Pendant height/width: 63x15 mm. Chain: 600 mm. The electrolyte processing enables covering with gold, silver and copper. These three metals have their own meaning and value. LICH In modern fantasy fiction, a lich is a type of undead creature. Often such a creature is the result of a transformation, as a powerful magician or king striving for eternal life uses spells or rituals to bind his intellect to his animated corpse and thereby achieve a form of immortality. Liches are depicted as being clearly cadaverous, their bodies desiccated or even completely skeletal. Liches are often depicted as holding power over hordes of lesser undead creatures, using them as their soldiers and servants, and thus are a threat both individually and as leaders of belligerent forces. A lich should not be confused with a zombie. While both are reanimated corpses, the difference lies in their intellect. Whereas a zombie is incapable of distinguishing friend from foe (only living from undead), a lich is usually as intelligent as a regular human - if not more so. Various works of fantasy fiction, such as Clark Ashton Smith's "Empire of the Necromancers", had used lich as a general term for any corpse, animated or inanimate, before the term's specific use in fantasy role-playing games. The more recent use of the term lich for a specific type of undead creature originates from the 1977 Monster Manual for the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game by Gary Gygax. In Roman Catholicism and the Church of England, the word "lychgate" refers to a covered area at the entrance to the cemetery where the casket awaits the clergy before proceeding into the cemetery for proper burial, "lych" being a word meaning body or corpse derived from Old English. The underlying idea of eluding death by means of arcane study and black magic can be traced to Middle Eastern folklore, and the method of achieving immortality by placing one's soul in a phylactery, usually hidden in some vast fortress, is suggestive of the burial practices of Egypt. Eastern Slavic mythology includes stories of a powerful dark wizard or a demon, Koschei the Deathless, who evades death by having his fiery soul placed in the eye of a magical needle. The needle is inside an egg, which is inside a duck, which is inside a hare, which is locked in an iron chest placed at the roots of a great oak tree, which is in a hole in the ground on the magical island of Buyan. Koschei can be killed only by breaking the magical needle, which is much like the phylactery of a lich. This image is consistent with the modern interpretation of the lich.