The Mass.
The mass, which has been for centuries the central item in Roman Catholic worship, finds its origin in the “unbloody sacrifices” which were offered to the Paphian Venus, and to her counterpart in Babylonia and Assyria. It was this worship of the Queen of Heaven into which the apostate women of Judah were drawn, whom Jeremiah[246] condemns for “burning incense, pouring out drink offerings, and offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven.” These cakes were marked with the phallic symbol of the cross. As before noted, they were the progenitors of the modern “hot cross-buns,” which are associated with Friday—day of Venus.
The form of the cake-wafer adopted in paganized Christianity, its roundness, was borrowed from the Egyptians, to whom the form represented the disk of the sun. The mystic letters on the wafer form another link which connects it with Egyptian paganism. Christians explain these letters as meaning Jesus Hominum Salvator; but when the worshippers of Isis, who were everywhere in the Roman empire in the early centuries, read them on the unbloody sacrifice, they understood by them Isis, Horus, Seb, i. e., The Mother, the Child, and the Father of the Gods. The pagan character of this unbloody sacrifice was so patent at the first, that it was sharply condemned; but familiarity changed opposition to acceptance, and what was wholly pagan became the centre of worship in paganized Christianity.