The “gammadion,” or the cross made thus 卐 a figure which, as we said before, is to be seen traced upon the earliest heathenish art-works, as well as the latest mediæval ones for Christian use, may be often found wrought on textiles here.
Knowing, as we do, that the first time this symbol shows itself to our eyes, is in the pattern figured on a web of the Pharaonic period, it is to the early history of Egypt we ought to go, if we wish to learn its origin and meaning.
The most astounding event of the world’s annals was the going out of Israel from Egypt. The blood of the lamb slain and sacrificed the evening before, and put upon both the door-posts, as well as sprinkled at the threshold of the house wherein any Hebrew dwelt—a sign of safety from all harm and death to man and beast, within its walls, on that awful night when throughout all Egypt the first-born of everything else was killed—must have caught the sight of every wonder-stricken Egyptian father and mother who, while weeping over their loss, heard that death had not gone in to do the work of slaughter where the blood had signed the gates of every Israelite.
Among the Hebrew traditions, handed down to us by the Rabbins, one is that the mark made by the Israelites upon their door-posts with the blood of the sacrificed lamb, the night before starting out of Egypt, was fashioned like the letter Tau made after its olden form, that is, in the shape of a cross, thus +.
What is still more curious, we are told that the lamb itself was spitted as if it had been meant to bear about its body, an unmistakable likeness to a kind of crucifixion. Treating of the passover, the Talmud says:—The ram or kid was roasted in an oven whole, with two spits made of pomegranate wood thrust through it, the one lengthwise, the other transversely (crossing the longitudinal one near the fore-legs) thus forming a cross.[412] Precisely the same thing is said by St. Justin, martyr, born A.D. 103, in his Dialogue with Tryphon the Jew. This very mode of roasting is expressed in Arabic by the verb “to crucify;” according to Jahn, in his “Biblical Antiquities,” § 142, as quoted by Kitto, under the word Passover.[413]
[412] Pesachim, c. 3.
[413] T. ii. p. 477 of the “Cyclopædia of Biblical Literature.”
From the words of St. Jerome, it would seem that that learned hebraist, well knowing, as he did, the traditions of the rabbins of his day, had understood from them that the mark of the lamb’s blood sprinkled on the doors of the Israelites going out of Egypt, had been so made as to take the shape of a cross.
Deeply smitten as the whole of Egypt must have been at the woe that befel them and theirs, the night before the great exode of the Israelites from among them, those Egyptians could not help seeing how all the Hebrews, their children, and their flocks had gone forth scatheless out of that death-stricken land. At peep of dawn, the blood upon the door-posts of every house where an Israelite had lately dwelt, told the secret; for the destroyer had not been there. From that hour, a Tau was thought by them to be the symbol of health and safety, of happiness, and future life. St. Epiphanius, born A.D. 310, in Palestine, for many years Archbishop of Salamis in Cyprus, and a great traveller in Egypt, tells us, that being mindful of that day on which the Israelites who had besmeared the door-posts of their houses with the blood of the lamb, had been spared the angel’s death-stroke, the Egyptian people were accustomed, at every vernal equinox—their new year—to daub, with red paint, their doors, their trees, and animals, the while they cried out that, “once at this time fire blighted every thing;” against such a plague, they think that the remedy is a spell in the colour of blood: “Egyptios memores illius diei quo a cæde angeli liberati sunt Israelitæ qui agni sanguine postes domorum illinierant, solitos esse, intrante æquinoctio vernanti, accipere rubricam et illinere omnes arbores domosque clamantes ‘quia in tempore hoc ignis vastavit omnia’ contra quam luem remedium putant ignis colorem sanguineum rubricæ.”[414]
[414] Hæreses, xviii.