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The Cross of Light Diamond

The Cross of Light Diamond is the trademark name of a diamond that was intentionally designed as a spiritual symbol. It was created to draw attention to a Christian visionary tradition that dates back at least a thousand years. In this tradition, diamond was also perceived as a spiritual symbol. The tradition typically consisted of visionary experiences wherein God and/or the human soul was seen as a brilliant diamond or some other transparent crystal that looked like diamond. The Cross of Light Diamond is a singular attempt to consciously use design to encourage the assimilation of this visionary diamond tradition to our own modern diamond traditions.

The Visionary Tradition

An early example of this tradition are visions attributed to Symeon the New Theologian www.monachos.net/patristics nearly one thousand years ago. "In the way that light shines thru crystal (diamond), so He revealed Himself to me as light". In another place he writes, "Come true light...shining crystal...whom my soul longs for still. Another better known example from the sixteenth century is provided by St. Teresa of Avila www.catholic.org/saints She writes in her well known book Interior Castle, "I saw the soul as a castle made of a single diamond containing many rooms".

This vision of the soul as a single diamond containing many rooms provided the framework for the entire book and she used this vision to illustrate many important points about the interior life as she had experienced it. For example, she thought it most tragic that while God sees the soul of each person, at all times, as a brilliant diamond, we humans seldom if ever do, and "so we trouble little about preserving the soulâ€™s beauty. All of our interest is centered in the (mounting)...that is to say, in these bodies of ours." However since her experience was otherwise, she believed like Symeon before her, that everyone is as capable of seeing the soulâ€™s brilliance and His presence there "as is the crystal of reflecting the sun". For her, His presence there is a Divine Spouse. The soul has the appearance of a diamond because a divine marriage has taken place within it. This sacred nuptial union radiates a brilliant light that gives it (the soul) a magnetic "splendor and (irresistible) beauty".

Throughout history, ownership of diamonds was limited to royalty and others of noble rank. It is otherwise today in our modern and more affluent surroundings. These gemstones are now affordable and available to millions of people and so new diamond traditions have been established. These modern traditions reflect both this wider distribution and our modern understanding of things. The Cross of Light Diamond is the first modern attempt to design a diamond that expresses this earlier visionary tradition. Its appearance in the marketplace may help to make the tradition better known.

The Design

The design of The Cross of Light Diamond features a crown that has the same number and arrangement of facets as the standard fifty eight facet round brilliant diamond. The pavilion, however, has a unique configuration of facets that are arranged in such a way as to create three cruciform images. To accommodate these images, twelve additional pavilion facets are needed, and so the total number of facets in this design is either sixty nine or eighty five depending on whether the circumference is rounded or sixteen sided. The three cruciform images require a total of sixteen facets, and it is from these sixteen cruciform facets that most of the light entering the diamond is reflected back thru the crown. www.coldiamond.com

The forms of the cross that make up the three images were chosen for a specific purpose. Each cross is intended to signify a slightly different spiritual reality. The three forms include the Greek cross, a form referred to as the Star cross and the Maltese cross. The traditional Greek cross is intended to signify divine love for the world that is sacrificial in character and involves voluntary suffering. A cross described as a Star cross is intended to symbolize nativity, and more generally, point to a divine presence throughout the world. The eight points of the Maltese cross www.orderofmalta.org.uk/cross represent the eight beatitudes, which when internalized, points to transfiguration. It represents the divine within us.

The cross is the best known and most widely used Christian symbol. It is for this reason that cruciform images were designed into the Cross of Light Diamond with the expectation that the earlier spiritually symbolic role of diamond could be better understood. Taken together, the three cross images that were selected are meant to symbolize an underlying spiritual reality that is both present to and exists within the physical world and in the human soul. This divine presence is understood as a sacred and eternal desire for relationship and union.

The Modern Tradition

There is a modern diamond tradition that is quite different from the visionary one described above. Our modern tradition reflects both our scientific predispositions and the fact that diamonds are much more common.

Today, diamonds are identified with romantic love, which for the most part, is characterized as self sufficient and unrelated to divine love. Diamonds have become the primary symbol of love and its commitments leading to engagement and marriage.

Diamonds are also used for reasons unrelated to romantic love. They are often thought of as an ideal means by which one can, as the need arises, either conceal or display wealth. When set in beautiful and well designed jewelry, they are experienced as a source of great aesthetic pleasure, beautiful in themselves but also making more beautiful the physical appearance of the person wearing them.

Diamonds are vehicles to express personal vanities in all of their many forms. Diamonds are symbols of wealth, success, high fashion and a glamorous life style.

Diamonds and the Scientific Perspective

As stated above, our modern diamond traditions "reflectâ€™ our scientific way of looking at things. Naturalism is the way most of us have been trained to see the world and so we are not surprised by the appearance of diamond in these visionary traditions.

Have we not been told that "diamonds are forever"? Diamond is one of the hardest elements and is relatively indestructible. [ Eternal and unchanging are adjectives attributed to the sacred most everywhere] Diamond has a very high refractive index, is transparent and can be polished to an extraordinary luster. These features cause it to reflect a uniquely brilliant light. [ One of the most common descriptions of God in many different religious traditions, including Christianity, is that of a uniquely brilliant light.]

The high refractive index of diamond also causes it to be unusually dispersive. Dispersion is a gemological term that means the breaking up of white light into its spectral components.

When cut properly, white diamonds display bright flashes of every color of the rainbow. There are almost no other gemstones that have this quality in such abundance. [The rainbow is one of the earliest images of divine blessing, and in the Christian era, color is understood as symbolizing the incarnation. ( a view most famously expressed by St. Bernard of Clairvaux) www.catholic.org/saints. Invisible white light (Father) becomes visible as colored light (Son). Whoever has seen the Son has seen the Father.] Millard Miess, "Light as Form and Symbol in Some Fifteenth-Century Paintings," Art Bulletin vol.27 (1945) pp 125-81.

Although our scientific way of looking at things may help us understand why diamond appears as it does, it may not help us see diamond as seen in the tradition we have been describing. In fact, it may preclude it. One of the goals of the Cross of Light design is to help people here and now be more aware of what some people in former times saw when they looked at a diamond, what meaning they attached to what they had seen, and what effects this may have had on them.

The modern tendency to segregate the physical and spiritual worlds and keep the two apart is an accepted fact and taken for granted. [Arthur Zajonc, Catching The Light, Oxford University Press (1993) In this kind of environment it is not always an easy task to look deeper into things and see a sacred presence within it. And this is true whether it is a diamond, another person, oneself or anything else in anture.It is not an easy task because it seems to involve a mysterious process of using what St. Augustine called the mysterious single eye of the soul that sees "the light that never changes". Margaret Miles, "Vision", The Journal of Religion, vol.63 (1984) pp 125-42. Others have referred to this as the spiritual intellect which, unlike our discursive faculties, resonates with, uses, and responds to spiritual symbols. And to the extent that we deep our worlds segregated, we suffer a kind of mental apartheid which makes it difficult for us to see things as they truly are. Our charistic "single eye of the heart" lies dormant and it is difficult if not possible for us to experience anything as a spiritual symbol. Our vision remains occluded and we "see thru a glass darkly".

Saintly vision, by contrast, perceives the sacred dimensions of nature. Blake expressed this way of seeing when he said, "Everything that lives is holy". St Paul expressed it as "clearly seeing invisible things of Him, by understanding things that are made". Rom. 1:20 Saintly vision can look deeper into the diamond and see a light that "that knows no evening", or look deeply into the soul and see a brilliant diamond reflecting that same light. Such was the experience of Saints Teresa, Symeon and others, all of whom saw a more beautiful diamond because it was the beauty Dostoevski referred to as " the beauty that will save the world". The motto of the Cross of Light Diamond is intended to express the same thought. EXPERIENCE THE GREATER BEAUTY

Diamond: Desecration and De-mystification

Our failure to integrate all of reality and remaining clueless regarding the inherent spiritual symbolism that resides in all of nature has consequences.The first may be relatively benign. The second is more pernicious. First, the saints that experienced the earlier tradition were irresistibly drawn to the soulâ€™s diamondlike beauty. They were privileged to see in a more holistic manner the greater beauty. If we cannot look into things as deeply and see everything that is truly there, we are thereby relatively deprived of the aesthetic enjoyment that things can give to us. In this case we make specific reference to our diamonds even though as physical objects they are no doubt more beautiful now than any time in the past. Today, we have superior skills and knowledge and so we have improved design, cutting, proportion calculations and polishing, and can make a more radiant gemstone.

The more pernicious consequence of remaining blind to the insight that "everything is holy" is the inevitable desecration of everything "we can get our hands on" and use without regard to their divine origin and content.[Phillip Sherrard, Christianity: Lineaments of a Sacred Tradition,Holy Cross O:rthodox Press (1998) pp. 200-231.] (originally presented as a paper, Temenos Academy, London,1994) De-mystified as it is and voided of any spiritual reality, diamond, like all other things in nature is subject to desecration. An especially egregious example has been popularized by the film Blood Diamond, where diamonds are depicted as used in the most hellish ways by people who thoughtlessly desecrate most everything in sight, including diamond, so long as it can be of some selfish benefit to them.

The Design: Motive and Purpose

The Cross of Light Diamond was created as a spiritual symbol that could function as a kind of bridge connecting some of our modern diamond traditions with the pre-modern visionary soul-diamond tradition. It was created as a spiritual symbol to encourage a more unified and integrated experience of the natural world. It was created to help people, contemplating these traditions, visualize their own souls and the souls of others as sacred and reflecting a brilliant light like the beautiful light of a radiant well cut and polished diamond.

When this happens, as it must in thousands of individual ways, when veils are lifted and a new light is seen, then the art of diamond design becomes a sacred art. It could be the experience of a light deep within. It could be a light coming from someone else. It could be a light that lights up the whole world. And whenever two people, as they must in thousands of different ways, celebrate and live out together their glorified visions of one another, the art of diamond design has become for them a liturgical sacred art.