Notes on British and other Coins. By Miss Russell. 381 



I find that, in India, the stone we call the ammonite, the fossil nautilus 

 shell, which forms a very fine volute, is often worn as the symbol of Vishnu 

 the Preserver, by his devotees. But it is the double spiral we are particularly 

 concerned with here. 



Sir Henry EawHnson engraves a statuette called Astarte, found somewhere 

 in Etruria, in which the goddess is standing on a large pair of volutes, which 

 however are upside down, regarded as horns. 



The connection with the water— which is interesting ethnologically, for it 

 must be remembered it is quite arbitrary — reappears in Brittany, where Mr 

 Milne found the large water- jars, of the same type as the broken pottery 

 which he dug up in the rubbish under the Roman remains, were, in the 

 present day, ornamented with a device somewhat resembling a yoke, but more 

 like a small pair of sheep's horns ; two waving lines are always carried round 

 the jar, and the mark is above this on one side. The potters could not tell 

 the meaning of these devices, though they used them. But our letter N is said 

 to be derived, through the old alphabets, from the Egyptian hieroglyphic 

 of a waving line, standing for a wave, or the sound en. The Greek scroll 

 pattern, with all the volutes turning one way, is avowedly meant for the sea. 



Sir James Simpson remarks that the spirals are commoner in Ireland and 

 Brittany than in Scotland, but they do not seem to be very common any- 

 where. They are found in Scotland rather with the rude cup- cuttings than 

 with the symbols ; in fact I am not sure that they occur with the latter except 

 as decorations. In the peculiarly interesting remains from Norie's Law, the 

 handsome volutes are mere scrolls, while the symbols are on separate clasps 

 or brooches. The circumstance is interesting, because I make them out de- 

 cidedly pagan, and the Symbols evidently were in use in the Christian period. 



The elemental symbols are often mixed up with personal or professional 



badges, books, swoids, tools, &c. The round classical hand-mirror looks 

 like another emblem of the sun, while the cocked-hat is an ornamented 

 crescent. Of two suggestions of Mr Campbell's about the Comb, I prefer 

 that which makes it mysterious (originally) on account of the line of light 

 which follows it along the hair in certain states of the weather. I have an idea 

 that the amber and jet beads of the tombs have been placed there partly on 

 account of their mysterious electrical sympathies ; one bead is often found. I 

 think this can hardly be accidental, though of course fossil resin outlasts many 

 other deposits, having no tendency to decay. 



The opposed volutes do appear, and in connection with the water again, in 

 a semi-pagan crucifix from an old chapel in Colonsay, which I should suppose 

 was of about the date of the Symbols, the 8th or 9th century — possibly later. 

 It is engraved in the Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot, for Feb. 14th, 1881. It is about 

 five feet high ; the outline of the stone is that of a cross, but the figure, with 

 a human head, not badly executed, has the tail and part of the body of a fish, 

 and instead of chest and arms, two large spirals. Fish are used in more than 

 one way in early Christian symbolism, and there is a small conventional 

 figure of Jonah and the Whale, engraved in Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot, for Jan. 

 10th, 1876, which shows how this Christ-Dagon may partly have been sug- 

 gested. Altogether it appeals to the imagination, for it was only in the 17th 

 century that the annual sacrifice, the libation of ale, to Shony (Lord), the 

 god of the sea, was stopped by the church in the Lewes. 



