The study of religious symbols[167] is not only a very extensive and
extremely attractive undertaking, but it is one of peculiar difficulty,
for with it is combined, not a danger, but a certainty of falling into
errors. There is hardly a subject upon which such diverse views can be
proposed and even maintained with a fair amount of presumptive evidence.
[167] Cf. pp. 119, 122, 213.
The danger of making mistakes is, however, considerably lessened if a
scientific method of study is adopted, and if speculation is reduced
to a minimum. No better example of the method of such a study is to
be found than in Count Goblet d’Alviella’s book on _The Migration of
Symbols_.[168] It is upon this valuable book that I have largely drawn
in compiling the following account.
[168] _The Migration of Symbols_, 1894.
The meaning of the term Symbol, like the objects we connote by it, has
undergone a transformation from a concrete reality to an abstraction.
Originally applied amongst the Greeks to the two halves of the tablet
they divided between themselves as a pledge of hospitality, in the
manner of our contract form, detached along a line of perforations
from the counterfoil record, it was gradually extended to the engraved
shells by which those initiated in the mysteries made themselves known
to each other, and even to the more or less esoteric formulas and
sacramental rites that may be said to have constituted the visible bond
of their fellowship. Then the meaning became amplified, and “the term
came to gradually mean everything that, whether by general agreement or
by analogy, conventionally represented something or somebody.”[169]
[169] _Loc. cit._, p. 1.
I have previously (p. 212) given Colonel Garrick Mallery’s definition
of the word, which sufficiently indicates the meaning generally applied
to it.