WIKIPEDIA: "Anastasis," symbolic representation of the resurrection of Christ. Panel, Roman lidless sarcophagus, ca. 350 A.D. From the excavations of the Duchess of Chablais at Tor Marancia, 1817-1821. / One of the oldest Christograms is the Chi-Rho or Labarum. It consists of the superimposed Greek letters chi (Χ) and rho (Ρ), which are the first two letters of Christ in Greek. Technically, the word labarum is Latin for a type of vexillum, a military standard with a flag hanging from a horizontal crossbar. A Chi-Rho Christogram was added to the flag by the Emperor Constantine I in the late Roman period. Therefore Christogram and labarum were not originally synonyms.
9:00 p.m. What a lovely Easter Day it was . . . I posted this image elsewhere, and it's interesting to see what people chose to comment on--the symbology of birds and wreath, the spread of Christianity (Roman soldiers), and also the Chi Ro said to be dreamed or seen by Constantine before the battle of Milvian Bridge. The accounts by Lactantius and Eusebius vary, and they are interesting--see the Wiki-version
here.
When I first read the title of this post and saw the top half of the image before scrolling down, I thought it was bread dough in a wreath shape...how wrong I was. Fascinating Christian symbols you write about.
ReplyDeleteIn a strange way, this takes me back to a book I just finished reading, of pre-Christian times though - an historical novel about Aristotle and his young student Alexander the Great: The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon.
Glad you had a lovely Easter Day. We did too, it was like summer and almost all our family together.
Can you believe it's almost April?!
It's starting to look vaguely like spring! Snow melting. Aconite. Snowdrops.
ReplyDeleteBread would be appropriate!