysticism, the pure dynamic of religious feeling strives to cast off and annul all rigid and external givenness. The relationship of the human soul to God finds its adequate expression neither in the image language of empirical or mythical intuition nor in the ambit of “factual” existence or empirically real events. Only when the I withdraws entirely from this sphere, only when it dwells in its being [Wesen] and ground, in order to let the simple being [Wesen] of God move [anrühren: touch] it without the mediation of an image, is the pure truth and pure inwardness of this relationship brought to light. Accordingly, mysticism rejects from itself as the mythical also the historical elements [historischen Elemente] of the content of faith. It strives to overcome dogma because in dogma, even when presented in a purely intellectual framing, the element of the pictorial [Bildhaft] is still predominant. For all dogma is enticed by isolating and delimiting: it seeks to transfer what is meaningful [sinnvoll] and graspable only in the dynamic

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of religious life to the determinacy of representation and its static “formations” [Gebilde]. Thus, from the standpoint of mysticism, image and dogma – the “concrete” as well as the “abstract” expression of the religious – amount to the same thing. The incarnation of the god must no longer be taken as a mythical or historical factum: it is grasped as a process that continuously takes place in human consciousness. The subsequent unification of two contradictory “natures” existing in themselves does not take place here; rather, the duality of the elements [Elemente] of this relation bursts forth from the unity of the religious relation, which for mysticism is the only known and original datum. “The Father,” writes Meister Eckhart, “bears the son unceasingly, and I say more: He does not bear me alone, His son; but more: He bears me for Himself and Himself for me.”21 This basic thought [Grundgedanke] of a polarity that strives to dissolve into a pure correlation and that must nevertheless be preserved as a polarity, determines the character and path of Christian mysticism. Once more, this path is indicated by the method of “negative theology,” which is realized through all the “categories” of looking at [Anschauen] and thinking. To apprehend the divine, we must first cast off all the conditions of finite and empirical being, the “where,” the “when,” and the “what.” God, according to Eckhart and Suso, has no where: he is “a circular ring; the center of the ring is everywhere and its circumference nowhere,” and likewise all difference and opposition of time – past, present, and future – are effaced in him. His eternity is a present [gegenwärtig] now, one that knows nothing of time. Thus, there remains for him only “nameless nothingness,” the figure of the figurelessness [Gestalt der Gestaltlosigkeit]. Christian mysticism is also constantly threatened by the danger that this nothingness and contentlessness [Gehaltlosigkeit] will seize being as well as the I. And yet there remains in the end a barrier beyond which, unlike Buddhist speculation, it does not cross over. For in Christianity, in which the problem of the individual I, the problem of the individual soul, is the focus, the liberation from the I can be thought only ever in that it likewise signifies the liberation for the I. Even where Eckhart and Tauler seem to approach the edge of the Buddhist Nirvana, even where they extinguish the self in God, they seek, as it were, to preserve the individual form of this extinction: there remains a point, a “little spark,” with which the I knows this very surrendering [Aufgeben] of its self.



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Once again, the dialectic that permeates here the whole development of mythical-­religious consciousness stands out with particular sharpness. As we have seen, it is a basic feature of the mode of mythical thinking that wherever it posits a determinate relation between two members, it transforms this relation into a relationship of identity. The attempted synthesis leads here necessarily to a coincidence, an immediate “concrescence” of the linked elements [Elemente].22 And where religious feeling and thought grow beyond their initial mythical conditionality, there always remains an echo of this form of striving for unity. Only when the difference [Differenz] between God and the human has vanished, when God has become human and the human God, does the goal of salvation seem to have been achieved. Even the Gnostics saw the true and supreme goal in immediate deification, apotheosis: “τοȋς τοῦτό ἐστι τὸ ἀγαθὸν τέλος γνῶσιν ἐσχηκόσι θεωθῆναι” [this is the good end for those who have had the higher knowledge: to become God].23 We stand here at the boundary that separates mythical-­ religious apprehension from the philosophy of religion in the narrower and stricter sense. The religious-­philosophical perspective thinks the unity between God and the human less as a substantial than as a genuine synthetic unity: a unity of differences [Verschiedenen]. For it, therefore, separation remains a necessary moment, a condition for the fulfillment of the unity itself. This is expressed with classical pregnance in Plato. In Diotima’s speech in the Symposium, the relation between god and the human is produced by Eros, who as the great mediator has the task of conveying to and interpreting for the gods what comes from humans, and to humans what comes from the gods. Standing halfway between the two, she fills the gulf between them so that the all is in itself connected through her. “Gods do not mix with humans; they mingle [Gemeinschaft: communion] and converse [Verkehr: intercourse] with us through spirits instead, whether we are awake or asleep.”24 In this rejection of the “mixture” between god and the human, Plato, as a dialectician, draws the sharp cut that can be drawn neither by myth nor by mysticism. Apotheosis, the identity between god and the human, is now replaced by the demand for ὁμοίωσις τῷ θεῷ [imitation of god]: a demand that can be fulfilled only in the doing of humans, in the steady progress in the direction of the good, while the good itself remains “beyond being” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας). Although Plato is far from rejecting here the mythical image as such, and though

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from the standpoint of content, he seems close to certain basic mythical representations, he announces a new thought-­form that points beyond myth. Synopsis no longer leads to σύμπτωσις [coincidence]: it becomes the unity of the ideal vision [Schau] that is constituted precisely by the reciprocal relation, the unsublatable [unaufhebliche] correlation between connection and separation. Religious consciousness, on the other hand, is characterized by the fact that in it the conflict between the pure sense-­content [Gehalt] that it grasps in itself and the pictorial [bildlich] expression of this content [Gehalt] is never resolved but bursts forth anew in every phase of its development. The reconciliation between these two extremes is continuously sought without, however, ever being fully achieved. A basic moment of the religious process is situated in the striving out beyond the mythical world of images and in the indissoluble attachment to and imprisonment in this same world. Even the highest spiritual sublimation that religion undergoes does not cause this opposition to disappear: it serves only to more clearly distinguish it and understand it in its immanent necessity. At this point, a comparison between the way [Weg] of religion and that of language once again suggests itself. And this comparison is no mere subjective reflection that seeks to establish an artificial mediation between spiritual domains that are far removed from each other in their content [Gehalt]; rather, we grasp by it an interconnection to which religious speculation was frequently drawn in its own development and which it repeatedly sought to determine with its own conceptual means and modes of thinking. What appears to the common, “profane,” view of the world as the immediately given reality of “things” is transformed by religious apprehension into a world of “signs.” The specifically religious point of view is indeed determined by this reversal. Everything physical and material, every existence and event, now becomes a parable for the corporeal-­pictorial expression of something spiritual. The naïve nonseparateness [Ungeschiedenheit] of the “image” and the “thing” [Sache], the immanence of both as they exist in mythical thinking,25 begins now to give way: in its place there takes shape ever-­more clearly that form of “transcendence” – to speak in ontological terms – in which the new separation that religious consciousness has now undergone in itself is expressed. Things and events [Ereignis] no longer simply signify themselves but



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have become an indication [Hinweis: pointing to] of something “other,” something “beyond” [Jenseitiges]. In this strict separation of the being of the “pictorial” [abbildlich] and that of the “archetypical” [urbildlich], religious consciousness breaks through to its own distinctive ideality – and likewise touches on a basic thought that philosophical thinking progressively works out by entirely different methods and based on other presuppositions. In their historical effectivity, the two forms of the ideal can immediately engage each other here. When Plato teaches that the idea of the good is “beyond being” and when he compares it with the sun, at which the human eye cannot look directly but can contemplate only in its reflection, in the mirror image in the water, he has provided the religious form of language with a typical and enduring means of expression. In the history of Christianity, the development of this means of expression, its further formation and religious deepening, can be followed from the books of the New Testament down to the dogmatic and mystical speculations of the Middle Ages and from these further to the philosophy of religion of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. From St. Paul to Eckhart and Tauler, from them to Hamann and Jacobi, there runs an unbroken chain of religious thought. And here the problem of religion merges again and again with the problem of language through the decisive mediating concept of the sign. As Hamann writes to Lavater: To speak to you from the bottom of my soul, my whole Christianity is . . . a taste for signs and for the elements [Elemente] of water, bread, and wine. Here, there is an abundance for hunger and thirst – an abundance that does not, like the law, merely cast a shadow of a future benefit but rather gives αὐτὴν τὴν εἰκόνα τῶν πραγμάτων [this image of things] insofar as it can be presented and actualized through a glass darkly26; for the τέλειον [perfect] lies beyond.27

Just as in Eckhart’s basic mystical outlook, where all creatures are nothing other than the “speaking of God,”28 here the whole of creation, all natural events as well as spiritual-­historical events, becomes a continuous speech [Rede] of the creator to the creature through the creature: “For one day says it to another and one night that makes known another. Their watchword runs through every climate to the end of the world and in every

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language their voice is heard.”29 In Jacobi, who in his thinking seeks to fuse the basic elements [Elemente] of Hamann’s metaphysical-­symbolic view of the world with Kantian elements [Elemente], the objective interconnection that is here disclosed undergoes a subjective psychological-­ transcendental turn. Language and religion are closely related to each other here and intimately interlinked through their derivation from one and the same spiritual root; both are nothing more than different faculties of the mind to grasp the sensible in the suprasensible [übersinnlich] and the suprasensible in the sensible. All human “reason” [Vernunft], since it is a passive “perception” [Vernehmen],” requires the help of the sensible. Thus, the world of images and signs is always and necessarily interpolated as an intermediary between the human spirit and the being [Wesen] of things. There is always something between us and true being [Wesen]: feeling, image, or word. Everywhere we see only something hidden; however, as hidden we see and sense [spüren] it. For what is seen and sensed we posit the word, the living word, as a sign. There lies the dignity of the word. It does not itself reveal; rather, it shows revelation, consolidates it, and helps to disseminate it. . . . Without this gift of immediate revelation and interpretation [Auslegung], the use of speech [Rede] would never have arisen among humans. With this gift the whole human species invented speech all together, at the very beginning. . . . Each race fashioned a tongue of its own; none understands the other, but all speak [reden] – all speak, because all, in like though not in identical degree, received with reason the gift of understanding and recognizing the inward from the external, the hidden from the revealed, the invisible from the visible.

If in this way religious-­philosophical contemplation as well as linguistic-­ philosophical contemplation thus indicate a point in which language and religion unite with one another to form, as it were, a single medium, the medium of spiritual “sense,” then this creates a new problem for the philosophy of symbolic forms. For it cannot, of course, strive to merge the specific difference of language and religion in some original unity, whether this unity be grasped as subjective or objective, whether it may be determined as a unity of the divine originary-­ground [Urgrund] of



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things or as the unity of “reason,” as a unity of the human spirit. For its question is directed not toward the commonality of origin [Ursprung] but toward the commonality of structure. It does not seek a concealed unity of ground between language and religion but must ask whether between the two, as such absolutely independent and unique formations [Gebilde], a unity of function may not be demonstrable. If there exists such a unity, it can be sought only in a basic tendency of symbolic expression, in an inner rule according to which it develops and unfolds. In our considerations of language, we endeavored to show how the word and the linguistic sound, before realizing their purely symbolic function, pass through a series of intermediary stages in which they hover, as it were, between the world of “things” and the world of “significations.” The sound can “designate” here the content at which it aims only by assimilating itself to it in some way, by entering into a relationship of immediate “similarity” or mediated “correspondence” with it. The sign must in some way fuse with the thing-­world, must become similar to this thing-­world if it is to function as its expression. Even religious expression, in the shape in which it first emerges, is characterized by this immediate proximity to sensible existence. It would not be able to occur in being and endure in being if it did not in this way hold onto the sensible-­tangible with clutching organs. Of course, there is no manifestation of religious spirit, however “primitive,” in which, as in the speech sound, we do not recognize a tendency toward separation, toward the “crisis” to come that will take place in it. For even in the most elementary formations [Gebilde] of the religious, a separation is always made between the world of the “sacred” and that of the “profane.” This separation of the two worlds does not, however, exclude a constant transition between them, a continuous interaction and mutual assimilation. Rather, the force of the sacred manifests itself precisely in that it dominates every single physical existence and every particular physical event with a sovereign, immediate sensible forceful power – which it is always prepared to seize on as an instrument for its own purpose. Thus, everything, however particular, accidental, and sensibly unique, possesses at the same time a magical-­religious “significance” [Bedeutsamkeit] of its own; indeed, this particularity and accidental character becomes the distinguishing characteristic trait by which a thing

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or an occurrence is withdrawn from the sphere of the everyday and transferred to that of the sacred. The technique of magic and sacrifice attempts to draw certain fixed lines through this maze of “accidents,” attempts to introduce a certain organization and a kind of “systematic” order into them. In observing the flights of birds, the augur divides the whole of the heavens into different regions, which he designates in advance as sacred precincts, each inhabited and governed by a god. Even outside of such fixed schemata, which show a first approach toward “universality,” every individual that is in some way still isolated and detached can, however, at any moment take on the function of the symbol [Wahrzeichen]. Whatever is and happens belongs at the same time to a magical-­ religious complex, the complex of significations [Bedeutungen] and augury [Vorbedeutung]. Thus, the all-­sensible being, even in its sensible immediacy, is at once “sign” and “wonder”: at this level of contemplation, both belong necessarily together and are only different expressions of one and the same state of affairs. The individual becomes a sign and a wonder as soon as it is regarded not in its mere spatiotemporal existence [Exis­ tenz] but as an expression of value, as a manifestation [Äußerung] of a daemonic or divine power. Here, the sign as a basic religious form, relating everything to itself and transforming everything into itself – at the same time, however, the sign itself enters into the whole of sensible-­concrete existence and fuses intimately with it. However, just as language is determined in its spiritual development by the fact that it clings to the sensible and yet continually strives beyond it, to go beyond the confines of the mere “mimetic” sign, the same basic characteristic opposition shows itself as well in the circle of the religious. Here too, the transition is not immediate; rather, between the two extremes there lies, as it were, a kind of mediating attitude of spirit. In religion, the sensible and the spiritual by no means coincide with one another, but they nevertheless point continuously to one another. They stand to one another in a relationship of “analogy,” by which they are at once related to one another and separated from one another. In religious thinking, this relation occurs wherever a sharp cut separates the world of the sensible and the suprasensible, the spiritual and the corporeal. On the other hand, both worlds undergo their concrete religious forming [Formung] by reflecting each other. Hence



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“analogy” always bears the typical features of “allegory”: for no religious “understanding” of reality flows from itself but is constrained in that it is oriented to an “other” and in it comes accordingly to recognize its sense. This progressive spiritual process of allegorization is illustrated above all in medieval thinking. In it, all reality loses its immediate significance of being [Seinsbedeutung] to the degree that it is subordinated to a specifically religious “sense-­bestowing.” Its physical existence [Bestand] remains only cloak and mask, behind which its spiritual sense is hidden. It is this sense that must be interpreted [auslegen: laid out] – in the fourfold form of interpretation [Deutung] that the medieval sources differentiate as the principle of historical [historisch], allegorical, tropological, and analogical interpretation [Auslegung]. While in the first, a specific event is apprehended in its purely empirical factuality, it is the three others that disclose its proper content [Gehalt], its ethical-­metaphysical significance. Dante still preserved this basic medieval view unchanged and his poetics is no less rooted in it than is his theology.30 In this form of allegory, a new and characteristic “focal point,” a new relationship of distance and proximity to reality is given. The religious spirit can now immerse itself in reality, in the singular and factual, without remaining confined in it, since what it beholds in reality is never its immediacy but its transcendent sense that finds its mediated presentation in this reality. The tension between the world to which the sign itself belongs and that which is expressed through it has attained an entirely new breadth and intensity here, and thus a new and intensified consciousness of the sign is also achieved. At the first stage, signs [Zeichen] and the designated [Bezeichnet] belong, as it were, to the same plane: one sensible “thing,” one empirical event, points to another and serves as its symbol [Wahrzeichen] and omen [Vorbedeutung]. Here, however, no such direct relation prevails, but only a relation mediated by reflection. The form of “tropological” thinking transforms all existence into a mere trope, a metaphor – however, the interpretation [Auslegung] of this metaphor requires a distinctive art of religious “hermeneutics,” which medieval thinking seeks to reduce to set rules. To establish these rules and to use and apply them, one point, of course, is required where the world of spiritually transcendent “sense” and the world of empirical-­temporal reality come into contact, despite

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their inner diversity and antithetical opposition – and at this point, they directly permeate each other. Every allegorical-­tropological interpretation relates to the basic problem of salvation and thus to the historical reality of the savior as its fixed center. All temporal becoming, all natural events and human doing, obtain their light from this center: it orders them into a meaningful cosmos by appearing as necessary links in the religious “plan of salvation” by taking a purposeful place in it. And from this one spiritual center, the circle of interpretation gradually broadens. The highest “analogical” sense of a text or a particular event is disclosed when an allusion [Hindeutung] can be found in it to the transcendent or to its immediate historical appearance, the Church.31 Even in the most far-­ reaching “spiritual” interpretation [Auslegung], all the spiritualization of natural being is bound here to the presupposition and opposing motive that logos has descended into the world of the sensible, that it has “incarnated” in it in temporal uniqueness. However, to this form of allegory, medieval mysticism opposed another, a new sense of the basic symbols of Christian doctrine. It sublates the temporal uniqueness into the eternal [Ewigkeit] – divesting the religious process of all mere historical content [Gehalt]. The process of salvation is restored to the depths of the I, to the abyssal ground [Abgr­ und] of the soul, where it is enacted free from all foreign mediation in an immediate correlation of I and God, God and I.32 And it becomes evident here that the sense of all basic religious concepts depends on the particular nature and tendency of the symbolism that lives in them, because the new orientation of this symbolism that takes place in mysticism now gives these individual concepts a new content [Gehalt] and, as it were, another mood [Stimmung] and tone. Everything sensible is and remains sign and likeness – however, this sign no longer has a “miracle” [Wunder], if the character of wonder is seen in its particularity, in an individual particular revelation of the supersensible. The actual revelation no longer takes place in an individual but rather in the whole: the whole of the world as well as the whole of the human soul.33 We stand here before a basic intuition whose full development and working out leads beyond the limits of the religious sphere. The new view of the “symbol” that emerges in mysticism achieves its full intellectual expression only in the history of modern philosophical idealism. Leibniz begins expressly from Eckhart’s saying that all individual being



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is a “footprint of God”34: “In our self-­being [Selbstwesen],” Leibniz writes in his essay On the True Mystical Theology, “there is an infinitude, a footprint, a likeness [Ebenbild] of God’s omniscience and omnipotence.”35 And from here, his worldview of “harmony” is formed, which rests not on some form of causal influence, not on any interaction of individual beings [Wesenen], but on their original reciprocal “correspondence.” Each monad is entirely independent and self-­contained; however, precisely in this particularity and independence it is the living “mirror of the universe” that it expresses, each monad according to its own perspective. There emerges here a kind of symbolism that does not exclude, but rather includes, the thought of the thoroughgoing and unbroken lawfulness of all being and events, which indeed is essentially based on this very thought. The sign has once and for all been stripped of all particularity and contingency; it has become the pure expression of a general order. In the system of universal harmony, there are no more “miracles”: to be sure, however, the harmony itself signifies the enduring and general miracle that sublates and thereby “absorbs” all others in itself.36 The spiritual no longer manifests itself in the sensible, in order to create in it an individual picture [Abbild] or analogy in which it manifests itself – rather, the totality [Gesamtheit] of the sensible is the real plane of the revelation of the spiritual. “Toute la nature,” writes Leibniz to Bossuet, “est pleine de miracles, mais de miracles de raison.” [“All nature is full of miracles, but the miracles of reason.”] Thus, a new and distinctive synthesis is effected between the “symbolic” and the “rational.” The sense of the world opens up to us only when we rise to a standpoint from which we view all being and events as at once rational and symbolic, and even Leibniz’s logic, through the mediation of the thought of a “universal characteristic” is intimately bound up with his view of symbolism. Among the modern philosophers of religion, Schleiermacher has developed the systematic continuation and justification of this basic view. His Speeches on Religion takes up the problem just as it had been framed by Leibniz. And it is precisely this ideal and historical-­spiritual interconnection that raises Schleiermacher’s religion of the “universe” above the form of a mere naturalistic “pantheism.” According to Schleiermacher, religion consists of taking every individual as part of the whole, everything limited as a presentation of the infinite. Space and mass, however, do not

303

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constitute the world and are therefore not the matter of religion – to seek infinity in them is to think like a child. “What in fact speaks to the religious sense in the external world is not its masses but its laws.” The true and authentic, the properly religious sense of miracle, lies precisely in these laws. What then is a miracle? Tell me in what language . . . it means anything other than a sign, a trace [Andeutung]? Hence, all these expressions mean [besagen] nothing other than the immediate relation of an appearance to the infinite, to the universe. But does this preclude an equally immediate relation to the finite and to nature? Miracle is only the religious name for event [Begebenheit]; every event, even the most natural, provided the religious view of it can be the dominant one, is a miracle.37

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We stand here at the opposite pole from the original view according to which the symbolic signified something objectively real, the immediate work of God, a mystery.38 For the religious significance of an event depends no longer on its content but solely on its form: what gives it its character as a symbol is not what it is and whence it immediately comes but the spiritual aspect according to which it occurs, the “relation” to the universe that it obtains in religious feeling and thought. The movement of religious spirit that constitutes its proper form, not as a static figure [Gestalt] but as a distinctive mode of configuration [Gestaltung], consists in the back and forth, in the living oscillation between those two basic views. We find here that correlation of “sense” and “image,” as well as that conflict between them, both of which are deeply rooted in the nature [Wesen] of symbolic [symbolisch], sense-­pictoral [sinnbildlich] expression. On the one hand, the very lowest, most primitive-­mythical configuration proves to be a bearer of sense [Sinnträger]: it already stands in the sign of that originary-­division [Ur-­Teilung] that carves the world of the “sacred” out of the world of the “profane” and delimits the one from the other. And on the other hand, even the highest “truth” of religion remains attached to sensible existence – to the existence of images as well as that of things. It must continuously immerse and submerge itself in this existence whose ultimate “intelligible” purpose it strives to expel and eject from itself, because only in this existence does religious truth



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possess its form of manifestation [Äußerungsform] and hence its concrete reality and efficacy. Speaking of concepts, of the world of theoretical cognition, Plato said that here the divergence of the one into the many and the return of the many to the one has neither beginning nor end but always was and is and will be as an “immortal and never-­aging occurrence [Begegnis: encounter]” of our thinking and discourse itself – thus, the interpenetration and opposition of “sense” and “image” are among the essential conditions of the religious. If this interpenetration and opposition were ever replaced by a pure and perfect equilibrium, the inner tension of religion, on which rests its significance as a “symbolic form,” would be sublated. The demand for such an equilibrium therefore points to another sphere. Only when we turn from the mythical image-­world and from the world of religious sense to the sphere of art and artistic expression does the opposition that dominates the development of religious consciousness appear, if not sublated then, as it were, calmed and appeased. For it is characteristic of the basic tendency of aesthetics that here the image is recognized purely as such, that to fulfill its function, it need give up nothing of itself and its content [Gehalt]. Myth sees in the image a fragment of substantial reality, a part of the thing-­world, endowed with equal or higher forces than this world. From this first magical view, religious apprehension strives toward a progressively purer spiritualization. And yet, again and again, it is carried back to a point at which the question of its sense-­content and truth-­content shifts into the question of the reality of its objects, at which it faces the problem of “existence” [Exis­ tenz] in all its harshness. Only aesthetic consciousness leaves this problem truly behind it. Since from the beginning, it gives itself over to the pure “contemplation” in which it develops the form of looking [Schauen] in difference and contrast to all forms of effective action, the images that are projected in this conduct of consciousness acquire for the first time a purely immanent significance [Bedeutsamkeit]. They confess themselves to be “semblances” as opposed to the empirical-­real reality of things; however, these semblances have their own truth in that they possess their own lawfulness. In the return to this lawfulness arises a new freedom of consciousness: the image no longer reacts to spirit as something independent-­tangible but instead becomes for spirit a pure expression of its own creative force.

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ENDNOTES 1 See Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 130ff. 2 [In German the term “Ursache” signifies the cause, reason, account, or principle in the sense of an arche. Cassirer splits the term, indicating that at this mimetic level where the sign and the signification are fused together, the cause or ground can be thought of only as an originary-­thing or matter (Sache).] 3 Cf. my “Language and Myth,” in The Warburg Years (1919–1933). Essays on Language, Art, Myth, and Technology, trans. S. G. Lofts with A. Calcagno (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 38ff.; 49ff. 4 For documentation, see Theodor W. Danzel, Die Anfänge der Schrift (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1912). 5 On this and the following, cf. 48ff. 6 [Deuteronomy 5:8.] 7 Isaiah 44:10ff. 8 Herodotus, book I, 131; cf. book III, 29. 9 For more details on this, see Henry, Le parsisme, 63. 10 Yasht, xiii, 22. (Geldner, Die zoroastrische Religion, 337). 11 On this change in linguistic-­religious signification, see Schröder, Arische Religion, 1, 273ff.; Jackson, in Der Grundriss der iranischen Philologie, vol. 2, 646. In opposition to Darmesteter, Henry, Le parsisme, 12ff., stresses that this is something more than a “linguistic accident.” 12 Jeremiah 10: 3ff. 13 This distinctive uncertain and mediary state of religious consciousness is often strikingly evident in the linguistic designation for the mythical, the “lower” daemonic world. Ahriman, e.g., is designated in the Avesta as the Lord of the lie (druj). The Indo-­European root (Sanskrit druj) contained in this word recurs in the Germanic root “drug,” which in modern German has developed into “Trug” and “Tratim.” It recurs also in the Germanic designations for daemons and ghosts (Old Norse, draugr-­ghost, OHG troc, gitroc, etc.). Cf. Wolfgang Golther, Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1895), 85f. Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (5th ed., Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1894), s.v. “Traum” and “Trug.” 14 For more details on this, see Hermann Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus, 63ff.; Paul Deussen, “Die Philosophie der Upanishad’s,” in Allgemeine Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 1, part II (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1899), 177ff., 206ff. 15 On the position of the concept of Samkhara in Buddhist doctrine, cf. Richard Pischel, Leben und Lehre des Buddha (Leipzig: Teubner, 1906), 65ff.; Oldenberg, Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus, 279ff. 16 Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling, “Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie,” in Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. Verlag, 1856), 248. [Friedcritical Introduction to the Philosophy of rich Wilhelm Schelling, Historical-­



17

18 19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26 27

28

29

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Mythology, trans. Mason Richey and Marcus Zisselsberger (New York: SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, 2007), 172.] Here I content myself with referring to a recent investigation in which this relationship has been illuminated from all sides: Eduard Norden, Die Geburt des Kindes, Geschichte einer religiösen Idee, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, vol. 3 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1924). Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (3rd ed., 3 vols., Leipzig and Mohr, 1894–97) 1, 198. Cf. 93ff. Here again, I shall not go into detail. It suffices to recall the penetrating analysis of the various liturgical images given by Dietrich in the second part of Eine Mithrasliturgie, 92ff. Meister Eckhart, in Franz Pfeiffer, ed., Deutsche Mystiker des Vierzehnten Jahrhunderts (2 vols., Leipzig: G. J. Göschcn, 1845–57), 2, 205. For details, see 80ff. Poimandres 1, 22; for details, see Richard Reitzenstein, Die Hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen: nach ihren Grundgedanken und Wirkungen; Vortrag Ursprünglich Gehalten in dem Wissenschaftlichen predigerverein für ElsassLothringen den 11. November 1909 (2nd ed., Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1920), 38ff.; Eduard Norden, Agnostos theos. Untersuchungen zur Formengeschichte religiöser Rede (Leipzig, Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913), 97ff. Plato, Symposium, 203 A: θεὸς δὲ ἀνθρώπῳ οὐ μίγνυται, ἀλλὰ διὰ τούτου πᾶσά ἐοτιν ἡ ὁμιλία καὶ ἡ διάλεκτος θεοῖς πρὸς ἀνθρώπους, καὶ ἐγρμγορόσι καὶ καθεύδουδι [trans. amended]. See 48ff. [For the expression, “through a glass darkly” cf. 1 Corinthians 13:12. The German “einen Spiegel im Räthsel” is literally “a mirror in the riddle.”] Johann G. Hamann to Johann Kaspar Lavater on January 24, 1778, in Hamann’s Schriften, ed. Friedrich Roth (9 vols., Berlin: G. Reimer, 1821–43), 5, 278. For details about Hamann’s symbolic view of the world and of language, see the excellent presentation by Rudolf Unger: Hamanns Sprachtheorie im Zusammenhange seines Denkens: Grundlegung zu einer Würdigung der geistesgeschichtlichen Stellung des Magus in Norden (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1905) and Hamann und die Aufklärung (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1911). Cf. e.g., Meister Eckhart, Predigten und Traktate in Pfeiffer, Deutsche Mystiker des Vierzehnten Jahrhunderts, vol. 2, 92, and elsewhere. [“Alle crêatûren sint ein sprechen gotes.”] Johann Georg Hamann, “Aesthetica in nuce,” in Hamann’s Schriften, 2, 261. How powerful this view originating in mysticism remains even in modern epistemology is made particularly evident by the example of Berkeley, whose psychological and epistemological theories culminate in the idea that the whole world of sense perception is merely a system of sensible signs, in which the infinite spirit of God communicates itself to finite spirits. Cf. Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1, 74f.

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30 Dante, Il convivio, in Opera omnia, book II, (Leipzig: Insel-­Verlag, 1921), 67ñ290, Trattato secondo (chap. 1),101 f. le scritture si possono intendere e debbonsi sponere massimamente per quattro sensi. L’uno si chiama litterale, e questo è quello che non si distende più oltre che la lettera propia. . . . L’altro si chiama allegorico, è questo che si nasconde sotto il manto di queste favole, ed è una verità ascosa sotto bella menzogna. . . . II terzo senso si chiama moSrale; e questo è quello che li lettori deono intentamente andare appostando per le scritture a utilità di loro e di loro discenti: siccome appostare si può nel Vangelio, quando Cristo salio lo monte SSper trasfigurarsi, che delli dodici Apostoli, ne menò seco li tre; in che moralmente si può intendere, che alle secretissime cose noi dovemo avere poca compagnia. Lo quarto senso si chiama anagogico, cioè sovra senso: e quest’ è, quando spiritualmente si spone una scrittura, la quale, ancora nel senso litterale, eziandio per le cose significate, signifca delle superne cose dell’ eternale gloria; siccome veder si può in quel canto del Profeta, che dice, che nell’ uscita del popolo d’Israele d’Egitto, la Giudea è fatta santa e libera. Che avvegna essere vero, sccondo la lettera, sie manifesto, non meno è vero quello che spiritualmente s’intende, cioè che nell’uscita dell’anima del peccato, essa si è fatta santa e libera in sua potestade. [that writings can be understood and ought to be expounded principally in four senses. The first is called the literal, and this is the sense that does not go beyond the surface of the letter, as in the fables of the poets. The next is called the allegorical, and this is the one that is hidden beneath the cloak of these fables, and is a truth hidden beneath a beautiful fiction. . . . The third sense is called moral, and this is the sense that teachers should intently seek to discover throughout the scriptures, for their own profit and that of their pupils; as, for example, in the Gospel we may discover that when Christ ascended the mountain to be transfigured, of the twelve Apostles he took with him but three, the moral meaning of which is that in matters of great secrecy we should have few companions. The fourth sense is called anagogical, that is to say, beyond the senses; and this occurs when a scripture is expounded in a spiritual sense which, although it is true also in the literal sense, signifies by means of the things signified a part of the supernal things of eternal glory, as may be seen in the song of the Prophet which says that when the people of Israel went out of Egypt, Judea was made whole and free. For although it is manifestly true according to the letter, that which is spiritually intended is no less true, namely, that when the soul departs from sin it is made whole and free in its power.] [W. W. Jackson, Dante’s Convivio (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909)] 31

Allegoria est, quando aliud sonat in littera et aliud in spiritu, ut quando per unum factum aliud intellegitur; quod si illud sit visibile, est simplex



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ἀλληγορία, si invisible et cadestc, tunc dicitur ἀναγογή, ut cum Christi praesenta vel Ecclesiae sacramenta verbis vel mysticis rebus designatur. . . . Anagoge dicitur . . . sensus, qui a visibilibus ad invisibilia ducit . . . ad superiors sive ecclesiam . . . et de praemio futuro et de futura vita disputans.” Guildmus Durandus, Rationale divnorum officionim (1286), Proem, fol. 2a, quoted in Joseph Sauer, Symbolic des Kirchengebdudes und seiner Ausstattung in der Auflassung des Mittelalters. Guillaume Durand, Rationale divinorum officiorum (1286) cited by: Sauer, Symbolik Des Kirchengeb udes Und Seiner Ausstattung in Der Auffassung Des Mittelalters (Freiburg: Herder, 1902), 52. 32 Cf. 301f. 33 See Albert Gorland, Religionsphilosophie als Wissenschaft aus dem Systemgeiste des kritischen Idealismus (Berlin and Leipzig: W. de Gruyter, 1922), 263ff.: For this religion . . . every irnatural ‘thing’ becomes a ‘footstep of God’ toward the I, a footstep of the I toward God. And, thus, the ‘world’ is nothing other than the path on which ‘proximity to God’ is gained. . . . The religious word ‘world’ signifies this relatedness. And if the relatedness of I and God is eternity, the relatedness of I and the world is temporality; thus, signifies the world, as the dead middle point between God and I, the finding of eternity in temporality, of temporality in eternity. . . . All religion – and in the clearest form . . . the German mysticism of an Eckhart – bears witness that the striving for a total sanctification of the world rises from the profoundest source of religious experience. 34 [Meister Eckhart, Predigten und Traktate, 11: “wan alle crêatûre sint ein fuozstapfe gotes.” Although “footprint of God” is the standard translation of Eckhart’s term “fouzstapfe,” the word signifies “vestige.”] 35 Leibniz, “Von der wahren theologia mystica,” in Deutsche Schriften, ed. Gottschalk E. Guhraucr (Berlin: Veit, 1838), 1, 411. 36 Leibniz, “Reponse aux reflexions contenues dans la seconde Edition du Dictionnaire Critique de M. Bayle, article Rorarius, sur le systeme de l’Harmonie preétablie,” in Die Philosophischen Schriften, ed. C. J. Gerhardt (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880), 4, 557: “Le merveilleux universel fait cesser et absorbe, pour ainsi dire, le merveilleux particulier, parce qu’il en rend raison.” [“The universal wonder brings to an end and absorbs every, so to speak, particular wonder because it justifies it.”] 37 Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1799), ed. Rudolf Otto (Göttingen, 1899), 33, 47, 66. by John Oman, On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893). [Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 48f. – trans. amended.] 38 See 300ff.

G lossary

of

G erman T erms

German English Abbild picture Abbilden picturing Absicht intention Abzeichen emblem Affeckt affect, emotion Ähnlichkeit resemblance Aktualität actuality Allgemeine universal Allgemeinheit universality Allheit allness Alltäglich everyday Anschauung intuition anzeichen indicate Aufbau construction aufbauen construct Auffassung apprehension, view Aufgabe task, problem aufheben sublate Aufhebung sublation



glossary of german terms

Augenblick moment Ausdruck expression Ausdruckswahrnehmung expressive perception Auseinanderlegung interpretative laying out Auseinandersetzung confrontation, setting asunder, Ausprägung expression Aussage proposition, statement Äußerung manifestation, utterance bedeuten signify Bedeutsamkeit significance Bedeutung significance, signification begreifen comprehend Begriff concept Begründung grounding, justification Beieinander togetherness Beieinandersein being together Benennung naming, denomination Beschaffenheit constitution, state Besinnung mindfulness besondere particular Besonderung particularization Besonnenheit reflective awareness Bestand consistent existence Bestandteil component bestehen subsist Bestimmtheit determinacy Bestimmung determination Betrachtung consideration, contemplation Bewußtheit state of consciousness Bewußtsein consciousness Beziehung relation Bezirk region, precinct Bezogenheit relatedness Bild image bilden form Bildung formation

319

320

glossary of german terms

Bildwelt image-world Boden ground, ground soil Dämon daemon darstellen present, exhibit Darstellung presentation Dasein existence Denken thinking Denkform thought-form Differenzierung differentiation Ding thing dinglich tangible Dingwahrnehmung thing perception Distanzierung distanciation Eigenart particular nature Eigenschaft property eigentümlich distinctive Einbildungskraft imagination Eindruck impression Einerleiheit one-and-the-sameness Einfühlung empathy Einheit unity Einheitlichkeit homogeneity Einordnung subordination Einteilung classification, division Einzelheit individuality Einzelne individual Element element Empfindung sensation Entäußerung alienation Entfernung distancing Entfremdung estrangement Entsprechung correspondence Entstehung emergence Entwicklung development entworfen project Ereignis event



glossary of german terms

erfahren undergoes Erfahrung experience Erfahrungsdenken experiential thinking Erfahrungserkenntnis experiential cognition erfassen apprehending Erfassung apprehension Erfüllbarkeit satisfiability ergreifen seize Erinnerung recollect erkennen recognize Erkenntnis cognition Erkenntnistheorie theory of cognition, epistemology Erklärung explanation Erlebnis lived-experience Erscheinung appearance, phenomenon Erschließung opening up erschlossen disclosed Erzeugung production Faktizität facticity Faktum factum fassen grasp Fassung framing, version Figure figure Form form Formenlehre morphology Formung forming Fragestellung framing the question Fügung construction, coincident Ganze whole, entirety, totality Ganzheit whole, totality Gebiet domain, region Gebilde formation Gedächtnis memory Gedanke thought, idea Gefüge framework Gefühl feeling

321

322

glossary of german terms

Gegebenheit givenness Gegenstand object Gegenwart present Gehalt content Geist spirit Geisteswissenschaft science of spirit Geisteswissenschaften human sciences geistig spiritual Gemeinschaft community Gepräge imprint, stamp Gesamtheit whole, totality Geschehen event, occurrence Geschick destiny Gesellschaft society Gestalt gestalt, figure, shape gestalten configure Gestaltgebung gestalt-bestowing Gestaltung configuration Gewalt forceful power, violent power Glied member gliedern organize Gliederung organization Grenzbegriff boundary concept Grenze boundary Grund ground, basis grund- basic, fundamental Grundlegung foundation Handlung action Herausbildung forming emergence hervorbringen bringing forth Hervortreten emergence hinstellen set out, posit Hinweis pointing to, indicate Idee idea Inbegriff ensemble Ineinandersein mutual interpenetration



glossary of german terms

Inhalt content inhaltlich contentual Kausalität causality Kennen know köperlich corporeal Körper body Kraft force, power Kreis circle, sphere Kulturbewußtsein cultural consciousness Kulturvölker cultural people Künftig coming Lage situation Lebensform life-form Leib lived body Leiden undergo, suffer Leistung achievement, performance Macht power Mannigfaltigkeit manifold Materie matter Mensch human being Moment element, moment Naturvölker natural people Nivellierung leveling down Objekt object Objektivität objectivity Offenbarung revelation Ordnung order Ort place örtlich local Phänomen phenomenon Prägnanz pregnance Quelle source Rahmen framework Realität reality Rede speech Reflexion reflection

323

324

glossary of german terms

Relation relation Repräsentant representative Repräsentation representation Repräsentative representative Richtung tendency, direction Sache thing sachlich factual, substantive Schau vision, showing Scheidung separation Schein semblance Scheinbild simulacrum Schema schema Schicksal fate Seele soul, psyche, mind Sehen seeing Sein being Seinde being, entity Selbsttätigkeit autonomous Setzen posit, set Setzung positing Sicht sight Sinn sense Sinnbild emblem Sinngebung sense-bestowing So-Sein being-a-certain-way Stelle position Stimmung mood Stoff stuff, matter, material stuff Struktur structure Tätigkeit activity Totalität totality Tun do, doing, activity Umfang extent Umgestaltung reconfiguration Umkreis ambit Unaufheblich unsublatable



glossary of german terms

Unterscheidung differentiation Unterschied difference Ur- originary Urbild archetype Urform originary form Urphänomen originary phenomenon Vergegenwärtigung re-presentification Verhältnis relationship Verknüpfung connection Verstand understanding Verständlichkeit intelligibility Verstehen understand [Verstehen] Vielheit multiplicity Voraussetzung presupposition, assumption Vorbild model Vorgang process, event Vorhanden present, available Vorhandenheit objectively present Vorstellung representation, idea Wahrnehmung perception Wechsel change Wechselbestimmung reciprocal determination Weltansicht view of the world Weltbild worldview Wesen essence, nature, being Wesenheit essential being Wiederholung repetition Wirken effective action Wirklich actuality Wirklichkeit reality Wirksamkeit effectiveness Wirkung effect Wissen knowledge Wissenschaft science wissenschaft Philosophie systematic philosophy Zerlegen break down

325

326

glossary of german terms

Zerlegung analysis, decomposition Zug trend Zuhandenheit at hand Zukünft future Zuordnung correlation, classification zusammenfassen concentrating, grasping together Zusammenfassung combination Zusammenghörigkeit belonging-togetherness Zusammenhang interconnection, coherence, context Zustand state, condition

I ndex

Achilles 194 Aeschylus 229, 236, 237 Agamemnon 229, 237 Agni 113, 248 Ahriman 142, 146, 165, 204, 294 – 6, 314n13 Ahura Mazda 141, 146, 204, 251, 293 Amesha Spenta 141, 294 Ananke 206 Anaximander 158, 183n92 Anselm, Saint 280 Apollo 25 Ariovistus 132 Aristotle 162, 256, 259n1 Astarte 227, 282n16 Atropos 158 Augenblick (the moment) xxix, 45 – 7, 162, 255, 258, 292 Auseinandersetzung xx, 1, 190, 244 Bastian 22 Being and Time (Heidegger) xix

Benfey 21 Berthelot, Marcellin E. 89n12 Bestand (existence) xxix, 4, 6, 32n15; dialectic of mythical consciousness 289, 299–300, 309; myth as form of intuition 135, 156; myth as life-form 189, 208; myth as thought-form 41, 47 Beth, Karl 103n2 Bezold, Carl 33n22 Bidney, Martin 179n24 Bild (image) xvi, 30, 62, 190, 225 bilden (forming) xvi, 18, 29, 120, 285 Bildgestalten (image-gestalts) 233 Bildung (formation) xvi Bildungsbestand (fixed cultural inventory) 2 Bildungsbürgertum (educated classes) vii Boll, Franz 186n142 Bossuet 311 Bousset, Wilhelm 184n115, 263n40, 265n60

328

index

Brahe, Tycho de 166 Brahma 66, 147, 248, 250, 278 Breasted, James H. 210n12, 210n14, 211n20 Breysig, Kurt 265n59 Brinton, Daniel G. 34n30, 71n11, 185n125 Bruno, Giordano 170 Buddha 147 – 9, 161 – 3, 299; see also Buddhism Buddhism 147 – 51, 160 – 1, 274 – 5, 297 – 9, 302 Budge, Ernest Alfred Wallis 72n16, 209n7, 211n19 Bücher, Karl 266n75 Brugsch, Heinrich K. 178n20, 265n64, 266n79 Caesar 132 Cantor, Moritz 125 Cardanus 170 Cassirer, Bruno xv Cassirer, Ernst vii – xiii, xv – xvii, xviii – xxi, xxiii – xxiv, 314n2 Catlin, George 260n14 Cebes 205 Ceres 242 Chthonia 154 Clotho 158 Clytemnaestra 237 Codrington, R. H. 96 – 7 Cohen, Hermann viii, 145, 275 Comte xxxiii, 287 Confucius 151 consciousness see philosophy of consciousness Crawley, Alfred E. 103n8 Creuzer, Georg 18, 48 cult xxiv; dialectic of mythical consciousness 287; myth as form of intuition 132 – 3, 151 – 2, 174 – 5; myth as thought-form

49; the phases of the mythical concept of the I 247, 266 – 7n79; and sacrifice 268 – 70, 277 – 8, 282 – 3n18; totemism 227 – 9 Cumont, Franz 179n29, 180n40, 210n12, 212n26 Cushing, Frank H. 109, 126 Dante 199, 309, 316n30 Danzel, Theodor W. 314n4 Daphne 25 Darmesteter, James 314n11 Dasein xix, 28, 43, 47, 98, 290; Daseinselemente 298; myth as life-form 195 – 6, 233, 277 Dedekind, R. 167 Demeter 233 – 4 Democritus 58, 62, 157, 206, 237 Descartes 170 Deucalion 25 Deussen, Paul 178n9, 181n55, 213n43, 265n66 dialectic of mythical consciousness xxi Diels, Hermann 88n4 Dieterich, Albrecht 259n6, 263n35 Dike 159, 237 Dionysus 227 – 8, 236 Diotima 303 Durkheim, Émile 230 – 2 Eckhart, Meister 302, 305, 310 – 11, 317nn33 – 4 Ehrenreich, Paul 32n20, 33n21 Einzelne, das (the individual) xvii Eisler, Robert 183n83 Electra 229 Ellis, Alfred 197 Empedocles 154 – 5 Epictetus 278 – 9 Erkenntnisse xvi, 13 Erman, Adolf 212n25, 267n79



330

index

Gough, Archibald 283n21 Graebner, Fritz 74n40, 179 – 80n36 Grassmann, Hermann 177n1 Grey, George 263n38 Groot, J. J. M. de 72n15, 139, 152, 182n79 Grundbestand 27, 271 Gruppe, Otto 70n5 Gutmann, Bruno 260 – 1n17 Hamann, Johann 305 – 6, 315n27, 315n29 Harnack, Adolf von 300 – 1 Hegel, G. W. F. x, xxiv, xxxi – xxxii, 12, 30, 254, 269 – 70, 277, 282 – 3n18 Hehn, Johannes 186n138 Heidegger, Martin xi – xiii, xix Helmholtz 39 Henry, Victor 212n33, 314n11 Heraclitus 120, 158 – 9, 161 – 3, 237 Herder, J. G. xx, 5, 120 Herodotus 293 Hillebrandt, Alfred 134 Hirzel, Rudolf 71n10 Hölderlin 4 Homer 122, 141, 197, 234 – 6, 238 Hopfner, Theodor 213n40, 281n5 Hopkins, E. W. 73 – 4n37, 281 – 2n7 Horus 230, 267n79 Howitt, Alfred W. 178n15 Huang, Emperor 150 Hubert, Henri 103n3 Humboldt, Wilhelm von xviii, xxxiv, 27 Hume, David 54, 56, 252 Husserl, Edmund xxivn1, 32n15 I-concept xxiii, 189, 207 – 8 identity-thinking xxi – xxiii, 83 image of life xxii, 134 immanence xxi, 194, 304

Indra 113, 248 Ionia 115 Isaiah 275, 292 Ishtar 165, 282n16 Isis 18, 229 – 30 Jackson, A. V. W. 182n68 Jacobi, Friedrich H. 305 – 6 James, Edwin 71n11 Jastrow, Morris 33n22, 178n17, 180n49 Jensen, Peter 181n50 Jeremiah 144, 296 Jeremias, Alfred 33n22 Jevons 281 – 2n7 Jones, William 103n2 Jong, Karel de 71n7 Junker, Heinrich F. 181nn58 – 9, 183n83, 266n71 Jupiter 115, 124 Kala 140 Kant, Immanuel viii – x, xii, xxviii, 4, 12; dialectic of mythical consciousness 306; myth as form of intuition 101, 116, 150; myth as life-form 220; myth as thought-form 37 – 8, 54, 74n40 Kapp, Ernest 256 Karutz, Richard 75n44 Kepler, Johann 164 – 6 Kingsley, Mary H. 72n18, 197 Kluge, F. 314n13 Kollektivwesen (collective being) 224 Kopp, Hermann 89n9 Kulturvölker (cultural people) xx Lachesis 158, 206 Langer, Fritz 33n24 Lavoisier 84 Legge, James 181n52



332

index

Patrizzi 165 Patroclus 194 Paul, Saint 305 Perseus 115 Phenomenology of Cognition, The (Cassirer) x phenomenology of mythical consciousness xx – xxi, 16, 190, 201 Pherecydes of Syros 154 Philolaus 166 – 7, 171 – 2, 205 philosophy of consciousness xii – xiii philosophy of mythology: the problem of 1 – 19; reversal of the problem of 19 – 31 Philosophy of Mythology (Schelling) 5, 12, 14 – 15, 216 – 17 philosophy of symbolic forms 37, 257, 306 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, The (Cassirer) vii – xiv, xv, xxviii Pischel, Richard 283n20, 314n15 Plato 3, 4; dialectic of mythical consciousness 303, 305; myth as form of intuition 125, 157 – 9, 162 – 4, 171; myth as life-form 204 – 6, 229, 237, 247, 251; myth as thought-form 42 Plethon, Georgios Gemistos 4 Plotinus 207 Polybius 126 Poseidon 233 – 4 Prajapati 140, 248 – 9 Preuss, Konrad T. 49, 56, 71n7, 75n43, 119 primitive, the xix – xx, 21 – 2; myth as form of intuition 119 – 21, 170 – 1; myth as life-form 192 – 4, 205 – 8, 225 – 33; myth as thoughtform 83 – 4; primitive logic 61; primitive-mythical configuration

77, 96, 205, 219, 279, 278; primitive stage of mythical thinking xix, 83 – 4, 102, 193; “soul-concept” 70n3 Ptah 247 Pyrrha 25 Reinhardt, Karl 74n40, 183n97 Reitzenstein, Richard 70n7, 212n25, 263n31, 263n36, 315n23 Renouf, Peter Le Page 181n51, 262n31, 266n79 repetition xix, 150 Reuchlin 170 Ritter, Hellmut 262n24 Rohde, Erwin 71n8, 73n34, 205, 262n30 Roscher, Wilhelm H. 178n13, 185n130, 186n138, 186nn140 – 2 Rumi, Djala od-din 280 Sache (the thing) xxi, 29; dialectic of mythical consciousness 292, 304; myth as form of intuition 102; myth as life-form 201, 275 – 7; myth as thought-form 46, 48 – 53, 67, 85; Ur-Sache (originary-thing, originary-cause) xxiii, 65, 288; Ursachen (causes) 65, 199, 314n2 Sachgehalt (material content) 29; see also material content sacred, the xx, xxii; dialectic of mythical consciousness 307 – 8; myth as form of intuition 95, 99 – 100, 107, 118, 122 – 3, 128, 170; myth as life-form 269, 275 – 8; myth as thought-form 49 – 50 sacred number xxiii, 77, 173, 185n127



334

index

Umwelt xix Unger, Rudolf 315n27 unity xxiv, xxix–xxx, 8–9, 11–16, 18–24, 26, 28; cult and sacrifice 269–70, 276–7; dialectic of mythical consciousness 302–4, 306–7; the I and the soul 196–9, 211nn24–5; myth as form of intuition 112–14, 166, 169, 171, 176–7; myth as thought-form 40–2, 67–81, 86–8; the phases of the mythical concept of the I 246, 258, 260n16, 261n17; totemism 215, 217–18, 220–2, 225–6 universism 139 Urgrund (originary-ground) xxiii, 138, 142, 152, 154, 306 – 7 Ur-Sache (originary-thing, originarycause) xxiii, 65, 288 Ursachen (causes) 65, 199, 314n2 Usener, Hermann K. 25 – 6, 122, 176, 203, 230, 240, 244 – 5 Van Gennep, Arnold 71n11, 74n39, 179n35, 180n43 Varutrit 248 Venus 165 Vernichtung (destruction) xxx, 288 Vico, Giambattista 4 Vignoli, Tito 33n26 Vishvakarman 250 Vohu Manah 294 Warneck, Johannes G. 73n37, 209n11, 212n29, 213n38 Weber, Max 264n42

Weinhold, Karl 74n37, 185n130 Wesen (being) xxiii – xxiv, xxviii, xxxiii, 5, 13, 15, 25 – 6, 29; dialectic of mythical consciousness 288, 298 – 9, 301, 306 – 12; die Eigenheit des Wesens (particularity of being) 51; Gotteswesen (divine being) 228; Kollektivwesen (collective being) 224; myth as form of intuition 112 – 13, 135 – 6, 140, 151, 165, 168 – 9; myth as life-form 202 – 3, 219 – 22, 225 – 6, 235 – 7, 274, 283n18; myth as thought-form 56, 66, 69, 80, 83 – 5; Selbstwesen (self-being) 311; Wesen für sich (independent being) 84 Wesen für sich (independent being) 84 wesenlos (essenceless) 149 Wiedemann, Alfred 212n25, 267 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von 263n34, 264n46 Williger, Eduard 104n11, 179n34 Wilson, Thomas 185n135 Winkler, Hugo 33n22, 180n49 Wirz, P. 261n23 Wissowa, Georg 71n12, 179n32, 212n26 Ymir 66, 73n31 Zagreus 228, 236, 262n30 Zeus 141, 154, 228 Zoroaster 204, 293 Zwingli 300