ANTICIPATORY USE OF THE CROSS.
(Vol. vii., pp. 548. 629.)
I think The Writer of "Communications with the Unseen World" would have some difficulty in referring to the works on which he based the statement that "it was a tradition in Mexico that when that form (the cross) should be victorious, the old religion should disappear, and that a similar tradition attached to it at Alexandria." He doubtless made the statement from memory, and unintentionally confounded two distinct facts, viz. that the Mexicans worshipped the cross, and had prophetic intimations of the downfall of their nation and religion by the oppression of bearded strangers from the East. The quotation by Mr. Peacock at p. 549., quoted also in Purchas' Pilgrims, vol. v., proves, as do other authorities, that the cross was worshipped in Mexico prior to the Spanish invasion, and therefore it was impossible that the belief mentioned by The Writer, &c. could have prevailed.
On the first discovery of Yucatan,—
"Grijaha was astonished at the sight of large crosses, evidently objects of worship."—Prescott's Mexico, vol. i. p. 203.
Mr. Stephens, in his Central America, vol. ii., gives a representation of one of these crosses. The cross on the Temple of Serapis, mentioned in Socrates' Ecc. Hist., was undoubtedly the well-known Crux ansata, the symbol of life. It was as the latter that the heathens appealed to it, and the Christians explained it to them as fulfilled in the Death of Christ.
Mr. Peacock asks for other instances: I subjoin some.
In India.—The great pagoda at Benares is built in the form of a cross. (Maurice's Ind. Ant., vol. iii. p. 31., City, Tavernier.)
On a Buddhist temple of cyclopean structure at Mundore (Tod's Rajasthan, vol. i. p. 727.), the cross appears as a sacred figure, together with the double triangle, another emblem of very wide distribution, occurring on ancient British coins (Camden's Britannica), Central American buildings (Norman's Travels in Yucatan), among the Jews as the Shield of David (Brucker's History of Philosophy), and a well-known masonic symbol frequently introduced into Gothic ecclesiastical edifices.
In Palestine.—