Our English name for the zodiacal sign referred to is the Ram, but in Latin it is _Aries_, and _Nisan_ (which is the month of March). The “sacred year” of all systems commences with this month and sign; hence the _Arian_ heresy and the Council of _Nice_; which resolves itself into a descriptive personified account of a conjunction of planets about the definite fixing of the _first point of Aries_ as a basic point in time in history, and which point is used in astronomical science to this day. But the appearance of the Cross, with the letters I H S on the planispherical chart, gives the key to the solution of the mystery. The Church interprets these letters to stand for _Jesus Salvator Hominum_—i. e. Jesus the Saviour of Men. The initiates read them as _numerals_, which stand for 608; which is the exact period of a solar-lunar cycle—i. e. the number of years which pass before the sun and moon occupy the same relative positions in the heavens. According to the astral theology of ancient religious systems, this cycle of 608 (or 600) years represented a Messianic period, at the completion of which a new messiah or avatar or savior was born upon the earth. The one prior to Jesus was _Cyrus_, who gave orders for the building of the temple at Jerusalem just six hundred years before Christ. Manatheo speaks of a “Cyrus,” son of Cambyses, first king of the twenty-second dynasty, but no Cyrus appears in the Egyptian annals. The biblical Cyrus is only another form of Osiris, and is in reality a sun-savior. The Arabs used the same system, for their Mohammed comes in just about six hundred years after Christ, and their era commences with their commencement of a new year, which dates from 622 A. D. Even our latest era—_Anno Domini_—did not come into general use until about one thousand years after the event it is said to commemorate had passed. This epoch was introduced into Italy in the sixth century by Dionysius the Little, a Roman abbot, and it began to be used in Gaul in the eighth, but was not generally followed until the ninth century. From extant charters in England it is known to have been used a little before the ninth century, but it did not come into common use for a century later. Time was, for centuries after the alleged birth of Christ, calculated from January 1 in the 4th of the 194th Olympiad, the 753d A. u. c. of the foundation of Rome, and 4714th of the Julian period.