Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/802

782 chrisme or monogram of Christ (X and P interlaced) by the simple addition of a loop. In a similar way the chrisme becomes the ansated cross or key of life, through a series of transformations which are found among the inscriptions of the island of Philæ.

It is not even necessary that the symbols thus combined shall originally have possessed the slightest analogy of forms. There are certainly not many traits common to the different images of the sun in the valley of the Nile, where it is represented, according to the districts, as a radiating disk, a hawk, a goat, etc. But the Egyptians not only succeeded in condensing all these figures into the winged globe of their pylons and their cornices, but they also contrived to give the strange amalgamation the features of another solar animal, the flying scarabæus. When the winged globe passed from Egypt into Asia, the Assyrians in turn inclosed in the Egyptian disk the figure of their god Assur, which they represented as a winged genius, and till then the ancient sacred bird of Chaldea, which, according to M. Menant, contributed with the Mesopotamians to form the definite type of their winged disk, was not. Some of the coins of Asia Minor help us to comprehend the different processes by the aid of which the two symbols could thus be combined, if not also the principal stages of the operation by which they produced a third. The sun was often symbolized in Asia Minor by a triscele—that is, a disk around which radiated three legs joined at the thigh; at other times it was represented there, as in Egypt, by animals like the lion, the boar, the eagle, the dragon, and the cock. A coin of Aspendus in Pamphylia shows the cock in the field, by the side of the triscele; other pieces of the same origin show the triscele placed over or joined to the body of the animal without its losing its natural appearance. Finally, in a Lycian coinage, in the British Museum, the two symbols, at first placed together, then joined, are literally fused into one another; the three legs of the triscele are metamorphosed into three cocks' heads, which are grouped in the same way around a center.

Most frequently the symbolical syncretism is conscious and premeditated, whether the matter be one of the union for greater efficacy of the attributes of several divinities into a single talisman, or one of affirming, by the fusion of symbols, the unity of the gods and the identity of cults. Of such character were the talismans called panthei, with which the Gnostics endeavored to condense the divine symbols supplied by the principal religions