( 603 ) 



XXII. — The Emblem, of the Crab in Relation to the sign Cancer. 

 By D'Arcy Went worth Thompson, C.B. 



(Read 16th May 1898.) 



This paper deals with a leisure-time study of mine, from which I once before 

 drew the subject of an essay for this Society. The representations of animal form 

 in Ancient Art interest me chiefly in so far as they present to us a problem in- 

 volving an unsolved question as to the whole spirit and motive with which such 

 representations were designed. We may see expressed in them merely a tendency 

 to portray familiar objects in appropriate associations, to use the fish, or the crab, 

 or the cuttle-fish as the device of an habitation of fishermen or resort of mariners, 

 or to employ those creatures and others — the ox, the sheep, and the goat, the lion, 

 the wolf, and the eagle — as the more fanciful appanage of divinities whose imaginary 

 attributes were the attributes of the sea, the plain, the mountain or the sky. But 

 we err, in my opinion, if we fail to recognise in this antiquated symbolism a deeper 

 intention, whose spirit is rather Oriental than Western, archaic than modern. I 

 believe these representations for the most part to have been associated with specific 

 notions or beliefs of astronomical or astrological science, of religion or superstition. 

 And though the origin of such ideas may be hidden from us, and the meaning of 

 the symbols often obscure, yet I think we may discern that the emblems were 

 grouped in a very artificial and curious way, that these conventional but much varied 

 collocations correspond in a singular and precise degree with natural groupings of 

 constellations that are similarly figured and designated, and that the divinities with 

 whom the emblems are associated had themselves a corresponding relation to the Signs 

 of Heaven, where they had their places according to the doctrines of astrology, or which 

 marked their festivals in the astronomic system of the sacred calendar. I have 

 chosen the Crab for the subject of this essay ; how are we to decide whether this 

 Crab was portrayed merely as a familiar object to the fisherman, a valued product 

 of the settlement, a natural emblem of the ocean, a symbol of the symbolised 

 god or goddess of the sea, or whether, on the other hand, it recalled and recorded 

 allusions to the celestial Crab, in whose sign astrology taught that one deity was 

 exalted and another domiciled, and whose conjunction with the Sun marked a great 

 upoch in the year? We may reasonably regard it as proved that the Crab which 



VOL. XXXIX. PART III. (NO. 22). 4 Y 



