Since the dawn of mankind humans have used symbols to reflect their spiritual beliefs and many of these symbols still survive today in various different forms. We will look at several of these symbols, discover their ancient meanings, how they are viewed by modern day civilization, and why.

The cross is one of the most common symbols of religious significance. For Christians it represents the suffering and death of Jesus in order for man to be saved from sin, but was not adopted as an official symbol of Christianity until the 4th Century (Walker, Steven). However, cross symbols have been found in many cultures dating to well before the advent of Christianity. A cross symbol was used to depict the solar eclipse by many different people. These usually showed a central disk with four arms radiating from the center, usually representing a god or goddess of the sun. What is interesting is how universal and similar in appearance this symbol was. It has been found on pottery and drawings from ancient Assyria, Mesopotamia, Hawaii, Peru, Mexico, and Egypt, just to name a few. To the ancients the eclipse held special significance. It often heralded the birth or death of a gr

Many other symbols that are used today have been found in ancient archeological sites pre-dating Christianity by many thousands of years. These most notably are the fish, which Christians use as a symbol of "Jesus Christ, Son of God", but was used by many ancient civilizations to symbolize feminine creative force and the Mother Goddess. The Caduceus, the universal symbol of the medical profession, has roots dating back to ancient Mesopotamia where it represented the goddess Ishtar; and ancient Greece, where is was used as a symbol for the medicinal god Asclepius (Walker, Barbara). Very similar symbols have been found in ancient India, and North and South America. What is most profound, perhaps, is that so many ancient cultures incorporated similar symbols that had similar meanings into their cultures. These people, for the most part, had no means of contacting each other and yet we see these archetypal images spread throughout the world. It makes one wonder if our society has lost its connection to these archetypes that held so much meaning to the ancients.

Another symbol that was used extensively in ancient times, but now much maligned, is the pentacle. The first use of the pentacle seems to be around 3500 BCE in Mesopotamia and was probably used as a symbol of imperial power and placed on royal inscriptions. In ancient Greece is was called a pentalpha and studied extensively by the Pythagoreans, followers of Pythagoras who was a Greek philosopher and mathematician. They revered the geometry of the pentacle as perfect because it is comprised of a circle divided into five arcs of 72„a each. 72 was considered the prime magic number as it is the only number that is divisible by all numbers 1-9 except for 5 itself, and the other main magic number, 7. When they were driven underground for their teachings, they used this symbol to identify ea

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