Now, there is another text in the same chapter, which, though not incorrectly translated, yet loses half its beauty as at present understood! It will startle you when I recite it! Yet here it comes. “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!”[567]
By lamb, no doubt, you mean a young sheep: but let me ask you, what connection can you perceive between a young sheep and the taking away of sin? That of immolation, you answer, as typifying the grand offering. Well, then, why add “of God”? Why say, the young sheep of God, if it was an ordinary animal of the mere ovine species that was intended?
No, sir; recollect the “Lamb slain from the beginning of the world,” recorded in the Revelations, as quoted before.[568]
A deep mystery is involved in this expression, which the ingenuity of man could not evolve but through the Irish. In that language lambh is a word having three significations. The first is a hand; the second a young sheep; and the third a cross.[569]
Let us now, in rendering the text, substitute this latter instead of the intermediate; and it will be, “Behold the cross of God, which taketh away the sin of the world!” By which you perceive that when John the Baptist, by inspiration, pointed out Jesus Christ as the universal Saviour of the world, his very words establish a previous crucifixion!
You now see how it happened that ten, in numerals, came to be represented by a cross X. This being the number of fingers upon each person’s hands: and a hand and a cross being both prefigured in the sacred, that is, in the Irish language,[570] by the same term, lambh, it hence occurred that in all reckoning and notation, a new score should be commenced therefrom—that its sanctity should be still further enhanced by the epithet of diag, or perfection, which characterises it as a submultiple, and that the mysteriousness of the whole should be additionally shrouded under the comprehensive symbol of a pyramid or triangle △[571]
“Our Hibernian Druids,” says Vallancey, “always wore a key, like the doctors of law of the Jews, to show they alone had the key of the sciences, that is, that they alone could communicate the knowledge of the doctrine they preached. The name of this key was kire, or cire; and eo, a peg or pin, being compounded with it, forms the modern eo-cire, the key of a lock. The figure of this key resembled a cross; those of the Lacedæmonians and Egyptians were of the same form.”
Estimable and revered Vallancey, it pains me to say anything against you! but on those subjects you were quite at bay! It was not to “show that they alone had the key of the sciences,” that “the doctors of law of the Jews always wore a key,” but because that they had seen it in the ceremonial of the Egyptians, from whom, like the Lacedæmonians, they had borrowed its use, without either of them being able to penetrate its import![572]
The origin, then, of this badge appearing amongst the habiliments of our ancient priests, is developed by the name which those priests themselves bore, viz. Luamh, which, being but a direct formative from lambh, a cross, unlocks the secret of their being its ministers.[573]
The Idæi-Dactyli, who superintended the mysteries of Ceres, obtained their designation from the very same cause, and corresponded literally with our Luamhs: for the Iod of the Chaldeans being equivalent to the lambh or hand of the Irish, the number of fingers thereon were made religiously significant of the X, or cross! And,—what cannot fail to excite astonishment, as to the immutability of a nation’s character,—to this very hour, the symbolical oath of the Irish peasant is a transverse placing of the forefinger of one hand over that of the other, and then uttering the words, “By the cross”!