Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/439

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MICHEL DE ZMIGRODZKI.
367

matic, that the cross well known to us since the earliest time is surrounded with inscription. Crux Christi.

What would this inscription signify if there was not any other Crux that was not Christi, though it was adored by the people. The same process we see in Polish numismatics till the end of the XII century, and in Scandinavia it existed still in the XIII century. Then this symbol vanished, bat only officially, while by common people in many countries it remains still in the present century.

I cannot omit a very curious point. The earliest Anglo-Saxon coinage is in many types identical with the Gallic coinage that had not at that time existed for many centuries. Lelevel Joachim, our celebrated numismatist, named it the reappearance of the Gallic type. I cannot agree with him in this expression—reappearance. I think that the numismatic is due to the fact that the Anglo-Saxon even as Gallic people had had the same symbolism. I have said that this symbolism had disappeared in numismatic since the XIII century, but it remains among the common people as a superstition or custom of a religious character until the present time. In the embroideries of the Ukraine people we find very distinctly the different forms of swastika. We find similar embroideries in Brittany, also in the excavations of Sehliemann Hissarlick.

We are at the end of our study, and we see that 2000 before Christ, and almost 2000 years after Christ, existed the same religion certified to by the same symbolism. So, for conclusion, this chart informs us that back, of all the worship that wename,or have named, heathen, the principle of every religion is and was the belief in a Supreme Being, Creator and Preserver of the world, but from time to time this primitive religion was observed with more or less rough superstition.

Finally, I ask the question: Is this religion the especial property of the Aryan race? Now, we have swastikas and suns wheel in China and in America also, and the primitive religion of fire gives a very large ethnologic and geographic perspection. I conclude with the hope that some one will make a study of the swastika in America.