The peoples of the past found that certain particularities of nature, through their very physicality and characteristics, expressed metaphysical insights and conveyed through analogy, universal truths. The unique patterns of this golden garland are reminiscent of a turtle’s shell.

Turtles and Tortoises are known scientifically as Testudines. Testudines herald from the age of dinosaurs. They have been around for more than two hundred million years. Up until the last couple of hundred years a great variety of tortoise species were abundant in the world’s oceans. To view more of the authors work visit: http://www.zoeinjewels.com

Like no other species tortoises can live for months without food or water. Sailors flipped the animals on their backside and stacked them in the cargo hold of ships to ensure a long lasting supply of fresh meat. This practice although good for the sailors obviously had devastating consequences for the Tortoise, many species as a result became extinct.

The Giant Galapagos Tortoise which grows up to thirteen hundred kilograms, has a shell width of two meters and lives to ages that reach into hundreds of years, has nearly been wiped out. Ecological laws and foundations like the Charles Darwin Foundation of Santa Cruz are doing their best to reverse the trend before these endangered creatures go the way of their ancient friends.

In Sanskrit and Balinese the turtle/tortoise is known as Kurma. According to Native American and other wide spread traditional lore, Kurma played an instrumental role in the act of creation and is often pictured carrying the world on its back.

A turtle’s underside, the plastron, is a hard flat shell that represents the plane of existence with its four legs being the four directions. The turtle’s upper dome, its carapace, is suggestive of the celestial vault. Rib like seams divide its under shell of it’s carapace, like the bands of longitude and latitude that cut and partition the cosmic shell of space and time.

The earth can be pictured as a giant turtle swimming through the universal ocean of space. And like the turtle, it is the atmospheric shell, that enshrines and protects life from devastating radiation. It is also the shell of gravitational weight that keeps us grounded, steadfast and in place.

The turtle lives in the sea while the tortoise exists on land. Through an evolutionary bifurcation this genus has adapted to both the under/sea and over/earth, which is yet another way that it spans the divide of duality.

A turtle’s extremities not only reach out to grasp and move about in the world, but recoil into the stillness within, absorbed by the inner space of body/mind-consciousness. Likewise the hardness of a turtle’s shell is contrasted by the softness of its flesh.

Even though they seem to embody creation’s heavy, material nature, the turtle most often suggests a complementation of opposites. The acoustics of its shell contributed to the development of the musical arts. Legends recall that Hermes/Orpheus fashioned the first Lyre by stretching strands of hide across a tortoise shell.

The turtle is thus symbolic of natural harmonies, the universal symphony and the frequencies and rhythms of consciousness. Music, the sense-ual expression of number, measures and divides the score of time and space. It seems only fitting that Saturn, who also cuts and divides, once appeared as a tortoise.

In the ancient Vedas however, the Creator-Brahma/Prajapati holds this distinction. “The Lord of progeny, having assumed the form of a tortoise, created offspring. He made (akart) the whole [of] creation, hence the name Deed (Kurma) [was] given to the Tortoise.” (H.P. 167 Satapatha Brahmana 7.5.1.5)