S925 Silver Five Thunder Command Token Pendant

When a Taoist practitioner performs a rite, there is a tablet in the hand — mostly wooden, sometimes metal or jade. The form is usually a long rectangle, the top slightly rounded or flat, the base square, characters cut on both faces. The practitioner holds it as the warrant of a command, not because the tablet itself has power; Taoist explanation is quite clear on the point. Wood is light, metal has weight in the hand, and each has its use; for a pendant, silver is the right material. Ritual tablets have rules about size; reduced to a pendant, those rules no longer apply and only the form is kept.

The four characters wu lei hao ling come out of the Thunder Rites. The Five Thunders are the thunder deities of the five directions; hao ling means to transmit an order, so together it is acting under the thunder bureau's command. Thunder Rites flourished from the Song onwards and the inscriptions on tablets multiplied with them: some cut "Five Thunder Command", some "By Imperial Decree Summon the Ten Thousand Gods", each school with its own usage. The characters are usually set vertically, top to bottom, with no large gap in the middle. The spacing between the four has to be even — even, it reads as an order; crowded, it falls apart. A thunder command is meant to be urgent, and the characters are cut tight.

Reduced to a pendant, the first difficulty is the characters. The face is smaller, four characters have to fit into a square inch, and the strokes still have to survive; cast them shallow and polishing wipes them out. Here the cuts are pressed deeper than usual: from the front they read black, and only in raking light do the edges show. The hole at the top is set high, so the weight hangs below and the piece does not flip. Deep cuts have to be polished with a fine wheel; a coarse one flattens them in a pass. There is not much open space on the face — only a hairline between the characters and the border.

Most people who wear it like the form and need not load it with meaning. A dark cord at chest length, and it does not look out of place outside a jacket with a centre opening. Some layer it with another pendant; the two knock together and chatter as you walk quickly. If you layer, stagger the lengths — two at the same level will fight.

Silver oxidises, the hollows go black first, and the cuts actually become clearer. Take the silver cloth in one direction and do not rub back and forth inside the cuts. Store it in its own bag; the face is flat and a hard object pressed against it leaves a mark. The aged tone of silver is cultivated slowly; there is no hurrying it.