In the book Maranatha - Et in Arcadia Ego, the page following the encoded part of the text carries only these lines:
The End
&
The Beginning
The ampersand on that page looks a lot like the letters e and t smashed together. It turns out that the ampersand character evolved from a ligature that combined those two letters.
'An ampersand (&), also commonly called an and sign, is a logogram representing the conjunction "and". The symbol is a ligature of the letters in et, which is Latin for "and".' (From Wikipedia).
So the weird symbol in "The End et The Beginning" is indeed an old-school ampersand.
Of course the end and the beginning calls to mind the Biblical phrase 'The Alpha and the Omega". Alpha and Omega are the first and last letters in the Greek alphabet respectively.
In Hebrew, the first and last letters are Aleph and Tau. Those two letters are used to stand for God in some passages of the Old Testament.
Apparently the Hebrew Aleph can be represented by either an A or an E in the Latin alphabet.
That means of course that the ampersand symbol, a contraction of the letters e and t, could in fact represent the Aleph and the Tau all by itself.
The End and The Beginning
The End et The Beginning
The End & The Beginning
Omega & Alpha
Tau & Aleph
&
So that one phrase could represent both microcosm and macrocosm at the same time:
The End & The Beginning
Tau & Aleph
Tau (Aleph-Tau) Aleph
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