The Migration of Symbols

Westminster: Archibald Constable.. 1894.

"it is in symbols that we think".

First edition. 8vo. 231x145mm. pp. xxiii, [5], 277 [3]. Six plates. Pale green cloth decorated on upper cover with the footprints of the Buddha, spine lettered in blue. Some soiling and marking to boards and spine and slight creasing to spine and lower cover. Internally very good with only slight toning to edges. Many pages are unopened. A nice copy of a book that appears infrequently in commerce. Front pastedown has the book label of "Florence Hankey from the library of her father".
The extravagantly named Eugène Félicien Albert Goblet D'Alviella was a Belgian academic who worked in the field of the history of religion. This is his most famous book, a phenomenally learned and forensically scientific study of religious symbols - trees, birds, crosses, the triskelion and swastikas - their meaning and how they are adopted across cultures and belief systems. In short, how they migrate. In 1891, D'Alviella gave the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford. His subject was Lectures on the Origin and Growth of the Concept of God, as Illustrated by Anthropology and History. He clearly liked big subjects with a huge intellectual sweep. The measure of the breadth of D'Alviella's ambition in the present book can perhaps be gauged from his observation that "by symbolism the simplest, the commonest objects are transformed, idealized, and acquire a new and, so to say, an illimitable value....We write, as we speak, in symbols; and it is in symbols that we think".

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