In this connection it may be mentioned, as a series of curious coincidences, that in the Zoroastrian religion long before our era the Sun-God Mithras bore much the same relation to the All-Father that the Christ does in ours, and is referred to in the Zend Avesta as the Incarnate Word; that Mithras is said, like the Christ, to have been born in a cave; that the Fathers admitted that the new-born Sun had been worshipped in the cave at Bethlehem to which the story of the birth of Jesus referred; and that in framing its calendar our Church fixed upon the recognised birthday of Mithras, the Natalis Invicti of the Roman Brumalia, as the birthday of the Christ.
It is also noteworthy that the Christ is thus said to have been born as well as to have risen again the third or fourth ("After three days," Matt, xxvii. 63; after "Three days and three nights," Matt, xii. 40) day. For the birthday of Mithras and afterwards of the Christ, known to us as Christmas day, seems to have been fixed upon as the third or fourth day after the winter solstice, and as that upon which the sun's resurrection from the south was first discernible after its apparent cessation of movement or death.
In this connection it should be added that Lucian records the fact that the Sun-God referred to by the Fathers as worshipped at Bethlehem was lamented as dead once a year and always acclaimed as alive again the third day; that in several places in the Zend Avesta we meet with passages which show that the Mithras worshippers of old believed that at the death of a man his spirit sits at the head of the corpse for three days and three nights, and then, at dawn, rises free from all earthly attachments; and that we say that the execution of Jesus took place at the time of the Passover or Vernal Equinox, while instead of the prophesied "three days and three nights in the heart of the earth" (Matt. xii. 40) the period between the death and burial on Good Friday evening and the resurrection before dawn on Easter Sunday is just about that during which the Sun's disc is at the Vernal Equinox transfixed by the Equator, viz., 32 2/3 hours.
The question why the Cock so often, like the Cross, surmounts the steeples wherewith we adorn our Christian churches, is brought before us by the fact that it was in ancient days a well-known symbol both of the generative
powers and of the Sun-God; often appearing as such upon the top of a sacred pillar in Assyrian and Babylonian representations of priests in the act of sacrificing or worshipping. It was probably as the "herald of the dawn" that this bird became a symbol of the Sun-God, and it would seem that we place its effigy aloft with the same idea in view.
Another point to be noted is that in the Kunthistorisches Museum at Vienna is an ancient vase upon which is a representation of the Sun-God Apollo bearing upon his breast as his one ornament and symbol a Svastika cross.
We are reminded of the facts that we Christians were once in the habit of alluding to the cross as the Tree of Life, and that the ancients dressed up the trunks of trees and worshipped them as symbols of life and growth, by an Attic vase of the fifth century B.C. Upon this is a red coloured painting of a tree so dressed, on which is to be seen near the top a head of the Sun-God Dionysos, and surrounding the trunk a shirt or garment covered with crosses.
As to the evidence obtained from the ruins
of Herculaneum and Pompeii, it is said that much which is of a phallic character has been, from quite worthy motives, kept in the background. An important fact has however been mentioned by Mr. C. W. King, M.A., in his well known work on the Gnostics and, their Remains, and this at least can be commented upon. He tells us that the Cross and the Phallus were found placed in juxtaposition upon the walls as meaning one and the same thing, and he goes on to add that
"This cross seems to be the Egyptian Tau, that ancient symbol of the generative power and therefore transferred into the Bacchic mysteries."
The foregoing are the last of the evidences throwing light upon the origin and history of the symbol adopted by our religion as its own, which the author thinks it necessary to bring forward in support of his contention. And however much of the evidence sought out by the author and in this work marshalled by him into something like order may seem by itself to be untrustworthy or worthless, no reader can reasonably deny that it has been proved that the cross was a well known