Today's featured jewelry comes to us thanks to TrendHunters, which also spotted the NipTuck app below. It's the OctopusMe tentacle ring, part of an extensive collection of octo-themed offerings. As OctopusMe explains, "The Octopus is a symbol of Transformation and Regeneration."
Jan Daniel Cadinot was a famous director of gay porn. The following post appeared on his blog on April 23rd, the day he died of a heart attack:
Dear friends, critics and others,
If you're reading these words I will have put down my camera, switched off the lights, drawn the curtains and taken my final bow. May all the efforts and work of a whole life, the quest for the moment of pure truth in the sublime communion of two beings under the spell of the undefinable desire for the other, inspire those who inherit my heart.
The human being is made such that it only remembers the good and the beautiful, therefore I leave you with a free mind and a head overflowing with a myriad of young men, sometimes strong and vigorous, sometimes fragile and sensitive. All of them gave me these unforgettable moments of their most tender intimacy, moments that only a few really know but which I made in to images to allow you to admire them over and over again.
Never were success or personal fortune my creed. You offered me gratitude, and I thank you for that because I wanted nothing else. Cadinot salutes you. Remember a kindly fellow, an extreme observer given to rages and contradiction but who listened to others and was full of love.
"An erect phallus is a symbol of life, a cross a symbol of death."
Here's a fact about yours truly that might not be obvious from this site: when I was high school & college, I became an uber-strict fundamentalist. As in, not tolerating anything remotely connected to worldliness, which included, well, basically most of my pop culture obsessions. Star Trek espoused evolution. Star Wars--the Force, which was obviously (to the folks I listened to, anyway) satanic. Non-Christian comics likewise were deemed to be pure evil.
Which is why I refused invitations to go see Star Trek III & Return of the Jedi, which in retrospect wasn't as bad a couple of omissions as they felt at the time. Perhaps the most painful thing was getting rid of my rather sizable comic collection and all my 1st edition Complete EC Library sets, a series to which I was an original subscriber.
Y'know, that comic collection had a complete run of Batman and Detective going back into the early 1950s. Sold those for 200 bucks to buy tracts. To see how I feel about that transaction now, watch this video.
This experience came to mind today when I read the story making the rounds re Simon White, the guy in the UK who is selling his extensive Doctor Who collection now that he's a Christian. A few excerpts from the story below--although before he gets rid of everything, he may want to attend the Spirituality and Doctor Who conference in Sheffield on April 19.
By the by, did you note how I said "most of my pop culture obsessions?" That's because even when I was separating from everything that wasn't fundamentalist, the one thing that stayed was Doctor Who.
As a counterpoint to what is clearly my spiritual Achilles Heel, here's the confession of Simon White:
Dr Who and his materialistic obsession with it represents the "greatest lie that Satan ever told" according to Mr White.
He said: "I loved science fiction as a kid. It was the Tardis that did it for me. You could get in that box and go anywhere.
"I started collecting Dr Who stuff starting with the Dalek, which I got from an old exhibition in Brighton.
"Me and a friend spent two years making the Tardis and I became obsessed. I made a model of K-9, then a full size Cyberman with authentic Dr Who parts. I couldn't stop.
"I had to retire early from my job as a nurse at the Royal United Hospital in Bath in 1998 because I was suffering from bipolar disorder.
"I turned to drink and became an alcoholic and the Dr Who obsession was the only thing that kept me going. I wouldn't have given it up if you'd have put a gun to my head."
Having discovered Christianity Mr Smith has renounced his old life and is putting the whole collection up for sale in local trade magazines and on eBay.
He said: "God delivered me from the evil that is Dr Who, materialism and alcoholism.
"Through my relationship with Jesus I saw that none of this was making me happy and I was born again like Lazarus.
"It's a timely tale as we come up to Easter. I wanted to tell others that no matter what trouble you are in God can deliver you from the evil. If you are prepared to have a relationship with him then God can help. I have been resurrected. My old life is dead, my new life is alive."
Via Bogoff.com, found through Neatorama, which featured the following super-cool Masonic watch from the 1930s and made the spot-on joke I wish I'd thought of first.
Sacred Cut Metal Designs is a multifaith spiritual marketplace with designs that represent a diverse range of spiritual traditions. This informative article from a local paper explains reason for the name: they custom-cut each piece with "holy water and sacred sand"--"customers can request that any refinable liquid, sand or herb that is meaningful to them be used to make their jewelry."
Because the aim is to promote peace and goodwill for all people, Sacred Cut has pieces from a wide range of traditions and beliefs, such as Christian crosses . . .
and Stars of David
and Oms.
But what really sets Sacred Cut apart is the following item, which links the sacred number 7 with a truly divine name:
'Tis the season for giving of all sorts, and OE Fine Jewellery has taken the opportunity to explain spiritual symbols through its own designs. Holidays, it seems, are everyone's teachable moment. Hat tip: Alt Religions, which has its own helpful study of the link between Christmas and Saturnalia.
For an intriguing discussion of how the complex design of traditional Islamic stars relates to contemporary design, check out this overview from Computer Science professor Craig Kaplan. His online Ph.D. dissertation has much more detail.
The jeweler as teacher: Washington's Altemueller Jewelry provides a guide to Judeo-Christian symbols of faith to help people understand what they wear.
In 1864 a German chemist named Friedrich Kekule was struggling to model the molecular structure of benzene when one day he fell asleep and dreamt of a snake swallowing its own tail. Kekule woke up with a start, realizing that he had his answer: the atoms in a benzene molecular joined together in a circular chain.
Thus did modern science meet ancient religion. The whirling, self-consuming snake in Kekule's dream was the ouroboros, a symbol of the cyclical nature of existence. Alchemy, gnosticism, hinduism, Christianity--as if to demonstrate the reality beneath the archetype, the ouroboros recurs across a wide array of spiritual beliefs. It also makes for rather striking jewelry.
Why is the ouroboros in our thoughts here at the BofG? Because it happened to be the subject of today's email from About.com's page on alternative religions! If you are fascinated by religious imagery, you can assure yourself a daily dose by subscribing to site's symbol of the day.
Now if only dreaming about an ouroboros would help me figure out how to stop the endless cycles of mailing list spam.
Hip Hop is the postmodern spiritual, an authentically American blend of rhyme, rhythm and redemption. Thus it is only fitting that the Smithsonian is collecting turntables, boomboxes and other hip hop "artifacts" for a permanent exhibit.
While some may be wondering what this means for hip hop's future, here at the B of G we just want to make sure that that the Smithsonian does not forget its spiritual bling!
But what to include? Hip hop is full of religious riches, from its narratives of personal deliverance to its many symbols of personal faith. To help the Smithsonian in its sacred quest, here is a list of a seven things to look for when collecting hip hop's holy relics.
7. Sacred Scriptures, Living Prophets & Moral Commandments
6. A message of love for humanity
5. Relics from revered martyrs
4. How Beautiful Are the Feet . . .
3. Symbols of the Protestant Work Ethic
2. Sacred Time
1. And, of course, the diamond Jesus Head!
EXTRA: Want to see more spiritual bling from throughout hip hop history? Check out the source for several of the pictures linked above: Minya Oh's Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels.
The Jesus/Darwin fish wars perpetuate the image of a war between science and religion. Nonetheless, the Jesus fish did play a key role in the evolution of modern science fiction--and with it, aided in popularizing its underlying science of complex adaptive systems.*
To the left are panels from Robert Crumb's adaptation of "the religious experience of Philip K. Dick." (Hat tip: Boingboing.net) As you can see, the object that set it all off was a Jesus fish necklace, worn by a girl bringing him some pain medication. A beam shot off of it into his eyes, unveiling a hidden truth: that we are actually living in New Testament times.
When PKD had his vision in March 1974, he already had written a sizable body of work dealing with alternate realities. The experience that you see described here, however, led PKD to see the modern world itself as a fictional skein obscuring the reality beneath. For PKD, the reality hidden by dark forces was the real world of around 50 AD, plunged into a mythic struggle between Christian enlightenment and satanic deception.
For the remainder of his life PKD wrote fiction and gave talks spreading his gospel of a real world hidden by fictional forms. As he himself observed, it was a theory that would have made Plato proud. His writings also helped popularize a neo-gnostic vision of hidden reality behind the deceptions of so-called modern day existence.
Sound familiar?
PKD's vision of a deeper reality behind our current fiction helped spawn a new generation of speculative fiction, Philip Dick's own Valis to William Gibson's landmark concept of cyberspace to Baudrillard's Simulacra to Grant Morrison's influential graphic fiction series, The Invisibles.
The first Matrix film arguably represents the high watermark of this movement, not only for its special effects but its imaginative integration of the science of complex adaptive systems with a host of memorable metaphors from philosophy and religion.
And it all goes back at least in part to a delivery girl's Christian fish sign pendant.
When denizens of ancient Roman catacombs sketched images of fish, little did they imagine that the role their piscine sketches would play in later culture wars.
Today, though, I want to turn swords into mindshare and without strife or judgment take a look at how the fish has become an all-purpose symbol for belief.
What is this last one, you ask? Why, it's the Flying Spaghetti Monster, which emerged as an object of worship worldwide at the height of the recent Kansas controversy over intelligent design!
Earlier this morning, I wrote about the Japanese symbol of the seed of life & its relation to the spiral patterns throughout life. Here's a little more.
The image on the left is a sketch of the Japanese seed of life taken from the encyclopedic Symbols by Carl Liungman (most of which is also viewable online at symbols.com). Next to it is another image that further illustrates the power of the spiral archetype. If you don't recognize what it is, click it!
EXTRA: In one of those weird coincidences that Aquinas would no doubt say is the sixth proof for the existence of God, I found the image of Superman linked above on a Japanese blog--http://blog.yam.com/momoshu/, where I found myself diabolically hypnotized by the singing dogs featured on February 10, 2006.
Our pendant today combines both of this week's themes of love & creation. It's the Japanese symbol known as the seed of the universe, and it's available from the good folks at Gems & More in Mooloolaba, Australia, a town at which I'd never shake the dust from my feet for no other reason than I love the name..
This image conveys a sense of dynamic creation and growth. If it reminds you of something you've seen already this week, praise yourself for your heightened degree of spiritual enlightenment--this symbol is one of many that echoes a spiral, and in so doing it echoes the spiral swirls in our Valentine's Day nebulae.
Why the fascination with spirals? We'll talk about a lot more as the Blingdom grows, but if you want a little taste check out this uplifting site.
In the 1980s, a Hollywood prop-maker had an idea. Wouldn't it be funny, Chris Gilman joked, to promote evolution by putting feet on a fish? His friends thought it was hilarious, and thus a fad was born.
The inspiration for this bumper bling was, of course, the Christian fish, a symbol now ubiquitous in Christian cars & jewelry. Why a fish? Supposedly the inspiration comes from the use of the Greek word for fish--ichthus--as a acronym for Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior:
Iesous CHristos THeou Uios Soter
However, in recent years the Darwin fish has become so ubiquitous in popular culture that some people think that the fish was itself originally a symbol for Darwin's theory of evolution!
Yesterday parishioners in hundreds of churches around the world gathered together to praise . . .
Charles Darwin?!?!???
Yes, it's true. As one of the most clicked stories on the web notes, several hundred churches did indeed participate in Darwin Day, held annually to commemorate Darwin's birth on February 12, 1809. In fact, the celebration still continues in many towns, churches and universities, as Darwin Day has evolved into Darwin Week.
To mark this event, this week in our devotionals we'll take a look at a heavenly host of bling emerging from the holy war over creation, from the Fish Wars on car bumpers to Pastafarian jewelry and beyond.
Of course, if you buy all the bling pictured in the coming days you'll need somewhere to put it, so to start I suggest that you pick up a new jewelry box--but exactly which intelligent design I'll leave up to you.
"Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." Just like "don't steal," "don't lie" and "don't covet your neighbor's ox," this is an essential part of the Torah's top ten commandments.
In honor of the Jewish Shabbat, or holy day of rest, we turn our thoughts today toward ancient Hebrew jewelry. Just wait until after sunset to buy it!
Pictured above are earrings and a necklace from judaicawebstore.com, all of which sport the word "hallelujah" in Hebrew as it was written around the seventh century B.C.E. The colored glass is somewhat more recent--which is to say, about 2000 years old.
Coins, seals, short religious texts--we've found a number of examples of ancient Hebrew inscriptions on which to model modern jewelry. But what about the ten commandments themselves?
Weeeeeelllllllllllllll...........
The above is an inscription of the Decalogue (Ten Commandments) in archaic Hebrew that some have found to be three thousand years old, a relatively short time after God would have handed them down from Mt. Sinai.
The problem?
It's carved in a rock in Los Lunas, New Mexico, a place not exactly known for its Shabbat observance in 1000 BCE.
Is this inscription proof that the lost tribes of Israel migrated to North America? Was it a subtle dig at an eighteenth century Catholic priest by his educated Jewish translator? Or could it simply have been a hoax perpetrated by some enterprising college students in the 1930s?
Beats me. All I want to know is, where's the Petroglyph Decalogue gift shop????
I have been meditating today on the catalog of Pictureballs, a Thailand shop that describes itself as "the world's largest source for picture and logo jewelry with over 2,400 designs currently online and more being added every day."
And they're not kidding! Akin to Pugster & its charms, Pictureballs sells earrings, toe rings & pendants from a multitude of faiths and lifestyles, including the colorful Bismillahs in my previous entry today.
But the one pictured above has wheels within wheels: a US-Afghan yin-yang symbol. Who Owns Culture indeed!
From fashion design to the Danish Mohammad cartoons, the appropriation of Islamic symbols can spark vehement and even violent protests. But there is one story from not too long ago that gives us hope for a more ecumenical future. It is the story of
Long-time readers will remember that in an earlier post, I noted that when Freddy Mercury sings "Bismillah" in the Queen anthem Bohemian Rhapsody, he is singing a phrase from the Quran--"In the name of Allah." This phrase is ubiquitous in Islamic jewelry, art and, of course, religious rhetoric.
Islamic fundamentalists, of course, have an extensive history of persecuting gays, non-Islamic religions and those who blaspheme the name of Allah. Since Queen is a gay icon whose lead singer was a Zoroastrian, you'd expect that Queen's Greatest Hits would be the last thing allowed to become a hit in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Oh ye of little faith!
As this article recounts, Queen bootlegs were popular for years in Iran, and the government eventually relented and allowed a cassette of Queen's Greatest Hits to go legit. And how could religious leaders justify this? By providing an explicitly Islamic message to Bohemian Rhapsody. The Iranian cassette includes a pamphlet with liner notes that
tells Queen fans that Bohemian Rhapsody is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil.
On the night before his execution he calls God in Arabic, "Bismillah", and so regains his soul from Satan.
So you see, it's a hymn!
But even though the blend of commerce and religious narrative can lead to newfound tolerance, I'm still not sure I want to know the ayatollahs' explanation for Another One Bites the Dust.
Religious jewelry miraculously appears in a three-page R. Crumb comic in the pages of the latest New Yorker. Look to the right of the panel to see Aline Kominsky-Crumb sporting a Virgin of Guadalupe bolo tie while visiting Manhattan last month.
Devotees of illuminated manuscripts know that the appearance of a Robert Crumb cartoon is in event in itself, so hie thee to a magazinery and check it out in the Feb. 13-20 2006 New Yorker!
But what is this Virgin of Guadalupe? A miracle, or at least that's what many believe--it is an image of the Virgin Mary that materialized on a piece of cloth after Mary appeared in a vision to Juan Diego in 1531.
Since then, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe has become a cultural icon in Mexico and beyond. In the picture below, for example, Our Lady of Guadalupe communes with the leading religious icon of the United States--
Saint Elvis!
White collar, Christian pendant, iron cross--
Is this Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld or a demonic biker priest?
Why do designers put religious imagery on clothing and accessories? Pious devotion or multicultural respect; inspiration from religious sources; a blundering accident, hubris or a desire to get attention by seeming outre--these are a few of the more prominent reasons, of course.
In the case of Karl Lagerfeld, the anticlerical message of his clerical garb might even reflect his most recent challenge to the fashion establishment itself, as he has just announced the first ever iTunes podcast of a top-tier runway show, to take place on February 10 for his eponymous Karl Lagerfeld line.
Lagerfeld is, of course, far from the first prominent figure to use religious symbols in a subversive fashion--his garb reflects an anticlerical tradition that extends back through a pronounced anticlerical strain in European art to Jesus' own inversion of temple imagery to challenge religious authorities.
But as Karl learned the hard way a few years ago, adorning clothes with spiritual references is not without its risks. In 1994 he embroidered clothing for Chanel with phrases from the Quran--accidentally, he claimed--leading to death threats against both him and supermodel Claudia Schiffer. He destroyed the clothes and apologized. A similar fate would soon await Quranic Liz Claibourne jeans and Nike shoes seemingly emblazoned with the Arabic for Allah.
A few years later Fida Na'amneha, a young designer who is Arab and a Muslim, similarly tempted fate by embroidering several attributes of Allah on a low-cut dress. Suffice it to say that despite her devout faith, she did not exactly receive flattering reviews.
The lesson of today's homily? As the Evil One himself once said, the purpose of life is life, so if you're going to be daring & transgressive with religious symbols, just do it with religions where you're not gonna get whacked!
"It is not for him to pride himself who loveth his own country, but rather for him who loveth the whole world. The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens." This quotation from the Writings of the Baha'u'llah underlies the pendant pictured below, and it is one of the core beliefs of the Baha'i faith.
As the designers of this pendant explain, little on this piece of jewelry lacks symbolic significance. Its eighteen background lines represent the eighteen steps to the main floor of the Bahai House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois. The "Ringstone Symbol" in the foreground
represents the worlds of God, His manifestations & humanity, linked by divine messengers.
At a time when many in the West associate monotheism with intolerance, Baha'i is a reminder that exclusionary religions can also give rise to more universal values. Global peace, the elimination of prejudice, the fundamental unity of all nations and religions in one God--such are the core principles of the Baha'i faith, which has spread far beyond its Middle Eastern roots to count among its members world leaders in law, politics, education, journalism and entertainment.
On a personal note, I couldn't finish my first post on Baha'i jewelry without noting my indebtedness to one of the most influential leaders of the Baha'i faith, the Hon. Dorothy W. Nelson, Senior Judge on the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, for whom I had the good fortune of serving as a law clerk. Without her I'd know a lot less not only about the Baha'i faith, but law, life and the inestimable value of a cup of tea and cookies on a rainy day. Thanks Judge!
WWJD? has become almost as ubiquitous a Christian symbol as the sign of the fish. But where did this design come from and what does it mean?
WWJD, of course, is an acronym for "What Would Jesus Do?", and the ostensible purpose behind the phrase is to remind believers to think before they act. About to gossip about your friend? Ask yourself WWJD? Cursing out the Knicks as they blow another game in overtime--WWJD? Coveting your neighbor's ox--well, you get the point.
While WWJD is popping up on jewelry from bracelets to shades, the man who coined the phrase was far from fashion-conscious, let alone market savvy. In 1896, a midwestern minister & newspaper editor named Charles Sheldon wrote a book called In His Steps, in which asking the question "What Would Jesus Do?" becomes the impetus for the global spread of Christian socialism.
In the spirit of his work, Sheldon let In His Steps slip into the public domain, leaving his family to profit precious little from a work that has sold more than 50,000,000 copies & inspired a fashion empire.
Imagine taking the first phrase of the Bible--"when God began creating the sky and the earth"--jumbling all the letters and using them to make a picturesque calligraphy design. While that would be unusual in Western religious iconography, it is common practice in Islam, with the difference being, of course, that the words in question are the opening of the Quran.
The pendant pictured above is an example of what in the Islamic tradition is referred to as "Bismillah," which literally means "In the name of God." "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful" is the phrase that opens the Quran, and art based on this recurring dedication abounds in Islamic culture.
(Of course, if you're a non-Muslim and the term "Bismillah" sounds strangely familiar, you probably heard it in Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody, when they sing "Bismillah, we will not let him go.")
That so much Islamic art (including jewelry) revolves around words and not images is not an accident. A longstanding interpretation of Islamic law is that the faith prohibits images of living things. According to one story in the hadith or reported sayings of Muhammed, "Whoever makes a picture, Allah shall torture him with it on the Day of Judgment until he can breathe life into it, and he will never be able to." As another saying elaborates, to make an image is to try to imitate the creative power of God, a sin of the highest order.
Forbidden to make pictures of animate beings, Islamic artists often turn to calligraphy to express the sublime. As we shall see over the course of our posting in the Blingdom of God, this tradition not only rivals the greatest achievements of abstract art in the West; it reflects even more fundamental patterns in nature.
The ankh, featured on this necklace from innergifts.com, is an ancient religious symbol. Its meaning varies depending on its context. In ancient Egyptian religion, it often appears in contexts in which the bearer has the power to give or to take life, such as in the hands of a pharoah, queen or god. Over the centuries the ankh has been used as a symbol of life in diverse religious communities from Christian to New Age--and even in even in the cult science fiction movie Logan's Run, where it represented the prospect (however futile) of life after 30.
Buddha set the Wheel of Law, or Dharmachakra, in motion with his first sermon. Here's the key section:
Now the Blessed One set the wheel of the most excellent law rolling, and he began to preach to the five bhikkhus, opening to them the gate of immortality, and showing them the bliss of Nirvana.The Buddha said:
"The spokes of the wheel are the rules of pure conduct: justice is the uniformity of their length, wisdom is the tire; modesty and thoughtfulness are the hub in which the immovable axle of truth is fixed.
Tthe Wheel of Law has become a standard symbol in Buddhist iconography, with the eight spokes representing the Eightfold Path toward the end of suffering. The Dharmachakra pendant pictured here is a nice example of the genre, and it is one of several available from exoticindiaart.com.
Want to learn more about Buddhism? Why not start with the writings of America's first Tibetan Buddhist monk, AKA Uma Thurman's dad--Columbia religion professor Robert Thurman.
This is a picture of a Jesus Head Medallion from gangstagold.com. Jesus Head Medallions are a particularly popular form of religious jewelry in the hip hop community.
The archetypical diamond/ruby Jesus Head Medallion was designed with & for Kanye West by the legendary New York jewelry designer, Jacob Arabo, AKA Jacob the Jeweler.
Although most popularly associated with West's song "Jesus Walks," the Jesus Head Medallion becomes a more ambiguous and troubling figure in West's "Diamonds from Sierra Leone." In this song West describes his response to learning about "conflict diamonds," diamonds sold to fund war. Here's a key quote:
I thought my Jesus Piece was so harmless
'til I seen a picture of a shorty armless
For more information, check out Bling Bling: Hip Hop's Crown Jewels, by Minya Oh.
The Wall Street Journal has an article on a rising fashion trend: bling for men. Turns out that sales of men's jewelry are (relatively) booming--"Once considered a fringe market for rockers, rappers, gay men and gangsters, men's jewelry is inching toward the mainstream." Worth a read, but wish the reprint had kept the photo of the big gold cross emblazoned on the WSJ's print version.
