Our plant world — trees, shrubs, crops, herbs, grass, even so-called weeds — are much more than medicine. They are, in many ways, Earth’s cardiovascular system: absorbing carbon dioxide, sending it through their veins, and transmitting outward to the rest of us as oxygen. Their bodies are what give the rest of us sweet, breatheable air.
Without their veins doing their work, our own would not survive.
So perhaps it’s fitting that a gemstone that takes one of its names from the blood of a religious figure of some 2,000 years ago and counting should, by that very name, evoke this natural phenomenon.
And since we focused last week on picture jasper, a gemstone unknown to most people but especially well-suited to the work of Native artisans, I though perhaps today would be a good day to explore another stone from the same family of minerals: a type of jasper known as bloodstone.
Last week, we noted that jasper is a form of chalcedony, sometimes called microcrystalline quartz. As I noted then, it doesn’t look much like what most people envision when they think of quartz, with translucent appearance and terminated crystal form. the microcrystalline mineral structure of jasper is coarser, grainier, and thus it manifests as an opaque stone, and one that appears in more conventionally rock-like shapes. As I also noted then, jasper, which comes in near-countless varieties, greatly resembles agate, which appears in equally diverse colors and forms. But agate is typically banded in particular patterns, and is a bit translucent. It’s difficult to find translucence in jasper, save with exceptionally thin cutting and cabbing and holding it to the light, and while some forms of the stone may have a banded appearance, others contain dots and orbs and whorls and blotches and a riot of colors and matrix shapes.
Bloodstone jasper (conventionally known simply as bloodstone, and how I will henceforth refer to it here) usually manifests in shades of green with dark reddish matrix inclusions. That is not, however, a hard and fast rule, and we’ll see examples of some unusual shades and patterning below.
Bloodstone has another name, too: heliotrope. That word derives from similar words in ancient Greek and Latin, with similar meanings— i.e., to orient oneself toward the sun. It’s the name of a flower, as well, one with brilliant purple petals that does indeed turn its face to the sun to absorb its warmth and light. But the flower looks nothing like the stone, in either shape or color.
And so, we use the name bloodstone, one that seems to fit it with greater accuracy. It comes with its own mythos, of course, and while it may not be one to which we personally subscribe, it makes for a far more interesting story.
I’ve written about it here before:
The name comes from the early Christian Church, perhaps during the days of the Roman Empire, but certainly by the time of the Crusades, when European invaders wore it as a protective talisman. Because of its deep green color shot through with lines and and patches and droplets of brick red, someone decided that it looked like the drops of Christ’s blood, fallen to the green grass covering the earth below the cross at Golgotha, and named it the Bloodstone. It became a stone sacred to some members of the Church, and was still worn as symbol of Christ’s supposed protection throughout the Middle Ages. For indigenous cultures on this side of the world, it has no such associations, but it remains a beautiful stone that can be found occasionally in Indian jewelry.
It is this early Christian symbology that puts me in mind of natural life-supporting systems, of the cardiovascular functions of Earth and of us: of the blood that courses through our veins, carrying the oxygen that permits breath and life; of the blood that dripped from the veins of a martyred leader onto the trees and shrubs and plants and grass below; of those plants that likewise carry oxygen, sending it outward to support the rest of life on this world.
But not all bloodstone appears in the traditional red-on-green range of colors like those in the ring at the top of this post.
When I last discussed this particular gemstone, I did so in part in the context of the photo shown immediately above: one of the pieces in Wings’s signature Mona Lisa series, this one commissioned by a dear friend for someone dear to her. She had no preference as to stone, trusting in Wings to create something appropriate for someone she loves. As the piece took shape, this became the stone belonged in the setting. As I said last year, while discussing stones that are sometimes mistaken for turquoise:
There is also another form of jasper, called Bloodstone, that is sometimes mislabeled as turquoise. It’s a dark green form of jasper, usually the color of jade, but opaque rather than translucent. Sometimes it’s a darker green, like the color of a raw emerald. And once in a great while, it’s so dark that it goes beyond teal to nearly blue in certain lights, like the large cabochon in the necklace shown above. In that particular case, the color was such a deep teal that it took careful examination to identify the stone at all. It clearly was not turquoise, of course, but it was not quite black enough to be either onyx or jet, either. Held to the light, some minute translucence appeared around the edges of the cabochon, and it became clear that it was actually a teal color, closer to the navy blue than the emerald green end of that spectrum. . . . It also bore the telltale red inclusions that give the stone its name, if in very small wisps.
And it did take some work to identify precisely what this stone was. In the photo, it no doubt appears to be an opaque black, rather like lightly-polished jet. For those with high-resolution screens that capture color with precision, its teal hue might be apparent. But what you cannot see because it is set in the bezel is what the stone looks like when held up to the light. That midnight shade comes clear as a deep and dusty green-blue, and the light catches the single brick-red streak across its face.
It was a bit of a novelty to see bloodstone in such a deep hue. That would turn out to be nothing compared the surprise we got when we examined closely a pair of matched cabochons that he purchased last year.
These earrings were a pair he made late last year, the only one of their kind. Their name was Snow at Twilight, a fitting metaphor for the season at the time. As I said when I posted them:
Sometimes a stone captures a natural phenomenon so vividly, so clearly, that it names itself. And so it is with these earrings, built around a matched pair of bloodstone jasper cabochons patterned like a flurry of snowflakes, so deeply-hued that the stones’ combined red-and-green hues manifest in the violet shades of the gathering dusk.
The patterning really did look like snowflakes, the kind of big, thick, heavy flakes we get in the middle of a full-on winter storm. But the colors! The red and green of the bloodstone were only just barely visible when held to the light; these particular slabs apparently were extracted from a deposit with at least one other co-occurring mineral, one whose color saturated the others and converted them from blood red and emerald green to what appears, at first glance to the naked eye, to be violet and lilac, plum and lavender. it was an object lesson in refraction of light and its influence on perception.
It was also one of the most popular pairs of earrings he’s ever made. They sold, literally, within minutes of my having posted them here on the site . . . and we received wave after wave of inquiries from clients hoping they might simply be mislabeled and in fact still be available.
They were one of a kind. But the next time we replenish his inventory of gemstones, we’ll look for more exotically-tinted bloodstone cabochons like these.
Because they don’t merely send oxygen symbolically through the bodies of our Earth and other beings.
They likewise travel the veins of Wings’s art, allowing it to expand its breath and reach.
~ 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 owner.
