# Crucifix

**Crocifisso**

**Known today as.** The image of Christ on the Cross.

Kind: Sacramental

## What did Canale use it for?

The display of “images of the Crucified” drives off demons (Treatise Two; note LXV).

## What does modern science say?

In universal Christian use.

## What lore surrounds it?

The crucifix’s power over vampires, which most readers now bring to it, is a literary invention of the nineteenth century, fixed by Stoker in 1897, rather than older folk belief; its long, documented history is against demons and hexes, as in Canale.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia reads the Palatine graffito of the crucified man with an ass's head as proof “that the Christians used the crucifix in their private devotions at least as early as the third century.” The Rituale Romanum supplies for a cross a blessing that “consists only of a short prayer, with a second prayer whose use is optional, and only holy water is used,” with the rubric directing the priest to kneel and “devoutly adore and kiss the cross.” In the ancient ceremony “the cross was first washed with holy water and then anointed with chrism precisely as in the form for the blessing of bells,” and St. Louis of France “regarded it as unseemly that crosses and statues should be set up for veneration without being previously blessed.”

## Sources

- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Cross and Crucifix in Archæology.” newadvent.org/cathen/04517a.htm
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Cross and Crucifix in Liturgy.” newadvent.org/cathen/04533a.htm

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*Crucifix.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/crucifix

Historical description, not medical advice.