5 pacific pendants
Jewellery
Inventory number
2025.6.6.16ae.JW.NC.C1970.EUDescription
Five white metal pacific pendants: one without a chain, one on a black cord, and three in polished white metal on a black waxed cord.Pacific became a symbol of the entire hippy era, today it represents peaceful intentions, brotherly love, and world peace, but it owes its origin and popularity not to hippies. The sign was designed by British artist Gerald Holtom for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in 1958. It consists of two English letters â N and D (from English "nuclear disarmament"), but they are depicted in the form of a semaphore alphabet. In one of his interviews, Holtom said: ââĶI was in deep despair. I depicted myself, a man in despair, with my arms down and outstretched to the sides, like a peasant before a firing squad in Goya. I formalized the drawing in a line and made a circle around it.â
In 1958, the famous peace activist Albert Smith Bigelow sailed on his boat, decorated with pacific sign, to the place of USA nuclear tests to prevent them. And in 1960, American student Philip Altback brought a whole bag of pacific badges from England to Chicago and sold them in student dormitories. Thus, in the late 60s, this sign became an international symbol of the struggle for peace, and later a cult symbol for the hippy movement, whose motto was freedom, peace, equality and brotherhood.
But there is also another interpretation. Pacific is the Algiz rune in an inverted position, in a closed space - a circle. The mystical meaning of the Algiz rune in an upright position means PEACE, the embodiment of the power of good, justice, wisdom, protection. In an inverted position, the meaning of the rune is the opposite - war, weakness, vulnerability, senseless self-sacrifice...
Materials
MetalCord