nd in
the Christian religion is a significant emblem of its Pagan origin; it
was adored, carved in temples, and worn as a sacred emblem by sun and
nature worshippers, long before there were any Christians to adore,
carve, and wear it. The crowd kneeling before the cross in Roman
Catholic and in High Anglican Churches, is a simple reproduction of the
crowd who knelt before it in the temples of ancient days, and the girls
who wear it amongst ourselves, are--in the most innocent unconsciousness
of its real signification--exactly copying the Indian and Egyptian women
of an elder time. Saturn's symbol was a cross and a ram's horn. Jupiter
bore a cross with a horn. Venus a circle with a cross. The Egyptian
deities a cross and oval. (The signification of these will be dealt with
below.) The Druids sought oak trees with two main arms growing in shape
of a cross, and, if they failed to find such, nailed a beam cross-wise.
The chief pagodas in India are built, like many Christian churches, in
the form of a cross. I have read in a book on church architecture that
churches should be built either in the form of a cross, or else in that
of a ship, typifying the ark; i.e., they should either be built in the
form of the phallus or the yoni, the ship or ark being one of the
symbols of the female energy (see below, p. 361).

The CRUCIFIX, or cross with human figure stretched upon it, is also
found in ancient times, although not so frequently as the simple cross.
The crucifix appears to have arisen from the circle of the horizon being
divided into four parts, North, South, East, and West, and the Sun-god,
drawn within, or on, the circle, came into contact with each cardinal
point, his feet and head touching, or intersecting, two, while his
outstretched arms point to the other quarters. Plato says that the "next
power to the Supreme God was decussated, or figured in the shape of a
cross, on the universe." Krishna is painted and sculptured on a cross.
The Egyptians thus drew Osiris, and sometimes we find a circle drawn
with the dividing lines, and in the midst is stretched the dead body of
Osiris. Robert Taylor gives another origin for the crucifix: "The
ignorant gratitude of a superstitious people, while they adored the
river [Nile] on whose inundations the fertility of their provinces
depended, could not fail of attaching notions of sanctity and holiness
to the posts that were erected along its course, and which, by a
_transverse beam_, i