Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/695

Rh and Egyptians should both have adopted as the symbol of the sun the lotus-flower, which opens its petals to the dawn and infolds them on the approach of night, and which seems to be born of itself on the surface of the still waters. But the hypothesis of a borrowing becomes much more probable when, in the iconography of both peoples, we see the flower at once serving as a support to the solar gods—as Horus or Vishnu—and figuring in the hands of the goddesses associated with those gods—Hathor or Lakshmi, the Venuses of Egypt and India. The probability at last changes into a half-certainty when we find the lotus employed on both sides to render the same shade of thought in the rather indirect applications of solar symbolism. With either, the plant represents less the sun itself than the solar matrix, the mysterious sanctuary to which the sun retires every night to draw from it a new life.

We do not know and shall probably never know how the first communications of ideas were made between Egypt and India, But we can, by comparing monuments, discover some of the intermediate steps of the route which the symbolism of the lotus followed toward the East. Thus, in the sculptures of Phoenicia we find goddesses holding lotus-cups in their hands, and in the Persian bas-relief of Tak-i-Bustan the solar god Mithra is seated on the opened flower of the plant. Among the Mesopotamians and the Persians it is not rare to see this flower adorning tall trees, in which it is easy to recognize the sacred tree of the Semites or the Iranian tree that secretes the liquor of immortality. On a patera of Phoenician workmanship, found at Anathontis, the flowers of the lotus, borne by these conventional trees, are gathered in one hand by persons clothed in the Assyrian style, holding a key of life in the other hand. While the rosy lotus of the Egyptian monuments does not now grow wild anywhere in the valley of the Nile, it is, by a curious coincidence, preserved in the flora as well as in the symbolism of India.

One of the most frequent forms of the cross is called the gamma cross, because its four arms are bent at a right angle so as to form a figure like that of four Greek gammas turned in the same direction and joined at the base. We meet it among all the peoples of the Old World, from Japan to Iceland, and it is found in the two Americas. There is nothing to prevent us from supposing that in the first instance it was spontaneously conceived everywhere, like the equilateral crosses, circles, triangles, chevrons, and other geometrical ornaments so frequent in primitive decoration. But when we see it, at least among the peoples of the Old Continent, invariably passing for a talisman, appearing in the funeral scenes or on the tombstones of Greece, Scandinavia, Numidia, and Thibet, and adorning the breasts of divine personages—of Apollo and Buddha—without forgetting certain representations of the