The Magic Ring

One of the earliest values found in rings was doubtless magic.

This worked in many ways, according to the beliefs of different times and peoples.

Simply to put a ring on another person’s finger was to bind that person to you—an early magical belief which has endured as a symbol in the engagement and the wedding ring.

To protect the wearer against the powers of evil in the world, rings are adorned with potent gems, or carved with potent symbols.

Turn the emerald in a ring on a poised snake, and the snake was stricken blind, as the nineteenth-century poet Moore remembers in Lalla Rookh:

Blinded like serpents when they gaze

Upon the emerald’s virgin blaze.

The snake itself, being associated with the sybils and other prophets of old and linked with man in earliest Bible story and man’s most fateful hour, is also a most potent and frequent device.

It might be carved upon the ring, or the whole ring itself might represent a serpent, eating its own tail—like the worm Ouroboros that winds around the world and keeps it from bursting asunder—or with its head nestling upon its body, watching for the approach of danger.

Being itself a lurking danger, the snake obviously was most fit to search out hidden evil.

A snake ring of gold with ruby eyes was often on the finger of George IV of England.

Marianne Ostier, Jewels andthe woman (The romance, magic and art of feminine adornment)

Photo: Pixabay/GDJ 

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