Orion Pendants

Orion Pendant is a star map, a wide oval of 18k gold whose matte face carries a large gemstone at its center, surrounded by seven raised gold spheres distributed across the field in a pattern that mirrors the great constellation that has been guiding human navigation, inspiring human mythology, and organizing human cosmology since before the earliest civilizations began to write. The gemstone at the center is Betelgeuse, the red super giant that marks the right shoulder of the Hunter, one of the largest and most luminous stars visible to the naked eye, a star so massive that if it replaced our own sun its surface would extend past the orbit of Jupiter. The gold spheres around it are the other stars of Orion: Rigel, the blue-white super giant at the left foot; Bellatrix, the female warrior at the left shoulder; Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak, the three stars of the belt that have served as north-south indicators and calendar markers for every civilization in the northern hemisphere; and Saiph, the curved knee of the Hunter in the lower right.

Orion, the great Hunter of Greek mythology, son of Poseidon and the mortal Euryale, or born from the earth itself in the older version of the myth, was the greatest mortal hunter who ever lived. He boasted that he would kill every animal on earth; Gaia, the earth, sent the Scorpius to kill him, and the two were placed in the sky on opposite sides so that they would never meet, which is why Orion sets in the west as Scorpius rises in the east, and Scorpius sets as Orion rises. In another version, Orion was killed accidentally by Artemis, the goddess of the hunt who loved him, deceived by Apollo into shooting at a distant shape in the water. In both versions, his placement among the stars was an act of honor, the sky as the highest reward for the life that was lived most fully.

The connection between Orion and the earth’s oldest sacred architecture runs deeper than mythology. In 1983, the researcher Robert Bauval proposed what became known as the Orion Correlation Theory: that the three great pyramids of Giza, Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure, were deliberately positioned to mirror the three stars of Orion’s belt as they appeared in the Egyptian sky around 10,500 BCE. The slight offset of the smallest pyramid, Menkaure, from the alignment of the other two mirrors the slight offset of Mintaka from the line formed by Alnilam and Alnitak. In ancient Egyptian astronomical religion, the Duat, the celestial realm of the dead, was associated with Orion, and the pharaoh’s soul was understood to travel to this region after death. The three pyramids were not merely tombs but landing pads for the royal soul’s journey into Orion’s domain. The Orion Pendant carries this extraordinary connection in its horizontal oval form: the shape of the sky viewed from below, the celestial field where the Hunter stands watch across the centuries.

In Mesopotamia, Orion was identified with Gilgamesh, the legendary king of Uruk and hero of the world’s oldest narrative poem, who sought the secret of immortality after the death of his companion Enkidu. In the Mesopotamian star catalogue known as MUL.APIN, composed around 1200 BCE, the stars of Orion were read as the figure of the great shepherd or the true shepherd of Anu, the sky god, a figure of divine authority watching over the celestial flock. In the astronomical traditions of the Cherokee people of North America, the belt stars of Orion were read as a canoe, three hunters in a boat pursuing a bear across the sky, a reading that arrived completely independently of the Greek tradition and yet found the same three stars as the center of a hunting narrative.

The matte field of the pendant face is the night sky itself, the fine texture of gold that absorbs light rather than reflecting it, that disappears into the dark as the sky does, making the gemstone and the gold spheres stand out as stars stand out against the velvet of space. The polished rim around the edge of the oval is the horizon, the circle that contains the visible sky, the boundary of the field within which the Hunter stands.

Available in 18k rose gold with ruby, 18k white gold with sapphire, and 18k yellow gold with diamond. In rose gold, the ruby at the center is Betelgeuse at its most literal, a red super giant in rose gold, the color of the star rendered in the color of the metal. In white gold, the sapphire is Rigel, the blue-white super giant at Orion’s foot, the coldest and most distant of the bright stars. In yellow gold with diamond, the central star blazes with the full spectrum, the Hunter at his zenith, seen from directly below, all of his light coming straight down to earth. The integrated bail at the top of the oval ensures the pendant hangs horizontally, exactly as the constellation appears in the sky when Orion stands at his highest point. 3D designed, hand finished in Sao Paulo, Brazil.