"At Verona is preserved the famous votive relief of Argenidas ['argentum' means silver - as the colour of the Moon] and the Disocuri; where we have the cult represented in so many different forms, the heroes standing [heroes must be standing], the urns of [= containing; like when the Moon must be contained in an urn when it is dark] the dead heroes entwined with serpents, and the sacred beams of dokana which were their Spartan symbol.

But this relief was found at Este.

These dokana are composed of a pair of upright beams, connected by a crossbeam in the form of the letter H; and they correspond to the unfinished brick wall of the Babylonian zodiacal sign, in the sense that they show the Twins to have been builders.

Miss Harrison points out to me that the dokana became actual objects of worship."

"Now in Sparta it is well known that the sign of the Dioscuri is the dokana, but it is not yet as clear as one could wish it to be, in what way the sacred cross-beams were arranged and what was the resulting conventional figure of them.

In the votive tablet of Argenidas, now at Verona in the Museo Civico, we have an Anakeion or Temple of the Dioscuri (Anakes), whose front is marked by the sign of the Dokana; the beams, if we may assume the relief to contain the whole of the representation, are simply arranged in the form of the letter H, and the figure is repeated, so that we have side by side the delineation H H.
 

But here we are not quite sure that the artist has treated the subject fairly: for, in the first place, Plutarch tells us (De amore frat. § 1) that the cross-beams were double, in which case we ought to have a representation of the form |=| |=| : and in the next place, it looks as if the repetition of the symbol were a mistake of the artist, who did not realize that one such sign stood for the pair of Dioscuri.

If the sign with double cross-beams be the correct one, we could then compare it with the unfinished brick wall which is the sign of the twins in Babylonia; but we need more information on this point from Spartan and other monuments.

It has something to do with building, but what the particular thing is that is being builded is not so clear.

And it is quite possible that the Verona monument is right, as far as Italy is concerned, and that it varied its Dokana from the traditional Spartan form.

Suppose, now, we pass from Verona and the votive relief of the safely-returned Argenidas, and examine the Milanese mosaics of S. Protase and S. Gervase, which are recognized to go back nearly to the time of S. Ambrose.

We shall find that the garments of the two saints are marked by a mysterious symbol, which the Milanese scholars have not succeeded in explaining.

These markings, according to Prof. Ratti¹, have the form of the letter H, when lying on its side, or rather, of a double T.

1) In Ambrosiana, p. 31.

They make one think, says Ratti, of the well-known passage in Ezekiel (ix. 46) where the sacred Tau is placed on the foreheads of the faithful; one has only to imagine that they have been removed from the forehead to the raiment for aesthetic reasons.

Unfortunately this hypothesis broke down at the start, for the same marks turned up elsewhere, and not always on Christian figures or monuments, so that the hyopthesis that they stood for the ordinary Christian sign had to be abandoned.

And no other solution seems to have been propounded, deserving of attention.
 

We propose an alternative explanation to that of Prof. Ratti, viz. that the signs are the taboo-mark of the Dioscuri².

2) I use the term taboo-mark, which may apply to men or things. Cain, in the book of Genesis, has such a taboo-mark. It was, no doubt, conventional."

(Harris)