The Orphic Tablet Pendant

In the ancient world, thin sheets of gold were inscribed with instructions for navigating the afterlife and tucked into linen shrouds. A map for the soul; a golden key.

This pendant is based on the Petelia Gold Tablet, a 3rd to 2nd century BCE Orphic inscription from southern Italy, unearthed in the 1830s. Its ancient Greek text guides the dead away from the waters of forgetfulness and toward the spring of Mnemosyne: Memory.

Cast in solid gold, the pendant translates an ancient funerary text into a wearable relic. Its words evoke thirst, darkness, memory, and divine descent: the soul not as something lost, but as something instructed, prepared, and remembered.

A talisman for transformation, memory, and the hidden knowledge carried beyond the visible world.

The translated inscription reads:

You will find to the left of the house of Hades a spring,
and by it stands a white cypress.
You should not even come near this spring!
But you will find another one, from the Lake of Memory,
cold water pouring forth. But there are guardians in front of it.
Say, "I am the child of Earth and Starry Heaven,
but my race is heavenly. This you yourselves also know!
I am parched with thirst and perishing. Quickly give me
cold water pouring forth from the Lake of Memory!"
And they will give you to drink from the divine [la]ke.
And thereafter you will reign [with the other] heroes.
This is [the "gift] of [Memory." Whenever he is about] to die,
[let the dying hero] write this [on a tablet of gold],
[before loathsome] darkness [might take him],
having enclosed him all around.