While they found blood upon the departed and unharmed Israelites’ door-posts, the sorrowing Egyptians must have seen that it had been sprinkled there, not at hazard, but with the studied purpose of making therewith the Egyptian letter Tau, as it used to be fashioned at the time. But what was then its common shape? That the old Tau was a cross, we are told by written authority, and learn from monumental evidence. Learned as he was in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, Moses, no doubt, wrote with the letters of their alphabet. Now, the oldest shape of the Tau in the Hebrew alphabet, and still kept up among the Samaritans in St. Jerome’s days, was in the form of a cross: “Antiquis Hebræorum literis, quibus usque hodie Samaritæ utuntur, extrema Tau crucis habet similitudinem, quæ in Christianorum frontibus pingitur et frequentius manus inscriptione signatur.”[415] For monumental testimony we refer the reader to the proofs we have given, at large, in “Hierurgia,” pp. 352-355, second edition. Strengthening our idea that the lamb’s blood had been put on the door-post in the shape of a cross, and that hence the old Egyptians had borrowed it as a spell against evil hap, and a symbol of a life hereafter, is a passage set forth, first by Rufinus, A.D. 397, and then by Socrates, A.D. 440:—“On demolishing at Alexandria a temple dedicated to Serapis, were observed several stones sculptured with letters called hieroglyphics, which showed the figure of a cross. Certain Gentile inhabitants of the city who had lately been converted to the Christian faith, initiated in the method of interpreting these enigmatic characters, declared that the figure of the cross was considered as the symbol of future life.”[416] We know that, while the old Tau kept the shape of a cross, it took at least three modifications of that form on those monuments which, up to this time, have been brought to light: others may turn up with that letter traced exactly like the so-called “gammadion” found upon an Egyptian stuff of such an early date. Most probably this was the very shape, but with shorter arms, of the letter found traced upon the door-posts.
[415] Hier. in cap. ix. Ezech.
[416] Hist. Eccles. lib. v. c. 17.
The recurrence of the gammadion upon Christian monuments is curious. We find it shown upon the tunic of a gravedigger in the catacombs; it comes in among the ornamentation wrought upon the gold and parcel-gilt altar-frontal dome by our Anglo-Saxon countryman Walwin for the Ambrosian basilican church at Milan; it is seen upon the narrow border round some embroidery of the twelfth century, lately found within a shrine in Belgium, and figured by that untiring archæologist the Canon Voisin of Tournay; and upon a piece of English needlework of the latter half of the same twelfth century—the mitre of our St. Thomas, figured by Shaw, and still kept at Sens cathedral. As a favourite element in the pattern worked upon our ecclesiastical embroideries, this “gammadion” is as conspicuously shown upon the apparel round the shoulders, and on the one in front of his alb, in the effigy of Bishop Edington, at Winchester cathedral, as upon the vestments of a priest in a grave-brass at Shottesbrook church, Berks, given by Waller in his fine work.
Always keeping up its heathenish signification of a “future life,” Christianity widened the meaning of this symbol, and made it teach the doctrine of the Atonement through the death of our Lord upon a cross. Furthermore, it set forth that He is our corner-stone. About the thirteenth century, it was taken to be an apt memorial of His five wounds; and remembering the stigmata or five impressions in the hands, feet, and side of St. Francis of Assisi, this gammadion became the favourite device of such as bore that famous saint’s name, and was called in England, after its partial likeness to the ensigne of the Isle of Man—three feet—a fylfot.[417]
[417] M. S. Harley, 874, p. 190.
To the symbolic meaning affixed unto some animals, we have pointed in the catalogue, wherein, at p. [156], the reader will find that Christ, as God, is typified under the figure of a lion, under that again of the unicorn, as God-man. Man’s soul, at pp. [237], [311], is figured as the hare; mischief and lubricity are, at p. [311], shadowed forth in the likeness of the monkey.
Birds often come in here as symbols; and of course we behold the lordly eagle very frequently. Bearing in mind how struggled the two great factions of the Guelphs whose armorial arms were “un’ Aquila con un Drago sotto i piedi”—an eagle with a dragon under its feet—and the Ghibellini, we do not wonder at finding the noble bird, sometimes single, sometimes double-headed, so frequently figured on silks woven in Sicily, or on the Italian peninsula, triumphing over his enemy, the dragon or Ghibelline stretched down before him. About the emblematic eagle of classic times we have already spoken.
If the Roman Quintus Curtius, like the Greeks before him, was in amazement at certain birds in India, so quick in mimicking the human voice: “aves ad imitandum humanæ vocis sonum dociles,”[418] we naturally expect to find the parrot figured, as we do here, upon stuffs from Asia, or imitations of such webs.
Famous, in eastern story, are those knowing birds—and they were parrots—that, on coming home at evening, used to whisper unto Æthiopia’s queen (whom Englishmen not till the sixteenth century began to call Sheba, but all the world besides called and yet calls Saba) each word and doing, that day, of the far-off Solomon, or brought round their necks letters from him. Out of this Talmudic fable grew the method with artists during the fifteenth century of figuring one of the wise men as very swarthy—an Æthiopian—under the name of Balthasar, taking as their warrant, a work called “Collectaneæ,” erroneously assigned to our own Beda; and because our Salisbury books for the liturgy, sang, as all the old liturgies yet sing, on the feast of the Epiphany:—“All shall come from Saba”—the name of the country as well as of that queen who once governed it—“bringing gold and frankincense,” &c. those mediæval artists deemed it proper to show somewhere about the wise men, parrots, as sure to have been brought among the other gifts, especially from the land of Saba. Upon a cope, belonging now to Mount St. Mary’s, Chesterfield, made of very rich crimson velvet, there is beautifully embroidered by English hands, the arrival at Bethlehem of the three wise men. In the orphrey, on that part just above the hood, are figured in their proper colours two parrots, as those may remember who saw it in the Exhibition here of 1862; on textiles before us this bird is often shown. The appearance of the parrot on the vestments at old St. Paul’s is very frequent.[419]