Was, Chi-Rho, Djed Pillar

The Was, Chi-Rho, and Djed symbols are usually depicted with the ankh, and have similar or related meanings. The Was is a staff, and a hieroglyph for an Egyptian word meaning power, and dominion. It’s a sceptre representing the “Set-animal”, which is the Egyptian god Sutekh; possibly in a different context, meaning the animal form of the god of chaos Set. The head of the staff and the forked end is the head of the animal and its bifurcated tail. The staffs were carried by priests, pharaohs and gods whether in life or art as a symbol of power that later took on the additional meaning of control over the forces of chaos that Set represented. The Was is also the symbol of the goddess Wosret, or Wasret. Wosret is a much older goddess, whose cult center was in Thebes, but is rarely depicted and no temples for the goddess have been found.

The Chi-Rho vaguely resembles the ankh and is also called a Labarum. It looks like an asterisk, except the top line has a loop, that curves to the right, like the letter P. The etymology and origins of the Chi-Rho or Labarum are unknown before it was used by Constantine. Chi-Rho are the first two Greek letters in Christ; Chi looks like the letter X, and Rho resembles a lowercase letter P. The symbol was military standard, and first used by the Roman emperor Constantine. Constantine saved an impoverished North African historian named Lactantius and the man worked as a tutor to Constantine’s son Crispus. Lactantius also recorded the origins of the Labarum, at least according to the Christian belief. This was that Constantine dreamed of a voice saying “In hoc signo vinces”; Latin for “In this sign you shall conquer” and displayed the Chi-Rho symbol. Later, Constantine affixed the symbol to the armor of his soldiers and on the same day they fought Maxentius and won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge. Some have speculated that the Labarum was actually one of the very first of Christian symbols.

The Djed is a symbol that has a much more clear history, although there are still separate theories of its origins. It was widely speculated for some time that the Djed pillar was actually the spine of the god Osiris, and its meaning was stability, and steadiness. However, in the 2004 book The Quick and the Dead, the authors Andrew H. Gordon and Calvin W. Schwabe speculated that the Djed originated instead from the spine of the bull. This corresponds to Egyptian cattle culture, as well as the believe that semen was created in the spine.