of diabolism. Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) also gave more
popular form to the principles of Mallarmé by locating them
within a Christian context. In fact, however, all of the Sym-
bolists stood firmly outside of the Christian frame in their
search for an alternate center to their aesthetic-mystico-
religious sensibility: ideal Beauty.
Although the Symbolist movement was short-lived, and
its theories have long since fallen out of favor, it did have an
impact on symbolism in literature by cross-fertilizing it with
anthropology, classics, and religion. The American counter-
part of the movement, represented by writers such as Edgar
Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Henry James, as well as Eu-
ropean post-Symbolists such as Rainer Maria Rilke and Wil-
liam Butler Yeats, shared many of the Symbolists’ instincts
about the mystical dimension of symbolism. Despite the
movement’s lack of influence on the study of symbols then
being undertaken by philosophers and anthropologists, its
reorientation from the objective world of facts to the evoca-
tive, psychological power of symbols brought the symbolic
process itself to the surface, thereby foreshadowing develop-
ments in the twentieth century.
THE RISE OF MODERN ANTHROPOLOGY. By Bachofen’s
time, the influence of the Romantic movement on the study
of symbols had begun to wane. Ethnological data gathered
directly from primitive societies was beginning to accumu-
late, and the empirical method for the study of symbols, in-
cluding those of the ancient world, was becoming more disci-
plined. Important work was done by Lewis H. Morgan
(1818–1881) on Native American sacrificial rites; by Wil-
liam Robertson Smith (1846–1894) on Semitic sacrifice; by
Henry Clay Trumbull (1830–1903) on the comparative
study of sacrifice in India, China, the Near East, Africa, and
Central America; by John Ferguson McLennan (1827–
1881) on marriage symbolism; and by N. D. Fustel de Cou-
langes (1830–1889) on the influence of religious symbols on
ancient Greek and Roman civil institutions. These and other
works of the period contained a new rigorous approach to
analyzing the data, coupled with an attempt to translate the
meaning of symbols into abstractions more suitable to the
modern critical mind.
This new scientific approach did much to demystify the
study of occult and secret symbolic traditions, as well as to
open the way to a more objective study of sexual symbolism
in primitive culture and religious rites. The censure that
Creuzer and Dulare had encountered a century before began
steadily to weaken.
No doubt the most important figure of this period is
Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), rightly credited as the
founder of modern cultural anthropology. Tylor’s contribu-
tion to the study of the symbol has no direct links to the Ro-
mantics. Drawing instead from mid-nineteenth-century
British philosophy, which had been rocked by evolutionary
theory, he formulated a rather rationalistic and often conde-
scending view of symbols. The myth-making faculty of prim-
itive peoples that F. Max Müller and the brothers Grimm
had helped to rediscover interested Tylor as a potential clue
to the evolutionary development of mind, and led him to un-
cover a fundamental animism at the source of the symbolic
process.
Another important influence on symbol theory at the
time was James G. Frazer (1854–1941). His monumental
study on the notion of the slain god, The Golden Bough,
which had grown out of his work on nature symbolism and
relied heavily on insights from Robertson Smith, not only
influenced students in all fields of symbolism, but also affect-
ed scholars of literature. The sheer scope and wealth of Fra-
zer’s achievement, however, tended to overshadow the lack
of development in his theory of symbols. And, as had Tylor,
he bypassed important questions raised by the Romantics
and the Symbolists.
At the start of the twentieth century, interest in symbol-
ism continued to strengthen and to gain respectability
among academics. Typical of this trend was Franz Boas
(1858–1942), whose work on primitive art symbols led him
to a number of interesting but controversial conclusions
about the relationship between religious ideas and the literal-
ization of natural symbols. The major influence at the time,
however, came from the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–
1917). Turning away from the nineteenth-century bias to-
ward treating symbols as discrete entities with meanings in
themselves—and thus turning his back on the Romantics
and the Symbolists alike—Durkheim sought to uncover
their social implications. He did not care very much about
any inner reality in symbols, nor did he care where they came
from; he was interested only in their effect on the society that
used them. To this end, he proposed the revolutionary idea
of viewing society as a system of forces conditioned by the
symbolizing process: symbols were social because they pre-
served and expressed social sentiments. In assuming that
non-empirical symbolic referents must be distorted represen-
tations of empirical reality, many critics later argued,
Durkheim had viewed symbols too narrowly and failed to
appreciate their polyvalent structure. While his concern with
symbolic referents may have prevented him from exploring
the wider reaches of symbolic significance, the boldness of
his hypothesis laid a challenge before students of the symbol
that retains its force in the early twenty-first century.
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) owed much to
Durkheim in the former’s approach to symbols as meanings
that give expression to sentiments in individuals in order to
regulate collective needs or preserve relations and interests
important to a particular society. Despite Radcliffe-Brown’s
numerous intuitions and descriptive distinctions, as well as
a more scrupulous grounding in direct fieldwork than his
predecessor, his work suffers from a certain lack of theoretical
clarity by comparison.
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) shared many of
Radcliffe-Brown’s views, but Malinowski approached sym-
bols with a keener sensitivity to their linguistic implications
and a more complex theoretical understanding of them.8910 SYMBOL AND SYMBOLISM