Eagle and Serpent. A Study in the Migration of Symbols

Abstract

In seeking to prove their case, 'diffusionist' ethnologists, who are concerned with the migration of symbols,1 have perhaps paid insufficient attention to those historical periods and civilizations in which the transmission of rites, symbols and ideas is adequately documented. And their opponents have been inclined to forget that in many fields of historical study the diffusionist method is already regarded as the natural starting-point of any discussion and, indeed, has often become a highly developed technique of research. On the other hand, students of European history have long realized that it is not enough, in order to understand a particular historical situation, to know whence a symbol came and whither it went. This method needs to be supplemented by the 'functional' method: that is, the attempt to understand the significance of a particular symbol in a given context. European history provides such a quantity of documentary material that it has long been possible to apply to it the functional method with positive results. In the present essay we shall deal with a very common symbol, the struggle between the Eagle and the Snake. Fights between eagles and snakes have actually been observed,2 and it is easy to understand that the sight of such a struggle must have made an indelible impression upon human imagination in its infancy. The most powerful of birds was fighting the most dangerous of reptiles. The greatness of the combat gave the event an almost cosmic significance. Ever since, when man has tried to express a struggle or a victory of cosmic grandeur, the early memory of this event has been evoked. Our procedure will be to argue from evidence to be found in the Mediterranean world. Since the migration of our symbol can be traced with certainty in Europe and the Mediterranean world of antiquity, it is reasonable to suspect that when the same symbol appears outside that area in different places and at different periods, it was not invented again independently, even if the connecting links are still missing. The most important part of such an investigation is the chronology, for the proof of the migration theory depends on it. Dates in ethnological material must quite often be based on uncertain suppositions; but in general, I hope, the chronological scheme here presented can be accepted. The 'functional' method applied to the European material shows that the same pictorial symbol, although always expressive of identical pairs of fundamental opposites, has in each case a very distinct meaning in the special historical setting in which it occurrs. Lack of space and lack of knowledge have compelled me to leave the nqn-European material in a more generalized form, although very often the exact function of the symbol could be worked out by specialists. 1 For a survey of ethnological methods cf. Alfred C. Haddon, History of Anthropology, 1934 and R. H. Lowie, The History of Ethno-