cross in the mail

My father is somewhat of a “car guy”… he’s building a 1940 ford in the garage (has been for some time… don’t know if he’ll ever actually finish it, but I digress). Obviously the kind of parts that a 60 year old automobile would require aren’t sold on the shelves anymore, so he regularly has to order things from cataloges, ebay, whatever.

A couple of months ago, I opened up one of the many packages we recieve here to find something rather unusual inside. A strange cross with a leaf or something in the middle… obviously not old or valuable or anything (looks more like a wall decoration to me)… take a look for yourself:
http://frozenemu.swoo.net/thecross.gif

It was wrapped in bubble wrap, and had a small piece of carpet over the green marble thing in the middle, so obviously whoever put it in there meant to. I checked the packing list, wondering why my father would order something like that. No mention of the cross anywhere. When my father found out about it, he called up the owner of the company that sent it. Being a fairly regular customer, they knew each other pretty well, my father asked him if he had put it in there for some reason. The guy sounded rather confused, and said he had no idea why it would have been put in there.

Anyway… long story leading up to a short question: Does anybody know of any significance of the design of the cross? Like I said, it’s clearly not more than a few decades old (it’s even got a loop on the back for hanging on a nail), just wondering if perhaps a cross with a leaf design on it meant something in some culture.

Thanks,

  • FrozenEmu

Hearse component? That would make sense.

By the by—repost the image, but better lit?? The image is too dark to see clearly.

I have never heard of a “meaning” for that image.

My first thought when I saw the photo was that I was looking at the finial for a wrought iron fence of some sort, where the decorative motif included leaves and nuts or berries. For what it’s worth, (just what you paid for my opinion), the leaf looks like ivy, which would be the sort of plant that would grow around a fence (and, therefore, might be included as a decoration on a fence). On the other hand, the object at the top looks vaguely like a stylized pine cone which does not fit with the ivy.

How big is it? (How far from the center “button” to the base or tip of the “pine cone” for example?)

Looks to me like a heraldic cross, possibly a cross bottany. Though normally that’s more stylized in appearance, as on this page, number 237 (fourth row, on the left). The cross bottany turns up on the arms of the state of Maryland, but I don’t know what the leaf in the middle is.

This is going to bug me now. I’m sure I’ve seen a cross like this before, but I can’t remember where (and I post from work, so don’t, unfortunately, have my heraldry reference books with me). Any friendly heralds out there?

There are more Google hits with it spelled as “cross bottony”, but it doesn’t necessarily have leaves in the center. Sometimes it just means a cross with rounded ends.

No clue as to what this is. Sorry. :frowning:

Okay, it came to me where I’ve seen something like this before. It looks like the thing they put at the top of a church steeple, to act as a lightning rod conductor. How are the leaves attached? It looks like there’s a rubber band or something holding them on there, from the picture. How is the loop for hanging attached? Does it look like somebody could have salvaged it from a church steeple and converted it to a wall hanging?

It’s about 750cm from base to top. The leaf and ring are firmly attached, molded as part of the cross itself (it’s made out of iron, I think).

  • FrozenEmu

750 cm??? That’s a damn big package … did you mean mm, or leave out a decimal point?

eep… yeah… that should say 75cm, not 750. heh

  • FrozenEmu

1)This thing came from a place that handles out of date I mean antique car parts.

2)It is a religious symbol with a floral/herbal pattern.
Therefore…

3)It’s gotta be a part from a hearse.

Somebody mixed orders, & a Funeral Director in Outer Slobbovia is, as we speak, looking at your Dad’s pink fuzzy dice emblazioned with the phrase “Born To Boogie” on it and is thinking: What the f**???*

Okay, I’ve got a carpenter’s folding rule here, and 75 cm is 29 1/2 inches long. This is IMO a pretty big and heavy object to fasten to the side of a hearse. All the hearses I’ve ever seen had non-denominational scrolls on the sides. If they had a huge wrought iron cross on their hearse, what if they wanted to use the hearse for a Jewish or Moslem funeral? If the ring is so you can take it off, how would you hold it on there while you were driving? I don’t think a single ring in the back would hold it straight, on the car. It would bounce around and tip sideways.

No, my vote’s still for the top of a church steeple. Here’s a picture of one that looks awfully similar.

http://www.denninger.com/histrepr.htm

Scroll about halfway down.

And a little further down are the rooster finials, which also look similar.

My WAG as to the ring on the back would be that it’s to hold the end of the lightning rod grounding wires.

http://www.hawkes-assoc.com/news.html

…and in the middle of the night I realized that the ring could be used to hold the cross up on top of the steeple. The lightning rod would be installed on the top of the steeple, and you’d slide the ring down over the lightning rod, which would hold the cross in place. So the lightning rod and the cross would be standing next to each other there on the top, with the grounding wires leading down from the lightning rod to the ground.