Its rewarding to explore Browne's obscure question in depth. It originates from his reading of the ancient Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses. In Ovid's long poem the myths of ancient Greece are linked by a common theme of transformation. A chaotic universe is subdued into harmonious order, animals turn into stone, men and women are rewarded and punished by gods and goddesses for their deeds to become trees, birds and stars. One of the most influential works in Western culture, Ovid’s Meramorphoses was a valuable source of information and inspiration to poet, painter and scholar throughout the Renaissance. [1]
The Roman goddess Juno's symbolic body language occurs during the birth of the hero Hercules in which she attempts to prevent the birth of her unfaithful husband Jupiter's child.
'When the time for Hercules difficult birth came, and Capricorn, the tenth sign, was hidden by the sun, the weight of the child stretched my womb: what I carried was so great, you could tell that Jove was the father of my hidden burden. I could not bear my labour pains much longer....Tortured for seven nights and as many days, worn out with agony, stretching my arms to heaven, with a great cry, I called out to Lucina, and her companion gods of birth, the Nixi. Indeed, she came, but committed in advance, determined to surrender my life to unjust Juno. She sat on the altar, in front of the door, and listened to my groans. With her right knee crossed over her left, and clasped with interlocking fingers, she held back the birth, She murmured spells, too, in a low voice, and the spells halted the birth once it began.[2]
The Roman goddess Juno ruled over the primary domains of feminine life in the ancient world, namely, childbirth, marriage and motherhood. As the wife of Jupiter she was one of the most important Roman gods. She is immortalized with the month of June being named after her.
Browne's interest in the mystical body language of Juno's crossed-legs is first mentioned in the opening chapter of the Discourse.
'That they sat also crossed legg’d many noble draughts declare; and in this figure the sitting gods and goddesses are drawn in medalls and medallions'.
In ancient depictions, goddesses sitting cross-legged often symbolized their spiritual power. Juno's crossed legs (one imagines the goddesses of antiquity to be long-legged beauties in order to form an elegant, elongated X) is a literal expression of body language, child-birth being impossible with crossed-legs.
Mystical body language is also featured in the Old Testament book of Genesis in which the patriarch Jacob blesses Ephraim and Manasseh.
'But Jacob crossed his arms as he reached out to lay his hands on the boys’ heads. He put his right hand on the head of Ephraim, though he was the younger boy, and his left hand on the head of Manasseh, though he was the firstborn'. [3]
This Biblical episode is alluded to by Browne in The Garden of Cyrus thus-
'the Statuae Isiacae, Teraphims, and little Idols, found about Mummies, do make a decussation or Jacobs Crosse, with their armes, like that on the head of Ephraim and Manasses' [4]
Browne's pioneering comparative religion studies detected that mystical body language is shared by various world religions. His ability to supply Egyptian, Judaic and Roman examples of mystical body language in The Garden of Cyrus demonstrates his ability to find connections between seemingly disparate concepts, and highlights his fascination with hidden patterns underlying human culture and symbolism.
The literary critic Peter Green noted that Browne, 'packs his prose with as much concentrated symbolic meaning as it will stand' and that, 'Every symbol is interrelated with the over-all pattern'.[5]
Browne's inclusion of the Roman goddess Juno in The Garden of Cyrus is exemplary of his methodical usage of proper-name symbolism. Taking his cue from Plato, Browne utilizes proper-name symbolism in order to tentatively sketch primordial patterns of the psyche known as archetypes. Indeed, the very title of the discourse features the archetype of the 'wise ruler' at a time when Britain wasn't ruled by the divine right of a King but during the short-lived proto-Republic of Cromwell. The 'wise ruler' figures of Moses, Solomon, Solon, Alexander the Great and Augustus along with Cyrus are all alluded to in The Garden of Cyrus. The archetype of the nurturing figure of the 'Great Mother' is also represented in the Discourse through allusion to Juno, the Egyptian goddess Isis and the Hebrew matriarch Sarah.
X
Received wisdom will claim that The Garden of Cyrus is 'all about' the Quincunx pattern, but in fact the quincunx pattern, the vehicle whereby Browne drives home his message of universal interconnectivity, is quite literally only half of his Hermetic vision. The symbol X (formed by joining the five dots of the Quincunx) features an equal number of times in the Discourse to the quincunx pattern.
The psychologist C.G. Jung noted that symbols can endure paradox and that's just as well because the symbol X is one of the most hard-working and flexible of all symbols and has accumulated many meanings over centuries.
The Roman numeral for ten, the Mosaic code of ten commandments as well as the Pythagorean tetractys (a pyramid of ten dots which Pythagoreans swore by) were all well-known by Browne. The Pythagorean and mathematical aspect of Browne's hermetic vision cannot be overlooked, as his candid confession in Religio Medici reveals-
'I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magicke of numbers'. [6]
The art historian J. B. Onians noted - 'The power of the Pythagorean mystery was based largely upon his understanding of the mathematical order of the universe, which could be summed up in visual representation of such numbers as tetractys and Quincunx.' [7]
It was also during Browne's lifetime that the mathematician William Oughtred designated the symbol X to denote the multiplication of number. Browne himself owned an edition of Oughtred's Clavis Mathematica (1648) [8]
Today, the hard-working symbol X can denote invisible X-rays, affection in the form of a kiss, as well as a wrong answer, restrictive viewing or X rated material or an unknown factor. It retains its abbreviated form for Christ in the word Xmas, and in the pattern known as the Criss-cross. Finally, conclusive evidence that all the money in the world cannot buy imagination, the social media platform once known as Twitter was rebranded X by its owner.
Crucially, (a word which itself derives from the Latin of Crux meaning a cross) Browne as a Christian knew that the Greek word for Christ begins with x (Chi) and this interpretation of X, as a pre-Christian anticipation of the Coming of Christ is foremost in his hermetic vision.
The crossed-legs of Juno and the Biblical crossed-arms of Jacob are also exemplary of how Browne interpreted the ancient pagan world anticipated the coming of Christ. Hermetic philosophers such as Browne believed that the mythic Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus (in reality a fusion of the Egyptian god Thoth and the Greek god Hermes) was the inventor of number and letter, including the letter X.
It was the Italian Renaissance scholars Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and his prodigy Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494 ) who first advanced and promoted the profile of Hermes Trismegistus as the founder of a priscia theologia. Ficino and Mirandola made Hermes Trismegistus the author of a pagan tradition of divine knowledge, an ancient theology (Prisca theologia) which paralleled and confirmed the revealed truth of the Bible and whose Egyptian providence reinforced tales of Plato’s travels in Egypt.
Browne subscribed to Ficino and Mirandola's belief that the Greek philosopher Plato studied in the land of Hermes Trismegistus, ancient Egypt, and the mythic sage's relationship to the symbol of X stating in The Garden of Cyrus -
'.. whereas it is not improbable, he (Plato) learned these and other mystical expressions in his Learned Observations of Egypt, where he might obviously behold the Mercurial characters, the handed crosses, and other mysteries not thoroughly understood in the sacred Letter X, which being derivative from the Stork, one of the ten sacred animals, might be originally Egyptian, and brought into Greece by Cadmus of that Country. [9]
The symbolism of how X was introduced through Hermes Trismegistus's observation of bird's legs is alluded to in The Garden of Cyrus thus-
'And if Egyptian Philosophy may obtain, the scale of influences was thus disposed, and the genial spirits of both worlds, do trace their way in ascending and descending Pyramids, mystically apprehended in the Letter X, and the open Bill and straddling Legs of a Stork, which was imitated by that Character'. [10]
The worthy Norwich philosopher-physician reinforces the symbolic importance of X and its close relationship to Platonic thought, notably Plato's discourse Timaeus stating-
'Of this Figure Plato made choice to illustrate the motion of the soul, both of the world and man; while he delivereth that God divided the whole conjunction length-wise, according to the figure of a Greek X, and then turning it about reflected it into a circle'; [11]
Plato along with Ovid is mentioned in the opening paragraph of The Garden of Cyrus. The ancient Greek philosopher's influence looms large throughout the Discourse, especially his Timaeus which is named by foot-note in the Discourse's opening page. Plato's Timaeus is his most Pythagorean writing. It elaborates upon the relationship between geometry, number and mysticism, all of which are primary thematic concerns of Browne's Garden of Cyrus.
In recent times the American poet and literary critic John Irwin focussed his critical attention on Browne's quincunx in his labyrinthine book The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (1994). Although Irwin's book is primarily concerned with the writings of Edgar Allen Poe and the early magical realist author Jorge Borges (1899-1986) both of whom greatly admired Browne's writings. Irwin recognised that -
'the idea that there is a necessary (because original) correspondence among numbers, letters and geometric shapes, is a belief found in esoteric alchemy and the cabala'.
Irwin continues with one of the most perceptive remarks ever stated about the quincunx pattern -
‘The quincunx represents God's infallible intelligence while it also embodies the main 'tools' man uses to decipher the universe: mathematics, geometry and language. The implication is that if the God-given design of man's original plantation was a quincuncial network, then this design must express the basic relationship between man and the world, known and unknown, which is to say that this formal pattern imposed on physical nature schematizes the interface of mind and world in that it contains within itself the various modes of intelligible representation of the world, i.e. mathematics, language, geometry joined together in the homogeneousness of their physical inscription as numbers, letters and geometric shapes’. [13]
The Argyle pattern (below) is a neat variant of the frontispiece of The Garden of Cyrus. The central point of decussation, X is visible within each lozenge. Its overlaid diamond or Lozenge pattern creates a 3D perspective, an optical trick which without doubt would have intrigued Thomas Browne
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