For April the birthstone is diamond. It stands for clarity, strength and commitment in crystal practice, and chakra charts set it at the crown.
The pen is on the table. Your hand is steady, or it is not. The room has gone quiet, the other person is waiting, and in a moment you will sign your name, or say the words you came to say.
That is the moment to wear a diamond for.
Words said once
A vow is made once, to another person or only to yourself, and the diamond, whose Greek name adamas means unbreakable, is the stone to wear when you make it. Weddings are the obvious case, and so are the promises godparents make at a christening. When two people make the vow together, both can wear a diamond on the day. A vow said quietly counts as much as one said to a crowd, and if the vow is to yourself, nobody else needs to know the diamond is there. Wear it to the first morning in a job you fought hard to get, too, and to any occasion where words are said and something starts because of them.
Wear it on your hands, as a ring or a small stone on a bracelet, so that it is there when you sign or reach out. Size does not matter here: a chip set in silver is as much a diamond as a one-carat stone. It does not have to be new, either. A diamond that has been at one beginning can go on to another, and an inherited diamond, reset or simply hung on a chain, is as good as one bought for the day.
An April birthday is a beginning of its own, the first day of a year, and a good morning to put the diamond on for whatever the year is for.
The ring of 1477
Diamonds reached Europe from India. They were gathered from the country’s rivers and streams, traded as early as the fourth century BCE and coveted by royalty and the wealthy, and later carried by caravan, with other exotic goods, to the medieval markets of Venice. By the 1400s they were becoming fashionable among Europe’s elite.
The Gemological Institute of America dates the first diamond engagement ring on record to 1477, given by Archduke Maximilian of Austria to his betrothed, Mary of Burgundy, the only daughter and heiress of Charles the Bold. That year the two were married, by proxy on 21 April and in person on 19 August. More than five centuries on, the institute calls the diamond engagement ring a near-universal symbol of love and marriage. A sixteenth-century writer on gems, as George Frederick Kunz reports, called diamond “a gem of reconciliation”, because it was believed to strengthen a husband’s love for his wife.
The American National Retail Jewelers’ Association chose diamond for April at Kansas City in August 1912, though seven of the eight month lists Kunz set side by side the next year gave the month sapphire.
The night before
If you are giving a diamond for a beginning, give it the night before, the evening before their move or their first day somewhere new, so that it is already theirs when the day comes and they can put it on in the morning. A partner can give it on the eve of the wedding, a friend on the eve of an opening night. The same gift suits the eve of a sixtieth or seventy-fifth wedding anniversary, since diamond is the stone for both. If you wore a diamond at your own wedding, it can go to your child the night before theirs. If the beginning is your own, buy the stone the week before and keep it boxed till the morning.
A hard knock can split even a diamond, while it is being set or while it is worn. Warm water and a little mild soap will clean it.
After the decision
Diamond also suits the days just after a decision. Its place in chakra work is the crown, the top of the head, and crystal writers see its clearness there as clarity, a choice seen for what it is. Wear it through the days after you hand in your notice, or the first days of a change you argued for, a move to another country, say, when there is no point weighing it all again. You do not need to wear it at the crown, and a ring or a pendant does for those days. Keep it on through that first week, under a collar if you like, and put it away once the change has become ordinary.
Before you leave on the first day of a change you chose, touch the diamond to the crown of your head, then put it on.
Sources
- GIA, April birthstones, for the road from India to Venice, the fashion of the 1400s, the 1477 ring, the name, the near-universal symbol, the anniversaries and cleaning: gia.edu
- Campbell Dodgson, Catalogue of Early German and Flemish Woodcuts Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, volume 1, 1903, p. 323, for Mary as Charles the Bold’s only daughter and heiress and the two marriages of 1477: archive.org
- George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, 1913, p. 70 for the gem of reconciliation, and pp. 315 to 316 for the eight lists and April’s tally: gutenberg.org
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, 14 August 1912, for the adopted list: archive.org
- GIA, diamond care and cleaning, on a hard blow in setting or wear: gia.edu
