The Non-Christian Cross: An Enquiry into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our ReligionParsons, John Denham
Religion
The Non-Christian Cross: An Enquiry into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion
Parsons, John Denham
Crosses
It would also appear that the two symbols in question to some extent
signified Fire and Water; Fire being of course the Male Principle, Day,
Summer, Light, and Life; and Water the Female Principle. This still
further illustrates the point dealt with above; for though Water is the
negative of Fire, yet Fire cannot produce Life without the aid of
Water.
Returning however to our consideration of the cross as a symbol of Life
of pre-Christian date and origin, and having already dealt with the
lands now known as Britain, France, Italy, and Switzerland, let us now
consider the evidence of Greece.
At Mycenae and elsewhere Dr. Schliemann discovered, among other relics
of a bygone age, not only articles marked with the Svastika cross and
the cross of four equal arms, but even seals and dies giving
impressions of such crosses; thus demonstrating how large and prominent
a part the symbol of the cross played in pre-Christian times among
those in whose classic tongue the earliest known copies of the
Christian Scriptures were written centuries later.
It is also remarkable that Dr. Schliemann found golden crosses in the
previously unopened tombs he discovered and explored at Mycenae; as
many as five such crosses having in some instances been placed with a
single body by those who sealed up the vaults in question thousands of
years ago and many centuries before the commencement of our era.
As few if any unrifled tombs of so ancient a date have been discovered
in Greece and first explored by a trustworthy investigator, and as,
moreover, it would only have been with the bodies of important
personages that crosses of so valuable a material as gold would have
been buried, these discoveries, coupled with the self-evident fact that
crosses of more perishable material may have been buried with the
bodies of less distinguished people, and by this time, like both the
bodies and the tombs which enclosed them, have gone to dust, are most
remarkable. And they entirely corroborate the testimony borne by the
coins of ancient Gaul, the contents of the tombs of Gola-Secca, and the
remains of the Lake Dwellers of Switzerland, to the veneration paid
long before our era by the inhabitants of Europe to the cross as the
recognised symbol of Life. Nor as the symbol only of the life which
ends in the grave, but also of the glorious hope that as the Sun, from
whom we derive that life, whether considered from a daily or yearly
point of view sinks but to rise again, even so we who owe our brief
lives to the Sun-God, may, like the Giver of Life and only Saviour,
rise from one life to another.
For whether the ancients were or were not unphilosophic enough to
believe in the resurrection of bodies whose constituent atoms are
continually changing and in time form part of other bodies, it is
absurd to assume that they did not at times like ourselves conceive and
dwell upon a hoped-for, if unexpected and improbable, Life-to-come.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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