Ankh

The Egyptian word ankh (𓋹) literally means life. The sign is attested as early as the First Dynasty (around 3100 BCE) on the stelae of the first pharaohs at Abydos. Its iconographic origin remains debated. Sir Alan Gardiner, in his reference grammar (1927), suggested that it was a stylized representation of a sandal, with the loop depicting the strap passing around the ankle — a hypothesis based on the homophony between ankh (life) and ankh (sandal). Other Egyptologists, such as E. A. Wallis Budge, saw in it a ritual knot, a mirror of Hathor, or even the symbolic fusion of the masculine and feminine principles.

In Egyptian iconography, the ankh is carried by the deities and held up to the nostrils of the deceased to breathe life into them beyond death. Isis, Osiris, Anubis, and Ra are depicted holding the ankh by its loop. On wall paintings, the gods give the ankh to the pharaohs as a sign of divine legitimacy. With the expansion of Christianity in Egypt, the Coptic Church, from the fourth century onward, adopted a form of ankh as a variant of the Christian cross (crux ansata) — Saint Anthony, the first desert monk, was happy to use it. In the twentieth century, the ankh became an occult and hippie symbol: starting in the 1960s, it flourished in New Age counterculture, the gothic movement, and alternative music.

In contemporary esotericism, the ankh is worn as jewelry to symbolize protection, vitality, and connection to the sacred. New Age practices attribute to it the role of an energetic amplifier, sometimes used in meditation: holding an ankh between the hands is said to allow you to channel vital energy. Aleister Crowley's Thelema takes up the ankh as a symbol of the union of principles — the loop (feminine) and the cross (masculine). On Tarotoui, the ankh appears in several decks of Egyptian inspiration, notably Saint-Germain's Egyptian Tarot (1901), as a recurring attribute of the reworked major arcana.

The ankh is sometimes confused with other Egyptian crosses such as the djed (pillar of Osiris, stability) or the tyet (knot of Isis, feminine protection). Today's Egyptologists (Jan Assmann, Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt) insist on the need to place the sign back into its precise ritual context: in Egypt it was never an individual amulet worn the way it is today. The contemporary use therefore amounts to a modern reappropriation, which takes nothing away from its evocative power.