Let’s start with Circe. As you may remember, she is the goddess and sorceress in chapter 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, who turns the men of Odysseus into swine:
“She brought them in and made them sit on chairs and seats, and made for them a potion of cheese and barley meal and yellow honey with Pramnian wine; but in the food she mixed baneful drugs, that they might utterly forget their native land. Now when she had given them the potion, and they had drunk it off, then she presently smote them with her wand, and penned them in the sties. And they had the heads, and voice, and bristles, and shape of swine, but their minds remained unchanged even as before. So they were penned there weeping, and before them Circe flung mast and acorns, and the fruit of the cornel tree, to eat, such things as wallowing swine are wont to feed upon.”
It is that “wand” I want to focus on. The Greek term for it is ῥάβδος/’rhabdos, and it has a range of meanings, from the basic “stick” to “rod,” “switch,” “wand” etc.
In chapter 16 of the Odyssey, the goddess Athena restores Odysseus to a more youthful appearance with her rhabdos:
“With this, Athena touched him with her golden wand. A well-washed cloak and a tunic she first of all cast about his breast, and she increased his stature and his youthful bloom. Once more he grew dark of color, and his cheeks filled out, and dark grew the beard about his chin.”
Now you may well be wondering why I am talking about the Odyssey and wands. It is because they show the very early connection between a wand/rod and magic. And I do that so you will have a beginning point for a discussion of the very interesting early Christian images of Jesus performing miracles.
You will recall that the appearance of Jesus in the earliest Christian art is nothing like the way he was later shown in icons. Here is an example from the Catacombs on the Via Anapo. Jesus stands at right, and wand in hand, raises Lazarus from his tomb at left.
Here he is again at the tomb of Lazarus, this time from the catacombs on the Via Latina. Note the wand in his outstretched hand:
Here, again from the Via Latina, is Jesus working another miracle, wand in hand. This time it is the multiplication of loaves and fishes.
There are numerous other such early images of Jesus working a miracle with a wand in hand, not only in catacombs but also on stone sarcophagi and even on glass medallions. We find them also carved into the presumably 5th century wooden doors of the Church of Santa Sabina on the Aventine Hill in Rome. Here he uses a wand not only to multiply loaves and fishes, but also to turn water to wine:
Some argue against using the term “wand” for the rod held by the miracle-working Jesus, and prefer the term “staff,” to make it perhaps seem less magical and Jesus less like the sorcerer Celsus, the 2nd century critic of early Christianity, held him to be, as reported second-hand in the work “Against Celsus,” by Origen:
“… that after being driven away by her husband, and wandering about for a time, she disgracefully gave birth to Jesus, an illegitimate child, who having hired himself out as a servant in Egypt on account of his poverty, and having there acquired some miraculous powers, on which the Egyptians greatly pride themselves, returned to his own country, highly elated on account of them, and by means of these proclaimed himself a God.”
Critics of calling what Jesus holds in his hand a “wand” point out that the early Christians detested magic, so would not have depicted a “wand” in art; but now we get into the essence of the problem. There is basically no distinction — other than point of view — between the magic worked by the polytheists of early Christian times and the miracles worked by the Christians. The methodology may have been somewhat similar in certain respects or somewhat different in others, but the real difference lay in what was believed to be the source of the “miracles” worked: the Christians asserted that their miracles were of God, and that those of the pagans were worked through demonic powers. So whether one calls the supposed wonders worked “miracles” or “magic” depends solely on viewpoint.
There is a strangeness to early Christianity that the later Church did its best to obscure, but traces of it pop up here and there, and certainly the images of Jesus working miracles with a wand are part of that strangeness that was later removed from Christian art. There is not one word in the New Testament about Jesus holding a wand while performing any miracle, so the wand is something added from the context of the magical-thinking environment of early Christianity. Some have argued that the wand is more a symbol of authority, citing the staff of Moses in the Old Testament, but I find this argument unconvincing.
Jesus was not the only New Testament figure shown with a wand. We also find Peter depicted in an apocryphal story as causing water to gush out in a spring, and thereby converting his two jailers, whom tradition has given the names Processus and Martinianus. As you can see in the image below, he is striking the rock with his wand. Note the rather distinctive round, flat-topped Pannonian hats on two nearby figures, representing the Roman jailers of Peter.
Here is Peter striking the jail wall, as represented on the sarcophagus of Marcus Claudianus:
In a Fall, 2020 article in the Biblical Archeology Review, Lee M. Jefferson argues that what Jesus holds in these early Christian depictions “. . . is not a magician’s wand but a staff.” I would say that is a meaningless distinction, because the rods held by Jesus and by Peter are certainly not staffs/staves for walking or sheep herding, and they are obviously being used as tools to transmit “power,” and that is basically the definition of a magician’s wand. And as we have seen in the Odyssey, the use of a wand/rhabdos to transmit “power” predates Christianity, so it was nothing new in the first several centuries of Christianity, when it was still trying to prove its superiority to the beliefs of the polytheistic masses.
ICONS AND THEIR INTERPRETATION 