5th-century relief featuring the Coptic "crux ansata" (Christianised ankh), from a 5th Century AD Coptic Church.
In my 2018 post "Square and compasses" and in my 2019 posts "Etemenanki" and "An-Ki-Ankh" discussed the origin of the Ankh symbol.
And I proposed that the ankh symbol came from Mesopotamia where it originally looked like this:
In these old posts I also wrote that:
Early examples of the ankh sign date to the First Dynasty (c. 30th to 29th century BC). There is little agreement on what physical object the sign originally represented. Most scholars believe the sign is a knot formed of a flexible material such as cloth or reeds or rope... The below stone ankh was actually made to resemble ankh made from reeds.
This ankh is made by bending one piece of reed into a loop, and then tying it to a handle created from another piece of reed bent to form T shape. Like this:
Here is one I made today :)
So An+Ki = Father+Mother = Life...
What did the intercourse between God (Father Sky) and Mary (basically symbolical replacement for Mother Earth) produce? Christ who is God who became Man. God materialised. So based on the above analogy, Christ is just a symbol. Symbol of life itself.
I wrote about Christ as Life in my post "Living nature", but I will repeat it here...
If Christ is life, living nature, then his immaculate conception and virgin birth become easy to understand...
If Christ is life, living nature, then his death and resurrection become easy to understand...
If Christ is life, living nature, and we are part of life, living nature, then we are Christ. We truly live and move and have our being in Christ...This too then becomes easy to understand...
If Christ is life, living nature, then god who became matter is easy to understand too...
If Christ is life, living nature, then we are all Christ, we are all god. Just like the mystics the world over have been teaching for millennia...
Apparently this is too "Pagan" for "Christians" and too "Christian" for "Pagans"...So everyone gets offended...
This is Christ on the cross from "Plaque from the Maskell ivories", AD 420-30, Rome
This is also crux ansata, Ankh, AnKi, life...
On the original Coptic relief, the priest (saint?) is using ankh to point at the green plants, symbol of life. Which can't grow without (rain, flood) water...It is (rain, flood) water that makes life possible. It is the (rain, flood) water that contains the essence of life...
I recently wrote an article "Sycamore tree goddess" in which I talked about the link between ankh (life) and (Nile flood) water (the source of life) in Egypt...
Which is why (rain, flood) water is holy. Cause, despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains (floods)...
This link between the Nile flood, life and Ankh is symbolically depicted through this, most likely the oldest, the original Egyptian Ankh: A hand holding a knot made from Papyrus (flowers during and therefore marks the beginning of the the Nile flood) and Lotus (flowers during and therefore marks the peak of the Nile flood). I talked about this first in my post "Goddess on a horse"...
Which is why this is super interesting: A relief from the ancient Egyptian Temple of Hatshepsut. It shows a platter with food arranged to look like a duck by making an (ankh) knot using lotus, the symbol of the Nile flood without which there will be no food in Egypt...
I talked about the blue lotus as the plant calendar marker for the Nile Flood in many of posts. For instance "Lotus and papyrus" in which I explain why the Egyptian god Hapi, who was the god of the annual flooding of the Nile in ancient Egyptian religion, was associated with papyrus and lotus flowers, and is often depicted as twins, tying papyrus and lotus flowers together...
And my post "Beautiful boy", about Nefertem, the Egyptian Beautiful Boy, originally a lotus flower at the creation of the world, who had arisen from the primal waters...Nefertem emerging from the lotus blossom, from the tomb of Tutankhamun...
