Jablonski was of opinion that this figure, the _crux ansata_, was also an emblem of generation,--"nihil aliud esse quam phallum," etc. However, we have historical facts stating that the women of ancient Egypt wore ornaments of a character or form so very unequivocal, as to leave no doubt about the allusion. The proofs of the vast antiquity of the cross might be carried much farther, acknowledged and confirmed as they are in many instances even by divines themselves, who have deeply investigated the subject, and could see no way to elude the unpalatable truth, that the cross was an object of superlative sanctity and veneration amongst the eastern nations, not only long anterior to the time of the Emperor Tiberius, but in the most remote of the known ages of antiquity. Thus this mystical figure was emblematical of at least four things, viz., eternity, generation, the _crossing_ of the equator by the sun at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, besides its allusion, in Egypt, to the rising and falling of the Nile. The Spaniards, in their murderous invasion of Mexico and Peru, were astonished to find there the whole machinery of Christianity; but the priests and the court of Spain smothered the fact as much as lay in their power. The immaculate conception was in full force, by a _Virgin_ of Peru becoming pregnant by the _Sun_; the cross was the principal emblem, and had been sacred from time immemorial: one of their Trinity was crucified upon a mountain, _between two thieves_; and also in the sky or heavens, where the serpent (not the boar, as in the case of Adonis, see Lecture II.) is depriving him of the organs of generation.* Here is an astro-fable, known positively to have existed in Syria, and even among the Jews, long anterior to the present version of Christianity; and, therefore, when the early Christians carried over their religion to America, they must have been wicked enough to carry over also the whole of the heathen mythoses of Africa and Asia. The Spaniards had likewise the mortification to find the resurrection of the crucified _Savior_, after three days; the ascension through the clouds, and that his return was expected, to save the human race. * The serpent being an adverse, or winter constellation, it is almost needless to observe that this allegory points to the sun's being deprived of his generative powers, while the winter constellations are in the ascendant. There is no accounting for these astronomical fables, being found in the new world, and their indisputable identity with those of the old, but in the one clear solution, of there being, in remote antiquity, one universal solar mythos, or fabled history of the planetary system, in which the sun, under a thousand different appellatives, as redeemer or savior, and as the grand ruling principle of the whole, was the chief object of adoration. This mythos is still prevalent, though abused for the most atrocious purposes.