Egyptian Intrusive Seals.
Ogee Svastika.
With circle. Plain.
As against all these theories, Major-General Gordon, writing to Dr. Schliemann in 1896 from the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, of which he was then Controller, points out that the Svastika is obviously Chinese, and that on the breech of a large gun captured in the Taku Fort in ’61, and at the time of writing lying outside his office at Woolwich, the same symbol is displayed. Dr. Lockyer, who was for many years a medical missionary in China, also says that the sign is thoroughly Chinese. Colonel Sykes, another authority on matters Chinese, concludes that according to the Chinese authorities, Fa-hiau, Soung-Young, and Hiuantusang, the ‘doctors of reason,’ Taosee or followers of the mystic cross were diffused in China and India before the advent of Sakya in the sixth century B.C. (according to other authorities in the eleventh century B.C.), continuing to Fa-hiau’s time, and that they were professors of qualified Buddhism, which it is stated was the universal religion of Thibet before Sakya’s advent, and continued until orthodox Buddhism was introduced in the ninth century A.D. As to this Colonel Tod holds the opinion that the first Buddha of the four flourished circa B.C. 2250. This was Budh the parent of the lunar race. ¶ The Greeks undoubtedly connected the symbol with the cult of Apollo, but it seems probable that the sign came to them from Egypt, where the Tau which was a cross was anciently a symbol of the generative power, and afterwards was introduced into the Bacchic mysteries. Such a cross has been found at Pompeii in a house, in juxtaposition with the Phallus and with other symbols embodying the same idea. This mystic Tau, or Standard of the Cross as it has been called, formed just half of the Labarum,[33] or idolatrous war standard of the Pagans. The Labarum bore at once the crescent and the cross, the crescent as the emblem of Astarte the Queen of Heaven, and the cross as that of Bacchus. ¶ The controversy, if so it can be called, will doubtless rage for all time, but the one essential point remains salient: namely, that the symbol is admittedly universal, and equally admittedly it is the basis and the mainstay in one form or another of all conventional decorative design. It is to be found everywhere in our modern life. In our household appointments, in our mural decorations, in the shapes and adornment of articles of our furniture. Even does it come down to us in the shape of those old irons on houses with which we are all familiar, and which, though a few persons fondly believe them to be so placed for the purpose of remedying cracking walls, are regarded by every right-thinking country person as a protection against lightning and fire. Unconsciously Svastika permeates our whole existence. We cannot even sit down to dinner without finding it set before us in some of our table appointments; and nowhere is the symbol more constantly and more permanently evident than in oriental rugs and carpets. In every specimen of these, of whatsoever provenance, and no matter how much the flowing line of curves may have encroached on the rectilineal design of convention, the Svastika is traceable. It may not be at once discovered in the main body of the pattern, though it is always present, but it is invariably and inevitably to be found in the border, which it may at once be said is as much an historical asset as is the central design itself.
Irons on Old Houses.
