Under the impact of humanism the historical sciences were placed in a paradoxical situation: philology, publishing, archaeology brought with them an enormous increase of factual knowledge, but the ancient universal and abstract perspectives still provided the necessary framework. If one compares a mediaeval chronicle to an Italian history from the 15th or 16th century, whether it be humanist or claims to be pragmatic, such as the work of Machiavelli, one is generally struck by an essential difference: the chronicler relates the events as a simple succession of facts, but for the Renaissance historiographer there is always an underlying theme, “human nature,” “the lessons of history,” the model of Rome.

In speaking of the value of symbols, I shall not go into the vexed problem of verbal symbols, but shall consider only symbols such as can be represented in sculpture or painting, visible forms; and in speaking of their value as historical data, I shall be concerned entirely with intellectual history, the history of ideas, of religion, Geistesgeschichte in general. Symbols can of course help in other ways. To find the recognized symbols of a special religion in an unexpected part of the world, such as Jewish symbols in Central China of a thousand years ago, at once suggests, indeed indicates, a contact between China and the Near East which must be taken seriously. Symbols on coins discovered in ancient sites similarly play an important part in identifying routes of trade. In these cases symbols become like heraldry, means of identification. My concern is much deeper, however, namely to ask whether the symbols of the past have much to tell us about the thoughts and ways of the people who used them.

In a society based on democratic principles and equipped with powerful techniques of dissemination, the participation of the masses in cultural life and the elaboration of works adapted to the needs of this new and vast public become imperative. This participation and elaboration are fairly extensive, and the quality of the cultural work disseminated or created is relatively high, but all modern societies, whatever their reigning ideology and their level of technical evolution, face this problem in their own fashion.

It is high time to draw up a map of power.

No experience is more direct, more immediate than that of power. No term gives rise to more confusion, willingly or unwillingly.

Everyone dreams of it, and when he believes he holds a part of it, he then strives to make people forget it. We can assume that the only true criterion of power would be the assertion of the power-wielder that he has nothing in his pockets, nothing in his hands. And yet we speak of the intoxication of power. But is this the same kind of power?

The general expansion of western Asian peasant cultures through the Mediterranean to Iberia, France, Switzerland and ultimately to the channel coast and across into Ireland and the British Isles is well documented by detailed studies. The resultant local European cultures, collectively known as Western Neolithic, were the product of colonists who introduced the first domestic cattle into their areas of settlement. The period of the migrations to Europe can be bracketed roughly. Mesopotamian tholoi and other megalithic architecture were introduced into Cyprus in the fifth millennium together with snake symbolism. At the farthest reach of the migration lies Great Britain, and the neolithic colonists, known to the archaeologists as the Windmill Hill culture, arrived at the southern shores of Great Britain ca. 2300. Obviously the expansion into Europe was not a single movement, but proceeded by fits and starts with groups hiving off and even back tracking along the routes. Longifrons cattle were introduced into Europe with this migration. The important migration of the fifth millennium was followed in the third millennium by a second major expansion with West Asian colonists following the track of the first expansion, but this time taking two major additional routes, one into southeastern Europe via Asia Minor and the Aegean and the other into Europe via the Caucasus, the southern Russian grassland and forest steppes. In the settlement sites of this second migration, whether in Crete or in the Caucasus on the shores of the Baltic, the evidence for the cultural complex we have described becomes overwhelming, and primigenius, the sacred breed, is found at all major sites.

Dreams have a privileged status among all the images. They do not depend on our will and appear to give evidence of the spontaneous eruption in our life of a power that is beyond us. Their most remarkable characteristic is that they make us believe they contain a mystery, that they open a door onto the reverse side of things, revealing to us an enigma to which we must find the key. The interpretations of dreams may differ, but everyone concedes that they have a power of transcendence with regard to the world of the wake. It is through dreams that the divine power has most frequently chosen to appear to its elected. The signs of dreams (if not of the other images of night, the stars) were considered when the future was to be foretold. But dreams, certainly also, restore to us a past long since effaced from our memory, dreams betray our most secret desires, ignored even by our conscience, and it is hence on dreams that we rely to discover the hidden motivations of our aberrant behaviour. In dreams things speak to us from a distance, people absent or even dead communicate with us; how many friends and lovers, whom life has separated, find each other every night and experience what Gérard de Nerval calls a second life? We pronounce the word “dream” when we want to describe an event that has astonished us, delighted us, and fulfilled us beyond what we would have dared to hope.

In order to dispel “the iron curtain of false enigmas,” of which Claude Roy speaks, it is urgent to undertake a revision, a critical reevaluation of the general conception, the methods and implements for the understanding of the Orient that have been used by the West, notably from the beginning of the last century, on all levels and in all fields.

This is an imperative of every exact science, which aims at understanding. And yet the resurgence of the nations and the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, in the last two generations, was required in order to provoke a prise de conscience, tardy and frequently reticent, of an exigency of principle become an unavoidable practical necessity, precisely due to the decisive influence of the political factor, i.e., the victories achieved by the various movements of national liberation on a world scale.