“In the Mexican tongue it bore the significant and worthy name, ‘Tree of our Life,’ or ‘Tree of our Flesh.’ It represented the god of rains and of health, and this was everywhere its simple meaning. ‘Those of Yucatan,’ say the chroniclers, ‘prayed to the cross as the god of rains when they needed water.’ The Aztec goddess of rains bore one in her hand, and at the feast celebrated to her honour in the early spring (as we have previously noted) victims were nailed to a cross and shot with arrows. Quetzalcoatl, god of the winds, bore as his sign of office a mace like the cross of a bishop; his robe was covered with them strewn like flowers, and its adoration was throughout connected with his worship.”
We have mentioned that “when the Muyscas would sacrifice to the goddess of waters, they extended cords across the tranquil depths of some lake, thus forming a gigantic cross, and that at the point of intersection threw in their offerings of gold, emeralds and precious oils. The arms of the cross were designed to point to the cardinal points, and represent the four winds, the rain bringers. To confirm this explanation, let us have recourse to the simpler ceremonies of the less cultivated tribes, and see the transparent meaning of the symbol as they employed it.
“When the rain maker of the Lenni Lenape would exert his power, he retired to some secluded spot and drew upon the earth the figure of a cross, placed upon it a piece of tobacco, a gourd, a bit of some red stuff, and commenced to cry aloud to the spirits of the rains. The Creeks at the festival of the Busk, celebrated to the four winds, and according to the legends instituted by them, commenced with making the new fire. The manner of this was to place four logs in the centre of the square, end to end, forming a cross, the outer ends pointing to the cardinal points; in the centre of the cross the new fire is made.”[4]
“As the emblem of the winds which disperse the fertilising showers,” says Brinton, “it is emphatically the tree of our life, our subsistence, and our health. It never had any other meaning in America, and if, as has been said, the tombs of the Mexicans were cruciform, it was perhaps with reference to a resurrection and a future life as portrayed under this symbol, indicating that the buried body would rise by the action of the four spirits of the world, as the buried seed takes on a new existence when watered by the vernal showers. It frequently recurs in the ancient Egyptian writings, where it is interpreted life; doubtless, could we trace the hieroglyph to its source, it would likewise prove to be derived from the four winds.”[5]
The Buddhist cross to which allusion has been made was exactly the cross of the Manicheans, with leaves and flowers springing from it, and placed upon a Mount Calvary as among the Roman Catholics. The tree of life and knowledge, or the Jambu tree, in their maps of the world, is always represented in the shape of a Manichean cross 84 yojanas, or 423 miles high, including the three steps of the Calvary. This cross, putting forth leaves and flowers (and fruit also, Captain Wilford was informed), is called the divine tree, the tree of the gods, the tree of life and knowledge, and productive of whatever is good and desirable, and is placed in the terrestrial Paradise. Agapius, according to Photius, maintained that this divine tree, in Paradise, was Christ himself. In their delineation of the heavens, the globe of the earth is filled with this cross and its Calvary. The divines of Thibet, says Captain Wilford, place it to the S.W. of Meru, towards the source of the Ganges. The Manicheans always represented Christ crucified upon a tree, among the foliage. The Christians of India, though they did not admit of images, still entertained the greatest veneration for the cross. They placed it on a Calvary in public places and at the meeting of cross roads, and even the heathen Hindus in these parts paid also great regard to it.
Captain Wilford was presented by a learned Buddhist with a book, called the Cshetra-samasa, which contained several drawings of the cross. Some of these his friend was unable to explain to him, but whatever the variations of the cross were in other particulars, they were declared to be invariable as regards the shaft and two arms; the Calvary was sometimes omitted. One of these crosses seemed to puzzle the Buddhist completely, or he would not say either what he thought or knew about it. It consisted of the ordinary cross with shaft and cross-bar, pointed at the ends, but with two other bars intersecting the right angles formed by the shaft and cross-bar, thus giving six points. No one can look at this cross, and not at once discern its phallic character. Some writers affect to laugh at this, but we have ample evidence that at times such a meaning has been attributed to the cross. In connection with this, Dr. Inman makes some remarks which we shall do well to consider, whether we receive them or not; there may be nothing in them, and there may be much. He says:—“There can be no doubt, I think, in the mind of any student of antiquity, that the cross is not originally a Christian emblem; nay, the very fact that the cross was used as a means of executing criminals shows that its form was familiar to Jews and Romans. It was used partly as an ornament, and partly in certain forms of religious worship. The simple cross, with perpendicular and transverse arms of equal length, represented the nave and spokes of the solar wheel, or the sun darting his rays on all sides. As the wheel became fantastically developed so did the cross, and each limb became so developed at the outer end as to symbolise the triad. Sometimes the idea was very coarsely represented; and I have seen, amongst some ancient Etruscan remains, a cross formed of four phalli of equal length, their narrow end pointing inwards; and in the same work another was portrayed, in which the phallus was made of inordinate length so as to support the others high up from the ground; each was in itself a triad. The same form of cross was probably used by the Phœnicians, who appear to have colonised Malta at a very early period of their career; for they have left a form of it behind them in the shape of a cross similar to that described above, but which has been toned down by the moderns, who could not endure the idea of an union between grossness and the crucifix, and the phalli became as innocent as we see them in the Maltese cross of to-day.”
So many traces of the cross, as used in ancient times in all parts of the world, meet us on every hand that we find it difficult within the limited space at our command even to enumerate them; we have already traversed in our account a greater part of the known world, and still vast numbers of instances remain unnoticed. Almost as varied as its principal forms are the explanations offered respecting its origin and significance. We are told by some that for its origin we must go to the Buddhists and to the Lama of Thibet, who is said to take his name from the cross, called in his language Lamh. Higgins quotes Vallence as saying that the Tartars call the cross Lama, from the Scythian Lamh, a hand, synonymous to the Yod of the Chaldeans; and that it thus became the name of a cross, and of the high priest with the Tartars; and with the Irish, Luarn, signifying the head of the church, an abbot, &c.
The last form of cross to which we shall here allude is that known as the Crux Ansata, or Handled Cross. Whatever may be the signification of that instrument, or ornament, it is certain that no other has ever been so variously explained, or has been so successful in puzzling those who have sought to give it a meaning. Some have said it was a Nilometer, or measure of the rise of the Nile; one—a bishop—thought it was a setting stick for planting roots; another said it represented the Law of Gravitation. Don Martin said it was a winnowing fan; Herwart said it was a compass; Pococke said it represented the four elements. Others, again, suggest that it may be only a key. “It opened,” says Borwick, “the door of the sacred chest. It revealed hidden things. It was the hope of life to come.” And he continues, “However well the cross fit the mathematical lock, the phallic lock, the gnostic lock, the philosophical lock, the religious lock, it is quite likely that this very ancient and almost universal symbol was at first a secret in esoteric holding, to the meaning of which, with all our guessing, we have no certain clue.”
This cross has certainly a most remarkable connection with the ancient history of Egypt, being found universally represented on the monuments, the tombs, the walls, and the wrapping cloths of the dead; hence, evidently, the idea that it is peculiarly Egyptian and its ascription of “Key of the Nile.” From Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, and Ruffinus, we learn that it was known to the Egyptian Christians at the close of the fourth century as the symbol of eternal life. Later on, Dr. Max Uhlman wrote, “that the handle cross means life, is manifest from the Rosetta inscription and other texts.” Zöckler, another German author, notices the opinion of Macrobius that it was the hieroglyphic sign of Osiris, or the sun, it being a fact that when the ancient Egyptians wished to symbolise Osiris, they set up a staff with an eye upon it, because in antiquity the sun was known as the eye of God, and then claims that the round portion represented the orb of the sun, the perpendicular bar signifying the rays of the high mid-day sun, and the shorter horizontal bar symbolising the rays of the rising or setting sun. The discovery of this emblem by M. Mariette in a niche of the holy of holies in the ancient temple of Denderah, points significantly to its importance and peculiar sacredness, and it has been thought probable that it was the central object of interest in the inner precincts of the temple.
It seems that the Egyptian priests, when asked for an explanation of this cross, evaded the question by replying that the Tau was a “divine mystery.”