Daniela and I were recently in London together visiting clients. The weather was grim and rainy so we decided to visit the exhibition devoted to the lives of the six wives of King Henry VIII at the National Portrait Gallery.
What a perfect way to spend a wet Wednesday!
The exhibition is superb and in the short video we made (see below) you can see the large quantity of jewellery which figures among the portraits. One thing that interested us was the way that rings were worn at this period – which fingers were adorned and which phalange in particular.
Daniela asked me whether I had an idea about this.
Having been a practising astrologer for over 25 years I had some clues to offer, and I can share these with you here.
In the ancient world the custom of wearing a number of rings at once is of quite an early date. Both Plato and Aristophanes mentioned the wearing of rings as a frequent custom. While Seneca spoke thus: ‘we adorn our fingers with rings and a jewel is displayed on every joint’.
In astrology the heavens are divided up into twelve ‘mansions’ or houses. The human hand with its four fingers, each with three phalanges, offers therefore the opportunity to attribute correspondences between these twelve digital elements and the twelve signs of the zodiac and the twelve mansions.
You will perhaps have noticed, as Daniela and I did, that the only finger which is consistently portrayed without a ring is the largest finger, the ‘finger of Saturn’. It is important to remember that at this date in England, the first half of the 16th century, astrology was reserved exclusively for royalty and the aristocracy, commoners were not usually admitted into this very rarified sanctuary of knowledge. 100 years later, thanks to the remarkable astrologers and magicians John Dee, (1527 -1608), court astrologer to Elizabeth I and the highly influential William Lilly, (1602- 1681), who was famous for having predicted among other things the Great Fire of London, astrology was becoming more and more popular and respected.
Saturn in the astrological world rather than the astronomical, is one of the so-called ‘malefic’ planets (along with Mars in the western tradition) and its influence traditionally was to be invoked with great caution – usually its effect was rather to be propitiated. Interestingly this tradition is still very much alive and well in India where the possible negative effects of ’Shani’ (the sanskrit name for Saturn) as the planet moves through the individual’s birth chart, is greatly feared. The seven years or so when Shani transits the twelfth, first and second houses to the natal moon is known in Vedic astrology as ‘Sade Sati’, it is the highlight of the planet’s roughly 30-year or so transit around the sun and is thus the focus of much anxiety – to such an extent that today in modern India millions of people live in fear of this event.
The truth is that while sometimes very challenging emotionally it is often forgotten that this is also a period of massive opportunity and change, punctuated with periods of great learning. It is nevertheless fortunate that it only takes place once every thirty years!
The wearing of rings – and thus gemstones – on specific fingers and phalanges is encouraged by a Vedic Jyotish (astrologer) as a propitiatory gesture during certain planetary transits. The planet Saturn according to the Vedic tradition is sacred to the blue sapphire, the Neelam stone in sanskrit, indeed all the planets and even the two lunar nodes, have their individual gemstones making nine in total – the navrattan of gemstones in the Vedic tradition.
This is not the place to expand on this further but it may perhaps be the reason why the Saturn finger has been avoided even in Europe where the ancient Vedic astrological tradition is little known, except as a basis for superstition. When the origin of a wisdom is forgotten it tends to survive as superstition and folklore.
It may also perhaps help to explain why none of the wives of Henry VIII were depicted wearing a ring on the Saturn finger.
