For today’s entry in our Jewels and Gems series, we turn to another member of the jasper family, one that manifests in patterns both diverse and unusually defined, seemingly random designs that nonetheless tend to appear with a certain regularity of form and shape. It’s a stone with a name I find beautiful, as well: It’s paintbrush jasper.
Fundamentally, it’s just one more in the seemingly infinite identities and names found in the extended jasper clan — all essentially the same quartz-based mineral, but with incredible genetic and environmental diversity, a mixture of co-occurring chemicals and minerals in the jasper host rock and a wide variety of external elemental influences all combining to create so-called “minor” gemstones of widely variable appearance. In its “paintbrush” form, those additional chemicals and minerals combine to create unique patterns that manifest in very specific ways.
Before we get tot he specifics of paintbrush jasper, it’s useful to revisit exactly what jasper is. Rather than paraphrase myself, I’ll simply reprise my earlier descriptions here:
[Jasper is] part of a much broader family tree: also a form of chalcedony, which is in turn a form of quartz, the earth’s second-most common mineral. Jasper is a cousin of chert, but where chert is functional, jasper tends to be frivolous. As I wrote here last year:
Jasper is a mineral in the quartz class; specifically, it’s a form of chalcedony. It is related to chert, a type of stone used by peoples ancient and not so ancient for knapping blades for use in tools and weapons.
Chert appears in plain form: an opaque substance with fairly uniform color, usually in a whitish, gray, or beige shade; it’s the sort of surface that one would tend to refer to as a “rock,” rather than a “stone.”
In its more colorful and variegated form, however, the same stone is known as “jasper,” and it comes in a dizzying array of patterns and hues. The most common shades range through the yellow-to-orange-to-red-to-brown section of the spectrum, followed by those in greenish shades of varying intensity (or lack thereof). Blues are more rare — rare in the sense they that are seldom found, not especially rare in terms of monetary value. Jasper also often appears with bold decorative patterns that occur naturally in the stone: spots and splotches; agate-like bands and plumes; matrices that create the appearance of landscape “pictures”; even dendrites, tiny fossilized once-living creatures. If you have a colorful banded or plumed stone and wondering whether it’s jasper or agate, hold it up to the light: If it’s translucent, it’s agate; if opaque, it’s jasper.
Jasper that is used in gemwork is stunningly diverse. Common varieties include bloodstone, a green so deep it is sometimes nearly blue, with a brick-red matrix that often appears in a drop-like pattern, hence the name; seafoam jasper, that usually appears in white or pastel shades, with round, puffy inclusions in a variety of colors that evoke the foam upon waves; and picture jasper, which is exactly what its name implies — a stone of wildly variable colors and matrices that appear to create their own picture, usually resembling a landscape.
Earlier this year, when we covered picture jasper specifically, I clarified some aspects of the stone’s crystal structure and appearance:
[J]asper [is] a form of microcrystalline quartz. Unlike other forms of those minerals, jasper is opaque. It’s virtually always multi-colored, and usually patterned, as well: Inclusions appear in the form of lines, waves, dots, swirls, orbs, clusters, and all sorts of geometric shapes. We’ve talked about jasper here before; some of it closely resembles agate, but it does not have agate’s translucence. And despite being part of the larger quartz family, it doesn’t appear in the sort of crystalline form common to ordinary quartz; its microcrystalline structure, much grainier, is what gives it its opacity. Jasper is found in all three types of rock — igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary — and it co-occurs with virtually every type of mineral, as well as some non-mineral materials such as coral and dendrites.
I said above that where its workhorse cousin chert is functional, jasper is frivolous. If frivolity might be defined as beauty, even as art, then paintbrush jasper certainly qualifies. Some insist that it is simply a variant of picture jasper, which we’ve highlighted here before; others regard it as its own stone. I think it’s possible for both to be true: It can be a type of the broader class of what might be termed “picture jaspers” without being picture jasper as that particular jasper variant is named. But because there is a type of jasper that is known formally as picture jasper that also manifests in very distinctive patterns and colors and mineralogical elements, and because this form of jasper manifests in equally distinctive but substantially different ways, we consider them to be two distinct variants.
There are a couple of theories about the origin of its name, and this disagreement is reflected in how the stone is named. You’ll see it written as “paintbrush jasper” and as “paint brush jasper,” the latter seemingly clearly a nod in the direction of the “art” theory of origin. According to this account, its name derives from the resemblances of its splotches and swirls and whorls to drops of paint and of its feathery lines that emanate from bands of color to the tips of an actual paintbrush.
This interpretation has given rise to one variant of the stone’s name: so-called Nature’s paintbrush jasper (sometimes rendered as four words instead of three, i.e., Nature’s paint brush jasper). There are two possible associations for this version of the name: the obvious one, in which the stone is viewed metaphorically as Nature’s canvas, on which, Pollack-like, she has flung lines and drops of paint; and one that is perhaps less so, referring to a specific plant. It is this latter possibility that links up with the other interpretation of the stone’s name.
There is a wild plant, one found all over Indian Country, known in English as Indian paintbrush. Our peoples have used it since time immemorial for many purposes: medicine and healing; adornment; art. In our various ways, it is given many names, but in the language of the broader society, it’s simply “Indian paintbrush.”
This form of jasper sometimes shares its name.
For the flowering plant, the name comes perhaps in part from the fact that some of our ancestors regularly used it as a pigment, sometimes for artistic purposes, sometimes as face and body paint. It may also be attributable to the shape of the blossoms themselves, long slender flaring petals collected together in a trumpet-like arrangement, much like the feathery bristles of an upright paintbrush.
The cabochon featured here today does not look much like the plant, true, but viewed metaphorically, it fits. In this particular instance, it’s also apt because it’s an exceptionally fine specimen, and one that, absent a commission for something else, is quite likely to be used in a big bold setting to personify a spirit being — a use that, in itself, is a form of traditional medicine.
This cabochon is actually slightly different in color than it appears here: earthy, yes, but cast with green — think what a blend of olive and seafoam touched with the color of pale sand might look like, and you’ve got a clear image of the color of this stone’s host rock.
You’ll notice a line that begins on the upper right, extending across almost to the center, then jutting sharply downward at a leftward diagonal. That type of line is known as breccia, common to jasper; it’s the Italian word for “breach,” and refers, quite literally, to breakage. You will often see brecciated jasper described as though its a wholly separate jasper variant, but in actuality, it simply refers to jasper that has manifested in a particular form: with lines of breakage, fine cleavages, that over time have “healed” — despite the fracture in the stone, it has remained in place over time on a geologic scale, and the powers of heat and pressure and erosion and other elemental forces have combined to “knit” the cloven pieces back together. The scar remains, but the stone is solid — an apt metaphor for a gem whose name is associated with a form of traditional medicine and healing.
If I’m right that Wings ultimately will use it as the focal point, the head and face, of a Corn Maiden or other katsina, it will be especially well-suited in both symbolic and literal terms, as a part of a spirit with powers of Medicine, with a geometric band around its face right where the eyes would be, in a style that has long been a hallmark of these spirits as evoked in Southwestern Native jewelry. And if you look closely at that band, you will see the feathery effect emanating from either side that gives the stone the “paintbrush” name, as well as a swirling floral look in the splotches that trace the band’s center.
Speaking of symbols and spirits, paintbrush jasper is one of those forms of the stone that is imputed by some [non-Native] “crystal” practitioners to possess certain powers. Some of these reportedly include security, stability, and a reputation as an “all-healer.” At least one such practitioner is spreading disinformation that is both disrespectful and dangerous (to say nothing of wrong), calling it “a sacred stone” “to Native Americans” (as though we’re all one unit), which it is not, at least to most of us, and that it is a stone of our “old ways,” which, again, is not the case for most (if not all) of us. This same source confuses the stone with magnesite, calling it “Crazy Horse.” They actually refer to “Wild Horse.” I’ve said this before, but let me repeat this yet again: THERE IS NO STONE CALLED “CRAZY HORSE.” This persistence in pretending to name things, people, animals, bands, objects, anything after the great warrior (or any Native icon) is dishonorable, and we refuse to indulge it. When people come looking for “Crazy Horse” stones, we make sure they leave knowing the proper name and type of mineral, and that the false name is rude and disrespectful.
For purposes of the stone we’re featuring here today, it most definitely has not been given a name stolen from any Native warrior or leader — indeed, it doesn’t even carry the name “Indian paintbrush.” The correct name is simply “paintbrush jasper,” and that is how it’s labeled here.
I mentioned above what I suspect Wings ultimately has planned for this stone — if, as I said, a client doesn’t fall in love with it and commission something else with it first. As with all of the stones we’ll be featuring between now and the end of the year, the ones that will be shown will be available for just such commission work, perfect gifts for the holidays; if it speaks to your spirit, simply inquire via the Contact form at left.
Otherwise, I suspect that we will one day, perhaps sooner rather than later, see this stone, a gem with metaphorical links to medicine and spirit, assume the mantle of one of the spirits themselves, one with its own powers of Medicine.
~ Aji
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