THE interest in relics has its foundation in the transitory nature of all material forms and the difficulty with which man makes any permanent impression upon them. It has taken but a thousand years or so to obliterate the monumental evidences of some of the greatest cities of the world. A few manuscript books have lasted a little longer, but time at last tyrannizes over all; walls crumble, the ancient books go piecemeal to rags, languages die, the meaning of Words and symbols changes, and it requires the continuous attention of man to rescue anything from the sea of oblivion that continually encroaches upon the shores of history. A few leading ideas and words seem to last forever, but, as a rule, all human handiwork that appeals to the eye disappears sooner or later; and when we meet with any artificial object which presents to our eyes a form preserved while cities have crumbled and nations have vanished, it seems a new revelation of the past. But it is in the unexpected discovery that familiar words, ideas, and objects have a pedigree as long as chronology itself, that we get, perhaps, the most vivid impression of contact with the past, and that shadowy hands seem to reach out suddenly from some mysterious storehouse of dead and dusty things to clasp our own. For the great majority of even educated people, such an experience as this may he found in the history of the modern dollar-mark, $. How little does the clerk, shopkeeper, or banker who makes a hundred times a day this familiar figure, imagine he is making representations of the oldest symbol known to the human race ; one which seems to have been elaborated out of the mythologies of all the ancients, passing through numberless changes by the outgrowth of fanciful legends from the original ideas, hut clearly traceable to the earliest races, of whom we get only shadowy outlines in the dusk of antiquity, — a symbol known to those who built Tyre and Carthage as “the pillars of Heracles,” but as ancient to them as to us. In comparatively modern times poetic fancy has conferred this name on the two mountains that stand at the entrance to the Mediterranean,—Calpe on the north, and Abyla on the south side of the straits. But for more than two thousand years before this diversion of the name, the form of the material symbol was two pillars of wood or stone.
But how came the two pillars to be symbolized in the dollar-mark, and what was their original meaning ?
The transfer of the title Pillars of Hercules to the two mountains furnishes at least a local beginning point in the answer to the first of these queries.
According to tradition, Melcarthus, a Tyrian navigator and explorer, sailing in search of fabled Atlantis or dimly rumored Britain, had paused in a bay at the western extremity of the land beyond the straits, and set up there two pillars as a memorial, building over them the temple, of Hercules. A colony of Tyre was established there, and the place grew into the ancient Gades, the modern Cadiz. As the temple increased in wealth through the votive offerings of passing voyagers it became more splendid, and the first rude pillars of stone were replaced by others made of precious metals. As late as the second century this temple existed in its greatest splendor. Flavius Philostratus, who visited it, testifies to its magnificence, and in his Life of Apollonius of Tvana gives the following description of the pillars: —“
“ The pillars in the temple were composed of gold and silver, and so nicely blended were the metals as to form but one color. They were more than a cubit high, of a quadrangular form, like anvils, whose capitals were inscribed with characters neither Indian nor Egyptian, nor such as could be deciphered. These pillars are the chains which bind together the earth and sea. The inscriptions on them were executed by Hercules in the house of the Paroce, to prevent discord arising among the elements and that friendship being disturbed which they have for each other.”
These pillars were the nucleus of the ancient Cades, and naturally became the metropolitan emblem of the modern city, as the horse’s head was of Carthage.
Leaving for the present the explanation of the original signification of the two pillars, the story of their descent to us may be briefly outlined as follows : —
When Charles V. became Emperor of Germany he adopted a new coat of imperial arms, in which those of Spain were quartered with those of the empire, the pillars of the arms of Cadiz being made supporters in the device.
At Seville was an imperial mint in which was coined a standard dollar called in the Mediterranean coasts “ colonnato,” the most prominent figures in the device on this coin being the two pillars and the scroll twined about them, the representation of which with a pen came to be the accepted symbol of the coin.
Melcarthus was a Tyrian, and the pillars must, therefore, have been known and reverenced as it sacred symbol in Tyre long before he set them up on the shores of the Atlantic. Additional proof of this may be found in the fact that on the coins of Tyre were prominently depicted, with some other emblems, two short pillars, arranged as supporters, one on either side of the general device, the proportions corresponding nearly to those described by Philastratus. The Tyrians, though not the first people to coin money, were the first to give it general circulation. Their coinage became the currency of the world, and the two pillars with which it was stamped would naturally become the symbol for money, so that the adoption of the dollar-mark to designate the “ pillarpieces ” of Charles V. was probably only the revival of an ancient custom which at first referred to the “pillar-pieces ” of Tyre.
The pound-mark, £, in all probability owes its distinguishing feature, the two horizontal bars, to the same symbol, though in tills connection they came into England by another route than Spain. The L was the initial letter of the Latin Libra, a balance, and was used to signify a standard by which to weigh the precious metals, the name of the weight being derived from the Roman pondo, a pound. But in the time of Henry VIII. the pound sterling which had been used as a standard for money was superseded by another pound, which had been brought from Cairo in Egypt to Troyes in France during the Crusades. In the two hundred years from the eleventh to the close of the thirteenth century, the zeal to recapture Jerusalem brought the people of Europe more in contact with each other, producing an interchange of ideas and customs, though the jealousies of the two or three most powerful nations retarded their general adoption. It was probably owing to the ancient hatred of Briton and Caul that this Troyes weight was not definitely adopted in England until it was carried there by Venetian goldsmiths, about the year 1496. When it was so adopted it was probably distinguished from the old sterling, or “ easterling ” pound by adding to the pound-mark L two strokes of the pen to represent the pillars of Hercules, the common money symbol in the Mediterranean cities. But as the lower arm of the L was the shortest, a symmetrical written character could be made more easily by changing the pillars from the perpendicular to the horizontal. In handwriting, it is natural to make all straight marks slanting and not upright, and the change from slanting marks to horizontal ones would be as readily adopted as any other change in the symbol.
So much for the story of the two pillars as connected with money.
The tradition of the Freemasons in regard to the two pillars, which are a prominent emblem of their craft, is, that they represent the pillars Jachin and Boaz which Hiram of Tyre made for Solomon and set one on either side of the entrance to the Temple, to commemorate the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night which guided the Israelites in their forty years’ wanderings in the wilderness. Whatever significance the Hebrews may have attached to these pillars, there is good reason for believing that they received the material emblem from the Tyrians at the time of the building of the Temple. The Scriptures give a minute account of the dimensions and designs of the pillars (2 Kings vii., and 2 Chronicles in.), but are silent as to their significance ; and there is nothing in the whole Scriptural account of them to forbid the conclusion that the ideas symbolized by them were as much Tyrian as Jewish. Tyre had been a rich and prosperous city for over two hundred years when Solomon undertook the building of the Temple. The Tyrians had been skilled in architecture and other arts to a degree that implied a high state of mental culture while the Hebrews were yet nomadic tribes living in tents. The tabernacle was only a tent, and in this first Hebrew endeavor to give it a more enduring structure of wood and stone, Solomon naturally appealed to the greater skill of the subjects of the friendly Hiram, king of Tyre. When the Hebrews began to build the Temple they ceased their wanderings, they became permanently established, and, as a memorial of this fact, they embodied in the architectural design of the Temple a symbol which, by the Tyrians and many other nations descended from the ancient Aryan stock, was considered emblematic of a divine leadership that had conducted them to a new and permanent home ; this was the true significance of the two pillars.
As long as the Hebrews were wanderers the pillars of cloud by day and of fire by night were merely a metaphor, to express their belief in a divine direction of their movements. When they came at last to the promised land, the figurative pillars of cloud and fire became the two pillars in the porch of the Temple as the symbol of the establishment of the nation.
Having thus traced the story of the emblems back through two lines of descent to a common point in Tyre, we must take a look into the remoter past to find the origin of the symbol in the earliest recorded ideas of the human race in connection with the Deity, and from that point we may follow its descent again through the two independent routes of Greek and Scandinavian mythology.
The ancient Aryans who composed the Vedas had not then arrived at the stage of intellectual development in winch they could entertain the idea of an abstract principle as the one universal law, or of any god except a visible one. To them it seemed impossible that there could be a spiritual essence without some material form. Fire, the most inexplicable and striking of the agencies of nature, was accepted by them as this first and allpervading force which controlled the universe ; and the sun, the grandest and most brilliant mass of fire, as the embodiment of the Deity.
Here are two verses of the Vedas, as translated by Max Müller, which may he called the Genesis of the Brahmins, and in them are two words around which have crystallized fancies growing into myths, and myths growing into monuments of wood and stone, and again into ideal beings, until the original conceptions have been almost lost. Yet through all these changes some characteristics of the original meaning have been so stamped upon each new form, that the thread of connection, from those ancient days when the first peoples of the human race worshipped the sun on the plains of Central Asia, down through all the ages to the comparatively modern symbol of the Pillars of Hercules, is unmistakable : —
1. “In the beginning there arose the golden Child. He was one born lord of all that is. He established the earth and this sky ; — Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice ?
2. “ He who gives life, he who gives strength, whose command all the bright gods revere, whose shadow is immortality ; whose shadow is death ; — Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice ? ”
If there were nothing but the coincidence of the two words italicized in the foregoing verses, with the names of the two pillars in Solomon’s Temple, — Jachin meaning strength, and Boaz to establish,—if there were nothing but this to establish the connection of the two pillars as well as the Pillars of Hercules and also the Greek myth of Castor and Pollux, with these ancient expressions, the identity of all these myths and symbols might be more doubtful than it is; but there is more.
In the Vedas the sun is called the “ runner,” the “ quick racer ” ; he is called Arvat, the horse; Agni, the fire ; Arusha, the. red one, the strong one, the son of Heaven and Earth; Indra, the god of all gods. He is represented as drawn in a chariot over his daily course through the heavens by “ the harits,” “ the rohits,” and “the arushas,” i. e. the gleaming, the ruddy, and the gold-colored horses of the dawn, which are the first rays of the morning sun.
The flexibility of the idea, within a certain range of expressions, seems to be acknowledged by the poets of the Vedas in the following verse : —
“ Hear thou, the brilliant Agni, my prayer, whether the two black horses bring thy car, or the two ruddy, or the two red horses.”
Notwithstanding all the interchanging of names, numbers, and genders, and the changing of forms from animal to human and vice versa, there is an adherence to the idea of beings endowed with supernatural strength and brightness, and of a contest between, and alternating supremacy of, light and darkness !
It requires no great stretch of the imagination to conceive how, in the Greek modification of tins many-sided plastic myth of the sun-god, Indra should be the prototype of Jove, and Arusha of Apollo, and also of Heracles. Indeed, it seems probable that, out of the numerous names of this one object of adoration, the sun, grew nearly all the wonderful and fantastic system of both Greek and Scandinavian mythology.
In the Vedic myths the phenomena which attended the rising and setting of the sun, the clouds, some black, some ruddy, and some shining like molten gold or silver, and also his first and last beams darting through, were spoken of as horses or cattle, or beings with human forms, almost invariably in pairs.
In some places the ruddy clouds that precede his rising are called the “ bright cows.” The two horses which the sun is said to harness to his car are called the “ Arusha,” the red ones ; in other places they are called the “ two Asvins,” the shining mares; and in others the idea is modified still more, and they are called the “ two sisters,” and, at last, we find, are named Day and Night, the “daughters of Arusha,” the one gleaming with the brightness of her father, and the other decked with stars. Professor Whitney, in his Essay on the Vedas, introduces the “ two Asvins ” as “ enigmatical divinities,” whose vocation or province in Aryan mythology he does not discover, though, at the same time, he intimates the probability that they may be identical with the Dioscuri of the Greeks; and Professor Miüler hints at the same identity, but with no more reference to their true character of divine forerunners or guides for families, tribes, or races of men wandering about the world in search of new homes. It is related of the Dioscuri, that, when Castor was killed, Pollux, inconsolable for his loss, besought Jove to let him give his own life for that of his brother. To this Jove so far consented as to allow the two brothers to each pass alternate days under the earth and in the celestial abodes, their alternate daily deaths and ascensions into the heavens being only another version of the story of Day and Night, the daughters of Arusha. The twin brothers Castor and Pollux are represented as always clad in shining armor, and mounted on snow-white steeds, thus reproducing the chief characteristics of the “two Asvins,” the shining mares of the Vedas, and showing that all these metamorphoses are only variations of the same idea.
The Hebrew metaphor of the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, to express the idea of a divine leadership, points to the same natural objects — clouds and fire— that to the earlier Aryans were symbols of the presence of the Deity; and the whole idea might seem a reproduction or elaboration of that expressed in the following verses of the Rig-Veda, written a thousand years before : —
“Wherever the mighty water - clouds went, where they placed the seed and lit the fire, thence arose He who is the sole life of the bright gods; —Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice ?
“ He who by His might looked even over the water-clouds, the clouds which gave strength and lit the sacrifice; He who alone is God above all gods.”
The fact that nearly every manifestation of the presence of the Deity recorded in Hebrew history down to the time of the building of the Temple was in a cloud, shows at least a remarkable resemblance to the Aryan conceptions of the divine presence.
The further elaboration of the idea in symbolizing the presence of the Deity by two pillars of wood or stone, and particularly of such presence in the character of a leader through long wanderings to a place of permanent establishment, was not exclusive with the Hebrews. Other races with whom the Hebrews could not have come in contact had precisely the same symbol of two pillars of wood or stone, —a* fact which makes it a reasonable presumption that the two pillars, one of cloud one of fire, which were their prototypes, were not more exclusively a Hebrew idea.
In Sparta the twin Dioscuri are said to have been represented by two pillars of stone, which were sometimes joined by a smaller horizontal bar to represent their twinship. Frequently the top of one of these posts was carved in the semblance of a human head. The Spartans may
have borrowed the emblem from the Tyrians ; the fact that the ancient Northmen employed the two pillars to symbolize precisely the same ideas as those connected with them by the Hebrews and Greeks makes it quite as likely that the Spartans derived the symbol from the same original source as the Tyrians.
A column of stone was in fact a common symbol of the deity among many ancient nations. Venus was worshipped at Paphos under the form of a stone. Juno of the Thespians and Diana of the Icarians were worshipped under the same form. The most famous of the Syrian deities was El Gabal (the stone), a name to which is akin the modern Arabic gebel, a mountain, or a rock. The very name of Gibraltar, one of the mountains to which poetry has transferred the title of Pillars of Hercules, is from Gebel Tarik, the mountain, or the rock, of Tarik, one of the first Moors who set foot on the northern side of the straits, and after whom came those who established in Spain the brilliant and romantic empire of these successors of the ancient Phœnicians.
There is good ground for the presumption that Heracles of the Greeks was only another version of the myth of the Dioscuri. The Hebrews gave each of the pillars a name, though they received the emblem from the Tyrians, who employed them as the emblem of one deity; and as the Tyrians were earlier than the Greeks, this phase of the monotheistic significance of the pillars must have come down from the same ancient source as the myth of the Dioscuri.
With both Greeks and Tyrians “ Heracles,” transformed by the Latins into “ Hercules,” seemed to be a transferable honorary title. The proper name of the Tyrian Heracles was Melcarthus, whose mother was said to be Asteria, the starry heavens; while the proper name of the Greek Heracles was Alcæus, who was said to be the son of Jove by a mortal mother, Alcmena, as the Dioscuri were said to be the twin sons of Jove by a mortal mother, Leda. The Heracles of the Tyrians and the Castor and Pollux of the Greeks were the patron deities of seamen and navigators, as well as of feats of strength and agility.
Turning now to the mythology of the Scandinavians, we find in the character of Thor one which corresponds in all these particulars. He was said to be the son of Odin, the eldest of the gods, by Jörd (the earth). Not only do the stories of his feats of strength with his hammer correspond to those of Heracles with his club, but he was the patron deity of the early Norse navigators who were as daring as even the Phoenicians.
The “sacred columns'” of the Norse mythology were two high wooden posts, or pillars, fashioned by hewing. These stood on either side of the “high seat” of the master of the household, and hence were called “the pillars of the high scat,” and were a sort of household symbol of Thor. The upper end of one of the pillars being, like the Spartan symbol, carved in the semblance of a human head, the setting up of these pillars was the sign of the establishment of the household on that spot. When a Northman moved, no matter how far, he took his sacred pillars with him ; and where these were set up, there was his home until he made a formal change of domicile by moving them to some new spot.
When the Northmen discovered Iceland and began to emigrate there the sacred pillars of each Norse family were thrown overboard when the ship came near the land, and on the nearest habitable spot to where they were cast ashore by the waves they were set up, by planting the ends in the ground, as a symbol of possession, being in some respect a formal act of “entry,” having something of the same significance as the act of the emigrant in the Western States who has “ staked out a claim.”
When the pillars were set up the house was built around them, and, though the pillars and the domicile might be moved to new locations, the place where the pillars were first cast ashore always retained a peculiar significance and sacredness to the family. Thus it is related of Throd Hrappsson, that his pillars, when cast overboard, were carried away by the weaves and currents and apparently lost. He settled, however, on the eastern side of Iceland, and had been living there ten or fifteen years when it was discovered that his pillars had been cast ashore on the western coast, upon which he straightway sold his estate and moved to the locality where his pillars had been found.
Many other instances of the casting of the sacred columns into the sea, in order that they might guide Northmen in their selection of homes in Iceland, are related in Rudolph Keyser’s Religion of the Northmen. Of Eirik the Red it is told, that having loaned his posts of honor (possibly as a pledge of some promise to be fulfilled) to another Icelander, he could not get them back, which gave occasion for a long feud, into which many other families were drawn, and many of the adherents of both parties were slain, “When the Norse chieftain Thorolf Mostrurskegg left Norway to settle in Iceland he tore down the temple of Thor over which he had presided, — in which he seemed to have some kind of proprietary right from having built it chiefly at his own expense for the use of the worshippers of Thor, — and took with him the most of the timber, together with the earth beneath the platform on which Thor’s statue had been seated.” When he came in view of Iceland the two sacred columns of the temple were thrown into the sea ; and where these were cast on shore by the waves he called the place Thorsnes, and built the temple of Thor, placing the two sacred columns, one on either side, just within the doorway.
The incident s in which the two columns thus appear in the earliest history of the Norse people are, it is true, of modern date when compared with their appearance at the building of Solomon’s Temple, or the erection of the Pillars of Hercules by Melcarthus, near the Straits of Gibraltar ; but their later appearance in history as the “ Pillars of Thor ” does not argue that they were copied from the Pillars of Hercules, but only that written history or even chronology of any kind was not known in Scandinavia until a much later period than in Syria and Greece. The Germanic race, however, of winch the Northmen were a branch, had its origin in the centre of Asia near the Caspian Sea. From there they had brought the same traditions as the Syrians and Greeks; and the religious myths out of which the Greeks afterwards elaborated their fanciful system of mythology were by the Northmen, whose rude climate gave imagination a gloomier turn, fashioned into the more barbarous, grotesque, and sanguinary “Asa faith.” The cosmogony of the Greeks and the Northmen corresponds so nearly as to leave no doubt of a common origin, and yet the details were so different as to show that for ages the ancient stories must have been handed down from one generation to another by people possessed of a vastly different degree of refinement and surrounded by a different aspect of nature.
The Asa faith was as ancient as the cosmogony of the Phœnicians and the Greeks, and the sacred columns of Thor were not an idea borrowed from the Pillars of Heracles, but an independent perpetuation of the same mystic symbol.
The facts that the two pillars were a sacred symbol in three ancient and contemporaneous religions, and that they occupied the same position and significance in the temples of Thor of the Scandinavians, Heracles of the Tyrians, and Jehovah of the Hebrews, help to confirm the theory of a common mythology as the foundation and the source of the ideas of all the later faiths. The fervid spirit of the Hebrews gave to their version of this and other ancient conceptions a diviner mould. As the solar ray of light, split up by the prism, yields three groups of rays, one of which carries with it the main portion of the heat, another the greater part of all the light, and another nearly all the actinic qualities, and each of these groups embracing two or more of the seven prismatic colors, so the rays of that ancient Aryan sun, the first and most natural emblem of the Deity, falling on the human mind, have been elaborated into a great variety of faiths, each carrying with it some of the divine light, but in other characteristics as different as the groups in the spectrum of the analyzed solar ray. With one race the predominant traits of religious thought are brilliant, but merely sentimental corruscations of poetic fancy; with another, cold, practical maxims of thrift; with another, the fervid, but sombre enthusiasm, the zealous dogmatism that overturns empires.
But in all there is the acknowledgment that the regular alternation of day and night is the work of God, the phenomena indicating his presence to guide man around the habitable portions of the world.
“ Sun and moon go in regular succession, that we may see Indra and believe,”writes one of the poets of the Rig-Veda.
“ The day is thine, the night also is thine : thou hast prepared the light and the sun,” sings the poet of Israel.
W. L. Fawcette.
