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Jewelry can be used as magic as well as for ornament. Like all fashion, it may appear to be a luxury, and a purely spiritual philosophy may judge it as superficial, but in the Ficinian philosophy of natural magic, jewelry may be of extraordinary value to the soul.
Polishing and arranging colorful stones, setting them in brooches and rings, imitating them in stained glass, and keeping them on our persons and in our homes, all have enchantment value. We don't need to mystify stones, making them too spiritual and exotic, for the soul disappears when we become too abstract, symbolic, and intellectual about such things. There may be more enchantment in luxury than in mysticism.
Enchantment doesn't require large sums of money, but it does require some degree of luxury. Over the centuries, luxury has been condemned, moralized about, and cautioned against, but in Ficino we find a fascinating, deep-seated, occasionally repudiated Epicureanism, an understanding that pleasure is not in itself an obstacle to the spiritual life. In the eighteenth century the philosopher Jeremy Bentham could say, "Necessaries come always before luxuries," but from a less spiritually pure position, we could re-examine his principle and see that the soul requires luxuries. The poet William Burford writes that "luxury helps us forget necessity, even the ultimate necessity, death," and he describes the precious jewels used in Egyptian tombs and medieval cathedrals as means of banishing death. While the saints' bones remind us of our mortality, cathedral windows with their rubies "are erected in praise of God."
All of us in our own ways can find luxury in our lives, and what may be luxury for one may be necessity for another. Certainly luxury can get out of hand and represent a division of society into the haves and have-nots, but luxury can be a virtue when it is part of a life-affirming, soul-centered way of life.
The sparkle of a precious stone can go a long way in teaching us the spiritual potentiality of material things. Writing about the scintilla or spark, Jung says the deep forms in life have a "certain effulgence," "a numinosity that entails luminosity." In the present context, I would reverse that statement and apply it to precious stones: They have a luminosity that evokes the numinous, the presence of the divine or a spiritual dimension. For all their luxury, precious stones do indeed mysteriously represent divinity as a spark within material life, and to children and adults alike they have real magic, offering a simple way to heal the breach between heaven above and earth below.
-- Thomas Moore, The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life
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