Cassian's four senses
John Cassian's Conferences, written for the monks of Gaul around 420, fix the fourfold reading of scripture — literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical — with Jerusalem as the worked example: a city, the Church, the soul, and the heavenly home at once.
The scheme systematises Origen's older three senses; the medieval mnemonic distich 'littera gesta docet' is a later coinage, not Cassian's own.
Gap · 420 CE – 450 CE · 30 years
Horapollo's Hieroglyphica
A Greek treatise ascribed to Horapollo of Nilopolis explains the hieroglyphs as allegorical pictures — the goose for filial devotion, the tail-biting serpent for the cosmos. As a guide to the script it is mostly wrong; as a theory of writing that shows essences rather than spelling sounds, it will govern European imagination for four centuries.
Both attribution and date are conventional; the text presents itself as translated from Egyptian by one Philippus, otherwise unknown.
Gap · 450 CE – 1419 · 969 years
The intervening millennium is transmission, not silence: the fourfold sense kept allegorical reading in constant exercise, and the Physiologus and the bestiaries carried the habit of reading creatures as meanings.
The hieroglyphic revival
Cristoforo Buondelmonti buys a manuscript of the Hieroglyphica on Andros in 1419 and carries it to Florence, where the humanists receive it as primal wisdom. The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili of 1499 prints invented hieroglyphs as the dream-language of its romance, and educated Europe now believes Egypt wrote in essences.
Fixed points
- Hieroglyphica rediscovered, 1419
- Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 1499
Gap · 1499 – 1531 · 32 years
Alciato's Emblemata
Andrea Alciato's Emblemata, first printed at Augsburg in 1531 — without his supervision and to his displeasure — invents the emblem book: motto, picture, and epigram made to be read together. Roughly a thousand emblem books follow across two centuries, a European industry of assembled meaning.
Alciato's own manuscript circulated without pictures; the woodcuts were the printer's addition, which is itself a lesson in how the form worked.
Impresa culture and Ripa's Iconologia
Paolo Giovio's Dialogo dell'imprese of 1555 codifies the personal device — picture as body, motto as soul — and courtly Europe takes up the game. Cesare Ripa's Iconologia of 1593 supplies the public counterpart: a dictionary of personifications consulted by painters and pageant-masters for two hundred years.
Fixed points
- Giovio's Dialogo dell'imprese, 1555
- Ripa's Iconologia, 1593
Gap · 1593 – 1652 · 59 years
Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus
Athanasius Kircher publishes the Oedipus Aegyptiacus in Rome, three volumes rendering hieroglyphic inscriptions as compressed Hermetic theosophy. The readings are almost entirely wrong; the conviction behind them — that the hieroglyph is a symbol and not a spelling — is the hieroglyphic imagination at its most complete.
Gap · 1654 – 1797 · 143 years
The Romantic symbol
Goethe distinguishes the symbol, which reveals the general in the particular, from allegory, which merely seeks a particular for its general; Coleridge's Statesman's Manual of 1816 gives the doctrine its English formula, the symbol partaking of the reality it renders intelligible. Allegory, the medieval workhorse, is demoted to mechanism.
Fixed points
- The Statesman's Manual, 1816
Creuzer's Symbolik
Friedrich Creuzer's Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker argues that Greek myth preserves a symbolic wisdom transmitted from eastern priesthoods. The philologists, Voss loudest among them, attack it at length, and the quarrel fixes the fault-line between symbolic and historical-critical readings of antiquity.
Champollion's decipherment
Jean-François Champollion's Lettre à M. Dacier announces that the hieroglyphs are in large part phonetic. Four centuries of the hieroglyphic reverie end: Egyptian writing spells sounds like any other script, and Horapollo and Kircher pass from authorities to curiosities.
The demonstration was completed in the Précis of 1824; symbolically minded readers resisted the result for decades.
Gap · 1822 – 1886 · 64 years
The Symbolist manifesto
Jean Moréas' manifesto in Le Figaro names the movement: a poetry that would clothe the Idea in sensible form, suggestion preferred to naming. Symbolism becomes the art-world carrier of the participatory symbol, the route by which the doctrine passes intact into the twentieth century.
Gap · 1886 – 1912 · 26 years
Jung and Saussure
Jung's Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido of 1912 reads the symbol as the psyche's natural speech, the best available expression of what is not yet known. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, assembled by his students and published in 1916, makes the arbitrariness of the sign the founding axiom of modern linguistics. The century's two positions are on the table.
Saussure himself reserved the word 'symbol' for the non-arbitrary case — the scales of justice — conceding the distinction even as he founded the rival school.
Gap · 1916 – 1952 · 36 years
1952-present
1952 – present
The archetypal afterlife
Mircea Eliade's Images and Symbols of 1952 defends the symbol as hierophany — the mode by which the sacred shows itself in profane things — while structuralism and semiotics carry Saussure's axiom through the human sciences. The claim of participation survives in depth psychology, in the history of religions, and wherever art keeps faith with the image.
