Prehistoric Time from Conversations
The following is a transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970. Participants were Eric Voegelin, Erin O’Connor, Charlottee Tansey, and Cathleen Going.
eric voegelin: What I have to do now is get all the analysis of concrete empirical material–which is horribly voluminous–into that fourth volume so that I have the basis for talking about these matters theoretically in the next volume.
eric o’connor: So the fourth volume will contain a good deal of the empirical matter–
voegelin: –and bring it to a close and make selections for the ecumenic empires, for Christianity, and for modernity.
o’connor: Then your search for when a symbol shows itself in history isn’t vitiated but modified? What is the modification? (It is extremely interesting to determine when something appears.)
voegelin: I can give you examples of what I’ve been doing on my present trip.
I started in Rome with Mario Praz, the best man on symbolism. (He is bringing out a new volume this year.) The Italians during the last four or five years have done most of the work on the development of Neoplatonism, Hermeticism, alchemy–because that was mostly an Italian phenomenon.
What turned out is that the following sequence: mannerism (sixteenth century), romanticism (end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries), symbolism (around 1900), surrealism (since the 1920s), is one sequence in continuity with medieval alchemy. The special program I was working on was a study of Hegel showing that speculative systems are a form of sorcery and alchemy. That can be shown only on the basis of comparative material (i.e., with mannerism and so on).
The alchemist Hermetic symbolism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is now well worked through by historians of literature and art, to show the continuity. So Hegel and Marx are magicians now.
o’connor: That won’t be very welcome.
Man is Not a Biological Species
voegelin: Another development in the last ten years only: With the East African discoveries by [Louis] Leakey of early man, it is now absolutely clear that man is not a natural species, a biological species.
o’connor: Meaning what?
voegelin: The biological species homo sapiens begins about thirty thousand years back; man as a tool-making, tool-using creature begins about three million years back. The history of humanity, if you make homo faber the criterion of “what is man?” begins long before we have the present biological species of man.
o’connor: You mean archeologically–?
voegelin: Yes, it can be shown by paleontological science that people who used tools did not at all belong to the species homo sapiens but to animal species (if you want to classify animals as a species). The whole study of man is independent now of the biological question.
o’connor:Has Leakey himself done that?
voegelin: Leakey made the discoveries in the 1960s, and [Adolf] Portman is the only man I have found who has drawn the consequences, developing a biological field theory as a substitute for the theory of species. We have a theory of evolution but not of species. And no longer a theory of mutations. Mutations pertain only to the laboratory species and experiments that have been coming to the fore since 1905, when Thomas Hunt Morgan started his studies in New York.
o’connor: The laboratory species that gave the grounds for notions of mutations–
voegelin: –do not apply to paleontological species. There probably aren’t any of that kind. The whole theory has to be revised. That is the biological side. After seeing Portman in Basel, I went to Saarbrucken to see Marie Konig, the best archaeologist for prehistoric matters. She gave me all the symbolisms of cave engravings, and so on, back to the Paleolithic Age.
o’connor: In paleontology is there any notion of what kind of creatures those were, except by their works? Have they identified them with the skeletons in any way?
voegelin: Oh yes, you can identify the skeletons with the artifacts which accompany them. It’s all there. And there is no doubt that they do not belong to the species homo sapiens.
o’connor: That’s a shift. Of course it’s been only three hundred years since the “species” notion, since the first struggles of John Ray about species in the logical and in the biological senses.
voegelin: Portman is of the opinion that the whole species concept is still in continuity with Linnaean description—something which approximately you called a species; whether it is one you really don’t know. For the great families of animals–reptiles and birds and mammals–it doesn’t work at all because they are not species. But the families are there.
o’connor: I see–so there has to be another grouping.
voegelin: An entirely different grouping as far as the species problem is concerned.
o’connor: And have you any glimmer in talking to them of what the definition will be of grouping that took hold with modern science?
voegelin: They don’t know yet. Probably we can do nothing but show that certain “plans of development”–say, a human type–emerge at some time.
o’connor: That is a larger notion and not easy to handle in a laboratory–
voegelin: But nobody knows the answer to that famous old question–whether the monkey is a side issue of man or man is a side issue of monkey. That’s a matter of speculative construction.
o’connor: I see you’re having some fun.
voegelin: These are the things that are now the great problems.
o’connor: In the material coming out in your volume four, will these questions be visible?
voegelin: They will become visible on the basis of the materials that I bring into this book, but the theoretical discussion comes in volume five.
The Emergence of Symbols in History
o’connor: May I go back to my first question: What you were so interested in–how symbols emerge, and at what points of history–certainly hasn’t got the same significance now, but it nevertheless is important.
voegelin: Oh yes. Whenever symbols emerge—of which we know the meaning because in continuity they go into the high civilizations—there are then commentaries on that meaning, in the form of myth, and they are written down, you know what they mean. Presumably when they appear without commentary they have the same meaning and express the same experience, which later is expressed in the myth.
o’connor: Except that the feedback of language is very strong once there is a story.
voegelin: Yes, there are accretions, and it is complicated. But there is no reason whatsoever to assume that, say, a symbol of cosmic unity, which is identical in a cave painting in Europe and in Egypt, would have entirely different meanings at the moment when a myth is written around it.
o’connor: No reason for saying they would be entirely different–but there is the feedback on the group.
voegelin: Yes, and of course you don’t know what else they talk of–because it’s not preserved. Or how far it goes back beyond paleolithic engravings. And also we don’t know because sometimes they used materials that have vanished. If instead of stone engravings, which require a certain development of tools, there were (for instance) wooden symbols, they would all be gone. In China the young capital of the Chou empire was a city of at least the splendor of Rome, and nothing is preserved because it was all built in wood.
o’connor: You’re almost back to the notion that perhaps there were whole massive civilizations that we don’t know anything about.
voegelin: Well, that is another matter. There may be others we don’t know about, but those we do know about are, I think, sufficient data. I’m satisfied to go back to about fifty thousand–I don’t want more!
o’connor: But it opens up the possibility–before, time was limited–for much to have happened.
voegelin: Of course we do not know yet what future excavations may bring. For instance, for the moment it looks as if all the oldest cave engravings are European (Isle de France, southern Alps, up to Norway–when the Ice Ages recede and so on). Perhaps we’ll find something in Asia if there are enough excavations.
[The conversation shifted to another subject and then returned to the main topic via the “archetypes” of Carl Jung.]
. . . . The drawings of Jung’s patients are simply mythical manifestations of an experience of wholeness of the cosmos, which can appear at any time.
o’connor: I see. He didn’t take it to the meaning, he took it to the image. Then obviously one found certain similarities–
voegelin: One has to go at it historically and see that what he calls the mandala type (squares in circles, Tibetan symbolization of the whole of the cosmos) you find everywhere. That’s how the cosmos is symbolized. You’re back in the Paleolithic Age, and it doesn’t help you to call it an archetype. It’s a type that always will reappear as symbolization of the whole of the cosmos. You can’t do anything but symbolize that either as the circle or the sphere or as four points.
The most primitive symbols are always simple strokes. You can symbolize by four lines (these are the four directions of the cosmos) [here Voegelin draws a diagram on the board] or you can make this figure [a cross in the circle, dividing it into four equal parts]–
o’connor: Now you make it closed in a way the other wasn’t.
voegelin: Or you can make a square combining the four points and inscribing in that another one; and then other ones, getting a sort of raster, a network.
All of these do appear on the paleolithic level. That raster, for instance, has become the symbol of cosmic power. And when you come to the Mesopotamian civilization you find a ruler seated on such a thing as his throne–it becomes a symbol of power. Or you find it in a cone: the cosmic omphalos, covered by that network–the omphalos of Delphi. There are coins of the Seleucid period where the king is sitting on that sort of throne. So the symbol becomes the power symbol of world empire.
Then you can get all sorts of combinations. For instance, a moon is always symbolized by the three phases–some sort of triangle.
And you can combine them; that’s why the tooth of a mammal or boar becomes a moon symbol also.
The Psychic Process
o’connor: You say “that’s why.” You’re not tracing a psychic process?
voegelin: The psychic process is always the fundamental experience of a cosmos symbolized by its ordering constellations (the sun–the moon).
tansey: Does the abstract thing come first?
voegelin: First you get abstractions; then the combinations (of a bison, say, in the cave paintings); then the iconoclastic reversals–still in the paleolithic period–where there is reduction to four lines or four or five points again, on small pebbles.
o’connor: So, there’s nothing against five?
voegelin: Nothing. You can get more: By putting a stick in the middle of such an engraving you get a sun dial and a sixth point–a below and an above point.
And there are combinations: a representation of the world as a square and on top of it the heaven–then you can put the axis of the world through heaven and earth into the underworld–and an underworld beneath it; it’s a sort of building–or a square topped by the heaven as a circle–the beginning, you might say, of cathedral architecture. All these things are possible.
o’connor: And related to a fundamental meaning–
voegelin: –the fundamental meaning of the four points as the sun symbol and the three points as the moon symbol. When you arrange properly a triangle and four lines you get something like a hand (you can interpret it naturalistically); after simple geometrical designs, you can add a thumb. The hand symbols appear as symbols of the world consisting of the sun and the moon.
o’connor: But when the marks are simple, they could be accidental marks.
voegelin: Such arrangements did not appear simply like that–they appear in groups. They are dotted by all sorts of points, produced probably by some sort of instrument with which you hit in a ritual gesture of knocking to the god to make him aware of your presence. The points due to ritual hammering show that these are ritual symbols.
o’connor: Quite shocking.
tansey: No, I like it better that the abstraction is first.
voegelin: Yes, the abstraction is always first. The naturalist interpretations come later: “that is a hand.” The symbol for the cosmos appears on late Byzantine coins as the decoration of an imperial mantle: That’s the world ruler. On Byzantine coins in the ninth and tenth centuries you see the emperor with the Christ symbol on his mantle instead. But that is not enough for a world symbol, so four dots and three dots are left and right of the emperor to show that he’s the world ruler. The imaginative elaborations are infinite.
The Beginning of Human Speech
o’connor: In materials you have worked with, is there any evidence as to where speech began?
voegelin: That is really a problem now in biology, because speech in the sense of human language requires a certain construction of the larynx and of the palate. It is a question, for instance, whether the construction of the palate in Neanderthal man is capable of producing speech–
o’connor: –if it is any way differentiated beyond just noises–
voegelin: Because animals can produce something like a bellow, but not articulate speech. These questions have been badly neglected because for early paleontological periods there are only skulls; the soft spots are gone.
going: What about imitative birds?
voegelin: They are imitative, but they do not articulate quite the way a man does.
o’connor: One can ask history when there is clear writing–but when you ask where speech begins, it’s like dropping a stone down a well.
voegelin: Well, no–biologists are working on that.
o’connor: Then there’s some hope of coming up with something.
voegelin: Yes. The Neanderthal man gets you back at least 35,000 years.
tansey: There is a theory that the innovations in speech happen through children; the creative thing didn’t happen once the pattern was formed.
voegelin: So the world is full of movements!
This excerpt is from The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers: 1939-1985 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 33) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004)
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