Good Shepherd in the Catacombs, we can not escape the conviction that, in significance if not in form, it proceeds from a single source. This assertion seems to be confirmed in the class of monuments in which it is met. It appears, in fact, from prehistoric times among the people originating in the basin of the Danube, who colonized on either hand the shores of the Troad and of northern Italy; thence it extends, with the products of that ancient civilization, on one side to the Greeks, Etruscans, Latins, Gauls, Germans, Bretons, and Scandinavians, and on the other side to Asia Minor, the Caucasus, Persia, India, and finally to China and Japan.
It is not always necessary, for two figures to have the same origin, that they should have the same primitive signification. Sometimes it happens that a symbol changes its meaning in changing its country. It may possibly preserve only a general value as a talisman or amulet, like those crucifixes, degraded into fetiches, which are the only vestiges of the Christianity left among certain tribes of the Congo by the Portuguese domination of the last century. Sometimes, again—especially in the case of an image proper—its new possessors will seek to explain it to themselves by some more or less ingenious interpretation, and will thus restore to it a symbolical bearing, although by means of a new conception. The rising sun has often been compared to a newborn child. The comparison led the Egyptians to represent Horus as a child sucking its finger. The Greeks fancied that he was putting his finger to his lips to admonish the initiated to be discreet, and made of the representation a figure of Harpocrates, the god of silence.
Such changes of sense may also be reconciled with knowledge of the primitive significance. It is a pleasant thing to find everywhere the image or idea we are fond of. The Neo-Platonists believed in good faith that they could distinguish representations of their own doctrines in the symbols as well as in the myths of all the contemporary religions. The early Christians saw a cross in every figure that presented an intersection of lines—in the anchor, the mast and its yard, the standard, the plow, the man swimming, the bird flying, the praying man with outstretched arms, the paschal lamb on the spit, and the human face, where the line of the nose is crossed by that of the eyes. When the Serapeum at Alexandria was demolished, the Christian authors of the time related that a number of ansated crosses were found. They themselves observed that the figures were the same as the ancient Egyptian symbol of life, but that did not keep them from seeing in them a prophetic allusion to the sign of the redemption. Sozomenus adds that the fact provoked numerous conversions among the pagans.
