PotW: A Mournful Ouroboros

This black beaded bracelet is shaped like a coiled snake swallowing its own tail, which is an image known as an ouroboros. The ouroboros symbol can have many meanings, but this one, created during the late 19th century, represents the eternal cycle of life and death. The bracelet’s color, materials, and symbolism identify it as an article of mourning jewelry. Victorian mourning culture was strictly regulated, with fashion etiquette codified by the mourner’s relationship to the deceased and the length of time since the death. Bright colors were replaced with black (and other darker hues), but otherwise the era's flair for fashion and ornamentation typically persisted.

Mourning jewelry was often made from the deceased’s hair, which could be braided into watch fobs and earrings, or pulverized into paint for a miniature, wearable scene. Equally trendy jewelry materials were jet and French jet. Jet is black, matte, lightweight, fossilized wood, similar to charcoal (but mess-free). French jet, also known as Czech glass, is black glass, typically shinier, heavier, and colder to the touch than true jet. Both were used in broad varieties of mourning jewelry, including tiaras, brooches, and bracelets. This ouroboros is likely glass and belonged to a German-Jewish Brooklynite named Jeanette Wachsmann Aschner. Aschner was a member of Beth Israel on Boerum Place and lived at 67 Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights with her husband Abraham. They owned six cigar emporiums and raised six children: Herman, Isidor, Amos, Frederick B., Nathan, and Ernestine. It is uncertain whose death prompted the purchase of the ouroboros bracelet, but it is possible that Jeanette wore it to remember her husband, who predeceased her by eight years. 
 

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