t. Paul's epistles, and the early Fathers.) And we have the expression
"washed in the blood of the Lamb" adopted into the Christian Church.

(1) It is said that pasach sometimes means not so much to pass
over, as to hover over and so protect. Possibly both meanings enter in
here. See Isaiah xxxi. 5.

(2) See Exodus xii. i.

(3) It is even said (see The Golden Bough, vol. iii, 185) that
the doorways of houses and temples in Peru were at the Spring festival
daubed with blood of the first-born children--commuted afterwards to the
blood of the sacred animal, the Llama. And as to Mexico, Sahagun, the
great Spanish missionary, tells us that it was a custom of the people
there to "smear the outside of their houses and doors with blood drawn
from their own ears and ankles, in order to propitiate the god of
Harvest" (Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 235).

In order fully to understand this extraordinary expression and its
origin we must turn for a moment to the worship both of Mithra, the
Persian Sungod, and of Attis the Syrian god, as throwing great light
on the Christian cult and ceremonies. It must be remembered that in the
early centuries of our era the Mithra-cult was spread over the whole
Western world. It has left many monuments of itself here in Britain.
At Rome the worship was extremely popular, and it may almost be said
to have been a matter of chance whether Mithraism should overwhelm
Christianity, or whether the younger religion by adopting many of the
rites of the older one should establish itself (as it did) in the face
of the latter.

Now we have already mentioned that in the Mithra cult the slaying of a
Bull by the Sungod occupies the same sort of place as the slaving of the
Lamb in the Christian cult. It took place at the Vernal Equinox and the
blood of the Bull acquired in men's minds a magic virtue. Mithraism was
a greatly older religion than Christianity; but its genesis was similar.
In fact, owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes, the crossing-place of
the Ecliptic and Equator was different at the time of the establishment
of Mithra-worship from what it was in the Christian period; and the
Sun instead of standing in the He-lamb, or Aries, at the Vernal Equinox
stood, about two thousand years earlier (as indicated by the dotted line
in the diagram), in this very constellation of the Bull. (1) The bull
therefore became the symbol of the triumphant God, and the sacrifice
of the bull a