Whereas the Kabalists say the reverse, and maintain it, solely out of their desire to veil their doctrine. By the way, the definition of Deity by the circle is not Pascal's at all, as Éliphas Lévi thought. It was borrowed by the French Philosopher from either Mercury Trismegistus or Cardinal Cusa's Latin work, De Doctâ Ignorantiâ, in which he makes use of it. It is, moreover, disfigured by Pascal, who replaces the words “Cosmic Circle,” which stand symbolically in the original inscription, by the word Theos. With the Ancients both words were synonymous.
A. Cross And Circle.
In the minds of the ancient Philosophers something of the divine and the mysterious has ever been ascribed to the shape of the circle. The old world, consistent in its symbolism and with its Pantheistic intuitions, uniting the visible and the invisible Infinitudes into one, represented Deity and its outward Veil alike—by a circle. This merging of the two into a unity, and the name Theos being given indifferently to both, is explained, and becomes thereby still more scientific and philosophical. Plato's etymological definition of the word theos (θεός) has, been given elsewhere. In his Cratylus, he derives it from the verb the-ein (θέειν), “to move,” as suggested by the motion of the heavenly bodies which he connects with Deity. According to the Esoteric Philosophy, this Deity, during its “Nights” and its “Days,” or Cycles of Rest and Activity, is the “Eternal Perpetual Motion,” the “Ever-Becoming, as well as the ever universally Present, and the Ever-Existing.” The latter is the root-abstraction; the former is the only possible conception in the human mind, if it disconnects this Deity from any shape or form. It is a perpetual, never-ceasing evolution, circling back in its incessant progress through æons of duration into its original status—Absolute Unity.
It was only the minor Gods who were made to carry the symbolical attributes of the higher ones. Thus, the God Shoo, the personification [pg 576] of Ra, who appears as the “Great Cat of the Basin of Persæa in An”[1283] was often represented in the Egyptian monuments seated and holding a cross, symbol of the four Quarters, or the Elements, attached to a circle.
In that very learned work, The Natural Genesis, by Gerald Massey, under the heading, “Typology of the Cross,” there is more information to be had on the cross and circle than in any other work we know of. He who would fain have proofs of the antiquity of the cross is referred to these two volumes. The author says:
The circle and cross are inseparable.... The Crux Ansata unites the circle and cross of the four corners. From this origin the circle and the cross came to be interchangeable at times. For example, the Chakra, or Disk of Vishnu, is a circle. The name denotes the circling, wheeling round, periodicity, the wheel of time. This the god uses as a weapon to hurl at the enemy. In like manner, Thor throws his weapon, the Fylfot, a form of the four-footed cross [Svastika], and a type of the four quarters. Thus the cross is equivalent to the circle of the year. The wheel emblem unites the cross and circle in one, as does the hieroglyphic cake and the Ankh-tie ☥.[1284]
Nor was the double glyph sacred with the profane, but only with the Initiates. For Raoul Rochette shows that:[1285]
The sign ♀ occurs as the reverse of a Phœnician coin, with a Ram as the obverse.... The same sign, sometimes called Venus' Looking-Glass, because it typified reproduction, was employed to mark the hind-quarters of valuable brood mares of Corinthian and other beautiful breeds of horses.
This proves that so far back as those early days the cross had already become the symbol of human procreation, and that oblivion of the divine origin of cross and circle had begun.