Note 22 — VI THE SELF-OFFERING OF THE MESSIAH. THE SUPPER

In all private religious associations and secret cults of later antiquity the members made use of a secret sign of recognition or union. This they carried about in the form, in some cases, of wooden, bronze, or silver amulets hung round the neck or concealed beneath the clothes, in others woven in their garments, or tattooed upon the forehead, neck, breast, hands, &c. Among these signs was the cross, and it was usually described under the name “Tau,” after the letter of the old Phœnician alphabet. Such an application of the cross to mystic or religious ends reaches back into grey antiquity. From of old the cross was in use in the cult of the Egyptian Gods, especially of Isis and Horus. It was also found among the Assyrians and Persians, serving, as the pictures show, in part as the mark and ornament of distinguished persons, such as priests and kings, in part also as a religious attribute in the hands of the Gods and their worshippers. According to some it was the sign which Jahwe ordered the Israelites to paint upon their doors with the blood of the lamb when he sent the angel of death to destroy the first-born of their Egyptian oppressors. It played a similar part also in Isaiah22 and Ezekiel,23 when it was a question of separating the god-fearing Israelites from the crowd of other men whom Jahwe purposed to destroy. When the Israelites were pressed in battle by the Amalekites Moses is said to have been helped by Aaron and Hur to stretch out his arms in the shape of that magic sign, and thus to have rendered possible a victory for his people over their enemies.24 Among the other nations of antiquity also—the Greeks, Thracians, the Gaulish Druids, and so on—the Tau was applied in a similar manner to ritualistic and mystic ends. It appears as an ornament on the images of the most different divinities and heroes—e.g., Apollo, Dionysus, Demeter, Diana (the Phœnician Astarte). It is also found upon innumerable Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Phœnician coins, upon vases, pictures, jewellery, &c. In Alexandria the Christians found it chiselled upon the stone when the temple of Serapis was destroyed, in 391. In this temple Serapis himself was represented of superhuman size, with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, as though embracing the universe. In Rome the Vestal virgins wore the cross upon a ribbon round the neck. Indeed, it even served as an ornament upon the weapons of the Roman legions and upon the standards of the cavalry long before Constantine, by his well-known “vision,” gave occasion for its being expressly introduced under the form of the so-called “Monogram of Christ” into the army as a military sign.25 But in the North also we find the cross, not only in the shape of the hooked-cross and the three-armed cross (Triskele), but also in the form of Thor’s hammer, upon runic, stones, weapons, utensils, ornaments, amulets, &c. And when the heathens of the North, as Snorre informs us, marked themselves in the hour of death with a spear, they scratched upon their bodies one of the sacred signs that has been mentioned, in doing which they dedicated themselves to God.26