Eighteen Petalled Flower

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A flower is an epitome of beauty (especially feminine), spiritual perfection, artless innocence, divine blessing, spring, youth, gentleness - but also the brevity of life and the joys of paradise. Essentially, the flower is a concise symbol of nature at its summit, condensing into a brief span of time the cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth. Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower decoration, is based upon this symbolic theme. In Eastern religions, flowers also represent the unfolding of spiritual life.

Here this eighteen-petalled flower is dominated at the center by a oval turquoise. Blue gems have historically been associated with the eyes, to cure and protect them, and with good luck. The belief associating them with the eyes is so widespread as to be universal, even among people in whom blue eyes would be so much a rarity as to be unique, such as the American Indians and the peoples of the Middle East and the Mediterranean. Blue was the color of the sky and the heavens, which had nothing to do with the color of the eyes. Even so, the eyes looked upward to the sky and those heavens where the gods dwelt, and that association gave blue stones an added significance religiously, with special powers to counteract the powers of evil and darkness or night.

References:

Cudlipp, Edythe. Jewelry: New York, 1980.

Tresidder, Jack. Dictionary of Symbols: Oxford, 1997.

Of Related Interest:

Women and Jewelry: The Spiritual Dimensions of Ornamentation (Article)