in Roman Catholic and in High Anglican Churches, is a simple reproduction of the crowd who knelt before it in the temples of ancient days, and the girls who wear it amongst ourselves, are—­in the most innocent unconsciousness of its real signification—­exactly copying the Indian and Egyptian women of an elder time.  Saturn’s symbol was a cross and a ram’s horn.  Jupiter bore a cross with a horn.  Venus a circle with a cross.  The Egyptian deities a cross and oval. (The signification of these will be dealt with below.) The Druids sought oak trees with two main arms growing in shape of a cross, and, if they failed to find such, nailed a beam cross-wise.  The chief pagodas in India are built, like many Christian churches, in the form of a cross.  I have read in a book on church architecture that churches should be built either in the form of a cross, or else in that of a ship, typifying the ark; i.e., they should either be built in the form of the phallus or the yoni, the ship or ark being one of the symbols of the female energy (see below, p. 361).

The CRUCIFIX, or cross with human figure stretched upon it, is also found in ancient times, although not so frequently as the simple cross.  The crucifix appears to have arisen from the circle of the horizon being divided into four parts, North, South, East, and West, and the Sun-god, drawn within, or on, the circle, came into contact with each cardinal point, his feet and head touching, or intersecting, two, while his outstretched arms point to the other quarters.  Plato says that the “next power to the Supreme God was decussated, or figured in the shape of a cross, on the universe.”  Krishna is painted and sculptured on a cross.  The Egyptians thus drew Osiris, and sometimes we find a circle drawn with the dividing lines, and in the midst is stretched the dead body of Osiris.  Robert Taylor gives another origin for the crucifix:  “The ignorant gratitude of a superstitious people, while they adored the river [Nile] on whose inundations the fertility of their provinces depended, could not fail of attaching notions of sanctity and holiness to the posts that were erected along its course, and which, by a transverse beam, indicated the height to which, at the spot where the beam was fixed, the waters might be expected to rise.  This cross at once warned the traveller to secure his safety, and formed a standard of the value of land.  Other rivers may add to the fertility of the country through which they pass, but the Nile is the absolute cause of that great fertility of the Lower Egypt, which would be all a desert, as bad as the most sandy parts of Africa without this river.  It supplies it both with soil and moisture, and was therefore gratefully addressed, not merely as an ordinary river-god, but by its express title of the Egyptian Jupiter.  The crosses, therefore, along the banks of the river would naturally share in the honour of the stream, and be the most expressive emblem of good