Romantic, the self-avowed psychological novelist Karl Philip
Moritz (1757–1793) merits mention for drawing attention
to dreams as symbolic expressions of the inner self. The first
major achievement in this area came after the turn of the cen-
tury, with Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860), whose
views of the dream as an abbreviated hieroglyphic language
later earned him recognition by Freud as a forerunner of
modern psychological dream interpretation. The work of
Carl Gustav Carus (1789–1869) on dream interpretation has
more immediate links to modern psychology, however, be-
cause of the extensive and systematic use he made of the no-
tion of an unconscious mind, a notion that incidentally was
widespread among the Romantics. Carus’s distinction be-
tween relative and absolute layers of the unconscious, and his
argument for a participation of the latter in a sort of univer-
sal, pantheistic life force reflected in dream symbols, were an
inspiration to theories later developed by Jung after his break
from Freud.
One side effect of the Romantic movement—perhaps
the one that, more than any other, carried the attention to
symbolism over into the nineteenth century—was the variety
of opinion it sparked among classical mythologists, both
among those sympathetic to the Romantics and those op-
posed. Scholars such as Samuel Clarke (1675–1729), Johann
Ernesti (1707–1781), Christian Heyne (1729–1812), and
Johann Hermann (1772–1848) reinterpreted the gods and
heroes of ancient Greece as symbols expressing a primitive
level of philosophy or psychology. The very tools of allegore-
sis that the medieval theologians—following a tradition
going back to the Greek philosophers and literary critics—
had used to reveal the hidden wisdom of the ancient myths
were used to discredit its symbolic importance. Moritz,
among others, objected to the reductionism in such interpre-
tation and argued for the primacy of understanding the his-
torical conditions of classical antiquity. The complaints of
Jacques Antoine Dulare (1775–1835) against “symbolizing”
what were basically pragmatic cults and beliefs typified the
new and more empirical approach to the symbol that was
gaining strength. This foment of opinion generated many
later efforts to link a personal meaning of symbols to a gener-
al morphology of nature myths, such as are described in the
work of Georg Ferdinand Frobenius (1849–1917) and Paul
Ehrenreich (1855–1914).
One key figure, whose systematic treatment of symbols
united the influences of the Romantic movement with the
study of classical mythology, was Georg Friedrich Creuzer
(1771–1858). Creuzer was steeped in late antique ideas
about the symbol. He produced editions of Proclus and other
key Neoplatonists which helped to re-awaken the Neopla-
tonic spirit of the symbol. Employing a comparative ap-
proach that used materials from Egypt, Greece, and Rome,
as well as India and Persia, he tried to develop a theory of
symbolism that would at once respect the pragmatic mean-
ing of symbols as carriers of concrete tradition (including the
scientific) and the religious meaning of symbols as the force
to unify (sun-ballein) spirit and matter. Objections to
Creuzer’s work, however, in particular to his attempt to show
the influence of Oriental symbolism on Christian symbol-
ism, arose on every side, the most devastating of them from
the pen of the classicist Johann Heinrich Voss (1751–1826).
Even scholars in the early twenty-first century often deny
Creuzer the important place he deserves in the history of the
study of symbolism.Perhaps the best known of the Romantic students of
symbolism is Johann Jakob Bachofen (1850–1887). A histo-
rian devoted to the non-literate ancient world, he turned to
myth as a guide to understanding the distant past, and from
there developed a highly particularized exegesis of symbols.
While Bachofen appears to have carried on his work inde-
pendently of Dulare and Creuzer, he shared their concern
for developing a universal, abstract theory of the symbol
rooted in the facts of history. For him, the fundamental
theme of the ancient myths—and hence also the basis for the
symbols that myths interpret—was that of gynecocracy, or
mother right. Although modern scholarship has since dis-
credited this idea, along with most of his other historical ar-
guments, the remarkable imagination and suggestiveness of
Bachofen’s work has kept it alive among those concerned
with a general theory of the symbol.
THE SYMBOLISTS. The Symbolist movement was one of lit-
erary esotericism that formed among a group of French poets
in the final two decades of the nineteenth century. The lead-
ing thinker was Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898); after his
death, it virtually came to an end. Although its roots may be
traced to the philosophies of Hegel and Schopenhauer, the
Aesthetic movement in England, and the mystical writings
of Swinburne, the movement took shape basically as a reac-
tion against the impact of scientific realism on the literary
arts.
Unlike the Romantics, who had been more concerned
with the interpretation of specific symbols or the develop-
ment of a general theory about symbolization processes, the
Symbolists were preoccupied with creating symbols of ideal
beauty appropriate to their age. While the Romantics were
overtly political and public—the idea of the “noble savage”
that was so dear to them provided part of the intellectual
backdrop to the French Revolution—the Symbolists deliber-
ately withdrew from the vulgar sentiments of public life.
Theirs was a quasi-metaphysical, highly theoretical attempt
to idealize absolute Beauty, to promote its contemplation,
and at the same time to create it by restoring a musical sense
to poetry and by using highly symbolic terms. Given to theo-
rizing about symbols in esoteric terms, as these thinkers were,
it is no surprise that their influence was restricted. In other
respects, too, the major proponents of the movement seemed
intentionally to flout existing traditions. Mallarmé used
Christian ritual symbolism to erect a metaphysics designed
to explain symbols. Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), who
may be credited as the first poet to exalt the value of symbols,
did so by inverting the symbols of Christianity into a sortSYMBOL AND SYMBOLISM 8909