This is part 2 of a series; The True Cross is part 1.

When Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden, they faced an enormous challenge. They were facing a life where they made their own destiny – for better or worse. They didn’t know what they were doing, any more than any of us – less than us, since they were the first people to face problems! All they knew was that they didn’t want God to decide for them.

Adam and Eve were suddenly faced with the great questions that their children have been trying to find answers to ever since; Who am I? Why am I here? How can I live after death? How can I be blessed without repenting and obeying the God who drove me from Eden?

So try to picture yourself as an intelligent, reasoning individual seeking meaning for your life. What causes drought? What causes disease? You obviously know nothing of germs and hygiene, weather patterns and sunspots. All you know is that sometimes bad things happen and sometimes good things happen.

More importantly, what happens when you die? Put yourself in Adam’s shoes. How do you find hope for your eternal future without God? To answer these questions, they had only the world around them, things they could see and touch. And if you stop and think about it, putting aside religion, mysticism, and tradition, all good things in our universe can ultimately be traced to a single source. A source clearly and demonstrably good, scientifically provable in a way God never was.

God is not here. We cannot see Him. Some claim they have seen or heard Him, but WE haven’t – you and I. Their claims often don’t make sense, and disagree with each other. So at best, to the cold, reasoning mind, God is a question mark. But the sun warms our face. The sun makes crops grow. Brings longer days, better weather. Quite literally, the sun brings life to us.

Once man was kicked out of the Garden, they did not see God regularly, if at all. But the sun was always there, every day. It was a constantly visible source of light and heat. It required no faith to believe in the sun, it was simply there, watching over them, making their lives better, being “a lamp to their feet”.

And the sun was demonstrably responsible for the growth of crops and the changing of the seasons. Any reasonably intelligent person could see that when the sun went down in the west, it grew cold at night. When the sun went to the south in the fall, everything died. When the sun returned high in the sky in the spring, the world came to life again – plants grew, animals had babies, and in many places in the world the harsh winter storms left and clear skies prevailed.

So one can hardly blame someone who rejected God for worshiping the sun; it was logical. So logical in fact, that almost everyone today still does it, without realizing it.

THE HOLY SUN

But while the sun is generally benevolent, sometimes he is not. Some winters were colder than usual, some years the sun hid behind clouds that brought destructive floods, or the sun grew angry and scorched the earth with his gaze.

They needed a way to placate his anger, and earn his good will. They protected their own families and servants, so it made sense that the sun would do the same to his servants. In a sense, they applied the Golden Rule – how would they want treated, if they were an all-powerful deity?

And the answer human nature gives us is “if I were an all powerful being I’d want flattery; gifts; love; I would want my servants to proudly wear my colors, announcing to the world that they were mine, and mine alone”. This reasoning would be unavoidable, for this is precisely how every petty baron in history has behaved.

But what sign should they wear to advertise their loyalty? How could they tell the world “I belong to the Sun”? How could they keep the forces of darkness at bay – literally? Obviously, they needed a copy of the sun to be with them all the time, so they would never walk in darkness!

So ask yourself, as a superstitious pagan seeking a way to honor the sun, whom he believes to be a god, how would you make a copy – an idol – of it? Remember, this was almost 6,000 years ago. You had no astrological symbols, no chemical formulas or Latin words. For that matter, you had no written language – the best you could do is to scratch things on rocks or carve them out of wood or hammer them out of metal. So how would you represent the sun?

Try a quick experiment. Go outside on a sunny day, close your eyes, point them towards the sun, and blink very fast. Don’t look at the sun, but glimpse it as best you can. What you see may surprise you. Due to a quirk of the lenses in your eye, when you look at the sun you will see a glowing circle. And coming out of that circle, you will see four elongated rays with four shorter rays in between them. Forming a cross, just like the image below, center.

This is a scientific fact. It has always been true. The first men who looked at the sun saw this, just as you will. Deifying the sun was an inevitable result of Adam’s rebellion, and as soon as the sun was deified, the discovery of this symbol for the sun was equally inevitable. The symbol you saw in the sun exists in the most ancient artifacts, in literally every single culture across the globe. I myself have taken nearly all the pictures in the remainder of this article, taken from museums and churches and temples in roughly 30 countries.

But the truly fascinating thing, is that one of those symbols at right came from a city near Babylon in 1500 BC, where it was used to honor the Sun-God. The other is a Christian symbol, supposedly honoring the Son-God.

I’m not going to tell you which is which. If you can’t tell me… what does that tell you?

ANCIENT CROSS

As I said, the association of a cross and a circle is not only logical, it is unavoidable. No one could have loved the sun without looking at it. And no one who spent any time looking at the sun could have NOT seen the sign of the cross in it!

But from what material would you choose to make your idol? You’d want it to be as close as possible to the real thing, of course. And what material best represents the sun on Earth? You could not do better than gold. No metal on Earth looks more like the sun, or shines brighter in sunlight than gold. It really seems to shine the sun right back at you, capturing some of the sun’s own goodness within it!

So you hammer this gold into a circle, like the sun itself. Gold, being soft, can be shaped easily even with stone tools. So upon this disc you carve four great rays, and four lesser rays – just as you, yourself saw in the sun (see pictures further down).

Then you wear this around your neck, in your ears, and you are buried with it clasped to your chest or over your eyelids. It is a constant comfort as you walk in darkness to know that your God is always with you, and loves you, brightening your path at night and giving you something to believe in!

This is not subjective opinion. Not a matter for debate. Without traditions, before mythologies, with nothing to go on but your eyes and your brain, there could be no other possible symbol of the sun than this. And we find it everywhere.

*****

As I said, gold has always been the material of choice for sun symbols, whether Christian or pagan. This, coupled with its relative rarity, has made it the most valued metal since the earliest records of history.

Curiously, six of these are Christian crosses, while two of them were made thousands of years before Christ. Really hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? Can you tell which is which? Are you sure?

If you can’t tell, for absolute certain, which one is holy, and which one is a pagan idol… what does that tell you?

And if they’re all the same, is it because all are holy… or all are unholy?

But gold was expensive. Not everyone who loved the sun could afford to represent him in his ideal metal, so they carved him on bone, on rock, even on themselves – the first tattoos. And always, they represented the sun as they saw him – a circle with four great rays, and four lesser rays.

This is how all ancient cultures represented him – from Babylon to Japan to the Americas. Cultures which, according to modern historians, had no contact for a tens of thousands of years, developed literally identical symbols for their God.

The sun-worship cult is a truly universal religion, because it is so logical – what else can compare with the blessings the sun gives us on a daily basis?

No faith is needed to believe in his warmth. No skeptic can deny his role in our welfare. And – best of all – he imposes no arbitrary rules on mankind.

There are literally tens of thousands of examples of pre-Christian crosses. I could fill a book with only the pictures I have taken in a small fraction of the museums across the world.

But I think the point has been made – anyone who looks at the sun and blinks will see a cross over it. Therefore, the best way to represent the sun is to carve an X over an O.

Whether you call it an image of Shamash, Ra, Odin, Fu Xi, or Jesus… it’s still a Sun-symbol. Or can you really argue that the cross on the left, from a modern Christian steeple in Poland, is different from the Babylonian sun-symbol of Shamash on the right? They are both, quite literally, symbols of the god of Babylon.

Think about that. For just as the cross supposedly represents the son-of-God, so Shamash was the son of the highest God in the Babylonian religion. That’s who they thought they saw in Daniel 3:25. Because the sun is like fire! And so the cross at right is a symbol of the Babylonian son-of-God!

So you have the same symbol, to which you attach the same meaning as the Babylonians… think about that, too.

Then think about the Mayan sun-symbol on the left. Taken from a temple where human sacrifice was performed, is it really so different from the other symbol on the right, a Christian one?

It was for sale a few hundred yards from St. Peter’s Basilica, where the membership believes they literally eat human flesh weekly as the wafer is transubstantiated.

Are these really such different religions?

Really?

Here are two adorations of Ra, the Egyptian sun-God, three adorations of Jesus, and one adoration of Shamash, the Babylonian sun-God. See a pattern?

It’s worth noting that Egypt and Babylon were the two religious influences God never ceased yelling at Israel about (Exodus 32:8, Jeremiah 51:6-9, etc.).

So you have seen overwhelming evidence that a circle with an X inside of it, in varying forms, is a symbol of the sun God. But I can hear you saying “but MY cross is Christian! MY cross is shaped like a “t”! It isn’t like these other crosses!”

Are you prepared to tell the family of the guy on the right that he is buried under the sign of God, but tell the family of the guy on the left that he was, unfortunately, buried under the an idol of the sun?

Can you honestly defend that position with a straight face? If one of these is Christian, then both are. But if one of these is a sun-symbol, then both are.

But the question remains, how did the one on the left become the one in the center? The answer is easy: by separating from, and then losing the circle, as in the one on the right.

For a solar wheel to become the modern Protestant T cross involved two main changes. First, the cross became separate from the circle. Then, the vertical bar was extended on the bottom. Both of these happened for a very logical reason.

First, the extension of the bar. It has always been critical that idols be worshiped as high up as possible (1 Kings 14:23, Ezekiel 6:13).

To this day, it is impossible to visit any hill, however small, in most of the world without finding a cross on top. There is certainly no command in the Bible to put a cross on every high hill, but it is extremely important in pagan religions.

Regardless the size of the crowd, the sun symbol needed to be elevated so everyone could worship it. A steeple worked nicely, but with the rise of itinerant missionary work, priests needed a symbol that was portable.

The shepherd’s hook, or Crozier, combined the elements of a walking staff and a royal sceptre, and also drew on various Biblical symbols like Psalms 23:4, Hebrews 11:21, etc. Of course, there were many different kinds. All, you can see, derive from earlier sun-symbols.

You can see in many Christian crosses around the world the clear evidence that the equilateral cross is the important part, while the lengthy lower stem is merely there for support. Compare these photos (all Christian). Are these REALLY different from the Protestant cross?

Come on, really?

But it was also common for a simple walking staff to have a cross-bar near the top, making the whole staff into a cross with an extremely long base. This is known as a processional cross today, and is used widely in parades to keep the cross elevated.

It’s easy to see how the exact length of the bottom of the bar can change, depending on the usage. These are all Christian crosses, note carefully how most of them clearly keep the symmetrical sun-cross distinct from the base or platform.

It’s easy to see that, were this division smoothed over, you would have the recognizable T-cross most familiar to Protestants.

Remember, none of this was an accident. Early false Christians knew they were merging the sun-religion and the Bible, but they wanted to distance themselves from pagan religion even as they were absorbing it. So even though they were worshiping the sun, they wanted to appear as if they were worshiping Jesus!

So a little bit of artistic license, such as lengthening the vertical bar and losing the circle would distance them from the original religion and give them deniability – the fact that these crosses are a little different makes it possible for people to say “that’s not quite the same! MY cross isn’t pagan!”, as you might be saying right now.

In this way, they could deceive the world. The deceived Christians could believe this was an image of the cross of Jesus, while the pagans could be placated knowing this was only a slightly-modified version of the sun they already worshiped!

The strong desire of false Christianity to merge the death of a Jesus with the sun-cross encouraged them to adjust the shape of the cross to match the proportions of a man. This is another reason why the ✝ would eventually win – it fits the crucifixion image better.

Despite this, many, if not the majority of early crucifixes showed Jesus on an equilateral cross, not a T cross! It is absurd to think that’s how Jesus was actually crucified by the Romans… so why depict Him on such a shape?

Because their intent was to honor the sun cross, not the real cross of Christ! They were pasting Jesus on top of their old religion, and so they LITERALLY pasted Him on top of their old cross!

The other reason why the ✝ cross eventually overtook the Solar Cross in the west was the Crusades. Roman Christianity was driven across Europe and into the Middle East by the sword. The crusaders were generally very devout Christians – and by that I mean false Christians, of course.

But they were deceived, and so they believed they were fighting for God. And as they expected God to protect them, it made sense for them to “put on the shield of faith” and protect themselves with the sign of the cross. Many different styles of crusader crosses exist, some equilateral, some not, but by far the most common simply took the cross most suited to the shape of the medieval shield – the Latin cross.

In addition, the Medieval broadsword had a very wide grip guard which formed another cross. So in their minds, they used the cross (sword) for offense, and the cross (shield) for defense.

This can only have strengthened the preference for the Latin cross in Medieval Europe, right before the reformers started the Protestant reformation and then many of them left for America. They took the cross that was fashionable at the time, and left most of the others behind.

And that’s why on top of your Protestant Church there is a Latin cross, and not its grandfather the solar wheel.

The cross is a pagan symbol, which means to the pagans the same thing it means to the Christian. And it is used by them in precisely the same way as it is used by the false Christian.

This is why you can see the exact same symbol of the sun over the hearts of these (left to right) Babylonian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Catholic, and Buddhist worshipers of the sun.

After all, if the sun represents God, and if you love Him, you would want to keep Him close to your heart. Therefore, it is important to keep His symbol over the chest, since that’s where the heart is.

Where do you wear your cross?

Remember, no pagan was stupid enough to believe that their idol was God. They prayed to God through the idol. The idol REMINDED them of their God’s sacrifices and His love for them.

This is exactly what any Christian who prays towards a cross says today. They don’t pray to the cross, they pray THROUGH the cross to God. The cross reminds them of God and His suffering, His love for them.

Idolaters from the beginning of the world displayed the image of a God – that is, the image of a man like them – in the center of the sun, and explained the fact that He was invisible by His blinding glory.

These images come from the Inca, the Assyrians, the Romans, and Christians. Can you tell which ones are Christian?

As always… think about that.

*****

But the discovery of the one true sun-symbol was not the end of the religion, it was the beginning. It was a starting point for the mythology – a logical, inevitable mythology which reaches into every corner of our modern culture.

But first let’s explore the evolution of the solar cross in more detail. There are only so many times you can write X over O before you get bored. So people were creative. Artistic. And one of they first things they did was play with the circle. For example, what if, instead of showing a continuous circle, you removed part of the outer border?

This is obviously the same symbol, but with a unique style that is yours. One that you can be proud of. One that represents God better than those savages (your in-laws) across the river who still use the whole circle.

You can easily invent reasons why the circle should be broken – to divide into four seasons, for instance. See how easy it can be to create dogma?

Of course, as you stylize these arms more (top right) you can just make the rays themselves curved, and fit them back inside the circle (top left, bottom right), and even add the rays around the outside again as in the bottom left example.

The bottom left, of course, is Christian, and has no connection to these other symbols. Yes, that was sarcasm.

As I’ve said, the various forms of the cross can all be explained simply by minor variations on the same original theme. One of the major variations began by trying to unite the circle and the cross, by making the bars flow directly into the circle. This in turn lead some to abandon the circle altogether.

The examples here come from Korea, Ephesus, Rome, Sweden, and a modern Christian church. Are these symbols REALLY different?

Why not? Why would God have the same symbol on His church as His enemies have on theirs?

Well… He wouldn’t.

The sun symbol began as a simple identifying mark. But as artisans and shamans began to think about the symbol itself, and compare it to the natural world, they began to discover ways to make connections between the sun symbol and the world around them.

It takes very little imagination to turn the rounded swastika you saw before into bird heads; or whole birds; just little more to turn it into boars and deer; any four creatures can be artistically connected to four sides of the sun circle!

The obvious advantage of this is it allows you to make spiritual connections between the sun and the hunt; for if God doesn’t bless it, how can you be sure you’ll have a good hunt? Or how can you explain a scarcity of game, without saying the sun frowned on it?

You can even find four men holding hands in prayer within a circle, using hands to illustrate the four lesser rays while their heads point towards the four greater rays.

A little more imagination puts two men with intertwined limbs inside the same circle. As usual, one of these is Christian and as usual, I’m going to let you guess which.

A more creative artist who spent his days and nights pondering the religion of the sun might notice the proportions of the solar disc in the shape of a man, perhaps dancing in worship of the very same sun.

Again, I cannot stress enough that all these pictures are gathered from across the globe and across the millennia, from cultures who had nothing in common and in some cases went to war to attempt to destroy the other’s idolatrous, pagan religion!

Find the Christian one, if you can!

But there are other cultures where circles are not considered artistic, and whose artisans prefer hard angles. So while some would draw the sun as it is at the top left, others would draw the exact same image but with right angles, as you see at the top center. Those same cultures might portray the sun inside of a square, while others prefer wrapping the sun – and the square – inside the more logical circle.

The square is not as representative of the sun, obviously, but artistically that doesn’t really matter. But one major side affect of the square sun is that this symbol allowed connections to be drawn to other everyday things, such as a sheep-fold, which was typically a square divided into four pens for rams, ewes, lambs and perhaps the sick, all of which needed kept separate.

With just a little thought, it could also be connected to the Garden of Eden – which was square, and which was divided by four rivers which sprang up out of the midst of the Garden! Which was, like the sun, a source of life!

The more these different things could be demonstrated to have a common, mystical root, the more power the priests would have because the more they would have a right to stick their noses into things – with just those connections, a priest now had a legitimate reason to be involved in (and to take a percentage of) agriculture and animal husbandry, a reason to have holy water and control water rights and usage.

This also led to ideas like the four winds of the Earth, the four cardinal directions of the compass, as well as the four seasons. Then of course there’s the fact that the day divides well into four equal parts – dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight.

The sun is at the heart of every one of these concepts. Not merely in symbol – the sun actually IS directly responsible for the four parts of the day and the four seasons, so this did not exist merely in the mind of the superstitious – but as you see, often logical – pagans.

So just as it was inevitable that the sun should be pictured as a cross, it was equally inevitable that some bright young soothsayer would connect those four points to the four winds and the four parts of the day.

God Himself uses these divisions, for example “And upon Elam will I bring the four winds from the four quarters of heaven” (Jeremiah 49:36).

But there was another, completely unrelated way of deriving a cross from the sun. The sun is obviously a circle – clearly seen at dusk on a foggy day when the glare is cut by the mist – but if you take four circles and set them with the edges just touching, you automatically form a cross inside of them!

This, to a superstitious pagan, had to be a coincidence too divine to be ignored. And if you further put a circle inside of that circle, the four points would stand out even more – matching other styles of crosses!

Again, this is more proof that the cross is not only an obvious symbol of the sun, it is an INEVITABLE symbol of the sun. No one could think about the sun for more than a few minutes and not notice it has rays; is circular; and forms other crosses inside itself; so they could not HELP but make this symbol signify the sun!

Crosses at top left are from pre-Christian Ephesus, part of the Roman Empire at the time. Top right, post-Christian Ephesus. Bottom left, 9th century BC Italy. Bottom right is a Christian cross. Right?

Why would the top two Christian crosses have the exact same shape as the lower two pagan crosses? Clearly derived by the same method of drawing circles or squares or diamonds, and seeing crosses inside of them? The obvious answer is that none of these symbols are truly Christian.

The obvious answer is that none of these symbols are truly Christian.

*****

Can you tell me with a straight face that the cross on the left, from pre-Colombian Colombia, is really different from the one on the right from Christian Ephesus? Or the common Christian print “He is the light of the world”, drawn over a sun; seriously, who does this point us to worship? How is this AT ALL different from Deuteronomy 4:15-19? Or Ezekiel 8:16-18?

And are either of them different from the cover of this Bible? I mean, it’s a picture of a sunset with a cross drawn over it – who are they kidding? And aren’t these all the same as this common style of Christian steeple?

So how is putting an idol of the sun on the cover of God’s holy word, or on top of a church called by His name, really any different from 2 Chronicles 33:7? How does God feel about idols of the sun? Jeremiah 8:1-2. And offerings made to the sun? 2 Kings 23:4, 11-12. So then think about how He feels about this idol being in the house of nearly every so-called Christian on Earth? Revelation 21:8.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

What you have seen here is history. Not dogma, not opinion, not speculation. You have seen with your own eyes undoctored photos, almost all of which I took with my own camera in the major museums of the world. That which you call a cross is an idol of the sun, likely the most ancient idol ever made.

The shape and appearance has changed slightly as the skill of artisans has improved on their crude scratches on rocks to finely worked gold; it has changed to meet the aesthetics of the times. It has lost pieces of the bar or circle, gained them back again, added others and lost them – whatever was necessary to keep up with the times.

And yet, in its basic form it has survived unchanged from the most ancient times (3500 BC, at left; by our dating, we would put it just after the Flood); it has survived in the most remote parts of the world, such as this Chinese “immortal disk” (center); to the heart of the resurrected beast itself, in this Medieval shield from Italy (right).

But most importantly to students of the Bible, it means we do not have to guess about the religion of ancient Egypt and ancient Babylon and where it thrives today. Because we know what their symbols were! WE KNOW what God warned us about! We don’t have to rely on ancient, third-hand descriptions of their idols; we can see them for ourselves!

Leviticus 18:3 After the doings of the land of Egypt, wherein ye dwelt, shall ye not do: and after the doings of the land of Canaan, whither I bring you, shall ye not do: neither shall ye walk in their ordinances.

Jeremiah 51:47 Therefore, behold, the days come, that I will do judgment upon the graven images of Babylon: and her whole land shall be confounded, and all her slain shall fall in the midst of her.

The symbol at left is a Hittite – Canaanite – sun symbol. The next is an Egyptian symbol. Then a Babylonian symbol. These, like many of the graven images of crosses you have seen in this article are LITERALLY the “doings of the land of Egypt, and the doings of the land of Canaan”!

These are LITERALLY the “graven images of Babylon”! Not symbolically, not understood through prophetic interpretation – this is the exact symbol Babylon loved! One of God’s enemies once prayed to that PARTICULAR idol which now rests in the British Museum!

A copy of which now stands proudly on your dash, on your nightstand, on your jewelry, and on top of your very own, supposedly Christian, church!

Now I want you to read Isaiah 30:22. These were exactly the same images the deceived world today calls Christian! And God said that when you learn this, you should treat them as a man would treat a dirty tampon.

As I’ve said many times in this article… think about that. Because you see, God’s prophecies are true in every possible sense. And you read in Revelation 13 about the image of the beast, which is the Roman Catholic Church. And that is completely true – but not the complete truth.

Because the beast is Babylon, and the image of that beast – the image that the original beast bowed down to, and loved – that image is the cross. We have actual pictures of Babylonians bowing down to that image! And if you want to know where the religion of Babylon is today, go find someone who bows down and prays to that very same idol of the beast.

You won’t have to look far.

Go back to Part 1: The True Cross

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