สัญลักษณ์กุญแจThe key

Haiti keeps the clearest statement of it. Most lwa are matched to Roman Catholic saints by an analogy between their functions, and Papa Legba, as the key to the spirit world, is typically associated with Saint Peter, who traditionally holds keys in Roman Catholic imagery. That is not a resemblance somebody noticed later; it is the documented mechanism by which Vodou and Catholicism were joined, and the key is the hinge of the pairing.

Manila carries the keys on a building. Quiapo Church, built in the Baroque style, had a quatrefoil window in the centre of its pediment sealed up in the late 1980s and replaced with a relief of the crossed keys and tiara of the pope, marking its status as a minor basilica. The keys sit above a plaza where amulets and remedies are sold from stalls.

Naples hangs one on a sprig. The cimaruta's branches sprout small charms in combinations that vary by region, and the cited account gives one example outright: a cimaruta might bear the collective imagery of a key, dagger, blossom and moon.

Egypt supplies a key that is not one. The ankh is known in English as the ankh or as the "key of life", the second name based on its meaning rather than its shape; the sign is a T topped by a droplet loop, it wrote the three consonants of the word for life, and it appears in Egyptian art as an object held by deities and handed to the pharaoh. Inference — the key reading came from outside. Nothing in the account of the sign's Egyptian use involves a lock, a door or an opening; the loop over a bar was named a key by people who already had a sign for a key and wanted one here. This atlas files it under this motif because that is the name the ankh now travels under, and marks where the name came from.

So: one documented loan, one badge of rank, one component on a compound charm, and one English gloss. The Neapolitan key sits inside the same Catholic world as the papal keys, and it would be easy to join them; no source read here does, and neither does this record.

A short record, and short on purpose. Four appearances, two traditions, and one of the four is a translator's name rather than a carrier's. It is filed under the tool family, added to the vocabulary for it; house would fit it about as well, since half of what a key means here is the door it belongs to.