The fact of course is that the symbol in question represented both Life and Death, and represented the latter only in a minor sense and owing to the fact that the Female Principle of Life was regarded as the necessary reverse, negative, or complement of the Male Principle;
which latter, having of the two the better claim to be considered the starter of life, was the one more particularly identified with Life and therefore with the vernal Sun-God.
It would also appear that the two symbols in question to some extent signified Fire and Water; Fire being of course the Male Principle, Day, Summer, Light, and Life; and Water the Female Principle. This still further illustrates the point dealt with above; for though Water is the negative of Fire, yet Fire cannot produce Life without the aid of Water.
Returning however to our consideration of the cross as a symbol of Life of pre-Christian date and origin, and having already dealt with the lands now known as Britain, France, Italy, and Switzerland, let us now consider the evidence of Greece.
At Mycenæ and elsewhere Dr. Schliemann discovered, among other relics of a bygone age, not only articles marked with the Svastika cross and the cross of four equal arms, but even seals and dies giving impressions of such crosses; thus demonstrating how large and prominent a part the symbol of the cross played in pre-Christian times among those in whose classic
tongue the earliest known copies of the Christian Scriptures were written centuries later.
It is also remarkable that Dr. Schliemann found golden crosses in the previously unopened tombs he discovered and explored at Mycenæ; as many as five such crosses having in some instances been placed with a single body by those who sealed up the vaults in question thousands of years ago and many centuries before the commencement of our era.
As few if any unrifled tombs of so ancient a date have been discovered in Greece and first explored by a trustworthy investigator, and as, moreover, it would only have been with the bodies of important personages that crosses of so valuable a material as gold would have been buried, these discoveries, coupled with the self-evident fact that crosses of more perishable material may have been buried with the bodies of less distinguished people, and by this time, like both the bodies and the tombs which enclosed them, have gone to dust, are most remarkable. And they entirely corroborate the testimony borne by the coins of ancient Gaul, the contents of the tombs of Gola-Secca, and the remains of the Lake Dwellers of Switzerland,
to the veneration paid long before our era by the inhabitants of Europe to the cross as the recognised symbol of Life. Nor as the symbol only of the life which ends in the grave, but also of the glorious hope that as the Sun, from whom we derive that life, whether considered from a daily or yearly point of view sinks but to rise again, even so we who owe our brief lives to the Sun-God, may, like the Giver of Life and only Saviour, rise from one life to another.
For whether the ancients were or were not unphilosophic enough to believe in the resurrection of bodies whose constituent atoms are continually changing and in time form part of other bodies, it is absurd to assume that they did not at times like ourselves conceive and dwell upon a hoped-for, if unexpected and improbable, Life-to-come.