Symbols of the Religions
Symbol · 1354
Star of David
Ancient Shape, Modern Emblem
The six-pointed hexagram (Magen David), symbol of Jewish identity, spiritual protection, and the union of heaven and earth.
What it meansTwo triangles interlocked, read in Kabbalah as the meeting of what descends and what ascends — heaven and earth, fire and water, held in one figure that belongs wholly to neither. Scholem's caution stands beside it: the shape carried no doctrine before the emblem did.
Symbol · Symbols of the Religions
Chi-Rho
The Name in Two Letters
A name made into a sign: Christ, and victory over death — first famed as a standard carried into battle.
What it meansChi and rho, the first two letters of Christos, laid across each other so the name becomes a single mark. The reading is compression: a word that cannot be spoken in battle or carved at length becomes a shape, and the shape carries everything the word did.
Symbol · Symbols of the Religions
Om
The Imperishable Syllable
Held to be the sound of ultimate reality itself — one syllable, and continuous with the self who says it.
What it meansThe Mandukya Upanishad takes it apart: A, U and M are waking, dream and deep sleep, and the syllable's fourth part is the silence after it — turīya, which is not a state but the reality the other three occur in. The teaching is in the stopping, not the sounding.
- Chi-RhoThe Name in Two LettersChristianity
- DharmachakraThe First TurningBuddhism
- KhandaThe Two SovereigntiesSikhism
- OmThe Imperishable SyllableHinduism
- Orthodox CrossThree Bars, Eight EndsEastern Christianity
- Star and CrescentThe Borrowed EmblemIslam
- Star of DavidAncient Shape, Modern EmblemJudaism
- Yin-YangTaijituTaoism
