Karl Blind has also drawn attention to a mediæval German church legend which affords a good example of the persistence of pagan ideas and of the pagan-christian overlap. “Thus Trauenlob makes the Virgin Mary say of God the Father—‘The Smith from the Upper-Land (Heaven) threw his hammer into my lap (schôz).’”[176]
Amongst the early Christians it was a form sometimes given to the Cross of Christ, itself called the Tree of Life; but if they made of it a symbol of life, it was spiritual life that it typified to them; and if they sometimes gave it the form of the patibulum (gallows), it was because such was the instrument employed among the Romans in the punishment by crucifixion.
In Central America, where, according to M. Albert Réville, the Cross was surnamed the Tree of Plenty, it assumed also the form of the tau. This pre-Columbian American Cross, T, was a symbol of fertility because it represented the rain-god; it is, in fact, an abbreviated rain-shower (as will be seen on reference to Figs. [62]-[64]). Similarly the four-rayed cross represented the four quarters whence comes the rain, or rather the four main winds which bring rain, and it thus became the symbol of the Tlaloc, god of rain and waters, fertiliser of earth and lord of paradise, and lastly, of the mythical personage known by the name of Quetzacoatl. From North to South America the Latin cross symbolises “the Father of the four winds” (Argentine Republic), “the old man in the sun who rules the winds” (Blackfeet Indians), or similar personages. But all crosses are not the four quarters of the wind, as will be seen on reference to Figs. [100] D, E, [102] A. For an account of the American cross, Colonel Mallery should be consulted, Tenth Ann. Rep., p. 724.
Mr. Beal, in the same number of the Indian Antiquary, which contains Mr. Thomas’s remarks on the Svastika (March 1880), has shown that in Chinese
is the symbol for an enclosed space of earth, and that the simple cross + occurs as a sign for earth in certain ideographic groups.[177]
The four-rayed cross, separate or inscribed within a circle, is a very common symbol of the sun in prehistoric Europe.
As different waves of culture drifted across Europe, as new religions permeated the mass of the people, the stream-borne symbols found physical and spiritual analogues among the indigenous symbolism, and union naturally took place. In some cases, at all events, the cross fertilisation, as I have termed it, resulted in a higher or more spiritual meaning animating the old symbols; thus the symbol of the Avenger, the crushing Hammer of God, became that of the God Redeemer of the world.
When symbols become merely the dry-bones of defunct religions they may retain a certain magical quality, but then they pass out of religion and enter the domain of magic, where in fulness of time they may be born anew and start a fresh career as the symbols of modern science.
Besides this natural approximation of analogous symbols and symbolism, there is a more conscious and complex amalgamation, a heteromorphism. As Count Goblet d’Alviella says,[178] “At other times the symbolic syncretism is intentional and premeditated; whether it be in the desire to unite for the sake of greater efficacy, the attributes of several divinities in a single figure, as is shown in certain pantheistic figures of Gnostic origin; or a wish to state, by the fusion of symbols, the unity of the gods and the identity of creeds, as in the mystic monogram wherein the Brahmaists of contemporary India have testified to their religious eclecticism by interweaving the Om of the Hindus with the Trident, the Crescent, and the Cross.