Latin cross

The sign before the picture

Christians made the sign of the cross long before they put crosses in their art. Tertullian wrote that at every step, at every going in and out, dressing, bathing, eating and lighting the lamps, “we trace upon the forehead the sign”; in the late second century, Walter Lowrie judged from his account, the gesture was made more often than at any time since. When pagans said Christians worshipped crosses, the apologist Minucius Felix answered that crosses were something Christians “neither worship nor wish for”, and added that the sign of the cross was everywhere anyway: in a ship under sail, and in a man praying with his hands outstretched.

Lowrie, in his 1901 handbook of early Christian monuments, put the absence of crosses from early art down to Christians’ distaste for picturing an instrument of execution still in use, “like our gallows”. The Crucifixion itself, he wrote, was never shown before the fifth century, and until the twelfth its pictures showed Christ alive.

Which shape was Christ’s cross?

The Catholic Encyclopedia holds that Christ was nailed to a crux immissa, the Latin shape, whose upright rises above the crossbar. It records the other view too: that he died on a crux commissa, a T-shaped gallows cross, and that the part above the crossbar in pictures is only the title board with its inscription.

What does an upside-down cross mean?

Turned upside down, the Latin cross is the cross of St Peter. Christian tradition holds that Peter was crucified head downwards in Rome. Eusebius, writing about 325, repeats Origen’s account that Peter “was crucified head-downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way”, and the Acts of Peter, an early text outside the Bible, has him ask the executioners to “crucify me thus, with the head downward and not otherwise”. Jerome, in his Lives of Illustrious Men, gave the reason usually repeated since: Peter asserted “that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same manner as his Lord.”

Because popes are counted as Peter’s successors, the inverted cross belongs to papal imagery. Catholic Answers calls it “a symbolic reminder of St. Peter’s humility and heroic martyrdom”, shown without a figure of Christ, “to designate Peter, not Christ”.

Its other meaning is recent. Writing for Christianity.com, Emily Hall dates it to the last half-century, in which the upside-down cross has been “employed as a symbol of atheism, humanism, and the occult”; in horror films such as The Omen it signals the demonic. Both Catholic Answers and Hall draw the same line. An upside-down crucifix, with the figure of Christ, is meant to mock; a plain inverted cross can be Peter’s cross or a gesture against Christianity, depending on who uses it.