cified
Sol_, whose birthday they annually celebrated on the 25th of December?

In the poetical tales of the ancient _Scandinavians_, the same legend is
found. Frey, _the Deity of the Sun_, was fabled to have been killed, at
the time of the winter solstice, by the same boar who put the god Adonis
to death, therefore a boar was annually offered to him at the great
feast of Yule.[489:1] "Baldur the Good," son of the supreme god Odin,
and the virgin-goddess Frigga, was also put to death by the sharp thorn
of winter.

The ancient _Mexican_ crucified Saviour, Quetzalcoatle, another
personification of the Sun, was sometimes represented as crucified in
space, _in the heavens_, in a circle of nineteen figures, the number of
the metonic cycle. A _serpent_ (the emblem of evil, darkness, and
winter) is depriving him of the organs of generation.[489:2]

We have seen in Chapter XXXIII. that Christ Jesus, and many of the
heathen saviours, healers, and preserving gods, were represented in the
form of a Serpent. This is owing to the fact that, _in one of its
attributes_, the Serpent was an emblem of the _Sun_. It may, at first,
appear strange that the Serpent should be an emblem of evil, and yet
also an emblem of the beneficent divinity; but, as Prof. Renouf remarks,
in his _Hibbert Lectures_, "The moment we understand the nature of a
myth, all impossibilities, contradictions, and immoralities disappear."
The serpent is an emblem of evil when represented with his _deadly
sting_; he is the emblem of eternity when represented _casting off his
skin_;[489:3] and an emblem of the Sun when represented _with his tail
in his mouth_, thus forming a circle.[489:4] Thus there came to be, not
only good, but also bad, serpents, both of which are referred to in the
narrative of the Hebrew exodus, but still more clearly in the struggle
between the good and the bad serpents of Persian mythology, which
symbolized Ormuzd, or Mithra, and the evil spirit Ahriman.[489:5]

As the Dove and the Rose, emblems of the Sun, were represented on the
cross, so was the Serpent.[489:6] The famous "Brazen Serpent," said to
have been "set up" by Moses in the wilderness, is called in the Targum
(the general term for the Aramaic versions of the Old Testament) the
SAVIOUR. It was probably a serpentine crucifix, as it is called a
_cross_ by Justin Martyr. The crucified serpent (Fig. No. 38) denoted
the _quiescent Phallos_, or the Sun after it had lost its power. It is
th