In rural villages tucked among the sun baked hills of Provence you still come upon these designs—a crowned dolphin worked into a rusted iron gate or a lion barely discernible on a worn stone grave marker—described by Victorian scholar Harold Bayley as “thought-fossils” from the middle ages. Gnostic sects, known variously as Albigensians, Cathars, Vaudois and Patarini, practiced their mystic beliefs in this region until they were vanquished by Papal crusades and The Inquisition that followed. Driven underground, they persisted in in pursuing their own path to enlightenment in secret and silently communicated their faith to one another by embossing emblems, or watermarks, into the fine paper they crafted.

I discovered the watermarks in Margaret Starbird's The Woman with the Alabaster Jar. She offered them, among many other trails of evidence, as clues to support the Grail heresy that told of the blood line of Mary Magdalene and Jesus in the South of France. I was charmed by the rustic drawings of the figures and tracked down the source material in The Lost Language of Symbolism: An Inquiry into the Origin of Certain Letters, Words, Names, Fairy-Tales, Folklore and Mythologies, published in 1909.

Bayley's suggestion that

“It seems to have been a happy thought on the part of the papermakers to flash signals of hope and encouragement to their fellow exiles . . .”

had me considering how their symbols might be displayed to good effect in these times. I am not a papermaker, although my father, grandfather, great grandfather and brothers were. But I did have the happy thought that jewelry with the watermark designs on them would be a fine way to flash signals of hope and encouragement and believe others might, as well.

—Mary Ann Sinclair

A portion of each medallion purchase aids The International Rescue Committee, a U. N. organization founded with the assistance of Albert Einstein to provide relief to modern-day refugees.