Anchor
An anchor, one of the oldest Christian symbols. It stands for hope, and in the catacombs of Rome it was also a way of drawing the cross without showing it openly.
Meaning
The Letter to the Hebrews calls hope “an anchor of the soul”, and early Christians drew the anchor on graves as a sign of the hope of salvation. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) notes that people in the ancient world already took the anchor as a sign of safety, and that Christians gave a familiar emblem a new meaning.
Origin and history
In the Paedagogus, Clement of Alexandria advised Christians choosing a seal to use a dove, a fish, a ship or a ship’s anchor. In the Roman catacombs an inscription with an anchor dates from the end of the first century, and the anchor is frequent on epitaphs of the second and third centuries, with about seventy examples from the catacomb of Priscilla alone. The oldest stand beside words like in pace, “in peace”, or names made from the Latin and Greek words for hope, Spes and Elpis. The earliest anchor shown with a fish, Walter Lowrie wrote in 1901, is on the sarcophagus of Livia Primitiva, from about the middle of the second century; by the century’s end two fish on either side of an anchor had become the picture-writing for a common epitaph, spes in Christo, “hope on Christ”. By the early fourth century, the Catholic Encyclopedia says, the anchor had disappeared from Christian monuments.
A hidden cross?
The reading is old but not universal. Lowrie records that early Christian writers traced the cross in ordinary things, among them “the crosspiece of the anchor”, and on one early carved gem he reads the anchor beside a ship’s mast as the cross again. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907) reads some catacomb anchors as crosses in disguise, understood by Christians and not by outsiders, at a time when the cross itself was rarely shown (see Latin cross). Its example from the catacomb of Domitilla stands upright with the crossbar just below the ring and two fish holding its curved arms in their mouths, with an ordinary cross carved beside it. The Catacombs of St Callixtus, describing the symbols to visitors today, give the anchor as the symbol of salvation and of the soul that has peacefully reached the port of eternity, and don’t call it a cross.
See also
Latin cross, Chi-Rho, Skull and crossbones, Latin cross, Orthodox cross, Jerusalem cross.
Sources
- The Anchor (as Symbol), The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–1912), via New Advent
- Hebrews, chapter 6, The Holy Bible, Knox translation, via New Advent, Hebrews 6:18–19
- The Paedagogus (The Instructor), Book III, Clement of Alexandria, via New Advent, Book III, chapter 11
- Monuments of the Early Church, Walter Lowrie, 1901, Macmillan, New York and London (Internet Archive), pp. 229, 236–237, 284
- The Catacombs of Saint Callixtus: Christian symbols, Catacombs of St Callixtus, Rome
Last reviewed September 24, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research