Djed Pillar

The djed is a strange shape: a column with a broad foot, a tall shaft, and four horizontal bars stacked at the top like a ladder cut short. The Egyptians themselves saw several things in it. It was a tree trunk with its branches lopped off, a sheaf of grain bound for the harvest, and above all a backbone, the spine that holds a body upright. The very word djed meant stability, firmness, endurance, the quality of things that do not fall. It is one of the oldest signs in Egyptian art, older than the pyramids, carved on seals from the first dynasties and perhaps descended from a Predynastic harvest fetish carried in fertility rites. From the beginning it belonged to the gods of the earth and the dead: to Sokar, the falcon god of the Memphite necropolis, to Ptah, the craftsman of creation, and then, forever, to Osiris.

The myth that bound the pillar to Osiris is one of the strangest in Egyptian tradition, preserved most fully by the Greek writer Plutarch, who heard it from the Egyptians themselves. Seth, the red god of chaos, murdered his brother Osiris, the good king of Egypt, by tricking him into a beautiful chest and sealing him inside, then casting the chest into the Nile. The waters carried it out to sea and north to the coast of Byblos, a city of Lebanon, where it came to rest at the foot of a tamarisk tree. The tree grew around the chest with miraculous speed, enclosing the body of the god within its trunk, and the tree became so fine and fragrant that the king of Byblos had it cut down and set up as a pillar in his palace hall. Isis, the great enchantress and wife of Osiris, tracked the body across the sea, disguised herself, and became nurse to the queen's own child, until the night she revealed herself in a blaze of flame and demanded the pillar. She split the trunk, drew out the coffin of her husband, and carried it home to Egypt. The tree that had held the god, straight and enduring, was remembered forever in the djed.

The pillar did not merely recall the god's death. It enacted his resurrection. In the ceremony called the Raising of the Djed, performed at Memphis, at Abydos the holy city of Osiris, and at Busiris in the Delta, a great wooden djed column was laid upon the ground like a corpse, and the pharaoh himself took hold of the ropes. Before the assembled priests and people, the king hauled the pillar slowly upright, straining until the column stood vertical, and the crowd understood exactly what they had seen: Osiris, struck down by Seth, was standing again. The rite was performed at the Sed festival, the jubilee that renewed a pharaoh's strength after thirty years of rule, and at the turning of reigns, when the stability of the whole land had to be re-established after a king's death. The upright pillar was the god resurrected, the king renewed, and the cosmos steady on its foundations, all in one movement of straining ropes.

For ordinary Egyptians, the djed worked closer to the skin. The Book of Going Forth by Day, the collection of spells that guided souls through the underworld, prescribed a golden djed amulet to be hung at the throat of every mummy, with words of power declaring that the dead person's back was now as firm as the backbone of Osiris. The spell promised that the bearer would stand upright in the realm of the dead and never be cast down. Djed amulets were made by the thousand, in gold, faience, and carnelian, and placed within the wrappings of the mummy or worn in life. The pillar was often paired with the tyet, the knotted loop of Isis, the goddess's own sign, which the Egyptians read as her blood and her life: the two amulets together were the divine couple in miniature, the backbone of the god and the life-blood of his wife, guarding the dead between them. Tomb walls, coffins, and stelae carried the djed everywhere, sometimes given eyes and arms, sometimes wearing the tall feathered crown of Osiris himself.

The pillar kept its place as long as Egypt did. Temple columns were shaped and painted to echo it, and the sceptre of Ptah joined the djed to the ankh of life and the was sceptre of power, fusing three great signs into one. The Delta city of Busiris bore its name, Djedu, the House of the Djed, after the sacred pillar kept within its walls. When Christianity came, the old images faded, but the djed never truly vanished: it stares from every museum case and every drawing of ancient Egypt, four bars on a column, instantly recognisable after four thousand years. Of all the signs the Egyptians invented, none said so much with so little. A tree that held a god, a spine that holds a body, a column that holds a roof, a kingdom that holds together: the djed is all of them, still standing.