theoryofliteratu00inwell

Image, Metafhor, Symbol, Myth 211
second ultimate type of metaphoric intuition, that of Einjiihlung,
itself subdivided into the "mystic" and the "magic." The mystic
metaphor we have illustrated from the mystics rather than the
poets. Inorganic elements are symbolically treated, not as mere
concepts or conceptual analogies but as representations which are
also presentations.
Magical metaphor is interpreted after the fashion of the art
historian Worringer, as an "abstraction" from the world of na-
ture. Worringer studied the arts of Egypt, Byzantium, Persia,
arts which "reduce organic nature, including man, to lineargeometrical
forms, and frequently abandon the organic world
altogether for one of pure lines, forms, and colors." "Ornament
detaches itself now ... as something which does not follow
the stream of life but rigidly faces it. . . . The intention is no
longer to pretend but to conjure." "Ornament ... is something
taken away from Time ; it is pure extension, settled and
stable." 43
Anthropologists find both animism and magic in primitive
cultures. The former seeks to reach, propitiate, persuade, unite
with personalized spirits—the dead, gods. The latter, pre-science,
studies the laws of power exerted by things : sacred words, amu-
lets, rods and wands, images, relics. There is white magic—that
of Christian cabalists like Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus ,
and there is black magic, that of evil men. But fundamental to
both is the belief in the power of things. Magic touches the arts
through image-making. Western tradition associates the painter
and sculptor with the skill of the craftsman, with Haephaistos
and Daidalos, with Pygmalion, who can bring the image to life.
In folklore aesthetics, the maker of images is a sorcerer or magi-
cian, while the poet is the inspired, the possessed, the productively
mad. 44 However, the primitive poet can compose charms and
incantations, and the modern poet can, like Yeats, adopt the
magical use of images, literal images, as a means to the use of
magic-symbolic images in his poetry. 45 Mysticism takes the con-
trary line: the image is a symbol effected by a spiritual state ;
is an expressive image not a causative image, and it is not neces-
sary to the state: the same spiritual state can express itself in
other symbols. 46
The mystical metaphor and the magic are both de-animizing:
it