What’s your talisman?

By Caitlin Kelly

From Wikipedia:

According to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical order active in the United Kingdom during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, a talisman is “a magical figure charged with the force which it is intended to represent. In the construction of a talisman, care should be taken to make it, as far as possible, so to represent the universal forces that it should be in exact harmony with those you wish to attract, and the more exact the symbolism, the easier it is to attract the force.”^[3]

As regular readers here know, I’m not very big on woo-woo stuff. Really not a crystals/shaman sort of girl.

But I have two small collections of charms I wear together on a piece of cord that I consider my talismans:

The heart is solid silver, bought in Vancouver from a jeweler on Granville Island after one of the most miserable weeks of my life, putting my mother into a nursing home after having to very quickly sort through and sell/toss/keep a lifetime of her belongings. Not to mention the creepy/weird/bizarre friend of hers who stressed me out so badly I called the police. Not fun. So…that’s my heart…solid but battered.

I found the “C” in a shop in Tucson, Arizona, where I and my husband taught at the New York Times Student Journalism Institute, and met a few lovely young professionals we are still close friends with.

The three other charms came from a shop in Atlanta, Georgia and express how I feel about my life and my hunger for beauty, fun and adventure.

On the black silk cord are the three charms from my childhood that resonate for me today:

The blue enamel heart was given to me by my mother when I was eight, sent off to boarding school. I wore this collection under my dress for my second wedding, in September 2011 in Toronto, because she was not going to be there.

The Art Nouveau charm was a gift to me at 12 from one of her beaux, a lovely older man. A few years ago, a I received an email from his daughter, who I had met, (and forgotten), who is, like me, now a globe-trotting ex-patriate Canadian, also a writer and editor, also happily married. Small world!

The gold charm is from my late maternal grandmother, Gemini, my birth sign. She died the year I turned 18 and I miss her still.

I loved this recent FT interview with former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the brooches she wore — and their symbolic power; on display until November 2 at the FDR Presidential Library in Hyde Park, NY:

On good days, I wore flowers, butterflies and balloons, and on bad days, horrible insects and carnivorous animals.

I was the only woman on the Security Council at the time. The ambassadors noticed, and they asked, “Why are you wearing . . . ” whatever brooch. President [George] Bush had already said “Read my lips: no new taxes”, so I just said “Read my pins.”

Do you have, own or wear something of similar sentimental value or emotional power?

Where is it from — and what does it mean to you?