For a long time, for centuries, perhaps even millennia, the gemstone
was considered to be essentially a mineral substance; whether it
was diamond or metal, precious stone or gold, it always came from
the earth’s depths, from that sombre and fiery core, of which we see
only the hardened and cooled products; in short, by its very origin, the
gemstone was an infernal object that had come through arduous, often
bloody journeys, to leave behind those subterranean caverns where
humanity’s mythic imagination stored its dead, its damned and its
treasures in the same place.
Extracted from hell, the gemstone came to symbolize hell, and took
on its fundamental characteristic: the inhuman. Like stone (and stones
provided a large amount of gems), it was associated above all with
hardness: stone has always stood for the very essence of things, for the
irremediably inanimate object; stone is neither life nor death, it represents
the inert, the stubbornness of the thing to be nothing but itself; it is the
infinitely unchanging. It follows then, that stone is pitiless; whereas fire
is cruel, and water crafty, stone is the despair of that which has never
lived and will never do so, of that which obstinately resists all forms of
life. Through the ages the gemstone extracted from its mineral origins
its primary symbolic power: that of announcing an order as inflexible as
that of things.
nevertheless, humanity’s poetic imagination was able to conceive
of stones that were made to wear out, noble, venerable stones, which
Chapter 5
From Gemstones
to Jewellery
1