As the frontispiece for his book
On Growth and Form, which I consider one of the intellectual monuments of our time, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson chose a picture in extreme close-up, taken at 1/50,000th of a second, depicting a drop of milk falling into the same liquid.
1 The milk that splashes up forms a pattern of remarkable beauty. At the point of impact, a perfectly round ruff flares out, then breaks up into fine serrations, each topped by a miniscule bead of milk.
The author was a biologist. Through that image, he wanted to demonstrate that a complicated form from the physical world, with an appearance so fleeting that only time-lapse photography can capture and record it, is altogether similar to the form that marine animals such as Coelenterata—hydras and jellyfish, for example—gradually assume over the course of their development. The book abounds in examples of this type. The conclusion to be drawn from these comparisons is that the physical and the biological worlds obey the same morphological laws. These laws translate invariant relationships that can be formulated in mathematical terms.
For the historian and the ethnologist, the frontispiece of Thompson’s book inspires comparisons of a different order, encouraging them quite simply to broaden the Scottish biologist’s thesis to include products of the human mind. The splash of milk prefigures exactly a man-made object whose design would seem to be completely arbitrary—namely, a crown, and more precisely a count’s crown. In the art of heraldry, such a crown takes the form of a circle of flared metal, cut into points at the top, each surmounted by a bead (sixteen, actually, rather than the twenty-four of the splash of milk, but the number of points is probably determined by the viscosity of the liquid). Within the hierarchy of the French nobility, the title of count was below that of duke and that of marquis. All three had what were called “open” crowns, as opposed to the closed royal (or imperial) crown, that is, one that incorporates half-circles that meet at the top. It seems that the closed crown was definitively adopted in France by Francis I, so that he would be the equal in all things to Henry VIII of England and Charles V, who had already chosen that type.
Just as the physical world provides an image of the most simple of the open crowns (the marquis’s and the duke’s crowns were somewhat more complicated), it is not difficult to find images of the closed crown, at least since instant photography has allowed us to see the different stages of an atomic explosion: first the cloud rises, then it widens and closes. In a no less significant analogy, drawn from the biological world this time, this is often called a “mushroom cloud.”
Thus we find that royal or nobiliary crowns, bizarre objects that might be taken for artistic whims corresponding to nothing in nature, anticipated a knowledge of the most fleeting states of matter, which were at the time realities as yet unperceived. Moreover, the hierarchy of heraldic symbols directly reflects the hierarchy that can be established between these states in the physical world: the gaseous state has a higher level of instability than the liquid state. And yet it was not until the late nineteenth century, with the advent of chronophotography, that it was discovered that a liquid splash prefigures a count’s crown, a gas explosion a royal or imperial crown. The artisans who designed these crowns and invented their forms, lacking suitable methods of observation, could not have possessed a representation of these physical phenomena that they unwittingly imitated.
A first conclusion: goldsmithery and jewelry making are undoubtedly arts in which the human imagination is believed to enjoy free rein, but even the wildest fantasies are products of the human mind, which is part of the world. Before knowing the world from the outside, the mind contemplates within itself a few of the world’s realities, all the while believing it is engaging in pure creativity.
That is not all. These crowns, which depicted unstable states of matter at a time when the fleetingness of these states made them impossible to capture, were covered with precious stones. In an exhibition currently being held in Paris, which assembles what remains of the royal treasures, the coronation crown of Louis XV is on view.
2 In its original state, it was adorned with 282 diamonds, 64 colored gems (16 rubies, 16 sapphires, 16 emeralds, and 16 topazes), and 230 pearls, all of which were replaced by copies in the eighteenth century. On this figuration, still unconscious at the time, of one of the most unstable states of matter—since this is a closed crown—gems were included, as they generally were on royal or nobiliary crowns. Like the metals from which these crowns are made (iron, silver, and gold), these gems constitute the most stable bodies in the physical world, so much so that they can be called imperishable.
Has not the principal aim of the art of jewelry, and not only that of crowns, always been to associate and combine the extreme states that matter is capable of assuming? The jewels that most astonish and captivate us are those that best succeed in uniting solidity and fragility—for example, the light, trembling leaves of gold with which ladies of Ur adorned themselves in the third millennium. It is as if the ideal goal of the gold worker and jeweler were always and everywhere to enchase hard, geometrical, incorruptible stones in a setting of precious metal, which, by the delicacy of its workmanship, evokes the grace, caprice, and precariousness of living forms.
Let us consider the problem in broader terms. Human beings in the past could not have imagined the form taken for a fraction of a second by a liquid splash or a gaseous explosion. But an image of instability was immediately available to them: the short duration of an individual’s lifespan, given the risks to which one was exposed or, quite simply, natural law. Is not the birth of each creature among a multitude of others and its brief passage on earth similar to tiny splashes or explosions on the surface of the great current of life? In decorating themselves with hard and durable substances that withstand the assaults of time, human beings transposed onto their own bodies the opposition between the stable and the unstable and sought to overcome it. When formulated in anatomical terms, this became the opposition between the hard and the soft, and ethnographic investigations have shown that it occupies the foremost place in the representations of the body by peoples without writing.
The Bororo of central Brazil, with whom I became acquainted more than half a century ago, find in that opposition the principle of their natural philosophy. For them, life connotes activity and hardness, death softening and inertia. They distinguish between two aspects of every corpse, human or animal: first, the soft flesh subject to putrefaction; and second, the incorruptible parts, such as the fangs, claws, and beak for animals; the bones, necklaces, and feather ornaments for humans. One myth tells that the civilizing hero “opened these vile things, the soft parts of the body.” He pierced ears, nostrils, and lips so that these parts could be replaced symbolically by hard things, including fingernails, toenails, claws, teeth, fangs, shells, and plant fibers, the very materials used in jewelry, whose significance thus becomes clear. Jewelry turns the soft into the hard; it stands in for the objectionable parts of the body, which prefigure death. Jewels are literally givers of life.
Initially, therefore, it is not very important whether these materials are rare or common: the essential thing is that they be rigid and hard. How many times have I seen an Indian who had lost a nose ring, a pendant earring, or a labret, precious by virtue of its material or workmanship, worry less about finding it than about hurriedly replacing it with some little piece of wood? These objects stand guard in front of bodily orifices, which are the most vulnerable aspects of the soft parts, exposed as they are to penetration by evil beings or influences. It is not without reason that the Aramaic word used in the Bible to designate earrings has the general sense of “holy thing.” Other parts of the body, such as the hands and feet, also require protection because they are the most exposed.
The Pacific Coast Indians of Canada used to say of a woman who did not have her ears pierced that she was “earless,” and, if she did not wear a labret, that she was “mouthless.” The same idea is expressed by certain Indians of Brazil but in more positive terms: according to them, the wood disk they insert in their pierced lower lip gives their words authority; the disks they wear in their earlobes make them capable of understanding and assimilating the words of others.
Such conceptions make distinguishing between jewelry and amulets a pointless exercise. The oldest jewelry known in Europe comes from prehistoric sites dating back thirty or forty thousand years: animal teeth with holes bored into them, so that they could hang from a string. Later came rings or disks of engraved bone, and fragments of carved bones shaped like the heads of horses, bison, or stags. All these objects measured between three and six centimeters and so were apparently too small for any utilitarian function.
It should be remembered that, just a few centuries ago, particular value was attached to diamonds because it was believed they protected against poison; to rubies, because they kept away poisonous vapors; to sapphires, for their sedative properties; to turquoise, which warned of danger; and to amethyst, because it allayed drunkenness, as attested by the meaning of its Greek name, amethustos.
In the Old and New Worlds it was obviously gold, once it was discovered, that was seen as the giver of life par excellence. Gold shines like the sun; its physical and chemical properties make it inalterable. When it comes to gold’s virtues, unanimity reigns. In the region inhabited by the Bororo, gold was abundant, sometimes lying right on the ground. The word they used for it means approximately “hardened fragment of the sun”; this corresponds closely to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, who regarded gold as the sun’s brilliant and incorruptible flesh. The poets of classical India sang the praises of gold, the equivalent on earth of the sun in the sky: “Gold is immortal, so too the sun; gold is round because the sun is round. Truly, this golden plaque is the sun.” Twenty-five or thirty centuries later, Karl Marx, an occasional poet, would appropriate the comparison, pointing out the aesthetic (and not only economic) qualities of precious metals: “They appear, so to speak, as solidified light raised from a subterranean world, since all the rays of light in their original composition are reflected by silver, while red alone, the colour of the highest potency, is reflected by gold.”
3 That transmutation of light, an impalpable element, into a solid metal brings us back to the dialectical opposition between the stable and the unstable with which we began.
In this respect, copper often played a comparable role to that of gold and silver. Gold, found as nuggets or flakes, is immediately recognizable: it is pure and shines in its full splendor when it is picked up. So too copper, which, when found in its native state, also lends itself to hammering. The oldest gold known was mined on the banks of the Black Sea in what is now Bulgaria, in the fifth millennium BCE. And excavations have yielded copper objects as well as gold ones. Also in the fifth millennium, the peoples of pre-Columbian North America, which, with the exception of Mexico, had no gold, fashioned copper objects in large quantities. That predilection for copper persisted among the Pacific Coast Indians of Canada and Alaska until the twentieth century. Their ideas about copper were in all points comparable to those about gold in ancient India and ancient Egypt: it was a solar substance of supernatural origin, a source of life and happiness, the most precious of riches and the symbol of all the others.
Have these beliefs disappeared in our own societies? Certainly not in the case of gold, but one might think so for copper, which is now put to all sorts of common industrial uses. From time to time, however, an advertisement can be seen in French magazines with the following text surrounding the image of a piece of copper jewelry: “Copper, discreet but vital; beautiful, eternal, brilliant, sparkling, universal, warm, rich, unique. Copper makes us more beautiful.” The myths of the Pacific Coast Indians are not expressed any differently.
Hence the appeal that jewelry, independent of its value and beauty, has for the ethnologist. It occupies one of those sectors of our culture where what I have called the “savage mind” persists, astonishingly vital. When European women put on earrings, they—and we who look at them—are still dimly aware that they are fortifying the perishable body with imperishable substances. Jewelry, which converts soft parts into hard parts, mediates between life and death. Are not jewels handed down from one generation to the next? They can perform that function only because, when we combine the most stable materials encountered in nature with forms like crowns, which evoke instability, or when we associate their hardness with our own fragility, we all act out in miniature the allegory of an ideal world, where these contradictions would have no occasion to exist.