Pleiades: Jewels Inspired by the Seven Sisters
Michelle Pajak-Reynolds’ s Pleiades Collection: Merope earrings featuring 4.45 carats raw sapphires, Fairmned 14k gold and champagne zircons. Photo credit; Julie Stanley/JuleImages
With the perfect balance of sparkle and fantasy, the Pleiades Collection honors the beauty of our night sky and ancient mystical traditions. Possessing unexpected elegance, these one-of-a-kind fine-jewelry designs handcrafted in Fairmined 14k gold, ethically mined Umba sapphires and champagne zircons captivate the imagination.
A Sense of Awe and Wonder
We’ve all gazed at the night sky and come under its spell. Twinkling at a distance of 444 million light years from Earth and known by many names including: Seven Sisters, Messier 45, Tur Toodus, Steoillin, Maimai, Mateo Tipi, Matariki, Subaru and many more, The Pleiades star cluster has captivated our collective imagination and connected civilizations across the world for millennia.[1] Tales of the Pleiades captured my attention via Munya Andrews’s book The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades: Stories from around the World. In it, Andrews explores over 40,000 years of Pleiadian legends across diverse global cultures and how these communities’ relationship with these stars as feminine entities influences daily life. Throughout history humankind has looked to the skies for when to plant and harvest our crops and find our way across land and sea. The Pleiades have guided humans in marking time, planning spiritual festivals, aligning sacred structures, and much more.[2]
A color composite image of the Pleiades star cluster from the Digitized Sky Survey
Learning about Pleiadian traditions had me dreaming about the idea of one-off jewelry designs for each star within the cluster. When I create a piece of jewelry for someone I like to learn as much as possible about them. To learn more about the members of this celestial family, I read every ancient and contemporary Pleiadian tale I could find. A few of my favorites include; Anjali Sachdeva’s “Pleiades” a dystopian short story co-narrated by one of the seven sisters and featured in Sachdeva’s book All the Names They Use for God, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters by Margo Neale, an Aboriginal-led exploration of the Dreaming tracks across the Australian continent, and Barbara Hand Clow’s The Pleiadian Agenda, a channeled book exploring cosmic dramas involving the Pleiades.
Creating the Pleiades Collection
Sapphires, long associated with the pure sky,[3] are the heart of my Pleiades collection. I carefully selected one-of-a-kind rough (unfaceted) Umba sapphires from Tanzania. I love working with rough gems; they are luxuriously textured treasures and unique wearable works of art sculpted by Mother Nature. These stunning sapphires have an added layer of specialness because they’re directly sourced and fully traceable to the women miners in Tanzania and imported to the US by my friends at Moyo Gems. The Moyo Gems team “works to empower women miners to work safely, mine better, improve financial security, and create stable, equitable markets for fair trade.”[4] I see great poetry between these special sapphires being mined by women (and their male allies) and the Pleiades’ connection with feminine energies. Another poetic link between sapphires and the Pleiades comes from Barbara Hand Clow’s The Pleiadian Agenda where she states, “Pleiadians enter our world via sapphires.”[5]
An exquisite Moyo Gems 5.35 carat blue-violet rough sapphire mined by Anna-Julius in Tanzania and featured in Michelle Pajak-Reynolds’s Pleiades Collection Adelpha pendant. Photo credit: Michelle Pajak-Reynolds Studios
The sapphires in the Pleiades Collection are beautifully cradled in custom hand-fabricated Fairmined 14 karat yellow gold open-back settings.[6] This style of setting showcases the unique beauty of the gems and allows them to gently caress the skin. Hand forged silky satin finished discs are another key design element in the this collection. The discs symbolize dots on star maps marking locations of individual stars and a scene in Sachdeva’s “Pleiades” where the main character, Adelpha, wears a glow necklace on her head as a crown/halo. The discs were made from tiny Fairmined gold scraps left over from the prong settings. Creating the discs involved melting the gold scrap into little balls, then hammering them flat on a steel block. Once the discs were hammered to the desired size and thickness they were soldered into special patterns for each design. Finally, clusters of pin-set faceted champagne zircons were added to provide the perfect extra touch of twinkling star sparkle.
All the names, except for one, for the designs within the Pleiades Collection come from Greek mythology about the Seven Sisters: Alcyone, Electra, Maia, Merope, Taygeta, Celaeno and Asterope and their parents Pleione and Atlas. Alcyone is the brightest star in the constellation and the only name I changed. I was deeply moved by Sachdeva’s “Pleiades” short story and saw the character Adelpha as the “brightest star” of the sisters in the tale. The name Adelpha means beloved sister in Greek, so the design with the largest sapphire is named in her honor.
[1] See Folklore and Mythology section on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleiades. See chapter titles in Munya Andrews’s The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades
[2] See Munya Andrews chapter “The Pleiades Calendar” in The Seven Sisters of the Pleiades pages 319-358
[3] Kunz, George Frederick, The Curious Lore of Precious Gems, page 104
[5] Hand Clow, Barbara, The Pleiadian Agenda page 186
[6] I believe jewelry can be a vehicle for positive change in the world. Fairmined gold offers a conflict-free, transparent, and traceable supply chain. In 2018, I became a Fairmined licensed brand to use my art as a way improve the lives and working conditions of artisanal small-scale miners, especially women, around the world. Fairmined certification, through the Alliance for Responsible Mining, enforces strict standards for mining practices including ethical and sustainable methods protecting the health and well-being of the miners and the environment. The Fairmined gold used in the handcrafted elements in my Pleiades Collection is imported into the US by Hoover & Strong via artisanal small-scale mines in Peru and Columbia. The Fairmined gold chains for the pendants are made by Riva Precision with gold sourced from Minera Oro Puno, a thriving 25-person mining community in Ananea, Peru.
