This article is a preview from the Summer 2018 edition of New Humanist
Gemma wore a red dress at her wedding. The bridesmaids were all in black. Ruth came down the aisle with her four-year-old daughter and Anna with her mother. Paul was followed by two “groomsmaids” as he approached Ricardo, who played the guitar and serenaded his love.
As a humanist wedding celebrant I’ve found that however radically atheist they may be, the couples I marry always want some elements of a traditional ceremony. Even staunch feminists will appear on the arms of their fathers, despite rejecting the idea that they’re being given away by one man to another. “I just don’t want to deprive Dad of that special moment” is the usual rationale.
Often, couples want to adapt traditions from their own religious backgrounds, regardless of their humanism. Laura and John chose a hand-fasting to reflect their Irish heritage. Jesse and Melissa, from two different faiths, liked the Jewish custom where the bride walks seven times round the groom. But, instead, they went round each other three times each, then once together, to emphasise their equality. And they had a church hymn as well.
But the one marriage symbol that all of them insist upon, with an almost religious fervour, is the ring. Most choose matching rings together. One couple even made their own in a gold jewellery workshop. Simon and Claire decided to follow a custom from his Greek family background, where chosen members of each family take it in turns to slide the rings on the fingers of the bride and groom.
Enormous creativity goes into the choice of who will be responsible for the rings until the big moment. Usually this task falls to the best man, leaving a kind of expectant doubt until the crucial moment – as in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral when Hugh Grant frantically scrambles in his pockets in vain. Couples will often choose a small boy as ring-bearer, to match the flower girl. In one memorable ceremony the two women brides chose their dog, who paced up the aisle with the pouch round his neck. But that wasn’t quite as memorable as last month’s ceremony at Peckforton Castle in Cheshire. The ring bearer chosen by Jeni and Mark was a barn owl – who, having delivered the rings to the first best man, took a dislike to the second and attacked him, sending him sprawling to the ground.
So embedded is the ring in all cultures and even the hardest of hearts that a wedding isn’t complete without that powerful symbol of love, constancy and the unbroken pairing of two matched souls. But that’s really just the more benevolent interpretation, argues Wendy Doniger in her new book The Ring of Truth. This exhaustive study interrogates the ring’s prevalence – from classical myth to popular culture – to uncover its varied and nuanced meanings.
Folk tales and songs abound with stories of rings as proof of identity. Only by showing the ring – or in some cases one half of the “broken token” – can a lover prove he is who he claims to be. Popular songs glisten with rings: of betrothal, of promise or of inconstancy. “She wears my ring to show the world she’s mine eternally,” croons Elvis. Lesley Gore cries at her own party because Judy is wearing Johnny’s ring. “I’ll give you back your ring,” threatens Patsy Cline. “And I’ll take back my heart.”
Some rings convey magic. Others are more sinister. In centuries gone by, Doniger explains, there were rings with concealed compartments like the ones full of poison favoured by the Borgias. Cold War secret agents would use them to conceal microfilm. “Rings are signifiers, semiotic objects,” she writes. “There are magic rings that cloud the mind with invisibility, forgetfulness and memory, and some are just destructive as poison rings or spy rings.”
Myth and folklore abound with rings as agents of the supernatural. The subject of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which owes much to ancient Norse myths, is invested with evil. In the hands of the Dark Lord it confers the power to corrupt and destroy. The ring at the centre of Wagner’s six-opera tour de force is also associated with destruction. While it gives its owner the power to conquer the world, it is also cursed. It comes from the sea, and is returned to it at the end of the work. But Wagner’s ring is also a symbol of love, set against the lust for power.
“Those who would use it for power must renounce love,” suggests Doniger. “The Wagnerian ring is said to be for forsaking love but is actually drawn back into the older mythology of the ring of power, and Siegfried both wins and forgets love because of the ring.” He is able to betray his Brunhilde because it is she who wears the ring and he who has given it to her. So while she is beholden to him, the strictures of fidelity simply don’t apply to him. And this male forgetfulness, according to Doniger, is a recurrent theme in ring mythology. Men who forget their wives sometimes blame a drug or a drink but more often place the blame on a ring: either they are wearing a ring but its evil power clouds their memory, or they lose it. Or they simply remove it when considering an illicit dalliance. And when it’s only the woman who has the ring, men assume the license to stray.
In many cultures the ring offers a socially acceptable reason for doing what you secretly want to do. “The ring expresses, long before Freud, repression and ambivalence,” writes Doniger. “It gives the hero permission to violate the promise of monogamy that the ring also represents.” She describes the ring as folklore’s drug of choice. “‘Forget me not,’ inscribed on so many rings, asks the lover not to forget that first intensity of feeling for the beloved. It is intended to ward against the mundane, gradual erosion of love,” Doniger writes. “The myth transmutes this gradual process into the sudden amnesia produced by the negative magic of the ring.”
Despite these many transformations, rings have for centuries been a symbol of love. The ancient Greeks and Romans would recognise them as love tokens. But once they became enshrined within the strictures of religion, their function shifted. The early Christian church authorities were the first to approve them as a sign of commitment to marriage. As far back as 1559 the Book of Common Prayer mentioned a ring as part of the service. Once the ring was consecrated as the essence of the marriage bond, it came to signify not just a simple expression of love, but a stamp of ownership. Even the act of sliding a ring on to a perfectly shaped finger is a sexually charged statement of possession: the possession by a man of a woman.
Doniger suggests that men exchange jewellery in much the same way that they exchange women: to cement alliances between themselves or their dynasties. And it’s a bargain that is common across religions. In India, for example, fathers give their daughters away to sons-in-law in exchange for a bride price – a sale that amounts to prostitution.
The marriage ring represents to the groom the assurance that children will be his, since it guarantees that the wife is his and his alone. In modern marriages, though – and certainly those which I conduct – the exchange of rings is an expression of mutual commitment: not that one person belongs to another, but that the two belong together.
Given the weight borne by a simple piece of jewellery, it’s no wonder that the loss of a wedding ring can cause such anguish. Which may be why, according to Cosmopolitan magazine, the latest fashion is to pierce the ring finger with a diamond that can never be mislaid in the basin at work, say, or between the sheets of a forbidden lover. People can have the diamond “floating” in the middle of the finger, or embedded under the skin.
It does sound painful, but then you should be prepared to suffer for the one you truly love. It’s one way, I suppose, to make a diamond last for ever. But it’s unlikely to catch on. The ring has too much passion invested in it ever to be replaced.
“The Ring of Truth and Other Myths of Sex and Jewelry” is published by Oxford University Press
