Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/438

366 Alpha and Omega (Α-Ω.) is the same God, whom we have adored from the earliest times under the symbol of swastika, so we place the monogram of Jesus Christ—our new religious symbol, in the same rank with the swastika, our old symbol. I have gathered also a great iconographic series that proves evidently the application of suns to God and Trinity—and nobody, even God's Mother, who was, according to Church-fathers, Dei para, has not the right to bear this symbol. Since the supremacy of the Christian religion over the old religions of the classic epoch: the swastika and the other sun's symbols commence to disappear, or rather to become Christian symbols.

On my chart, I have tried to show, century by century, in what manner the numismatic of Byram was already in the VIII century overfilled with swastikas and suns symbols.

The same process we mark also in the development of numismatics of Charles the Great and his successors. When Pope Gregory the Great sent missionaries into England he gave them the following injunction: "Don't destroy the heathen temples, but only the idols, and the temples take for divine service of God. The people accustomed to come in, will come also afterward to adore a veritable God." This was the same idea largely practised in the Catacombs. This idea afterwards became the prescription for the Church and its ministers. We can see it in the numismatics of the IX century. Ludwig's pious coins present us the application of this rule. We see there the perfect heathen temple on Koman coins, but the idol on the door is destroyed and replaced by the Maltese cross, which, though a heathen symbol, was easy to transform into a Christian symbol. On the top of the temple was placed the cross, and the inscription surrounding the coin proclaimed the Christian religion; on the reverse was: Ludovicus Rex. It was by his order that the temples became the Christian churches. It was a king's medal-diploma which was going into each of the humblest homes, proclaiming the order of Regent. When the temples had disappeared there still remained the heathen symbols that it was necessary to christianize.

We see in the X. and XI. centuries, in the German