Raised At A Festival, Buried With The Dead

Raising the Djed pillar, restoring it from a horizontal or leaning position to fully upright, was performed as an actual ritual act at festivals, most notably as part of the observances associated with Osiris and with kingship, and Wilkinson reads the physical act of raising as a deliberately staged enactment of Osiris's own resurrection after his murder and dismemberment by Set, and, by extension, of the renewal of stability in the kingdom under the reigning pharaoh, who was ritually identified with the raising in some ceremonial contexts.

Beyond festival ritual the symbol was produced in quantity as a funerary amulet, placed with the dead or painted on coffins and tomb walls with the stated purpose of granting the deceased a share of Osiris's own restored stability and continued existence in the afterlife, one of the more explicit examples in Egyptian religion of a single symbol operating simultaneously as public festival ritual and as private funerary practice. Djed amulets appear in large numbers among funerary goods recovered from burials across a wide span of Egyptian history, frequently in blue or green faience, a colour choice Egyptologists connect to broader Egyptian colour symbolism around renewal and living vegetation rather than treating the material as decorative alone.