To ansate: Not all Christians lopped off the loop.
I, being quasi-
goth, was shocked to recently see my
Arabic teacher, a
little old lady of the first calibre and firmly
Christian, wearing a rather nice
silver ankh. I spent the hour-and-a-half lesson concocting lengthy
daydreams on how she was a member of some secret
cult; but when I finally asked her about it, the truth turned out to be far more mundane.
My teacher, it seemed, had travelled extensively in the
Middle East - as one would expect. Apparently, the Ankh is a major symbol of the
Coptic church, used in much of the same symbolic contexts as the
cross is in, say, the
Catholic or
Anglican churches. The ankh was given to her by a Copt friend in
Lebanon.