Drawing on undeveloped insights found in the work of the mythographers Georg Friedrich Creuzer and Johann Joseph von Görres, Benjamin points out how “the temporal measure for the experience of the symbol[Symbolerfahrung] is the mystical instant [Nu]” (OGT, 173). We must understand the temporality of the allegorical, in contrast, as something dynamic, mobile, and fluid. This authentic concept of allegory arises in the 17th century baroque as a response to the antithesis between mediaeval religiosity and Renaissance secularization discussed earlier. The spatialization of the temporal structure of eschatology in the allegorical corresponds to the naturalization of the religious structure of history in the baroque: “Whereas in the symbol, with the sublimation of downfall, the transfigured countenance of nature reveals itself  fleetingly in the light of salvation, in allegory there lies before the eyes of the observer the facies hippocratica [lit. ‘Hippocratic face’ = the sunken, hollow and pinched features exhibited by the dying] of history as petrified primal landscape. History, in everything untimely, sorrowful, and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in a face—no, in a death’s head [Totenkopfe]” (OGT, 174).