Kyshar Rings

Kyshar Rings. Before the gods of Babylon had names, before Marduk had slain the chaos-dragon and before the first human had been formed from the blood of the defeated, there were the primordial pairs, the ancient couples whose union generated the divine assembly. Apsu, the spirit of the primordial freshwater ocean, mingled his waters with Tiamat, the spirit of the salt sea, and from their commingling the first generations of deities were born. Among the earliest of these were Anshar and Kishar, the cosmic horizon of the sky and the cosmic horizon of the earth, the two great circumferences that bounded the visible world above and below.

Kishar, from whose name the Kyshar ring takes its own, meant in ancient Akkadian the whole earth as horizon, the entirety of what exists at the level of the ground, the circular rim of the world as perceived by a standing observer at its center. Kishar was not merely a deity of the earth’s surface; she was the principle of terrestrial extent itself, the fact that the earth has a horizon, that it extends in all directions equally from every point on its surface, that it is bounded and yet effectively infinite within those bounds. She was the geometry of the world before geometry had a name.

The Kyshar ring carries that geometry in its surface. Each band is covered with a continuous tessellation of triangular facets, polished raised planes separated by matte grooves that define their edges, the whole pattern repeating around the full circumference of the band in a rhythm of geometric regularity. The triangles are not identical; they are arranged in an interlocking pattern that divides the curved surface of the band into facets, the way a cut gemstone is divided into facets, the way the faces of a geodesic dome are distributed across a curved surface to cover it completely with the minimum number of planar forms. Each facet catches light at a slightly different angle from the ones beside it, so the band is in constant dialogue with its illumination, at certain angles the facets all blaze together; at others, some recede into shadow while their neighbors glow.

The triangle is the most ancient of the sacred geometric forms. In the religious art of ancient India, the downward-pointing triangle represented the feminine principle, the yoni, the receptive, the earth, while the upward-pointing triangle represented the masculine principle, the active, the sky. Their superimposition produced the Star of David, the Seal of Solomon, the Sri Yantra: the symbol of union, the geometry of creation made visible. In ancient Egypt, the triangle was the shape of the pyramid, the form in which the divine mountain, the primordial mound of creation, was most perfectly expressed in stone. In the mathematics of the ancient Greek Pythagorean, the triangle was the first plane figure that could not be reduced further: the irreducible unit of two-dimensional space.

Kishar and Anshar, the two horizons, were understood in Babylonian cosmology as the parents of Anu, the god of the sky, and grandparents of the divine assembly that would eventually include Enlil, Enki, and all the rest. They represented the generation that stands between the primordial chaos of the beginning and the organized divine world that follows, the moment when the universe first developed the capacity to be looked at from a fixed point, the moment when there was something that could be called a horizon and therefore something that could be called a world.

The Kyshar ring is available in six metal combinations. Each pair is made to order in São Paulo, Brazil, individually crafted and finished by hand. Because rings require precise sizing, please consult the Friszman MD Ring Size Guide before placing your order. Inner diameter measurements in millimeters ensure the ring settles onto the finger exactly as Kishar settled onto the earth, as though it had always been there.