The Secret Vault presents: The Christian and Pagan Creeds Collated. Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
By the Rev. Robert Taylor, A. B. & M. R. C. S.
The Nile was worshipped as a god by the inhabitants of the countries fertilized by its inundations, before all records of human opinions or actions. Plato, who flourished 348 years before the Christian era, records, that the Egyptian priests had pointed out to him on their pyramids the symbolical hieroglyphics of a religion which had existed in uninterrupted orthodoxy among them for upwards of ten thousand years. Nor has the progress of Christianity or civilization, even at this day, entirely abolished the religious honours paid to this king of streams. The priests called the Cophtes still think that they "sanctify its waters to the mystical washing away of sin," by throwing into it some beads or some bits of a cross; as in our own baptismal service in the church of England at this day, the priest spreads his hand over the font, and uses the words, "Sanctify this water to the mystical washing away of sin;" and then sprinkling the water so sanctified in the child's face, and making the sign of the cross upon its forehead, he adds, "We do sign him with the sign of the cross," &c.
The Sign of the Cross Entirely Pagan.
The holy father Minucius Felix, in his Octavius, written as early as the year 211, indignantly resents the supposition that the sign of the cross should be considered as exclusively a Christian symbol; and represents his advocate of the Christian argument, as retorting on an infidel opponent, "As for the adoration of crosses, which you object against us, I must tell you, that we neither adore crosses nor desire them; you it is, ye Pagans, who worship wooden gods, who are the most likely people to adore wooden crosses, as being, parts of the same substance with your deities. For what else are your ensigns, flags, and standards, but crosses gilt and beautified. Your victorious trophies not only represent a simple cross, but a cross with a man upon it. The sign of a cross naturally appears in a ship, either when she is under sail, or rowed with expanded oars like the palm of our hands. Not a iugum ejected but exhibits the sign of a cross; and when a pure worshipper adores the true God, with hands extended, he makes the same figure. Thus, you see that the sign of the cross has either some foundation in nature, or in your own religion, and therefore ought not to be objected against Christians." [Reeves's Apologies of the Fathers, &c. vol. 1, p. 139. This Reverend Mr. Reeves is unquestionable authority for the text of the orthodox Fathers; in which he could not be wrong. We may be allowed however to question his authority, where he would persuade us that, all the heretics ate children.]
Cross' of the Nile
Meagher, a Popish priest, who came over from the Roman Catholic communion and attached himself (for what reasons, or with what motives, must rest with himself alone) to the ministry of the church of England, furnishes us with the most satisfactory prototype of what he had come at last to consider as a corrupt Christianity, in the idolatrous worship of the Nile. The ignorant gratitude of a superstitious people, while they adored the river 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 the land. [LN., the previous sentence is utter nonsense, it had nothing at all to do with safety.]. 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 honours of the stream, and be the most expressive emblem of good fortune, peace, and plenty. The two ideas could never be separated, the fertilizing flood was the waters of life, that conveyed every blessing, and even existence itself, to the provinces through which they flowed was the water of life, that conveyed every blessing, and even existence itself, to the provinces through which they flowed.
The Demon of Famine
One other and most obvious hieroglyph completed the expressive allegory: The Demon of Famine, who, should the waters fail of their inundation, or not reach the elevation indicated by the position of the transverse beam upon the upright, would reign in all his horrors over their desolated lands. This symbolical personification was, therefore, represented as a miserable emaciated wretch, who had grown up "as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground, who had no form nor comeliness; and when they should see him, there was no beauty that they should desire him." Meagre were his looks; sharp misery had worn him to the bone. His crown of thorns indicated the sterility of the territories over which he reigned. The reed in his hand, gathered from the banks of the Nile, indicated, that it was only the mighty river, by keeping within its banks, and thus withholding its wonted munificence, that placed an unreal sceptre in his gripe. He was nailed to the cross, in indication of his entire defeat; and the superscription of his infamous title, "This is the king of the Jews," expressively indicated, that Famine, Want, or Poverty, ruled the destinies of the most slavish, beggarly, and mean-spirited race of men with whom they had the honour of being acquainted.
Madame Dacier, in her edition of Plato, quotes authorities in proof that, when Plato visited Egypt, the priests showed him the symbols of a religion which, they alleged, had continued in observance among their ancestors for upwards of ten thousand years.
From the way in which it was apparent to M. Dupuis, that the mythologies and astronomical allegories of the ancients were connected with the periodical return of the seasons, he was induced to suppose that they must have originated in Egypt, where the annual inundation or deluge was marked in so peculiar a manner; and all ecclesiastical indications, it must be admitted, point to Egypt, as the birth-place and cradle of Religion.
The similarity between the Nile, Ganges and the Indus?
But it has happened not to occur to the reflections of M. Dupuis, nor to ecclesiastical writers, that with the variation of a few weeks only, the Ganges and the Indus produce precisely similar phenomena to those of the Nile. And it is in a very peculiar manner worthy of consideration, that a colony from India arriving in Egypt, so far from finding their country's superstition discouraged by dissimilarity of circumstances, would find every circumstance of season and climate favourable to it, tending to recall the same associations of idea, and to sanctify the same absurdities of practice.
The most learned antiquaries agree in holding it unquestionable that Egypt was colonized from India. It received one of the earliest swarms of emigrants from the Bactrian hive. And thus, even if we had not the proof we have yet to adduce, of the actual importation by the monks of Alexandria, would the superstitions of India get footing in Egypt; the Krishna of the Ganges would become the Christ of the Nile; and the priests be left to no better expedient to disguise the real origin of their allegorical figment, than by transporting him again to the banks of the Jordan. The first draft of the mystical adventures of Krishna, as brought from India into Egypt, was The Diegesis; the first version of the Diegesis was the Gospel according to the Egyptians; the first renderings out of the language of Egypt into that of Greece, for the purpose of imposing on the nations of Europe, were the apocryphal gospels; the corrected, castigated, and authorised versions of these apocryphal compilations were the gospels of our four evangelists.
It should never be forgotten, that the sign of the cross, for ages anterior to the Augustan era, was in common use among the Gentiles. It was the most sacred symbol of Egyptian idolatry. It is on most of the Egyptian obelisks and was believed to possess all the devil-expelling virtues which have since been ascribed to it by Christians. The monogram, or symbol of the god Saturn, was the sign of the cross, together with a ram's horn, in indication of the Lamb of God. Jupiter also bore a cross with a horn, Venus a cross with a circle. The famous Crux ansata is to be seen in all the buildings of Egypt; and the most celebrated temples of the idol Krishna in India, like our Gothic cathedrals, were built in the form of crosses.
The sign of the cross is the very mark which in Ezekiel, 9-4, the Lord commands his messenger to "go through the midst of Jerusalem and set upon the foreheads of the men that sigh, and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof." But here, as in a thousand other places, our English rendering protestantizes, for the purpose of disguising the papistical sense, just as their immediate predecessors, the papists, had set them the example of Christianising whatever came in their way, for the purpose of concealing the Pagan origination.
On a Phoenician medal found in the ruins of Citium, and engraved in Dr Clarke's Travels, and proved by him to be Phoenician, are inscribed not only the cross, but the rosary, or string of beads, attached to it, together with the identical Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world. [LN., we should note that on many of the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian seals found the main god often holds a cross or Ankh, and also a necklace but the true meaning of it, might not be to many' liking, it is discussed amongst some my works on the gods and stories of the afore mentioned people, to which you may add the Canaanite, and Phoenician deities.]
"How it came to pass," says the pious Mr. Skelton, "that the Egyptians, Arabians, and Indians, before Christ came among us, paid a remarkable veneration to the sign of the cross, is to me unknown; but the fact itself is known. In some places this sign was given to men who had been accused of crime but acquitted upon trial; and in Egypt it stood for the signification of eternal life." Christian revelation, what is it that thou hast revealed? [Skelton's Appeal to Common Sense, p. 45.]
End part one.
next Chapter 29. part two
The Christian, Worshippers of the God Serapis