Beads were anciently used to reckon time, and a circle, being a line without termination, was the natural emblem of its perpetual continuity; whence we often find circles of beads upon the heads of deities, and enclosing the sacred symbols upon coins and other monuments. Perforated beads are also frequently found in tombs, both in the northern and southern parts of Europe and Asia, whence are fragments of the chaplets of consecration buried with the deceased. The simple diadem, or fillet, worn round the head as a mark of sovereignty, had a similar meaning, and was originally confined to the statues of deities and deified personages, as we find it upon the most ancient coins. Chryses, the priest of Apollo, in the “Iliad,” brings the diadem, or sacred fillet, of the god upon his sceptre, as the most imposing and invocable emblem of sanctity; but no mention is made of its being worn by kings in either of the Homeric poems, nor of any other ensign of temporal power and command, except the royal staff or sceptre. THE LOTUS The double sex typified by the Argha and its contents is by the Hindus represented by the “Mymphœa” or Lotus, floating like a boat on the boundless ocean, where the whole plant signifies both the earth and the two principles of its fecundation. The germ is both Meru and the Linga; the petals and filaments are the mountains which encircle Meru, and are also a type of the Yoni; the leaves of the calyx are the four vast regions to the cardinal points of Meru; and the leaves of the plant are the Dwipas or isles round the land of Jambu. As this plant or lily was probably the most celebrated of all the vegetable creation among the mystics of the ancient world, and is to be found in thousands of the most beautiful and sacred paintings of the Christians of this day—I detain my reader with a few observations respecting it. This is the more necessary as it appears that the priests have now lost the meaning of it; at least this is the case with everyone of whom I have made enquiry; but it is like many other very odd things, probably understood in the Vatican, or the crypt of St. Peter’s. Maurice says that among the different plants which ornament our globe, there is not one which has received so much honour from man as the Lotus or Lily, in whose consecrated bosom Brahma was born, and Osiris delighted to float. This is the sublime, the hallowed symbol that eternally occurs in oriental mythology, and in truth not without reason, for it is itself a lovely prodigy. Throughout all the northern hemispheres it was everywhere held in profound veneration, and from Savary we learn that the veneration is yet continued among the modern Egyptians. And we find that it still continues to receive the respect if not the adoration of a great part of the Christian world, unconscious, perhaps, of the original reason of this conduct. _Higgins’s Anacalypsis._