may turn up with that letter traced exactly like the so-called "gammadion" found upon an Egyptian stuff of such an early date. Most probably this was the very shape, but with shorter arms, of the letter found traced upon the door-posts.
The recurrence of the gammadion upon Christian monuments is curious. We find it shown upon the tunic of a gravedigger in the catacombs; it comes in among the ornamentation wrought upon the gold and parcel-gilt altar-frontal dome by our Anglo-Saxon countryman Walwin for the Ambrosian basilican church at Milan; it is seen upon the narrow border round some embroidery of the twelfth century, lately found within a shrine in Belgium, and figured by that untiring archæologist the Canon Voisin of Tournay; and upon a piece of English needlework of the latter half of the same twelfth century—the mitre of our St. Thomas, figured by Shaw, and still kept at Sens cathedral. As a favourite element in the pattern worked upon our ecclesiastical embroideries, this "gammadion" is as conspicuously shown upon the apparel round the shoulders, and on the one in front of his alb, in the effigy of Bishop Edington, at Winchester cathedral, as upon the vestments of a priest in a grave-brass at Shottesbrook church, Berks, given by Waller in his fine work.
Always keeping up its heathenish signification of a "future life," Christianity widened the meaning of this symbol, and made it teach the doctrine of the Atonement through the death of our Lord upon a cross. Furthermore, it set forth that He is our corner-stone. About the thirteenth century, it was taken to be an apt memorial of His five wounds; and remembering the stigmata or five impressions in the hands, feet, and side of St. Francis of Assisi, this gammadion became the favourite device of such as bore that famous saint's name, and was called in England, after its partial likeness to the ensigne of the Isle of Man—three feet—a fylfot.[1]
To the symbolic meaning affixed unto some animals, we have pointed in the catalogue, wherein, at p. 156, the reader will find that Christ, as God, is typified under the figure of a lion, under that again of the unicorn, as God-man. Man's soul, at pp. 237, 311, is figured as the hare; mischief and lubricity are, at p. 311, shadowed forth in the likeness of the monkey.
Birds often come in here as symbols; and of course we behold the lordly eagle very frequently. Bearing in mind how struggled the two great factions of the Guelphs whose armorial arms were "un' Aquila con
- ↑ M. S. Harley, 874, p. 190.
