One may be interested in the manifold interactions between the various spheres of a culture and yet reject what I have called the “exegetic method,” the method, that is, that bases its interpretations on the detection of that kind of “likeness” that leads the interpreter of the scriptures to link the passage of the Jews through the Red Sea with the Baptism of Christ. Hegel, it will be remembered, saw in the Egyptian sphinx an essential likeness with the position of Egyptian culture in which the Spirit began to emerge from animal nature, and carried the same metaphor through in his discussion of Egyptian religion and Egyptian hieroglyphics. The assumption is always that some essential structural similarity must be detected which permits the interpreter to subsume the various aspects of a culture under one formula.
E.H. Gombrich, Symptoms and Syndromes chapter excerpt in In Search of Cultural History, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969
