Note 28 — VI THE SELF-OFFERING OF THE MESSIAH. THE SUPPER

After the careful investigations on this subject which have been undertaken by French savants especially, there can be no doubt that we have before us in this so-called “seal” of the Gods and religious personalities a symbol of the creative force of nature, of the resurrection and the new life, a pledge of divine protection in this world and of everlasting blessedness after. As such it appears upon heathen sarcophagi and tombstones; and on this account in some cases their Christian character is too quickly assumed. Moreover, the cross has been preserved in present-day musical notation as the sign of the raising of a note,28 while its use in the Mysteries and private Cult associations is authority for the statement that precisely in these the thought of a new-birth and resurrection in company with the hero of the association or God of the union stood as a central point of faith. One understands the painful feeling of the Christians at the fact that the private sign used by them and their special sacraments were in use among all the secret cults of antiquity. They could explain this to themselves only as the work of spiteful dæmons and an evil imitation of Christian usages on the heathens’ part.29 In reality the symbol of the cross is much older than Christianity; and, indeed, the sign of the cross is found associated in a special manner with the cult of divinities of nature or life with its alternations of birth, blossoming, and decay, representatives of the fertility and creative force of nature, the Light-Gods and Sun-Gods subjected to death and triumphing victoriously over it. It is only as such, as Gods who died and rose again, that they were divinities of the soul and so of the Mysteries and pious fraternities. The idea of the soul, however, is found everywhere in nature religion considered as being connected with the warmth of life and with fire, just as the sun was honoured as the highest divinity and, so to speak, as the visible manifestation of the world-soul solely on account of its fiery nature. Should not, then, the symbol of life, which in its developed form plainly refers to the sun, in its simplest and original shape point to the fire, this “earliest phenomenon” of all religious worship?