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[JUNE, 1895.
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
harassing demon or some disease fiend has been coaxed or scared out of its human lodging, and set at the nearest meeting of roads as both a spirit haunt and a prison, from which the spirit. cannot escape to return and vex his victim. At many Gujarat cross roads, especially where the crossing takes the shape of a trident, or trisûla, a small shrine is built to shelter the local spirits. In Ratnagiri, the spirit to whom the shrine is raised at the chég, or cross-road, is the chigchár, or acharya, that is, the master of ceremonies, or the lord of the spirits, whose haunt is the road crossing. So in Catholic Christian villages, both in Western India and in Europe, except where it marks the site of some murder or of some special escape, the road-side cross is a chôgchár, or crossing-master, set there to keep in order the spirits who haunt cross-ways. Till lately the English suicide was buried with a stake driven through his body where three roads met. What is the sense of this special burial? The sense is that the spirit of the suicide, leaving the body in anger and at the same time suddenly and so in full power, was a special source of danger. The stake was driven through the body to lay the body and prevent it walking. Cross-roads were chosen as the burial place, because from the crossing of roads no spirit can escape. The road is a spirit haunt. So Roman tombs line Roman streets. Travellers going in fear, their minds full of ghosts, see something pass and disappear. No where do so many visions disappear as at a cross way: therefore no place imprisons spirits so effectively as a cross way. The adaptations, by which the early idea that cross roads are spirit haunts has been altered to meet the requirements of the higher faiths, is a notable example of the great religious law of meaning-raising, the law by which wit breathes into old beliefs a meaning that enables the earlier rite to continue in keeping with higher conditions. The Chinese raise the original picture of cross-ways into a symbol of the fourfold division of the earth; the Assyriau into the main directions of space, a symbol of the god Anu: the Argentines into a symbol of the Wind, and the Mexicans into a symbol of the Rain; the Sun-worshipper into a symbol of the Suu, whose beams ray to the ends of the heavens: finally, as Count D'Alviella notices, to the Christian the cross is a symbol of the latest phase of the deep-seated worshipfulness of the guardian, the redemption of the world by the voluntary sacrifice of a God. Or, as Justin Martyre still more enthusiastically cries:-"The sign of the cross is impressed on the whole of Nature. Hardly a craftsman fails to use the figure of the cross among his tools. The cross forms a part of man himself when he raises his arms in prayer." Count D'Alviella has probably successfully proved that the guarded cross, tho yammation of the Greeks, the svastika of the. Hindus, is especially a sun, cross. The same year (A. D. 323) which saw Constantine the Great tura the labarum, a Roman cavalry standard, into the imperial sign of the cross, saw the same Constantine dedicate the first day of the week to Apollo and call it Dies Solis or Sunday. Three years later (A. D. 326) saw the finding of the true cross by Helena, Constantine's mother, and the beginning of the miraculous diffusion of its fraginents over Europe. Still this is the end, not the beginning, of the history of the sign of the cross. As a sun-symbol, the lines in the gammadion or seastika, at right angles to the ends of the cross limbs, are explained as representing the speed with which the sun runs his daily race through the heavens. In spite of the suitableness of this explanation, the original object of drawing lines across the limb-ends seems to have been, not the addition of speed to a sun-symbol, but to increase the spirit controlling power of crossed lines by guarding the points of exit and so preventing the escape of the imprisoned spirit. No example can be quoted to prove the use of the end line as a prison bar. Still, in the higher phase of the idea of crossed lines, as a means of housing and caring for a guardian, the lines across the limb-ends preserve the original meaning of guards and become devices to protect the housed guardian from the attacks of wandering or of rival fiends. With this slight raising of their meaning, the root idea of the guarded cross ends remains in certain Hindu ceremonies, where an enclosing belt of svastikas, forming a barrier to the entrance of wandering or rival spirits, leaves a central area of safety, which is called Nandyavarta, that is, Nandi the lucky one's house. The same idea of
Migration of symbols, pp. 2, 12 and 13.
Apol. 1. 72 quoted in Ency. Brit. IX. Ed. Cross.
