Jewelry, Amulets, Rings...

Cino

Cino

Big Love! (Atheist mystic)
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After mentioning a medal of the Lady of Czenstochowa, which my relatives somehow got me from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, in a recent thread, I thought it would be interesting to compare our views, memories, and experiences with religious or spiritual jewelry.

Do you wear any? What are your thoughts? Any good anecdotes?
 
I normally don't wear jewelry, however I do have amulets. I use my amulets as notebooks, by associating the memory I want recorded with the given amulet. If I need to remember something from a specific ritual, I will either think about the amulet or actually look at the amulet until I remember what I need to remember.
 
I wear a necklace with a sort of complex design and it has layers of personal meaning for me.

The main part of the necklace is a pentagram, which to me represents the Four Phases of Alchemy as well as the virtues of Will, Discipline, Reason, and Perspective. Whenever I touch the necklace, I ask myself if I'm following those virtues in the moment. The pentagram is also a direct tie to my past history with Hermeticism and Neopaganism.

Inside of the pentagram is a spiral. The ancient Irish used spirals to decorate the inside of caves that had some sort of connection to the Underworld. To me, this serves not only as a Memento Mori but also as a tie to my past history with Spiritism and Neoshamanism.

Circling the outside of the pentagram is a Celtic knot that is often used as a symbol of eternal recurrence, similar to how the lemniscate symbolizes infinity. I see it more clearly as a reminder that there is no "end" to my personal growth there is just "forward." It also serves as a connection to my Irish ancestry.

The loop which the chain goes through is embroidered with moldavite. I don't really believe in or know much about the beliefs in crystal energy or crystal magic but from what I've heard moldavite is seen as heralding transformation, which I think goes well with the Celtic knot.

The actual necklace itself was just some New Age design that was thrown together because it looked nice as something to sell to people looking for New Age fashion. It's not meant to be anything deep and I found it in a bin with several others just like it while I was window shopping. I didn't buy it until months after I first saw it because its design sort of wormed its way into my head. I couldn't stop thinking about how perfect of a symbol it was for me, even if it was sort of haphazardly tossed together, and how it looked perfect as an accessory to my gothic fashion sense, too.

I don't really wear a lot of jewelry. I don't have any piercings. I always tried to find cute styles that looked nice but were affordable, modest, and minimalist. The necklace was an odd purchase for me and very out of character but I knew it would continue haunting me if I didn't get it.
 
Cino said:
After mentioning a medal of the Lady of Czenstochowa, which my relatives somehow got me from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, in a recent thread, I thought it would be interesting to compare our views, memories, and experiences with religious or spiritual jewelry.

Do you wear any? What are your thoughts? Any good anecdotes?
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Could we see a pic of your medal?

My wife has collected gemstone rings for many years and because of that I know something about them.
I make rings, sometimes from ebony, and mostly by casting them in silver, rose silver, and occasionally in rose gold and gold.

And because I occasionally collect oysters from the foreshore for a feed-up, if I see a nicely shaped one that can fit in my casting shells I will cast it in white metal. But I cannot cast 3d figures because I have never gained the knack of carving out its shape in wax ..... wax beats me.

Here are some simple castings, the two silver rings on the far right of the picture are unfinished, unpolished rings but my wife saw some of these one day and exclaimed 'Wow!....Like 'em!' ......so now I make them just like that...unpolished.

P1020774.JPG
 
Nice rings, I agree! And is that a badger?

badger said:
Could we see a pic of your medal?
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Unfortunately, it did not survive my iconoclast teenage years. I remember it to have been a small round gold medallion to be worn on a necklace, less than 1cm in diameter, with the image embossed on one side. The rim was raised but plain.
 
Cino said:
Nice rings, I agree! And is that a badger?

Unfortunately, it did not survive my iconoclast teenage years. I remember it to have been a small round gold medallion to be worn on a necklace, less than 1cm in diameter, with the image embossed on one side. The rim was raised but plain.
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Yes....a Badger badge. My badges are clasped by magnets.

Like you, I got rid of good stuff in my youth, mostly money.
 
Thomas said:
Yes, I like the unfinished look, too.
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That's what my wife said....I was so used to slaving away at polishing them that I did not appreciate that finish, but I get it now, at last .
 
For our Wooden Wedding Anniversary I made a wooden wedding ring for my wife from a piece of walnut. It was the first ring that I ever made. I made a ring for myself as well and on that day we both wore wooden rings. We've both kept those rings ever since, and so for an anniversary several years later I pressed my wife's walnut ring in to a cuttlefish bone and cast it in silver, and for a much later anniversary still I copied it in gold.

I can just reach a high enough temperature to melt copper in small amounts and so can cast rose silver and rose gold. I had thought that rose silver would be a delightful colour but it is much less impressive than simple silver, imo.

Here is a pic of those three anniversary rings.

P1020775.JPG
 
badger said:
I had thought that rose silver would be a delightful colour but it is much less impressive than simple silver, imo.
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I like silver better than gold or white gold. Not as "hard" visually.
 
Cino said:
I like silver better than gold or white gold. Not as "hard" visually.
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Fair enough.
My own wedding rings are titanium, my wife bought an X and a Y for me in case I might gain weigh in later years. titanium cannot be resized easily. I wanted the least expensive yet toughest metal and a local jewellery shop was selling off its titanium stock cheaply. So they are priceless to me and yet of no value to anybody else. :)
 
badger said:
Fair enough.
My own wedding rings are titanium, my wife bought an X and a Y for me in case I might gain weigh in later years. titanium cannot be resized easily. I wanted the least expensive yet toughest metal and a local jewellery shop was selling off its titanium stock cheaply. So they are priceless to me and yet of no value to anybody else. :)
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Titanium is a good metal. Lightweight, easy to clean, and durable.
 
RJM said:
But extremely difficult to work with?
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From what I hear, although I am not a metalworker. I am more of an end-user on that one. I have managed to hold on to a titanium spork for almost over a decade now and it's the most reliable tool I think I've ever owned. If I ever have the money, I think I'll buy a whole cutlery set made from titanium and maybe a water bottle.
 
RJM said:
But extremely difficult to work with?
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Yes. Jewellers won't risk damaging their tools by working on titanium, so my wife bought me two wedding rings in x and y sizes, just in case I might ever gain weight. :D
I bought her two wedding rings as well, one basic gold band and a gold band which was curved to fit around a solitaire diamond ring. Before the wedding she asked me to put the ordinary gold band on her finger first, which I did. What I didn't know at the time was that she was never ever going to take it off, which she hasn't.

When Covid struck us here in early 2020, elderly people who couldn't breath were being taken in to hospitals where they could not be seen by any visitors, often dying without ever being seen again. A television report showed a hospital property room, filled to overflowing with deceased patients' belongings. I decided that such property could easily be lost, go astray, and that since I'm old and could suffer thus, that I would put my wedding rings in my little keepsafe box and copy one of them in rose/silver to wear throughout the pandemic, so that if I should ever be taken in to hospital and not be seen again I should have nothing with me that had any special value to my wife at all. In May 2021 I was rushed in to hospital for an unexpected emergency operation, and when I came to consciousness the next morning a nurse came to tell me that they had lost my wedding ring, somehow. It was the pseudo wedding ring, and I laughed out loud and told the nurse my story. Two days later a group of nurses brought my ring to me, found after the most huge search....... they were determined to find it. I still wear it to this day.......... daft but true. :)
 
RJM said:
But extremely difficult to work with?
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Just for fun, I took a pic of my two wedding rings and the pseudo ring in rose silver.
You can see that I have only ever worn the x titanium ring because of its surface patina. The pseudo ring looks slightly smaller because cuttlefish bone castings have a grain which casts to the item, and polishing reduces the item slightly.
P1020781.JPG
 
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