Hegel, influenced by the work of a former colleague, the Heidelberg philologist Friedrich Creuzer, adds to Schlegel’s categorization of art forms by positing a further category of symbolic art, characterizing the material cultures of ancient Eastern civilizations such as Persia, India and Egypt. The symbolic art of pantheistic religions of the East used natural elements to symbolize the gods of their cultures: Zoroastrianism had taken light, for example, to symbolize the divine (Aes I: 325), and animal worship was found in the Egyptians (Aes I: 357). But such actual things had to be distinguished from what was meant to be symbolized by them, so violence had to be done to such natural forms in attempts to represent the absolute—such cultural products thus becoming “bizarre, grotesque, and tasteless” (Aes I: 77), This, however, undermined their initial function, and the Greeks were able to offer a dialectical solution to this contradiction. They gave expression to the Absolute or the Idea by taking as its material the specifically human form, but only on condition of its being rendered “exempt from all the deficiency of the purely sensuous and from the contingent finitude of the phenomenal world”. But even as idealized in Greek sculpture, say, the represented Greek god is still an object of “naïve intuition and sensuous imagination” (Aes I: 77–8), and as such the classical gods contained the germ of their own decline as they could not evade