What Does an Upside-Down Cross Mean? The Cross of St Peter

An upside-down cross is the Cross of St Peter. It recalls an early tradition that Peter, condemned to die in Rome, asked to be crucified head downward because he was not worthy to die as his Lord had. In the last century some people have turned the sign against Christianity, most often as an inverted crucifix.

So the same shape can speak of humility or of mockery, and where you find it tells you which. On a church wall or on a pope’s chair it is Peter’s cross. Turned against the faith, with the figure of Christ hanging head down, it is meant as an insult. But the Christian story behind it is older than that by some seventeen centuries, and it begins with a question Peter asked at the Last Supper.

“Lord, whither goest thou?” he asked, and Jesus answered, “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shalt follow me afterwards” (John 13:36). That same night Peter promised to lay down his life for him, and before morning he had denied his Lord three times. The upside-down cross remembers how, in the end, he did follow.

Does the Bible say Peter was crucified upside down?

The New Testament never describes Peter’s death, though Jesus foretold it to Peter himself. On the shore of the Sea of Tiberias, after the resurrection, he asked Peter three times, “lovest thou me?”, gave him his sheep to feed, and then said: “When thou wast young, thou girdest thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not” (John 21:18). John adds, “This spake he, signifying by what death he should glorify God. And when he had spoken this, he saith unto him, Follow me” (John 21:19).

Early Christians saw a cross in those stretched-out hands. Tertullian, writing about 200, put the two together when he said that under Nero “is Peter girt by another … when he is made fast to the cross.” Nothing in the Bible says which way up Peter hung, though; that detail comes from outside it.

Where does the story of Peter’s upside-down crucifixion come from?

The earliest witnesses agree that Peter died a martyr in Rome, and it is the later ones who add the manner of his death. In the order they wrote, they say this:

Clement, writing from Rome to the church at Corinth, says only that Peter, “through unrighteous envy, endured not one or two, but numerous labours; and when he had at length suffered martyrdom, departed to the place of glory due to him.” Tertullian says of Rome: “How happy is its church, on which apostles poured forth all their doctrine along with their blood! Where Peter endures a passion like his Lord’s!”

The first book to say “head downward” is the Acts of Peter, written in Greek “not later than A. D. 200”, in the judgment of its translator M. R. James. It is not Scripture, and no church reads it as Scripture, but this is where the story is first told. Peter, warned to flee Rome, meets Jesus on the road and asks him, “Lord, whither goest thou thus?”, the question of the Last Supper again. The Lord answers, “I go into Rome to be crucified,” and Peter turns back. At the cross he asks the executioners, “crucify me thus, with the head downward and not otherwise.”

Origen of Alexandria, born in 185, wrote the story down in his commentary on Genesis, and Eusebius, “the Father of Church History”, kept his words for us: “having come to Rome, he was crucified head-downwards; for he had requested that he might suffer in this way.” What the early sources say of every apostle’s end is gathered in How Did the 12 Apostles Die?

Why did Peter ask to be crucified upside down?

The reason Christians know best is the one Jerome gives. Writing near the end of the fourth century, he says Peter received “the crown of martyrdom being nailed to the cross with his head towards the ground and his feet raised on high, asserting that he was unworthy to be crucified in the same manner as his Lord.” The man who had once sworn he would never fall away now did not count himself worthy even to die as Jesus died.

The Acts of Peter gives a stranger reason, in a sermon Peter preaches from the cross. “The first man,” he says, “fell (was borne) head downwards,” and the whole world was turned upside down with him, so that people “thought those things that were not fair to be fair, and those that were in truth evil, to be good.” In this sermon Peter, hanging head down, becomes a teacher’s picture of fallen humanity, and the cross of Christ the way back.

Under both reasons lies the same thing: Peter knew who had died for him. In the letter that bears his name he asks all of us to “be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble” (1 Peter 5:5).

Is the story of Peter’s upside-down crucifixion true?

We have early and consistent witnesses, from Clement to Tertullian, that Peter died a martyr in Rome under Nero. The Catholic Encyclopedia sets his death between the outbreak of Nero’s persecution in July 64 and the beginning of 68, and finds the Vatican, where Nero’s gardens stood, the likely place both of his execution and of his grave.

Clement, who wrote about thirty years after Peter’s death, does not say that he hung head down, and neither does Tertullian; the first to say it is a book of legends from more than a century later. Origen and Jerome were great scholars, but they received the story rather than saw it. So we say plainly what we know: Peter was crucified for Christ in Rome. That he hung head downward is an ancient and much-loved tradition that may be true and cannot be proved. The humility before his Lord that Christians see in it does not depend on the angle of a beam.

For the whole of Peter’s life with Jesus, from the nets to the denial to the shore, see Peter in the Bible.

Why does the pope use an upside-down cross?

Catholics see the pope as Peter’s successor, and so Peter’s cross has become one of the pope’s signs. Fr Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university, explains that “the inverted cross is a relatively frequent symbol of the Petrine office along with other symbols such as the keys and the triple tiara.” Such a cross marks the brick wall that seals the Holy Door of St Peter’s Basilica between jubilee years, and when John Paul II visited Israel he sat on a chair with a Petrine cross on its back.

It is still chosen gladly, as at St Peter’s College in Auckland, which set a large blue inverted cross at its entrance with a plaque beneath it that reads: “This inverted cross represents the martyrdom of St Peter the Apostle.” Orthodox and Protestant Christians honour Peter as an apostle and martyr too, though they do not share the Catholic teaching on the pope’s authority.

Is an upside-down cross satanic?

The plain inverted cross, with no figure on it, is not satanic in itself. It is Peter’s cross, and Fr McNamara notes that, as far as he knows, when the Church uses it as a symbol it “never contains the crucified figure of St. Peter,” so the Petrine sign is a bare cross. An inverted crucifix, with Christ’s body hung upside down, is another matter. “At the very least it is disrespectful and is often considered as a satanic or anti-Christian symbol,” he writes, and “some denizens of popular culture have used it in films, music videos, album covers and stage costumes to represent Satan or the Antichrist.” In the last century or so, some have pulled the plain inverted cross into the same use.

So look at where you see it. In a church, on a papal chair, or in a painting of the apostle’s death such as Caravaggio’s in Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome, it is the Cross of St Peter. On a horror poster, worn to provoke, or with the Lord’s body hung head down, it is meant as defiance, and even then we need not fear it. The cross has been mocked since the day it stood on Golgotha, and “the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18).

Jesus had promised that Peter would follow him afterwards, and he did. The fisherman who once could not stay awake an hour went to his cross asking to be lower than his Lord, and in his letter he asks the same of us: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time” (1 Peter 5:6).

Related reading

• Does the Bible Record How the Apostles Died? Only James and Judas
• Why Did Peter Deny Jesus?
• 22 Bible Verses About the Cross
• How Many Popes Have There Been? 267, From Saint Peter to Leo XIV
• Why was Jesus crucified?