The old saying warns against being distracted by the glitter of shiny things, of cheap diversions lacking in value.
But there’s another way to interpret it, one perhaps at least as important but virtually always overlooked: a reminder that materials need not carry the price tag assigned by the dominant culture to possess great value and beauty.
Today’s featured gem is the perfect embodiment of both lessons: iron pyrite, which the rest of the world calls “fool’s gold.”
It’s a mineral of philosophers as much as fools, although most of the world flatters itself that it belongs only to the latter. It’s seen as a stone of suckers and swindles, one designed to rook the unwashed masses into wasting time and money on pursuit of a fake and fraud while those of greater status and skill devote their energies to the real thing.
Iron pyrite is not gold, true. It is common, also true. But pyrite is a material that occurs naturally in the earth of this place, a bit of shimmery beauty in the soil and slate of the local landscape. It is also one of the substances that gives the Skystone, that most indigenous of local gems, its own great beauty (and often, a higher monetary value). You can see an example of a spectacularly clear pyrite matrix in the rectangular cabochon pictured at the top of this post, and in the misty pewter gray drifting across the surface of the two cabochons in the image immediately below.
Despite its colloquial name, iron pyrite often does not look gold at all, but silver. It’s what gives a lot of turquoise, particularly that from Arizona, it’s shimmery matrix: those patches of silver, ranging from near-white to lead gray, are pyrite. It creates beautiful delicate webbed patterns and big bold metallic swatches against the background of the blue-green stone.
But what, exactly, is it?
Many people mistake it for a metal, in the lay sense of that term, but it’s actually a mineral: an iron sulfide, meaning that it’s a chemical compound composed of both iron and sulfur in varying amounts, with a chemical formula expressed as FeS2. It’s sometimes labeled “iron disulfide,” and among the sulfide minerals, iron pyrite is the most common. [There are other pyrite minerals, as well, all of them collectively known as the “pyrite group,” so classified based on their crystal structure. Our focus today is only on the most widely known and commonly occurring, iron pyrite.]
Iron pyrite is found in all three types of rock: igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary. It occurs in a range of temperature environments, and in terms of appearance, it manifests in a variety of forms. Some of the most interesting are cube forms, arising out of the host rock in perfect three-dimensional squares; you can see examples at the wiki page, here. It also appears in other shapes, some overtly geometric, others less so. It usually forms in relatively small amounts, but its occurrence is widespread.
Many sources refer to iron pyrite as “brassy” in appearance, and it is true that some of it is vaguely yellowish in color, but most of it doesn’t actually look like the bright golden-yellow that the word “brass” brings to mind for most people. It’s a paler, washed out version of the color, and it often appears to contain no yellow at all, looking more like silver, tin, or lead. Of course, it’s best known for its more derisive label, “fool’s gold,” a reference to miners misled by its color and appearance into thinking they’d struck it rich. However, pyrite does frequently occur with gold, particularly in so-called Carlin-type sedimentary deposits (named, as it happens, for the old Carlin Mine in Nevada, where turquoise is also found). Some pyrite from such sources also contains not-insignificant traces of actual gold in some nuggets.
I said earlier that pyrite is an exceptionally common mineral, and it is. It’s found worldwide; it would not surprise me to learn that it appears on all continents, although to my knowledge, no one has definitively stablished its presence in Antarctica . . . yet. But here in North America, there are abundant sources in the U.S. alone: Unusual and variable crystal forms occur in both Ohio and Pennsylvania; large specimens are found in Leadville, Colorado (home of turquoise mining operations covered here previously); and in a couple of different mining districts in Utah. In South America, Peru is home to multiple deposits that are said to produce specimens of extraordinary quality. In Europe, both Spain and Italy boast what are said to be crystals of similarly phenomenal quality, if of different shapes and structures. And in africa, a deposit was reportedly only recently found in Tanzania.
The word “pyrite” comes from the Greek word that, when translated into the alphabet we use, is rendered pyr, meaning “fire.” In ancient times, this word gave rise to another, rendered pyritēs, meaning “of fire,” a label given to the various stones and mineral substances that were used for igniting sparks. It was an apt label; pyrite was a literal ignition source for early firearms such as the flintlock and, especially, the wheellock.
In ancient times, pyrite was used in a process called heap leaching, in which the mineral was literally piled into a heap and left exposed to the elements, allowing it to weather. The weathering produced an acidic substance as a runoff — the leachate — which was used to make iron sulfate. By the 1400s, this process had been adapted to produce sulfuric acid, and some 400 years later, it was the most common method of sulfuric acid production.
Today, pyrite still finds wide use in industrial applications. It is to this day a part of the process of making sulfuric acid, and is also used to produce sulfur dioxide, utilized by the paper industry. It’s also important to the production of semiconductors, and is used in the manufacture of some lithium batteries, a type now in widespread use in microelectronics and microcomputing technologies, including smartphones and tablets. Around a century ago, pyrite was the substance of choice for so-called “crystal detectors” in radio receivers, and is found even today crystal radios of the sort popular in the early 1900s. Today, it is reportedly under consideration by photovoltaic (PV) solar cell manufacturers as a possible cost-saving material for use in PV solar panels.
And, of course, pyrite has an ancient and now a more recent history in the making of jewelry. In the latter half of the 19th Century, a substance that came to be known as marcasite became fashionable in the production of jewelry. It was a shiny, silvery substance, widely available and without the high price tag of silver, and its less highly polished finish was well-suited to the “antiqued” look popular in the jewelry of the era: understated in terms of metallic flash, yet susceptible to use in highly elaborate settings and designs. Marcasite jewelry saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, and is a regular player in the production of so-called “steampunk” jewelry, fashionable over the last decade or so. It is, however, a bit of a misnomer: There is a mineral called “marcasite,” as well, but ironically, “marcasite” jewelry contains no actual marcasite.
Among our peoples’ more elemental traditions of jewelry-making and adornment, it can be found in bead form, or as a natural accent. As noted above, it is iron pyrite that gives much American turquoise its beautiful matrix, whether dark spiderwebbing or bold metallic patches that look like glints of gold and silver. An example of the latter appears in the earrings shown immediately above, where silvery mica-like sheets glow from the surface of each stone. Iron pyrite occurs in American turquoise from virtually all geographic regions (including that found in northern Mexico), but it is most common
in turquoise from the mines of Arizona. It is perhaps most obvious in Morenci turquoise, the brilliant sky-blue nuggety stone like that shown in the pendant at left; it is the substance that gives it the black puts and whorls in the stone’s surface. But it is found regularly in stone mined at Sleeping Beauty and Turquoise Mountain, and it is the material that provides the bright black webbing in high-grade Kingman turquoise, like that found immediately below. In the light of the photo, it looks nearly maroon in color, but to the naked eye in natural light, the webbing looks jet black.
But iron pyrite can be used in jewelry on its own, in its more natural state — one wholly apart from that of marcasite, which involves processing by modern technology. Pyrite nuggets are beautiful entirely on their own, bold and textured and glowing like chunky bits of the light of the sun itself. Wings has pyrite nugget beads that he uses in beadwork, such as that found in his new collection of coil bracelets, and they have already found their way into two of them.
The first is one that is priced a bit higher than most of his coil bracelets, simply because of its sheer size and volume of stones. It contains a full five strands of big bold chinks of teal-colored turquoise, lightly polished free-form nuggets that are nonetheless so smooth and silken they feel almost wet. In this piece, lengths of turquoise are interspersed with shorter lengths of iron pyrite beads, a choice inspired by the presence of pyrite matrix in these same Skystone beads. From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Hoops of Earth and Sky Coil Bracelet
They say that all of life is a sacred hoop, but there are more elemental hoops that link earth and sky and sky around us, holding the world in their protective embrace. The peoples to whom this land was given have always known this; it’s why they find protection in the Skystone. Here, dozens of polished glossy Skystone nuggets trace a pattern of five spiraling hoops, bright turquoise jewels in graduated sizes, all strung together along a length of memory wire and interspersed with chunks of the same pyrite that gives them their mysterious dark-webbed matrix. At the center of the coil, a tiny turquoise fetish in the form of the hump-backed bear adds the power of Medicine to the stones’ protective qualities. Joint design by Wings and Aji.
Stainless steel; turquoise; iron pyrite
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
In this piece, the pyrite is an accent, designed to pick up its counterpart in the matrix of the turquoise beads, and to add a little flash and fire to the overall look. But sometimes, a little glitter needs to take a more prominent role, as it did in one of his most recent coils, completed only ten days ago. From its description in the same gallery:
Taking Flight Coil Bracelet
Some call it the phoenix; others, the firebird; still others, a being with no given name. It is a symbol of metamorphosis, of rebirth, of freedom of spirit. Wings captures it here and then sets it free, spiraling upward into the air on a coil of earth and fire. Four small faceted garnet beads refract the light from either end; rectangular beads of earthy and colorful jasper, named for the great land-bound cat, alternate with nuggets of fiery iron pyrite. At the center, the small wingéd spirit, summoned from polished elk antler with inlaid eyes of jet, takes flight to soar above the world. Joint design by Wings and Aji.
Stainless steel; garnet; leopard-skin jasper; iron pyrite; elk antler
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
For us, iron pyrite is simply a beautiful mineral, one well-suited to jewelry and adornment. But for “crystal practitioners,” it’s been assigned a deeper meaning — or, rather, meanings, plural. Some regard it as a stone useful for boosting one’s energy or overall health; others, for boosting one’s confidence. Some consider it an all-healer of sorts, good for the immune system and as proof against colds and environmental toxins. Still other contend that it can do everything from repairing damage to one’s DNA and to one’s spirit to permitting the holder to see the truth in any situation.
It’s a lot to place upon such a modest mineral, one that is both common and commonly mistaken for something society perceives to have far greater value and subsequently derided when its own identity is shown. But to me, that is perhaps the greatest symbolism, and the greatest lesson, of all: Pyrite is proof that beauty and value exist in the most common, everyday things. Their value is intrinsic to them, and need neither depend on nor fall by comparison to anything else, even when measured against those things that society has decreed are of paramount worth.
That’s something we all would do well to remember, whether the subject is pyrite or people. All that glitters may not be gold, but it still shines, and it is still beautiful.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
