of their genial spirits, not unlike the character of Venus, and looked on by ancient Christians with relation unto Christ. Since however they first began, the Egyptians thereby expressed the process and motion of the spirit of the world, and the diffusion thereof upon the celestial and elemental nature; employed by a circle and right-lined intersection,—a secret in their telesmes[B 1] and magical characters among them. Though he that considereth the plain cross[A 1] upon the head of the owl in the Lateran obelisk, or the cross[A 2] erected upon a pitcher diffusing streams of water into two basins, with sprinkling branches in them, and all described upon a two-footed altar, as in the hieroglyphicks of the brazen table of Bembus; will hardly decline all thought of Christian signality in them.
We shall not call in the Hebrew Tenupha, or ceremony of their oblations, waved by the priest unto the four quarters of the world, after the form of a cross, as in the peace offerings. And if it were clearly made out what is remarkably delivered from the traditions of the rabbins,—that as the oil was poured coronally or circularly upon the head of kings, so the high-priest was anointed decussatively or in the form of an X,—though it could not escape a typical thought of Christ, from mystical considerators, yet being the conceit is Hebrew,
- ↑ telesme.] Talisman.
approaches very near to this character, except that the arms of the cross are within the circle."—Supp. Ency. Brit. vol. iv, p. 66, No. 108. Whether the notion of Lacroze controverted by Dr. Young was derived from the "cross erected upon a pitcher," &c. mentioned by Browne in the same paragraph; we have no present means of ascertaining, but even if so, Dr. Young's remark will not be invalidated, for the Bembine table, on which only, as it would appear, that representation occurs, is a document of no authority, as we have already had occasion to observe, in a note on the Pseudodoxia, p. 451, note 1. The handled cross, as Dr. Young has elsewhere intimated, seems to have been the only one of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, the true signification of which was never quite lost, a traditionary record of its having always been preserved. The error of attributing a Christian origin to this symbol, has, if we remember right, been committed by some modern traveller in Egypt or Nubia, who finding certain stones with inscriptions having this cross over them, supposed them to be the grave-stones of Christians, and marvels greatly at the discovery of Christian monuments in that particular locality, the situation of which, if our recollection be correct, was sufficiently inconsistent, indeed, with the notion of the existence of such relics.—Br.
