Upon this noteworthy piece of evidence the Tree of Knowledge or Life, with which the figure of the cross was identified by the early Christians; the Serpent, which in all countries and every age has been more or less identified with the sexual powers; the Man; the Woman; and the Apple; are all represented. And it is important to note that, according to the cuneiform inscription upon another time-worn relic in the British Museum, the Babylonians of old, at a time when the descendants of Jacob or Israel were without scriptures of their own, had a tradition to the effect that the fate of our first parents--who, thanks to a wicked Serpent of Darkness, tasted of the forbidden fruit which grew in the "Garden of the Gods"--was placed in the hands of "their Redeemer." It should also be pointed out that this voice from the dim and distant past distinctly states that the Redeemer in question was--the Sun-God. In ancient days the so-called forbidden fruit or apple seems to have borne somewhat the same symbolic meaning that the egg did. But while the apple not only represented Life, but also, and primarily, that union between two sexes or principles which produces life, the egg more or less lacked the latter meaning, and, on the other hand, signified Existence in a wider sense than the apple did. The _Cosmos_ itself was an egg according to the conceptions of many of the ancients; and few ideas were more widely spread, or can be traced further back, than the one that the whole visible creation emerged from the original Chaos or Darkness in the shape of an egg. The egg also, and above all, signified the Sun-God, as the acknowledged Giver of Life and Saviour of Life. Hence the prominent part which it played in the various religious mysteries of the ancients, and also the fact that the Egyptians represented the Sun-God Ra as giving forth such utterances as "I am the Creative Soul of the celestial abyss. None sees my nest, and none can break my egg." The egg referred to, was of course the Sun itself. Even our Christian custom of exchanging eggs at Easter is more or less derived from Sun-God worship, being a survival from customs practised long before our era at that particular period of the year, the time of the Vernal Equinox or Pass-over of the Sun, when the Orient Light crosses the Equator to rise once more in the Northern Hemisphere. Nor are these the only facts connecting the egg with Sun-God worship, for the Sun-God Apollo was of old represented as born from the egg of Leda, and the Sun-God Osiris was also said to have been born from an egg. Moreover the Chinese believe that the first man was born from an egg, the Orphic hymns speak of the "First-Begotten One" as "egg-born," and the Greeks fabled that their Sun-God Dionysos sprang from the cosmic egg.