And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form;
and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help,
descending, as the Fire, to speak but as the Dove, to bless.
67. Next, in the serpent we approach the source of a group of myths,
world-wide, founded on great and common human instincts, respecting which
I must note one or two points which bear intimately on all our subject.
For it seems to me that the scholars who are at present occupied in
interpretation of human myths have most of them forgotten that there are
any such thing as natural myths, and that the dark sayings of men may be
both difficult to read, and not always worth reading. And, indeed, all
guidance to the right sense of the human and variable myths will probably
depend on our first getting at the sense of the natural and invariable
ones. The dead hieroglyph may have meant this or that; the living
hieroglyph means always the same; but remember, it is just as much a
hieroglyph as the other; nay, more,--a "sacred or reserved sculpture," a
thing with an inner language.
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