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SUMMARY OF LECTURE BY MR. JOHN IRWIN ON "THE PILLAR AND THE CROSS IN THE CULTS OF INDIA AND EUROPE"
Speaking at the L.D. Institute of Indology on January 2, 1979 arthistorian John Irwin took his audience by surprise with the claim that new advances in Indology would shortly revolutionise the understanding of many important aspects of Western art and civilisation.
The title of Mr. Irwin's lecture was "The Pillar and the Cross in the Cults of India and Europe."
The core of the art historian's thesis was that Indo-European scholarship was now at a crossing-point. The scientific study of India's past had been initiated in the colonial period by Western scholars who had brought to India an exclusively Western vision of ancient Indian civilisation, interpreting Indian culture in this light. This approach had concealed or overlooked the fact that the Western evidence upon which their value judgements were based was modern in comparison with the far more ancient culture of India. As a result, their interpretation of ancient India was inevitably falsified. However, recent advances in Indology were not only correcting this false bias but were now due to transform understanding to the roots of European culture itself.
In his lecture, Mr. Irwin focused on one aspect-the Cross-cult of early Christian Europe-which he re-interpreted in the light of experience gained by study of the Indian cult of the sacred Pillar.
The early Christian Fathers, he said, had made no bones of the fact that the cult of the Cross was an inheritance of the pre-Christian cult of the Cosmic Pillar, exactly parallel to the cult of the pillar as revealed in the Vedas and Brahmanas and only now beginning to be understood by the latest advances in scholarship.
Hitherto, the early Christian cult of the Cross has been interpreted in the light only of Christian doctrine-in other words, as symbol of the Crucifixion. However, this represents only a later interpretration imposed by the Established Christian Church some three centuries after the death of Jesus. Before that, the Cross had been worshipped as symbol of the world Axis (Axis Mundi) of older cosmic religion, once universal to the prehistoric world. The fundamental creed of early Christianity had rested not upon the Crucifixion of Jesus but upon the Resurrection of Christ.
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