A Curious Detail of Natural Magic

[ecosophia]

These days people in most Western countries assume as a matter of course that engagement and wedding rings have to have diamonds on them. That didn't become the universal custom until after the Second World War, though; it was in 1947 that the DeBeers diamond syndicate launched the first of a series of massive ad campaigns under the slogan "Diamonds Are Forever." Well, maybe they are, but...

In the lore of natural magic, every kind of gemstone has a different effect on consciousness; these are normally categorized by the old scheme of the seven planets. Diamonds correspond to the planet Mars. Their magical virtue is that they give strength and victory in battle, but they are also traditionally unlucky, and make their wearers unhappy. 

Maybe it's just pure coincidence, but I find myself noticing that it was right after a stone of war and unhappiness became standard wear for married women that the divorce rate began to soar, and many branches of the feminist movement took on a distinctly angry and bitter tone. 

If you want a better-omened stone for an engagement or a wedding ring, the magical lore suggests going for an emerald. Emeralds correspond to Venus, and are fortunate for love; they were held to strengthen the eyes and the memory; and they make the wearer truthful and difficult to fool by trickery, all of which would be helpful in marriage. I'm sure the diamond merchants won't approve, but it might be worth trying to reverse the trend...

Comments

nice work?

[(Anonymous)]

So is this an example of very clever and successful magic on the part of DeBeers (or their agents)?

Re: nice work?

[ecosophia]

Of course. As Ioan Couliano pointed out in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, advertising is a debased form of magic. Wearing an emerald, since it strengthens the mind against trickery, would help ward off spells of that sort!

Other Bad Stones for Rings

[packshaud]

I think other stones are also very bad to be used in rings.

Could you please provide some examples?

And because someone may get here through web searches in the future, I will take the liberty to link the famous 1982 article on diamonds by The Atlantic.

Re: Other Bad Stones for Rings

[ecosophia]

Let's see..

Onyx is a stone of Saturn, and brings depression, bad dreams, and discord; you can counteract those effects by wearing it together with sard, which is the opaque form of carnelian. (These two are often found layered, forming the stone sardonyx, which has powerful magical properties.)

Opals are generally bad luck to wear; the opal corresponds to the Moon in its waning phases, and attracts all kinds of misfortune. The one exception is the very rare black opal, which has the opposite effect and attracts good fortune of all kinds.

Those are the two I know of. Most other gemstones have beneficial influences when worn.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for this! As a bit of anecdata: my wedding ring has an opal and two garnets, because neither my husband nor I like diamonds and I wanted vintage rather than dealing with the silliness of modern jewellery shops. I didn’t do it intentionally and I’m finding very inconsistent results for opal’s properties, but it seems to be something like fidelity and devotion, and garnets are a traditional gift of friendship and love. I’d originally wanted emerald, funnily enough, but those were out of my budget. :)

(I clearly need to pick up a copy of the Encyclopaedia of Natural Magic; finding information on these kinds of things is halfway impossible as most sources will promise that the thing will manifest everything under the sun, and good luck picking out what it might actually be helpful for from that long list.)

[ecosophia]

Interesting! Opals have a bad reputation in the old magical lore, but you may have hit on a way of balancing them -- just as onyx is safe when worn together with sard, the protective energy of garnets may make it possible to wear an opal safely. Garnets are stones of Mars, with a warm protective energy; they strengthen the will, especially in the matter of promises -- swear an oath over a garnet and you will keep it -- and they also banish nightmares, depression, and misfortune.

engagement ring

[dfr1973]

Amusing you would post this. In early 2006, I told now-hubby I didn't want a diamond on my engagement ring. Instead, I wanted an emerald. Seems to be working so far ... of course, marrying a nice guy helps as well.

Re: engagement ring

[ecosophia]

Makes sense. You'd been practicing magic for how long in 2006? ;-)

Deliberate Sabotage?

[(Anonymous)]

The Imp in me just had a nasty little thought: what if DeBeers’ advertising campaign was backed by mages who knew the Martial properties of diamonds and figured that it’s a great way to ding a customer more than once, since those who divorce often remarry! What company doesn’t want repeat customers?

Ron M

Re: Deliberate Sabotage?

[ecosophia]

Hmm! I suppose it's possible -- and there's also the notion, heavily marketed by DeBeers as well, that if your wife is unhappy, you should get her something pretty -- say, some more diamonds..

[neonvincent]

Oh, my! This adds a whole new meaning to the phrases "conflict diamonds" and "blood diamonds." Those and not wanting to contribute to the DeBeers monopoly were the reasons I wanted to avoid having diamonds in the my second wife's wedding ring (my first wife insisted on the biggest diamond I could afford; that marriage was riven by conflict and ended badly). Instead, the gem in my wife's ring is a blue sapphire. It may still be associated with Saturn, but at least it is also associated with wisdom, communication, and healing.

[(Anonymous)]

Ah, thanks. I was curious about the effects of blue sapphires since my wife's engagement ring has one, too (surrounded by a ring of tiny diamonds).

Would have looked it up in my copy of the Encyclopedia of Natural Magic, but we're moving and it's packed away in storage...

-escher

gems in wedding rings

[deborah_bender]

American wedding rings didn't necessarily have any kind of gemstone. In the middle of the twentieth century, they were often slender gold bands, with or without some decorative engraving. The matched set of an engagement ring and a wedding band both bearing diamonds is a marketing scheme to sell more diamonds.

The social utility of engagement rings with gemstones is that they show that the suitor has money (or in the case of a ring that is handed down in the family, that his family has money). The engagement ring is spoken of a love token, but this is chivalry; an engagement ring with a big rock is a bride price. If the fiancee breaks the engagement, she is supposed to return the ring.

Re: gems in wedding rings

[ecosophia]

Sara and I have silver rings with no stone. Partly that's what we could afford at the time, but it also suits our tastes -- and we've been married going on 35 years, so it apparently worked.

[(Anonymous)]

A cheaper option -
for us in winter of culture
Topaz for friendship!

[ecosophia]

Also a good choice!

[methylethyl]

Always thought diamonds were a racket. Why pay so much for something that isn't even pretty? I like color! I forbade my now-husband to get me anything with diamonds on it. My engagement ring has three little stones: citrine, peridot, and aquamarine. Hardly ever wear it, because I'm just not much of a jewelry person. But now I'll have to go look those up...

[ecosophia]

Let me know what you find; I wasn't able to find anything on peridot when I wrote The Encyclopedia of Natural Magic.

Love is pure gold

[(Anonymous)]

What would be the magical properties of a plain gold wedding band with no stone at all?

Re: Love is pure gold

[ecosophia]

Gold corresponds to the Sun and tends to make things endure, thus would be another good choice.

...

[(Anonymous)]

(Sven Eriksen)

The word "conflict diamond" comes to mind... ;-)

Re: ...

[ecosophia]

Good. Magically speaking, all diamonds are conflict diamonds...

Opals

[(Anonymous)]

An interesting note about opals:
Lore in my family had it that opals were fine if worn by those born in October, opals being the birthstone of the month of October, but were unlucky if worn by anyone not born in October.

Yanocoches

Re: Opals

[ecosophia]

Several other people have mentioned that, too. Interesting.

diamonds

[(Anonymous)]

I have an engagement ring with a diamond, I don't use it more than once or twice a year... I am married and not unhappy about it so a suppose one must use it to fill the effects. I only use cristals, which have no particular magical effects, right?

Re: diamonds

[ecosophia]

Exactly. The problem comes when you wear it; simply owning it doesn't bring your subtle body into close contact with it.

Quartz crystals do indeed have magical effects, though nothing like as extensive as some New Age books like to claim. They correspond to the Moon and tend to strengthen clairvoyant abilities, thus the old habit of using a crystal ball for scrying.

[(Anonymous)]

Does the color of the diamond have any effect? I am not so much thinking about wedding rings as much as a certain notorious stone known as the Hope Diamond. Its cursed reputation was largely a marketing ploy but the blue color is the result of trace amounts of boron in the stone. If it is bombarded by ultraviolet radiation it will briefly glow a startling red color (best viewed in a darkened room). The curious thing about that is most blue diamonds will glow bluish-white if exposed to UV.

And it now resides in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. where it has been since 1958. Hmmm.....

JLfromNH

[ecosophia]

I haven't read anything in the old lore about the color of a diamond having a significant effect, though from first principles it should have at least a modest influence. I've seen the Hope diamond -- maybe it's just a reflection of the role it's been given in popular culture, but it felt really creepy to me, as though it did in fact have some kind of malign energy in it.

[espresso_addict]

Interesting. I've accumulated my late mother's and two grandmothers' diamond engagement rings but don't ever wear them (I dislike diamonds). All three had stable till-death-do-us-part marriages. My grandmothers both married in the interwar period, decades before the DeBeers campaign started. I wonder if UK trends have been different from US ones?

[ecosophia]

Did they wear their engagement rings after their marriages? As I recall, that didn't use to be common.

Investment

[(Anonymous)]

So, did you just invest all your savings in an emerald mine and are trying to drum up biz?;)
any indications for the metal used in the rings? My wife and I only have platinum bands, no stones.

Re: Investment

[ecosophia]

Funny. No, and I'm not short-selling De Beers stock, either. ;-)

Platinum's an odd one. It wasn't in common use until after natural magic dropped out of common practice, so it didn't get assigned a planet in the traditional scheme. Plain metal bands seem pretty safe, though.

[(Anonymous)]

JMG,

For the sake of thought experiment (with disclaimer I understand your stance on fictional magic, and that it don't work. Let's say we are discussing the chaos magic idea of stealing symbolism from fiction), if you wanted to create real-world replicas of Tree Elven Rings (Vilya, Nenya and Narya), what materials and gems would track the closest? I am pretty sure that some occultist give such speculations some thoughts;)

Changeling

[ecosophia]

Tolkien knew much more about occultism than his Christian fans like to notice; it's certainly not an accident that his history of Numenor drew all its core themes from the version of the Atlantis legend Blavatsky presented in The Cosmic Doctrine, and it may not be an accident that his rings of power have noticeable similarities to the magical rings described in medieval sources such as the Picatrix. Thus it's not at all hard to work out the three rings for the Elven-kings under the sky. Narya, the Ring of Fire, would be of gold set with a ruby. Nenya, the Ring of Water, would be silver set with a rock crystal. Vilya, the Ring of Air, would be of electrum (an alloy of gold and silver) set with a sapphire. The maker would place certain magically effective substances between the stone and its setting, of course -- again, that was standard practice.

[(Anonymous)]

(Maria here)

When we got married, my husband and I made the old-fashioned choice to have matching, relatively plain white gold bands. A diamond solitaire came to me when my husband's mother died during the first year we were married. The ring has been part of three happy marriages so far: it was originally a fiftieth anniversary gift from my husband's grandfather to his grandmother, and my husband's parents were happily married for over forty years. I hope that kind of history, and the fact that the ring makes me smile every day when I think of my late mother-in-law, who was my best friend long before she was ever a relative by marriage, will outweigh any bad associations of the gem itself.

Of course, the idea of "conflict" could mean different things to different people. My husband and I hope to have many decades ahead of us in which to hand each other snappy comebacks. :)

[ecosophia]

How often do you wear the diamond solitaire? If you only wear it now and then, it shouldn't have any ill effects.

[(Anonymous)]

Does cubit Zerconium have any effect? That is what is in my wedding band.

[ecosophia]

Cubic zirconia wasn't around yet when the old books of natural magic got written -- it's manufactured by a special process involving a lot of heat and complex chemicals. There are a lot of things like that -- substances whose magical properties are still unknown, because there's been a shortage of occultists with the necessary training to figure them out.

Thanks

[(Anonymous)]

Today is my birthday and this article is a great gift for me, because I was meant to ask you on magic Monday tomorrow about stones magical powers and how to handle them before using one. I've been in Mexico last week and brought some Obsidian stone but I am not using it because the ways they said to clean it were not very clear.
Reading the comments I found out that I can use the encyclopedia (that arrived before heading to Mexico)
So thanks... To you and this article I found were to search for my answers!

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm. The question, that comes to my mind here is: How powerful is this effect? There's a lot of space between "major disruptions to any relationships" and "can make a good relationship slightly worse, might break one that was on the verge of breaking anyway"... Steering a bit off-topic: Is it possible to reach a state where one is not susceptible to such effects anymore? (a text about feng-shui comes to my mind... basically it said, if I recall it correctly, that if you were "developed" and aware enough (I suppose "developed" was meant in a spiritual way here) you would not need to use feng shui anymore).

Greetings,
Nachtgurke

[(Anonymous)]

So my wife has worn her white gold solitaire with a flawless diamond in it non-stop for over ten years. She's naturally stubborn and belligerent anyway, but should I be concerned?

Magic in so many things

[(Anonymous)]

My husband works in a lab, so after hours, he made my ring for me. The first ring was copper or brass; either way it turned my fingers green, so I asked for a different one. He fashioned a second one out of titanium and brought it home. My ring was free. We had so little expendable income, that was the only option that made sense. But being free doesn't mean it's cheap. We were already married by then, and I'm sure he was thinking about our marriage while he made it. Though my husband only reads ecosophia for the more secular side of things, I bet he was using his magic in his own way when he made it.

Diamonds leave me cold

[(Anonymous)]

Fascinating! Thank you for this.

While diamond is supposedly my birthstone (Aries, April), diamonds have always left me cold. I've always liked emeralds and rubies, also garnets, turquoise, sapphires - well pretty much any gemstone with color. No budget for the really good stones, but I have a modest collection of small inexpensive ones, just because I like rocks and minerals (don't know why, mystique? connection with the natural world?).

When my husband and I were married we exchanged simple handmade gold bands. I made it very clear to him I did not want a diamond ring (or diamond anything for that matter). He has obliged, thankfully. Still married (42 years, and - yes - we've had our moments!). Don't want to think about where would be if diamonds had been involved...

[(Anonymous)]

What would balance a diamond ring? My wife loves wearing hers.