The Strange History of the Christian Cross by Arthur Drews Ph.D 1911
In the whole of Christendom it passes as a settled matter that Jesus “died upon the cross”; but this has the shape, as it is usually represented among painters, of the so-called Latin cross, in which the horizontal crosspiece is shorter than the vertical beam. On what then does the opinion rest that the cross is the gibbet? The Evangelists themselves give us no information on this point. The Jews described the instrument which they made use of in executions by the expression “wood” or “tree.” Under this description it often occurs in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, in which the gibbet is rendered by xúlon, the same expression being also found in the Gospels. Usually, however, the gibbet is described as staurós (i.e., stake), so much so that staurós and xúlon pass for synonyms. The Latin translation of both these words is crux. By this the Romans understood any apparatus for the execution of men generally, without thinking, however, as a rule of anything else than a stake or gallows (patibulum, stipes) upon which, as Livy tells us, the delinquent was bound with chains or ropes and so delivered over to death. That the method of execution in Palestine differed in any way from this is not in any way shown. Among the Jews also the condemned used to be hanged upon a simple stake or beam, and exposed to a lingering death from heat, hunger, and thirst, as well as from the natural tension of his muscles. “To fasten to the cross” (stauroun, afigere cruci) accordingly does not mean either in East or West to crucify in our sense, but at first simply “to torture” or “martyr,” and later “to hang upon a stake or gallows.” And in this connection it appears that the piercing of hands and feet with nails, at least at the time at which the execution of Jesus is supposed to have occurred, was something quite unusual, if it was ever employed at all. The expressions prospassaleuein and proséloun, moreover, usually signify only to “fasten,” “to hang upon a nail,” but not at all “to nail to” in the special sense required.
There is not then the least occasion for assuming that according to original Christian views an exception to this mode of proceeding was made at the execution of Jesus. The only place in the Gospels where there is any mention of the “marks of the nails” (viz., John xx. 25) belongs, as does the whole Gospel, to a relatively later time, and appears, as does so much in John, as a mere strengthening and exaggeration of the original story. For example, Luke xxiv. 39, upon which John is based, does not speak at all of nail-marks, but merely of the marks of the wounds which the condemned must naturally have received as a consequence of being fastened to the stake. Accordingly the idea that Christ was “nailed” to the cross was in the earliest Christianity by no means the ruling one. Ambrose, for example, only speaks of the “cords” of the “cross” and the “ligatures of the passion” (“usque ad crucis laqueos ac retia passionis”), and consequently knew nothing of nails having been used in this case. If we consider that the “crucifixion” of Jesus corresponds to the hanging of Attis, Osiris, and so forth, and that the idea of the gibbeted gods of Nearer Asia called forth and fixed the Christian view; if we remember that Haman, the prototype of Jesus at the Purim feast, was also hanged upon a gallows, then it becomes doubly improbable that our present ideas on the matter correspond to the views of the early Christians. For although we have no direct picture of the hanging of those Gods, yet we possess representations of the execution of Marsyas by Apollo, in which the God has his rival hauled up on to a tree by ropes round his wrists, which have been bound together. But Marsyas, the inventor of the flute, the friend and guide of Cybele in the search for the lost Attis, is no other than the latter himself, or at any rate a personality very near akin to Attis. It is not difficult to conclude that Attis too, or the man who represented him in the rites, was hung in the same manner to the stake or tree-trunk and thus put to death. Thus it seems that originally the manner of death of the Jewish Messiah was imagined in the same way, and so the heathens too called the new God in scorn “the Hanged One.”
How, then, did the idea come into existence that Jesus did not die upon a simple gallows, but rather upon wood having the well-known form of the cross? It arose out of a misunderstanding, from considering as the same and mingling two ideas which were originally distinct but described by the same word wood, tree, xúlon, lignum, arbor. This word signifies, as we have already said, on the one hand indeed the stake or gallows (staurós, crux) upon which the criminal was executed; but the same word, corresponding to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, also referred to the “wood,” “the tree of life,” which was supposed to stand in Paradise. According to the Revelation of John it was to serve as food for the holy in the new Paradise to come, and it was honoured by the Christians as the “seal” and guarantee of their salvation under the form of the mystic cross or Tau.
In all private religious associations and secret cults of later antiquity the members made use of a secret sign of recognition or union. This they carried about in the form, in some cases, of wooden, bronze, or silver amulets hung round the neck or concealed beneath the clothes, in others woven in their garments, or tattooed upon the forehead, neck, breast, hands, &c. Among these signs was the cross, and it was usually described under the name “Tau,” after the letter of the old Phœnician alphabet. Such an application of the cross to mystic or religious ends reaches back into grey antiquity. From of old the cross was in use in the cult of the Egyptian Gods, especially of Isis and Horus. It was also found among the Assyrians and Persians, serving, as the pictures show, in part as the mark and ornament of distinguished persons, such as priests and kings, in part also as a religious attribute in the hands of the Gods and their worshippers. According to some it was the sign which Jahwe ordered the Israelites to paint upon their doors with the blood of the lamb when he sent the angel of death to destroy the first-born of their Egyptian oppressors. It played a similar part also in Isaiah and Ezekiel, when it was a question of separating the god-fearing Israelites from the crowd of other men whom Jahwe purposed to destroy. When the Israelites were pressed in battle by the Amalekites Moses is said to have been helped by Aaron and Hur to stretch out his arms in the shape of that magic sign, and thus to have rendered possible a victory for his people over their enemies. Among the other nations of antiquity also—the Greeks, Thracians, the Gaulish Druids, and so on—the Tau was applied in a similar manner to ritualistic and mystic ends. It appears as an ornament on the images of the most different divinities and heroes—e.g., Apollo, Dionysus, Demeter, Diana (the Phœnician Astarte). It is also found upon innumerable Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Phœnician coins, upon vases, pictures, jewellery, &c. In Alexandria the Christians found it chiselled upon the stone when the temple of Serapis was destroyed, in 391. In this temple Serapis himself was represented of superhuman size, with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, as though embracing the universe. In Rome the Vestal virgins wore the cross upon a ribbon round the neck. Indeed, it even served as an ornament upon the weapons of the Roman legions and upon the standards of the cavalry long before Constantine, by his well-known “vision,” gave occasion for its being expressly introduced under the form of the so-called “Monogram of Christ” into the army as a military sign. But in the North also we find the cross, not only in the shape of the hooked-cross and the three-armed cross (Triskele), but also in the form of Thor’s hammer, upon runic, stones, weapons, utensils, ornaments, amulets, &c. And when the heathens of the North, as Snorre informs us, marked themselves in the hour of death with a spear, they scratched upon their bodies one of the sacred signs that has been mentioned, in doing which they dedicated themselves to God.
That here we have to do with a sun symbol is easily recognised wherever the simple, equally-armed cross appears duplicated with an oblique cross having the same point of intersection with it,
or where it has the shape of a perpendicular which is cut symmetrically by two other lines crossing one another,
After the careful investigations on this subject which have been undertaken by French savants especially, there can be no doubt that we have before us in this so-called “seal” of the Gods and religious personalities a symbol of the creative force of nature, of the resurrection and the new life, a pledge of divine protection in this world and of everlasting blessedness after. As such it appears upon heathen sarcophagi and tombstones; and on this account in some cases their Christian character is too quickly assumed. Moreover, the cross has been preserved in present-day musical notation as the sign of the raising of a note, while its use in the Mysteries and private Cult associations is authority for the statement that precisely in these the thought of a new-birth and resurrection in company with the hero of the association or God of the union stood as a central point of faith. One understands the painful feeling of the Christians at the fact that the private sign used by them and their special sacraments were in use among all the secret cults of antiquity. They could explain this to themselves only as the work of spiteful dæmons and an evil imitation of Christian usages on the heathens’ part. In reality the symbol of the cross is much older than Christianity; and, indeed, the sign of the cross is found associated in a special manner with the cult of divinities of nature or life with its alternations of birth, blossoming, and decay, representatives of the fertility and creative force of nature, the Light-Gods and Sun-Gods subjected to death and triumphing victoriously over it. It is only as such, as Gods who died and rose again, that they were divinities of the soul and so of the Mysteries and pious fraternities. The idea of the soul, however, is found everywhere in nature religion considered as being connected with the warmth of life and with fire, just as the sun was honoured as the highest divinity and, so to speak, as the visible manifestation of the world-soul solely on account of its fiery nature. Should not, then, the symbol of life, which in its developed form plainly refers to the sun, in its simplest and original shape point to the fire, this “earliest phenomenon” of all religious worship?
Naturally, indeed, different views can be held as to what the various forms of the cross betoken. Thus, for example, according to Burnouf, Schliemann, and others, the Svastika represents the “fire’s cradle,” i.e., the pith of the wood, from which in oldest times in the point of intersection of the two arms the fire was produced by whirling round an inserted stick. On the other hand, according to the view most widespread at the present day, it simply symbolises the twirling movement when making the fire, and on this, too, rests its application as symbol of the sun’s course. Hochart considers the cross in the shape of the Greek Tau as the inserted stick (pramantha) of the Vedic priests. Very likely, however, this form arose simply through the identity of sound between the Greek and Phœnician letter, the Greeks having interchanged the like-sounding foreign letter with their own Tau. That the cross generally speaking, however, is connected with the Fire Cult, and that both parts of the sign originally contained a reference to the pieces of wood (aranî) of which in most ancient times use was made to produce fire, has been placed beyond doubt by the investigations into the matter. This is confirmed inter alia by the use of the symbol in the worship of the Vestals, the Roman fire-priestesses. This is the explanation of the wide extent of the symbol of the cross. Not only among the peoples of antiquity and in Europe, but also in Asia among the Indians and Chinese, it is in use from ancient times. In America, too, among the Mexicans and Incas, it played a part in worship long before the arrival of Europeans. In the same way is explained the close association of that symbol with the priestly office and kingly dignity, which was itself often connected with that office; similarly the intimate relations between the sign of the cross and the Gods of Fertility, Vegetation, and Seasons. For all of these were, as representatives of the warmth of life and the soul’s breath, in their deepest nature, Fire-Gods special aspects, closer characterisations and connections of that one divinity, of whom the oldest form known to us is in the Vedic Agni, and in whose service the priests of all peoples and times grew to their overwhelming strength. Julius Firmicus Maternus was thus quite right when he declared that Mithras, whose followers bore the sign of the cross upon their foreheads and at their communion-meal had the cross, imprinted upon the holy loaf, before their eyes, was an ancient Fire-God. But if the cross is the symbol of fire and also of the Mediator God, who brings earth and heaven into connection, then the reason can be found why Plato in the “Timæus” makes the World Soul in the form of a Chi, i.e., an oblique cross, stretched between heaven and earth. Then, indeed, it is not strange that the Christians of the first century regarded as an inspiration of the devil Plato’s doctrine of the mediatory office of the “double-natured” World Soul, which, according to that philosopher, was formed from a mixture of ideal and sensible matter. It is not strange that a Justin, “the most foolish of the Christian fathers” (Robertson), could actually assert that Plato borrowed the idea, as well as that of a world-conflagration, from—Moses.
In the Old Testament also, as was shown above, we meet the cross. Here it served as a mark of recognition and distinction of the God-fearing Israelites from the heathen, and as a magic sign. With a similar significance we meet it again in the New Testament. In the Revelation of John it appears as “the seal (sphragís) of the living God.” By it here, too, are the chosen ones of Israel marked off from the rest of mankind whom judgment has overtaken. At the same time, it is said that this sign is imprinted upon the foreheads of the inhabitants of the true Jerusalem. In the Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians it is said of the believers in Christ that they were “sealed” before God by the mystic sign upon their foreheads, hands, or feet. The sign thus serves them as a pledge of redemption. Again, in the Epistle of Barnabas ix. 8, the cross contained in the letter T is expressly interpreted as (charis) “grace.” Under the form of the Greek Tau the cross appears during the first century of the Christian era, especially among the Christians in Egypt, and according to many was a symbol of Adonis or Tammuz. Now since the expressions xúlon and staurós, lignum and crux, were of double significance and denoted both the “seal” of religious salvation and the gibbet, it is possible that the two different significations became of themselves identical in the minds of the faithful. This was possible so much the more easily since the biblical account placed by the side of the “tree of life” in Paradise a “tree of death,” the fateful “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” which was supposed to have been accountable for the death of Adam and so of the whole of mankind, and as such made the comparison possible with the wood upon which Jesus died. We meet again with a special form of the cross in the old Assyrian or Babylonian so-called “mystical tree of mystery,” which was also a symbol of life. Among the Persians it appears to have had some reference to the holy Haoma tree; and here, too, as well as in India, where it was connected with the Bodhi tree, under which Sakyamuni by his devout humility rose to be a Buddha, it was represented in the artificial shape of a many-armed cross.
One and the same word, then (xúlon, crux), betokens both the gibbet and the pledge of life. Christ himself appears as the true “Tree of Life,” as the original of that miraculous tree the sight of which gave life to the first man in Paradise, which will be the food of the blessed in the world to come, and is represented symbolically by the mystical cross. It was easy to unite the ideas connected with those expressions, to look upon the “seal” of Christ (to semeion tou staurou, signum crucis) as the cross upon which he suffered, and vice-versâ, and to ascribe to the “wood” upon which Jesus is supposed to have died, the shape of the mystic sign, the Tau, or cross. The heathens had been accustomed to regard the stake upon which their Gods were hanged both as the representative of the God in question and the symbol of life and fruitfulness. For example, the stake furnished with four oblique sticks (like a telegraph post), which went by the name of the tatu, tat, dad, or ded and was planted at the feast of Osiris in Egypt, often had a rough picture of the God painted upon it, as also the pine-tree trunk of Attis, in which connection the idea that the seed contained in the cones of the rock-pine from of old had served men as food, while the sap found in them was prepared into an intoxicating drink (Soma), played its part. We are reminded also of the Germanic custom of the planting of the may-tree. This was not only a symbol of the Spring God, but also represented the life bestowed by him. In the same way the cross did not appear to the Christians originally as the form of the gibbet upon which God died, but as “the tree of life,” the symbol of the new birth and redemption. Since, however, the word for the mystical sign was identical with the expression for the gibbet, the double meaning led to the gibbet of Jesus being looked upon as the symbol of life and redemption, and the idea of the gibbet was mingled with that of the cross, the shape of the latter being imagined for the former. As Justin in his conversation with the Jew Trypho informs us, the Jews used to run a spit lengthwise through the whole body of the Paschal lamb and another cross-wise through its breast, upon which the forefeet were fastened, so that the two spits made the shape of a cross. This was to them obviously not a symbol of execution but rather the sign of reconcilement with Jahwe and of the new life thereon depending. For the Christians, however, who compared their Saviour with the Paschal lamb, this may have been an additional cause for the above-mentioned commingling of ideas, and this may have strengthened them in the conception that their God died upon the “cross.” The Phrygians, moreover, according to Firmicus Maternus, at the Spring Feast of Attis, used to fasten a ram or lamb at the foot of the fig-tree trunk on which the image of their God was hung.
In agreement with this view is the fact that the earliest representations of Christ in connection with the cross had for their subject not the suffering and crucified, but the miraculous Saviour triumphing over sickness and death. He appeared as a youthful God with the Book of the Law, the Gospel, in his hand, the lamb at his feet, the cross upon his head or in his right hand, just as the heathen Gods, a Jupiter, or some crowned ruler, used to be depicted with a cross-shaped sceptre. Or Jesus’ head was placed before the cross, and this in the orb of the sun—and exactly at the point of intersection of the arms of the cross, thus at the place where one otherwise finds the lamb. Even the Church, probably with a right feeling of the identity of Agnus and Agni, and in order to remove the connection of ideas therein contained, in the year 692, by the Quinisext Synod (in Trullo), forbade the pictures of the lamb and required the representation to be of the Saviour’s human shape. In spite of this even then they did not represent “the Crucified” in the present-day sense of the word, but portrayed Christ in the form of one standing before the cross praying with outstretched arms. Or he was shown risen from the grave, or standing upon the Gospels at the foot of the cross, out of this arising later the support for the feet in the pictures of him crucified. Here he was represented with open eyes, with his head encircled by the sun’s orb. In all of these different representations accordingly the cross only brought again before the eyes in symbolical form what was at the same time expressed by the figure of Christ standing at the cross, just as at the feasts of Osiris or Attis the God was doubly represented, both in his true shape (as image or puppet) and in the symbolical form of the Jatu or pine-tree trunk. This mode of depicting Christ lasted a long while, even though as early as the fifth or sixth century mention is made of crucifixion, and in arbitrary interpretation of Psa. xxii. 17 he was depicted with the marks of the nails. For, as has been said, “crux” betokens both the gibbet and the mystical sign, and the marks of the nails served to symbolise the Saviour’s triumph over pain and death. An ivory plate in the British Museum in London, mentioned and copied by Kraus, is considered the oldest representation of a crucifixion in our present sense. It is said to be of fifth-century origin. This assignment of date is, however, just as uncertain as the other, according to which the miniature from the Syrian Gospel manuscript of the monk Rabula of the monastery of Zagba in Mesopotamia, which also has the crucifixion for subject and is to be found in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana at Florence, is assigned to the year 586. In any case, as a general rule until the eleventh century it was not the dead but the living Christ who was depicted before or on the cross. Consequently an illustration in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana of about the date 1060 is considered as the first certain example of a dead crucified Christ.
The conception of Christ being put to death upon the cross is, comparatively speaking, a late one. The connection of Christ with the cross was originally not a reproduction of the manner of his death. It rather symbolises, as in the ancient Mysteries, precisely the reverse—the victory of the Christian Cult-God over death—the idea of resurrection and life. Hence it is obvious that the above-mentioned juxtaposition of the cross and lamb must have expressed the same idea. Here, too, the cross was originally only the symbol of fire and life. The lamb encircled by the sun’s orb refers to the ceremonial burning of the lamb at the spring equinox as an expiatory sacrifice and as a pledge of a new life. It appears the more plainly to be a figure of Agni (Agnus), since it is usually placed exactly at the point of intersection of the two arms—that is, at the place whence the divine spark first issued at the kindling of the fire with the two aranî.
In the whole of Christendom it passes as a settled matter that Jesus “died upon the cross”; but this has the shape, as it is usually represented among painters, of the so-called Latin cross, in which the horizontal crosspiece is shorter than the vertical beam. On what then does the opinion rest that the cross is the gibbet? The Evangelists themselves give us no information on this point. The Jews described the instrument which they made use of in executions by the expression “wood” or “tree.” Under this description it often occurs in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, in which the gibbet is rendered by xúlon, the same expression being also found in the Gospels. Usually, however, the gibbet is described as staurós (i.e., stake), so much so that staurós and xúlon pass for synonyms. The Latin translation of both these words is crux. By this the Romans understood any apparatus for the execution of men generally, without thinking, however, as a rule of anything else than a stake or gallows (patibulum, stipes) upon which, as Livy tells us, the delinquent was bound with chains or ropes and so delivered over to death. That the method of execution in Palestine differed in any way from this is not in any way shown. Among the Jews also the condemned used to be hanged upon a simple stake or beam, and exposed to a lingering death from heat, hunger, and thirst, as well as from the natural tension of his muscles. “To fasten to the cross” (stauroun, afigere cruci) accordingly does not mean either in East or West to crucify in our sense, but at first simply “to torture” or “martyr,” and later “to hang upon a stake or gallows.” And in this connection it appears that the piercing of hands and feet with nails, at least at the time at which the execution of Jesus is supposed to have occurred, was something quite unusual, if it was ever employed at all. The expressions prospassaleuein and proséloun, moreover, usually signify only to “fasten,” “to hang upon a nail,” but not at all “to nail to” in the special sense required.
There is not then the least occasion for assuming that according to original Christian views an exception to this mode of proceeding was made at the execution of Jesus. The only place in the Gospels where there is any mention of the “marks of the nails” (viz., John xx. 25) belongs, as does the whole Gospel, to a relatively later time, and appears, as does so much in John, as a mere strengthening and exaggeration of the original story. For example, Luke xxiv. 39, upon which John is based, does not speak at all of nail-marks, but merely of the marks of the wounds which the condemned must naturally have received as a consequence of being fastened to the stake. Accordingly the idea that Christ was “nailed” to the cross was in the earliest Christianity by no means the ruling one. Ambrose, for example, only speaks of the “cords” of the “cross” and the “ligatures of the passion” (“usque ad crucis laqueos ac retia passionis”), and consequently knew nothing of nails having been used in this case. If we consider that the “crucifixion” of Jesus corresponds to the hanging of Attis, Osiris, and so forth, and that the idea of the gibbeted gods of Nearer Asia called forth and fixed the Christian view; if we remember that Haman, the prototype of Jesus at the Purim feast, was also hanged upon a gallows, then it becomes doubly improbable that our present ideas on the matter correspond to the views of the early Christians. For although we have no direct picture of the hanging of those Gods, yet we possess representations of the execution of Marsyas by Apollo, in which the God has his rival hauled up on to a tree by ropes round his wrists, which have been bound together. But Marsyas, the inventor of the flute, the friend and guide of Cybele in the search for the lost Attis, is no other than the latter himself, or at any rate a personality very near akin to Attis. It is not difficult to conclude that Attis too, or the man who represented him in the rites, was hung in the same manner to the stake or tree-trunk and thus put to death. Thus it seems that originally the manner of death of the Jewish Messiah was imagined in the same way, and so the heathens too called the new God in scorn “the Hanged One.”
How, then, did the idea come into existence that Jesus did not die upon a simple gallows, but rather upon wood having the well-known form of the cross? It arose out of a misunderstanding, from considering as the same and mingling two ideas which were originally distinct but described by the same word wood, tree, xúlon, lignum, arbor. This word signifies, as we have already said, on the one hand indeed the stake or gallows (staurós, crux) upon which the criminal was executed; but the same word, corresponding to the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, also referred to the “wood,” “the tree of life,” which was supposed to stand in Paradise. According to the Revelation of John it was to serve as food for the holy in the new Paradise to come, and it was honoured by the Christians as the “seal” and guarantee of their salvation under the form of the mystic cross or Tau.
In all private religious associations and secret cults of later antiquity the members made use of a secret sign of recognition or union. This they carried about in the form, in some cases, of wooden, bronze, or silver amulets hung round the neck or concealed beneath the clothes, in others woven in their garments, or tattooed upon the forehead, neck, breast, hands, &c. Among these signs was the cross, and it was usually described under the name “Tau,” after the letter of the old Phœnician alphabet. Such an application of the cross to mystic or religious ends reaches back into grey antiquity. From of old the cross was in use in the cult of the Egyptian Gods, especially of Isis and Horus. It was also found among the Assyrians and Persians, serving, as the pictures show, in part as the mark and ornament of distinguished persons, such as priests and kings, in part also as a religious attribute in the hands of the Gods and their worshippers. According to some it was the sign which Jahwe ordered the Israelites to paint upon their doors with the blood of the lamb when he sent the angel of death to destroy the first-born of their Egyptian oppressors. It played a similar part also in Isaiah and Ezekiel, when it was a question of separating the god-fearing Israelites from the crowd of other men whom Jahwe purposed to destroy. When the Israelites were pressed in battle by the Amalekites Moses is said to have been helped by Aaron and Hur to stretch out his arms in the shape of that magic sign, and thus to have rendered possible a victory for his people over their enemies. Among the other nations of antiquity also—the Greeks, Thracians, the Gaulish Druids, and so on—the Tau was applied in a similar manner to ritualistic and mystic ends. It appears as an ornament on the images of the most different divinities and heroes—e.g., Apollo, Dionysus, Demeter, Diana (the Phœnician Astarte). It is also found upon innumerable Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Phœnician coins, upon vases, pictures, jewellery, &c. In Alexandria the Christians found it chiselled upon the stone when the temple of Serapis was destroyed, in 391. In this temple Serapis himself was represented of superhuman size, with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, as though embracing the universe. In Rome the Vestal virgins wore the cross upon a ribbon round the neck. Indeed, it even served as an ornament upon the weapons of the Roman legions and upon the standards of the cavalry long before Constantine, by his well-known “vision,” gave occasion for its being expressly introduced under the form of the so-called “Monogram of Christ” into the army as a military sign. But in the North also we find the cross, not only in the shape of the hooked-cross and the three-armed cross (Triskele), but also in the form of Thor’s hammer, upon runic, stones, weapons, utensils, ornaments, amulets, &c. And when the heathens of the North, as Snorre informs us, marked themselves in the hour of death with a spear, they scratched upon their bodies one of the sacred signs that has been mentioned, in doing which they dedicated themselves to God.
That here we have to do with a sun symbol is easily recognised wherever the simple, equally-armed cross appears duplicated with an oblique cross having the same point of intersection with it,
And as a matter of fact this symbol of a sun shedding its rays is found upon numberless coins and illustrations, in which it is obvious that a reference to the sun is intended—e.g., upon the coins of the Egyptian Ptolemies, of the city Gods of Rome, of Augustus and the Flavian Cæsars. Here the Sun sign appears to have been adopted as a consequence of the fusing of the Sun Cult of later antiquity with the cult of the Emperor. Much more frequent, however, is the simple Tau, sometimes, indeed, in a shape with equal limbs (Greek cross), +, sometimes with the upright below lengthened (Latin cross), t, sometimes upright, sometimes oblique (St. Andrew’s cross), X, sometimes, again, like the Greek letter Tau, T, sometimes in the shape of the so-called mirror of Venus, in which the ring plainly refers to the sun, sometimes in that of the Svastika, or hooked cross, [swastika], sometimes with, sometimes without a circle, and so on. A form made up of the oblique and the ring cross of the Egyptians (so-called Key of the Nile) is the cross known under the description of the “Monogram of Christ”. According to the legend it was first employed by Constantine on account of his “vision”; and ecclesiastical writers, especially on the Catholic side, try even to-day to support this view, in spite of all facts. For this form of the cross also is clearly of pre-Christian origin, and had its prototype in the ancient Bactrian Labarum cross, as is found, for example, upon the coins of the Bactrian king Hippostratos (about 130 B.C.), of the Egyptian Ptolemies, of Mithridates, upon Attic Tetradrachma, &c.
After the careful investigations on this subject which have been undertaken by French savants especially, there can be no doubt that we have before us in this so-called “seal” of the Gods and religious personalities a symbol of the creative force of nature, of the resurrection and the new life, a pledge of divine protection in this world and of everlasting blessedness after. As such it appears upon heathen sarcophagi and tombstones; and on this account in some cases their Christian character is too quickly assumed. Moreover, the cross has been preserved in present-day musical notation as the sign of the raising of a note, while its use in the Mysteries and private Cult associations is authority for the statement that precisely in these the thought of a new-birth and resurrection in company with the hero of the association or God of the union stood as a central point of faith. One understands the painful feeling of the Christians at the fact that the private sign used by them and their special sacraments were in use among all the secret cults of antiquity. They could explain this to themselves only as the work of spiteful dæmons and an evil imitation of Christian usages on the heathens’ part. In reality the symbol of the cross is much older than Christianity; and, indeed, the sign of the cross is found associated in a special manner with the cult of divinities of nature or life with its alternations of birth, blossoming, and decay, representatives of the fertility and creative force of nature, the Light-Gods and Sun-Gods subjected to death and triumphing victoriously over it. It is only as such, as Gods who died and rose again, that they were divinities of the soul and so of the Mysteries and pious fraternities. The idea of the soul, however, is found everywhere in nature religion considered as being connected with the warmth of life and with fire, just as the sun was honoured as the highest divinity and, so to speak, as the visible manifestation of the world-soul solely on account of its fiery nature. Should not, then, the symbol of life, which in its developed form plainly refers to the sun, in its simplest and original shape point to the fire, this “earliest phenomenon” of all religious worship?
Naturally, indeed, different views can be held as to what the various forms of the cross betoken. Thus, for example, according to Burnouf, Schliemann, and others, the Svastika represents the “fire’s cradle,” i.e., the pith of the wood, from which in oldest times in the point of intersection of the two arms the fire was produced by whirling round an inserted stick. On the other hand, according to the view most widespread at the present day, it simply symbolises the twirling movement when making the fire, and on this, too, rests its application as symbol of the sun’s course. Hochart considers the cross in the shape of the Greek Tau as the inserted stick (pramantha) of the Vedic priests. Very likely, however, this form arose simply through the identity of sound between the Greek and Phœnician letter, the Greeks having interchanged the like-sounding foreign letter with their own Tau. That the cross generally speaking, however, is connected with the Fire Cult, and that both parts of the sign originally contained a reference to the pieces of wood (aranî) of which in most ancient times use was made to produce fire, has been placed beyond doubt by the investigations into the matter. This is confirmed inter alia by the use of the symbol in the worship of the Vestals, the Roman fire-priestesses. This is the explanation of the wide extent of the symbol of the cross. Not only among the peoples of antiquity and in Europe, but also in Asia among the Indians and Chinese, it is in use from ancient times. In America, too, among the Mexicans and Incas, it played a part in worship long before the arrival of Europeans. In the same way is explained the close association of that symbol with the priestly office and kingly dignity, which was itself often connected with that office; similarly the intimate relations between the sign of the cross and the Gods of Fertility, Vegetation, and Seasons. For all of these were, as representatives of the warmth of life and the soul’s breath, in their deepest nature, Fire-Gods special aspects, closer characterisations and connections of that one divinity, of whom the oldest form known to us is in the Vedic Agni, and in whose service the priests of all peoples and times grew to their overwhelming strength. Julius Firmicus Maternus was thus quite right when he declared that Mithras, whose followers bore the sign of the cross upon their foreheads and at their communion-meal had the cross, imprinted upon the holy loaf, before their eyes, was an ancient Fire-God. But if the cross is the symbol of fire and also of the Mediator God, who brings earth and heaven into connection, then the reason can be found why Plato in the “Timæus” makes the World Soul in the form of a Chi, i.e., an oblique cross, stretched between heaven and earth. Then, indeed, it is not strange that the Christians of the first century regarded as an inspiration of the devil Plato’s doctrine of the mediatory office of the “double-natured” World Soul, which, according to that philosopher, was formed from a mixture of ideal and sensible matter. It is not strange that a Justin, “the most foolish of the Christian fathers” (Robertson), could actually assert that Plato borrowed the idea, as well as that of a world-conflagration, from—Moses.
In the Old Testament also, as was shown above, we meet the cross. Here it served as a mark of recognition and distinction of the God-fearing Israelites from the heathen, and as a magic sign. With a similar significance we meet it again in the New Testament. In the Revelation of John it appears as “the seal (sphragís) of the living God.” By it here, too, are the chosen ones of Israel marked off from the rest of mankind whom judgment has overtaken. At the same time, it is said that this sign is imprinted upon the foreheads of the inhabitants of the true Jerusalem. In the Epistles to the Galatians and Ephesians it is said of the believers in Christ that they were “sealed” before God by the mystic sign upon their foreheads, hands, or feet. The sign thus serves them as a pledge of redemption. Again, in the Epistle of Barnabas ix. 8, the cross contained in the letter T is expressly interpreted as (charis) “grace.” Under the form of the Greek Tau the cross appears during the first century of the Christian era, especially among the Christians in Egypt, and according to many was a symbol of Adonis or Tammuz. Now since the expressions xúlon and staurós, lignum and crux, were of double significance and denoted both the “seal” of religious salvation and the gibbet, it is possible that the two different significations became of themselves identical in the minds of the faithful. This was possible so much the more easily since the biblical account placed by the side of the “tree of life” in Paradise a “tree of death,” the fateful “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” which was supposed to have been accountable for the death of Adam and so of the whole of mankind, and as such made the comparison possible with the wood upon which Jesus died. We meet again with a special form of the cross in the old Assyrian or Babylonian so-called “mystical tree of mystery,” which was also a symbol of life. Among the Persians it appears to have had some reference to the holy Haoma tree; and here, too, as well as in India, where it was connected with the Bodhi tree, under which Sakyamuni by his devout humility rose to be a Buddha, it was represented in the artificial shape of a many-armed cross.
One and the same word, then (xúlon, crux), betokens both the gibbet and the pledge of life. Christ himself appears as the true “Tree of Life,” as the original of that miraculous tree the sight of which gave life to the first man in Paradise, which will be the food of the blessed in the world to come, and is represented symbolically by the mystical cross. It was easy to unite the ideas connected with those expressions, to look upon the “seal” of Christ (to semeion tou staurou, signum crucis) as the cross upon which he suffered, and vice-versâ, and to ascribe to the “wood” upon which Jesus is supposed to have died, the shape of the mystic sign, the Tau, or cross. The heathens had been accustomed to regard the stake upon which their Gods were hanged both as the representative of the God in question and the symbol of life and fruitfulness. For example, the stake furnished with four oblique sticks (like a telegraph post), which went by the name of the tatu, tat, dad, or ded and was planted at the feast of Osiris in Egypt, often had a rough picture of the God painted upon it, as also the pine-tree trunk of Attis, in which connection the idea that the seed contained in the cones of the rock-pine from of old had served men as food, while the sap found in them was prepared into an intoxicating drink (Soma), played its part. We are reminded also of the Germanic custom of the planting of the may-tree. This was not only a symbol of the Spring God, but also represented the life bestowed by him. In the same way the cross did not appear to the Christians originally as the form of the gibbet upon which God died, but as “the tree of life,” the symbol of the new birth and redemption. Since, however, the word for the mystical sign was identical with the expression for the gibbet, the double meaning led to the gibbet of Jesus being looked upon as the symbol of life and redemption, and the idea of the gibbet was mingled with that of the cross, the shape of the latter being imagined for the former. As Justin in his conversation with the Jew Trypho informs us, the Jews used to run a spit lengthwise through the whole body of the Paschal lamb and another cross-wise through its breast, upon which the forefeet were fastened, so that the two spits made the shape of a cross. This was to them obviously not a symbol of execution but rather the sign of reconcilement with Jahwe and of the new life thereon depending. For the Christians, however, who compared their Saviour with the Paschal lamb, this may have been an additional cause for the above-mentioned commingling of ideas, and this may have strengthened them in the conception that their God died upon the “cross.” The Phrygians, moreover, according to Firmicus Maternus, at the Spring Feast of Attis, used to fasten a ram or lamb at the foot of the fig-tree trunk on which the image of their God was hung.
In agreement with this view is the fact that the earliest representations of Christ in connection with the cross had for their subject not the suffering and crucified, but the miraculous Saviour triumphing over sickness and death. He appeared as a youthful God with the Book of the Law, the Gospel, in his hand, the lamb at his feet, the cross upon his head or in his right hand, just as the heathen Gods, a Jupiter, or some crowned ruler, used to be depicted with a cross-shaped sceptre. Or Jesus’ head was placed before the cross, and this in the orb of the sun—and exactly at the point of intersection of the arms of the cross, thus at the place where one otherwise finds the lamb. Even the Church, probably with a right feeling of the identity of Agnus and Agni, and in order to remove the connection of ideas therein contained, in the year 692, by the Quinisext Synod (in Trullo), forbade the pictures of the lamb and required the representation to be of the Saviour’s human shape. In spite of this even then they did not represent “the Crucified” in the present-day sense of the word, but portrayed Christ in the form of one standing before the cross praying with outstretched arms. Or he was shown risen from the grave, or standing upon the Gospels at the foot of the cross, out of this arising later the support for the feet in the pictures of him crucified. Here he was represented with open eyes, with his head encircled by the sun’s orb. In all of these different representations accordingly the cross only brought again before the eyes in symbolical form what was at the same time expressed by the figure of Christ standing at the cross, just as at the feasts of Osiris or Attis the God was doubly represented, both in his true shape (as image or puppet) and in the symbolical form of the Jatu or pine-tree trunk. This mode of depicting Christ lasted a long while, even though as early as the fifth or sixth century mention is made of crucifixion, and in arbitrary interpretation of Psa. xxii. 17 he was depicted with the marks of the nails. For, as has been said, “crux” betokens both the gibbet and the mystical sign, and the marks of the nails served to symbolise the Saviour’s triumph over pain and death. An ivory plate in the British Museum in London, mentioned and copied by Kraus, is considered the oldest representation of a crucifixion in our present sense. It is said to be of fifth-century origin. This assignment of date is, however, just as uncertain as the other, according to which the miniature from the Syrian Gospel manuscript of the monk Rabula of the monastery of Zagba in Mesopotamia, which also has the crucifixion for subject and is to be found in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana at Florence, is assigned to the year 586. In any case, as a general rule until the eleventh century it was not the dead but the living Christ who was depicted before or on the cross. Consequently an illustration in the Bibliotheca Laurenziana of about the date 1060 is considered as the first certain example of a dead crucified Christ.
The conception of Christ being put to death upon the cross is, comparatively speaking, a late one. The connection of Christ with the cross was originally not a reproduction of the manner of his death. It rather symbolises, as in the ancient Mysteries, precisely the reverse—the victory of the Christian Cult-God over death—the idea of resurrection and life. Hence it is obvious that the above-mentioned juxtaposition of the cross and lamb must have expressed the same idea. Here, too, the cross was originally only the symbol of fire and life. The lamb encircled by the sun’s orb refers to the ceremonial burning of the lamb at the spring equinox as an expiatory sacrifice and as a pledge of a new life. It appears the more plainly to be a figure of Agni (Agnus), since it is usually placed exactly at the point of intersection of the two arms—that is, at the place whence the divine spark first issued at the kindling of the fire with the two aranî.
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