Today, we continue with our coverage of gemstones that are in Wings’s inventory of supplies, but for which we have no photos of finished works using them. In some cases, like today’s featured stone, he has used them in the past, but we simply failed to get photos of the pieces created with them (often, these were pieces made years ago, before we launched the Web site).
For this week’s feature, I’ve chosen a stone that is among my own personal favorites, manifesting as it does in a pure and perfect shade of blue. It also appears in other colors, in combinations of various hues, and even sometimes changes colors in the sunlight, just as the autumn landscape trades green robes for more vibrant ones before settling at last on a more sedate winter white.
Today’s gemstone is sometimes called “the poor man’s lapis,” but there’s nothing “poor” about it. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful mineral called sodalite.
Sodalite is found in igneous and metamorphic rock formations. It’s one of a class of minerals known as tectosilicates, a reference to their physical structure. Such minerals are divided four basic categories, which are then further subdivided into a variety of subgroups. Sodalite belongs to the category known as feldspathoid, which means that they possess some of the characteristics of feldspar, but are not identical to it; one significant difference is that their silica content is much lower than the levels found in feldspar. What it does possess in abundance is sodium, hence its name.
One subgroup of feldspathoid tectosilicates is the sodalite group, and it includes both the mineral that shares its name and a variety of other minerals, such as lazurite. Like sodalite, lazurite manifests in an intensely royal blue color, and both stones are sometimes mistaken for lapis lazuli, for azurite, and for each other.
However, while sodalite is best known as a brilliant indigo-hued gemstone, it also manifests in other forms and colors. Sodalite generally will fluoresce under certain kinds of light, but one variant known as hackmanite, a stone containing significant amounts of sulfur, is marked by a quality called tenebrescence: It changes color when exposed to sunlight. The colors differ depending on the stone’s point of origin, no doubt a reflection of the minerals in the host rock: For hackmanite from Ilímaussaq, Greenland (where it was first “identified” in contemporary terms), or from Mont Saint-Hilaire in Quebec, it appears in varying shades and intensities of purple when first pulled from the earth; after exposure to sunlight, the color fades to shades of white tinged with green or gray. Hackmanite mined in Afghanistan and Burma (Republic of Myanmar), however, demonstrates a near-opposite dynamic: It appear off-white when first mined, but exposure to sunlight turns it shades of pink, red, and purple. Ultraviolet light, particularly the short-wave form, speeds this process of color transformation, and under such light, some of it appears orangey in hue.
Other sodalite that does not share hackmanite’s powers of tenebrescence appears in a broader range of colors, from a translucent absence of color to shades of white, in greens and yellows and browns and grays, in a variety of pinks and purples, and, of course, its most common color: a brilliant, intense, almost pure blue. The blue form often appears with a mottled, speckled, webbed, or swirled matrix, which may manifest in whites and grays (much like denim lapis), or in shades of pink and rose. An example of the latter appears at the top of this post.
As noted above, sodalite was first described in contemporary terms (not “discovered,” despite how it’s usually worded) in the early part of the 19th Century, in a region of Greenland now known as the Ílimaussaq Intrusive Complex. On Greenland’s southwestern coast, it’s an alkalic intrusion of layered igneous rock that dates back some 1,000 to 1,600 million years ago. It is host some thirty different minerals, some of them classified as rare, and to various rare earth elements and valuable metals, as well. One of the minerals found there is sodalite.
In 1811, when a modern (European) person found the mineral there, it immediately became a “discovery.” Of course, various indigenous cultures the world over had traded the beautiful stone for millennia, using it for ornamental purposes. Even so, while its blue color was no doubt seen as remarkable in 1811, it would take another 80 years for it to be recognized by the white world for the beautiful ornamental gem that it is. That realization occurred with the [white man’s] “discovery” in 1891 of a truly enormous deposit of sodalite in what is now Bancroft, Ontario, in Canada.
Today, the finest material is thought to come solely from North America: first and foremost, the Ontario deposit; second, from the Quebec source; and then from a couple of sites in the U.S. — in a place called Magnet Cove in Arkansas and in Litchfield, Maine. There is also a small deposit in the Golden area of British Columbia, in the Ice River Complex.
Worldwide, it’s found on most continents in one form or another, but in small quantities: In South America, in Bolivia and Brazil; in Asia, in Burma; in Europe, in Greenland, of course, and also in Portugal, Romania, and Russia. In the form of transparent crystals, sodalite is also found in Italy, specifically in the ancient lava flows of Vesuvius, and in Africa, in Namibia, a source of many rare and beautiful minerals. In its hackmanite form, it appears mostly in Greenland and Quebec.
As is usually the case, sodalite has no specific meaning for our particular peoples beyond the ornamental; it’s a beautiful stone, one that manifests in unusually stunning shades of blue. For contemporary [non-Native] “crystal practitioners,” however, it’s imbued with multiple meanings, and the symbolism varies widely depending on whom you ask. Some describe it as a stone of “inner peace,” perhaps a nod to the supposed calming qualities of the color blue; others associate it with “truth,” an association that perhaps harkens back to old medieval and religious associations of the color blue with concepts of “fidelity” (usually in the broader sense, as in fidelity to God and king); still others with fundamental “idealism.” Some call it a stone of the “head and heart chakras,” combining rational mind with spiritual essence, while others regard it as providing motivation and “clearing energies.”
For us, it’s just a gift of the earth, a natural archetype of the color we call “blue.” Oddly, Wings currently has only one in inventory, the one shown above, and he’s had it for many, many years. It’s a small domed cabochon, about 1.25 centimeters in length, and a centimeter across at the widest point: very modest in size, but not at all understated in its intensity of color. I am not at all a “pink” person, and normally I steer as clear as humanly possible of clothes and jewelry in that color, but combined with this deep indigo, near-cobalt color? This one speaks to me. If it speaks similarly to you, he can incorporate it into a work designed specifically to suit your tastes and identity; simply inquire via the Contact form at left. And if you’d like something made with a larger cabochon, perhaps something more traditionally blue, with less variegated color inclusions, he can always order stones to suit.
It is perhaps fitting that it should be named for salt, this stone that manifests largely in the color of the seas. In this place, however, it looks like nothing so much as this high desert land’s stormy skies: in this particular case, great blue thunderheads backlit with the warm rose glow of the setting sun.
Judging from this week’s forecast, with snow already on the peaks and more perhaps due to fall here below, it’s a fitting stone for the current season.
~ Aji
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