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JUNE, 1895.)
SPIRIT BASIS OF BELIEF AND CUSTOM
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of the salt. That the object of signing the cross is to scare the devil, is again shewn in the Roman Catholic baptism, where the priest says: - "And this sign of tbe holy cross, which we make upon his forehead, do thon, accursed devil, never dare to violate. Similarly, the baptismal sign of the cross is said to be made that Christ may tnke possession. A Roman Catholic should make the sign of the cross as soon as he awakes, according to the rule," when you awake defend yourself (that is, from the lagging spirits of night) with the sign of the cross.97 In the Litany the Cross is called the Terror of Demons. The black rood or black cross of St. Margaret worked wonders.99 The Royal English Scoptre has a cross, 100 and a Maltese diamond cross is used in the coronation of the English kings. If, after supper on Christmas Eve, i girl shakes out the table cloth at a cross-way, a man will meet her and give her good even. Her husband will be of the same height and figure.2 In the north of England, the bride's maids at night cross the bride's stockings. The following lines occur in Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, Vol. I. p. 15 :
“That his patron's cross might over him wave,
And scare the fends from the wizard's grave." The widespread worship of the cross, to which these examples bear witpess, seems to belong to two main stages : - (a) The worship of crossed lines as in itself a lucky evil-scaring shapo; (b) the worship of the cross as the symbol of a guardian. The earlier view of the luckiness of crossed lines is the Indian (perhaps, is the Brabant) village idea that a whitewash cross gunrds a wall: this is the value of the cross on the Ashantee bronze and on the religions gourd-drum both of North and of South America. The same value may be supposed to lie at the root of the early cross worship in Asia Minor and Europe. Besides this early worship of crossed lines as a spirit-controlling picture, the use of the cross as a guardian-symbol was widespread before its adoption by the Christians. In India the favourite end-guarded cross is called svastika, meaning "it is well"; in China the cross is a symbol of life; in Japan it is a sign of luck: among the Phoenicians and the Israelites the tau, or headless cross, was a sign of life and health; in Germany and in early America the hammer-shaped cross was a sign of ferti. lity. This widespread agreement between the meaning of the cross as a symbol and its meaning as a picture of crossed lines seems to shew that the early belief that the cross shape has a spirit. scaring value aided its adoption by the later religions as a guardian symbol. Its form, into which so many meanings might be breathed, helped its popularity. Till late born Islam, with the doubtful exception of the religion of Zoroaster, few of the higher religions have failed to adopt the cross as a worshipful symbol. Among the high pre-Christian religions Sun-worship 5) thoroughly accepted the cross as a symbol of the goardian Sun that Count D'Alviella, in his Migration of Symbols, rosts satisfied with tracing the cross to a sun-symbol. The examples given above shew a worship of crossed lines that passes back into beliefs earlier and coarser than the refinements of sun-symbolism. That the good luck, or spirit-controlling power, of crossed lines is older than its guardian influence as a sun-symbo! is shewn by the use of the cross as a symbol of the moon and of so many other guardians besides the sun, that the cross has been supposed to be a general sign of divinity.
The question remains: - If the virtue of the cross has its origin, not in the fact that it is the symbol of some great guardian but because of the demon-ruling influence of a picture of crossed lines, to what is the demon-ruling power in crossed lines due? The explanation seems to be the early and still widespread belief that spirits haunt the crossings of roads. In many parts of Western India, even in Bombay City, in the early morning, may be found at the crossings of roads a basket with cocoa kernel, flowers, an egg, red powder and oil, into which spme ." op. cit. p. 674.
Op. cit. p. 670.
» Op. cit. p. 670. * Op. cit. p. 25. Op. cit. p. 64.
• Op. cit. p. 120. Jones' Cronons, p. 49. 140 Op. cit. p. 71.
1 Op. cit. p. 47. Stallybrass in Grimm'. Teuto, Myth. Vol. III. p. 1115.
3 Henderson's Folk-Lore, p. 42. • Count D'Alviella's Migration of Symbols, P. 74.
