The key which is still worn with the Priapic hand, as an amulet, by the
women of Italy appears to have been an emblem of the equivocal use of
the name, as the language of that country implies. Of the same kind,
too, appears to have been the cross in the form of the letter _tau_,
attached to a circle, which many of the figures of Egyptian deities,
both male and female, carry in their left hand; and by the Syrians,
Phœnicians and other inhabitants of Asia, representing the planet Venus,
worshipped by them as the emblem or image of that goddess. The cross in
this form is sometimes observable on coins, and several of them were
found in a temple of Serapis, demolished at the general destruction of
those edifices by the Emperor Theodosius, and were said by the Christian
antiquaries of that time to signify the future life. In solemn
sacrifices, all the Lapland idols were marked with it from the blood of
the victims; and it occurs on many Runic ornaments found in Sweden and
Denmark, which are of an age long anterior to the approach of
Christianity to those countries, and probably to its appearance in the
world. On some of the early coins of the Phœnicians, we find it attached
to a chaplet of beads placed in a circle, so as to form a complete
rosary, such as the Lamas of Thibet and China, the Hindus, and the Roman
Catholics now tell over while they pray.