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of Thebes. Orpheus brought them into Greece, and the Sibylline verses announced them to the queen of the world (Rome). If I were to adduce the passages from those prophetic songs, it would be said, that some Christians had either fabricated or falsified them; but were the verses of Virgil inspired into a Gothic monk? Was the pagan Servius,* who commented upon them a critique in a convent? If Virgil was a Roman, if he flourished in the times of Augustus, how was it that he announced that the last times predicted by the sibyl were accomplished, that the golden age was advancing, that the sun, the eternal emblem of the Divine Word, was about to diffuse its light? Who was that virgin, that child which should change the face of the world? It was Augustus, reply the learned commentators; but, if the flattery of the poet applied this prediction to a man, does it not address itself to a God?

The gross multitude of antiquity adored the material symbols of a worship which was divine in its origin; the school of the eighteenth century thought that it saw the adoration of the sun in Christianity. Every religion arises in spiritualism, and becomes extinct in materialism. The unbelieving feticism of Dupuis, like the superstitious feticism of antiquity, proclaims the end of a church, and brings to pass a new religious regeneration (or a new dispensation.)

Truth appears a stranger to human nature; although the gift of heaven, men reject it or pervert it. The principle of paganism must be sought for in the human heart, and not in history, which can only take cognizance of its external manifestation. Politics do not give rise to idolatry, but politics know how to profit by it; to give it new powers, but not to create that infinite variety of divinities. The unity of God would have been, no doubt, the religion created by oriental despotism: the unity of government claimed it; polytheism could engender nothing but schisms and division. The symbols of the divinity, materialized by people sunk in what is material, were the origin of the creeds which imbruted the nations of antiquity, and four thousand years arrested the march of the human mind.

St. Clement, of Alexandria, informs us, that the Egyptians made use of three sorts of characters in writing. Varro, the most learned of the Romans, proves the existence of three kinds of theology; and we find in the history of religions three epochs marked by three distinct languages.

The divine language addresses itself first to all men, and reveals to

*The Jesuit Hardouin pretended that the Eneid of Virgil was fabricated by monks in the cloisters of Citeaux. This was, no doubt, a joke or a mystification.

them the existence of God; symbols are the language of all people, as religion is the property of every family. The priesthood did not yet exist; every father was a priest and a king.

The sacred language had its birth in the sanctuaries and temples; it regulated the symbols of architecture, of statuary, and of painting, as well as the ceremonies of worship and the costumes of the priests. This first materialization imprisons the divine language under impenetrable veils.

Then the profane language, which is the material expression of symbols, is the food cast to the nations that are given up to idolatry. God first speaks to men in the celestial language contained in the Bible and in the most ancient religious books of the east. The sons of Adam soon forget this heritage, and God again reveals the Word under the symbols of the sacred language; he regulates the costumes of Aaron, the Levites, and the rituals of worship; religion becomes external, and men, no longer feeling it in themselves, wish to see it.

In the last degree of corruption mankind understands only what is material; then the divine Word clothes itself with a body of flesh, in order to make known, in profane or common language, the last echo of eternal truth.

The most ancient religious traditions inform us, that the Iranians assigned to each planet a beneficent or malign influence, according to their colour and their degree of light. In Genesis God said to Noah, "I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth." In mythology, Iris was the messenger of the gods and of good tidings, and the colours of the girdle of Iris, the rainbow, are the symbols of regeneration, which is the covenant or conjunction between God and man.

In Egypt, the robe of Iris sparkles with all colours, and with all the hues which shine in nature. Osiris, the all-powerful god, gives light to Isis, who modifies it, and transmits it by reflection to men. Isis is the earth, and her symbolic robe was the hieroglyphic of the material and of the spiritual world. The fathers of the church, those Platonicians of Christianity, see in the Old Testament the symbols of the New Covenant.* Joseph was a symbol of the Messiah, and that coat variegated with the most beautiful colours, which his father gave him, was, says St. Cyril, the emblem of the divine attributes. Such were the symbols of the divine language, when the sacred language took its rise.

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The arts sprung from religion; it was for the purpose of adorning the temples and the sacred enclosures that sculpture and painting

made their first essays. This fact is not only applicable to the history of the human race, but it is also found to be true in the origin of every people. In the most ancient monuments of India and Egypt, as in those of the middle ages, architecture, statuary, and painting, are the material expressions of religious thought.

Painting among the Hindus, the Egyptians, and even still in our days, among the Chinese, derived its rules from the national worship and from political laws: the least alteration in the design or the colouring entailed upon the artist a grievous punishment.

Among the Egyptians, writes Synesius, the prophets did not permit those who fuse metals, or statuaries, to represent the gods, from fear lest they should deviate from the rules.

"In the temples of Egypt," says Plato, "it has never been permitted, nor do they permit at the present day, either to the painters, or to the other artists who make figures, or other similar kinds of work, to innovate in the least, or to depart in any thing from that which has been regulated by the laws of the country; and if we give attention, we shall find amongst them works of painting and sculpture which have been done for ten thousand years (when I say ten thousand years, it is not an hyperbole of speech, but literally so), which are are neither more nor less beautiful than those of the present day, and which have been worked according to the same rules."*

At Rome those who put on, or sold, a purple garment incurred the pain of death. At the present day, in China, he who wears or purchases garments with the prohibited designs of the dragon and the phoenix, is punished with 300 stripes, and with three years banishment. Symbolical science explains this severity of the laws and of manners: to every colour, and to every design, belonged a religious or political idea; to change or alter it was a crime of apostasy or rebellion."

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We might affirm, without invoking any authority, that if the design of the Egyptian hieroglyphics is symbolical, the colour was equally so. Does it not, indeed, present the most direct means of striking the eye and of attracting the attention? Even in our days, are not great colourists more popular than great designers?

In ascending to the origin of writing, we find that colours were the great means of transmitting thought and of preserving the memory of it. The quipos of Peru and the small cords of China, dyed in different colours, formed the archives, both religious, political, and administrative, of those people in their infancy. The Mexicans went a step far*The Laws of Plato, book 2.

Justinian Cod. lib. 4, tit. 40

ther in the art of representing speech; and we shall see (in the course of this treatise) colours playing an important part on the pictures of this people. The Egyptian hieroglyphics were the apogee and the last term of this symbolic writing.

The profane language of colours was a degradation of the divine and sacred language. We find some traces of it amongst the Greeks and the Romans. In scenic representations colours were significative. A curious passage from Pollux* gives the sense employed in these costumes of the theatre. Tradition also demonstrates it, but materialized

as it is in our days.

Christianity gave a new energy to the language of colours, and recalled their forgotten signification; the doctrine taught by Jesus Christ was not therefore new, since it borrowed its symbols from the ancient religions. The Son of God, in bringing back mankind to truth, did not come to alter the law, but to fulfil it: this law was the worship of the true God, which was primitively revealed to all mankind, and preserved in the holy ark of the Mosaic dispensation. Moses and the prophets quote from certain sacred books, which are not found in the Bible; the books entitled The Wars of Jehovah and The Prophetic Enunciations of the Book of Jashert, had, therefore, announced the Divine Word to other nations. We shall find the manifest proof of this in comparing the monuments of antiquity with those of the middle ages.

The three languages of colours, the divine, the sacred, and the profane, are characteristics, in Europe, of the three classes of society,—the clergy, the nobility, and the people. The painted windows of Christian churches, like the paintings of Egypt, have a double signification, -apparent and hidden; the one is for the multitude, and the other is addressed to mystic creeds. The theocratic era lasted even to the revival of a new order of things. At this epoch the symbolic genius becomes extinct, the divine language of colours is forgotten; painting is an art and no longer a science.‡

The aristocratical era commences; symbolic science, banished from the church, takes refuge in the court; disdained by painting, we find it again in heraldry. The origin of armorial bearings is lost in antiquity, and appears to have originated with the first elements of

* Julii Pollucis Onomasticum, lib. 4, cap. 18.

+ See Numb. 21; Josh. 10; 2 Sam. chap. 1, ver. 18.

The more the influence of art is observed on the paintings of the middle ages, the less we discover the traces of the symbolic language. The Bible of the tenth century, preserved in the Royal Library, is one of the most curious monuments for the symbolic science, and perhaps the most pitiable for design.

writing the Egyptian hieroglyphics, like the aztec paintings, indicated the signification of a subject by speaking emblems or arms. It is sufficient to consider the Mexican pictures, and the explanation of them which has been preserved, to banish all doubt on this subject.* The representations of the Indian and Egyptian divinities, consisting of a monstrous combination of forms, both human and animal, had, no doubt, a mysterious sense. In Greece the progress of art delivered statuary and painting from these hybrid creations, but the divinities would have confounded themselves in one and the same type. They gave them attributes. Jupiter had for his armorial bearings the eagle and the thunder-bolt, Minerva the olive tree and the owl, and Venus the dove. The middle ages renewed these mongrel creations of high antiquity; on the most ancient monuments of Christian art these compound figures appear: Christianity, like Paganism could not sculpture and paint its dogmas but by borrowing the symbolic language. Hence it was, that the queen Pedauque was represented with a goose's foot on the portal of several churches in France.t The confinement of women in cloisters in the East gave a new importance to the emblems of colours; they replaced spoken language, as the symbolic nosegay became the written language of love. Amongst the Arabs, as amongst all people, this language was of religious origin. In ancient Persia, spirits or genii had certain flowers which were consecrated to them ; and we also find the symbolic language of flowers in India and in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome.§

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The selam, or nosegay of the Arabs, appears to have borrowed its emblems from the language of colours; the Koran gives the mystic reason of it. "The colours," says Mahomet, "which the earth displays to our eyes, are manifest signs for those who think."||

This remarkable passage explains the chequered robe which Isis, or nature, wore, conceived as a vast hieroglyphic. The colours which appear on the earth correspond to the colours which the seer beholds in the world of spirits, where every thing is spiritual, and, consequently, significative. Such is, at least, the origin of the symbolical

* See Receuil de Thevenot.

+ See Bullet, Mythologie Française, p. 33. Boun-Debesch, p. 407.

§ A learned German has lately published the mythological history of the flowers in Greece and in Rome, (Dierbach, Flora Mythologica oder Pflanzenkunde in bezug auf Mythologie und Symbolik der Griechen und Römer). We shall confirm the existence of these traditions in the middle ages; their last popular expression is preserved even to our days; and the author of the language of flowers has gathered the emblematic signification of 190 plants (Delachenaye, Abécédaire de Flore, or langage des fleurs, P. Didot).

See Koran, chap. 16, trans. by Savary.

-VOL. 3.

N.S. NO. 34.-v

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