Atlantis ring

In the 1990s, my parents had a phase which I call The Esoteric Phase. A lot of stuff moved through our house: Reiki, Silva Mind Control, Pharaoh's Cylinders, Hopi Ear Candling, Tarot (my mum even allowed me to touch the deck once), and more, which I can't recall now by name. But, like, full house. We even hosted prominent people from these circles for an afternoon tea (okay, once, but still). I think that Poland was opening to these various things and there was an all-at-once moment. Looking back, it feels like a rather harmless hobby. Sure, a lot of these activities were later debunked and are treated as pseudoscience, but I was a kid, so it weighs in differently.

In the early 2000s, my father discovered a Protestant church (I'm not good with denominations, so let's keep it generic, but it's a legit church), and any esotericism came to an end. By then, I was more into partying and discovering the world on my own terms, so this largely happened outside of my attention. Just one day, the old ways were gone, Cylinders were sold without a financial loss, and esoteric books on the shelf were replaced with Christian ones. I have to admit that as an open-minded person, I gave them a shot too, I even went for a Real Men Weekend, and it was generally fun, but it was not my thing, so I abandoned it completely after a while. I have a fond memory of their masses, though, full of singing and dancing, which was like a breath of fresh air to the boring standards of Catholic Church service. It reminded me a lot of what Black people had in their churches (as known to me solely from American movies).

One of the items from that time was an Atlantis ring. I am not going to google it now because I might learn it's something completely different than I remembered, which would spoil the memory. It's a ring with a specific engraving, which was supposed to do positive things to its bearer. Probably energetic things. As the name suggests, it was used by people of Atlantis [sic!]. I can see in the image search results now that many of those rings are closed, while back then, it would be wrong. The ring couldn't be a full ring. All of them had this gap, which I didn't like because it would often catch a piece of finger's flesh. Also, I just don't like rings. I don't even wear my wedding ring: I went full Beckham and tattooed my wife's name instead, and it's more permanent than a wearable (to many people's dread, for some reason). But esoteric people are clever and it's possible to wear the ring as a pendant. A flat pendant that is, not an actual ring, because it's the engraving that matters. And so after a brief fling with a crucifix, I switched to the Atlantis ring. (It was funny with a crucifix when I was called to the black board by the priest, and as I stood next to him, someone yelled from the classroom: "He's a satanist," which took me by such a surprise that I only muttered to the priest, "That's not true." The priest didn't fell for my colleague's provocation, though. Faith was strong in him.) At first, I had a leather strap, but it broke, so my father gave me a chain, which turned out to be taken out of a printer. For some reason, printers had a mechanism which used a small-link chain. It had no lock and it was generally strong (unless a jerk was involved).

I most likely wore it for years, until I stopped for no reason that I can recall now. I can't even tell at which point nor where it ended. I guess I didn't like pendants that much either. But if I had to choose a physical item to represent The Esoteric Phase for me, my Atlantis ring pendant would be it.