Inside the Artroom No. 006 – Meet the maker behind the St. Levantius Talisman Pendant

Every piece begins with obsession. Meet Stuart, Principal Artist at Alchemy of England.

Every saint needs a shadow.

The idea of the protective medallion is older than the Church that eventually codified it. Travelers have worn talismanic discs since antiquity – not only to invoke protection, but to carry something of the unseen world against their skin. The saint on the front. What lives on the back has always been a matter of what you are willing to acknowledge.

Stuart recalls: “With this one I liked the idea of doing an Alchemy take on a Saint Christopher necklace, but with the added twist of a demon on the reverse. It’s always great when you can add a little novelty into a piece of jewelry. With this one you can wear it either way around depending on your mood for the day, and it makes a great talking point.”

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The figure on the front is Saint Levantius – patron of mystics, alchemists, and occultists, whose origins, according to Alchemy’s own mythology, reach back to Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. He is rendered as an angelic figure, wings spread, draped in white cloth, framed within a quatrefoil – a shape borrowed from medieval Gothic architecture, where the four-lobed form symbolized the four Evangelists, the four cardinal virtues, or simply the ordering of sacred space. Levantius stands at the center of that ordering. Composed, authoritative, and watchful.

Turn the disc over and the symmetry inverts.

The reverse belongs to Asmodeus – one of the most consistently documented figures in the demonological tradition, appearing in the Hebrew Book of Tobit, the medieval grimoire the Ars Goetia, and the writings of the seventeenth-century occultist Johann Weyer. He is described variously as a king of demons, a lord of chaos and carnal knowledge, and a being whose power is precisely that which lies outside the sanctioned order. The Ars Goetia places him among the 72 spirits of Solomon, ranking him as one of the great kings of the infernal hierarchy. He is not a minor figure. He is not decorative.

On this talisman, Asmodeus is cast in blackened pewter, winged and horned, coiled around a serpentine staff – a deliberate echo of the caduceus, the ancient symbol of transition and passage between worlds. The quatrefoil frames him as it framed Levantius. The same architecture. The same weight. The same gravity given to each side.

That is the point.

The devotional language surrounding the talisman is the epithet whispered by those who wear it: Ut supra, ut infra – as above, so below. The phrase derives from the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, one of the foundational texts of Western alchemical and occult thought, and it encodes the principle that whatever exists in the higher realm has its correspondence in the lower. Light requires darkness to be legible. Endings make beginnings possible. The angel and the demon are not opposites in conflict – they are the two faces of the same coin.

Stuart’s design does not resolve that tension. It wears it.

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The St. Levantius Talisman Pendant is handcrafted in England by the Alchemy artisan team, cast in fine English pewter. The front face is finished to a high polish, giving Saint Levantius a silver luminosity. The reverse is dark-antiqued, pulling the shadow deep into the relief work of Asmodeus and the surrounding detail. The contrast is not incidental – it is structural, built into the finishing process so that each side declares its nature the moment it catches the light.

The pendant hangs from a high-quality chain with a clasp fastener. It wears well. The disc is substantial without being heavy, balanced enough for everyday use, and double-sided in a way that actually changes how it reads on the body depending on which face you choose to show.

Angel or demon. Protection or chaos. The choice is yours each morning.

SHOP THE ST. LEVANTIUS TALISMAN PENDANT

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Inside the Artroom is a series exploring the makers, myths, and methods behind Alchemy’s handcrafted gothic jewelry. Each piece tells a story. This is where those stories begin.