Another symbol, as deeply significant and as little understood as the symbol of the clock, is that of the funeral customs which all great Cultures have consecrated by ritual and by art. The grand style in India begins with tomb-temples, in the Classical world with funerary urns, in Egypt with pyramids, in early Christianity with catacombs and sarcophagi. In the dawn, innumerable equally-possible forms still cross one another chaotically and obscurely, dependent on clan-custom and external necessities and conveniences. But every Culture promptly elevates one or another of them to the highest degree of symbolism. Classical man, obedient to his deep unconscious life-feeling, picked upon burning, an act of annihilation in which the Euclidean, the here- and-now, type of existence was powerfully expressed. He _willed_ to have no history, no duration, neither past nor future, neither preservation nor dissolution, and therefore he _destroyed_ that which no longer possessed a present, the _body_ of a Pericles, a Cæsar, a Sophocles, a Phidias. And the soul passed to join the vague crowd to which the living members of the clan paid (but soon ceased to pay) the homage of ancestor-worship and soul-feast, and which in its _formlessness_ presents an utter contrast to the ancestor-_series_, the _genealogical tree_, that is eternalized with all the marks of historical order in the family-vault of the West. In this (with one striking exception, the Vedic dawn in India) no other Culture parallels the Classical.[139] And be it noted that the Doric-Homeric spring, and above all the “Iliad,” invested this act of burning with all the vivid feeling of a _new-born_ symbol; for those very warriors whose deeds probably formed the nucleus of the epic were in fact buried almost in the Egyptian manner in the graves of Mycenæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos and other places. And when in Imperial times the sarcophagus or “flesh-consumer”[140] began to supersede the vase of ashes, it was again, as in the time when the Homeric urn superseded the shaft-grave of Mycenæ, a _changed sense of Time_ that underlay the change of rite.