representation of the instrument of execution once referred to.

Another fact worthy of special note is that, whether the Fathers wrote
in Greek and used the word _stauros_, or wrote in Latin and translated
that word as _crux_, they often seem to have had in their mind's eye a
tree; a tree which moreover was closely connected in meaning with the
forbidden tree of the Garden of Eden, an allegorical figure of
undoubtedly phallic signification which had its counterpart in the Tree
of the Hesperides, from which the Sun-God Hercules after killing the
Serpent was fabled to have picked the Golden Apples of Love, one of
which became the symbol of Venus, the Goddess of Love. Nor was this the
only such counterpart, for almost every race seems in days of old to
have had an allegorical Tree of Knowledge or Life whose fruit was Love;
the ancients perceiving that it was love which produced life, and that
but for the sexual passion and its indulgence mankind would cease to
be.

Starting upon an examination of the early Christian writings in
question, we read in the _Gospel of Nicodemus_ that when the Chief
Priests interviewed certain men whom Jesus had raised from the dead,
those men made upon their faces "the sign of the stauros."[12] The sign
of the cross is presumably meant; and all that need be said is that if
the men whom Jesus raised from the dead were acquainted with the sign
of the cross, it would appear that it must have been as a pre-Christian
sign.

Further on in the same Gospel, Satan is represented as being told that
"All that thou hast gained through the Tree of Knowledge, all hast thou
lost through the Tree of the Stauros."[13]