Today’s gem is fully a stone of summer, of the shades and shapes of the lush green fruits of the earth, adorned with trailing ribbons of the earth itself: gaspeite.
A part of the calcite family, gaspeite is a carbonate mineral with one very unusual quality: It is rich in nickel. It is considered a “rare” mineral, although not, as gemstones go, a spectacularly costly one. It’s found mostly in environments with substantial aridity, formed through a process known as paragenesis: Deposits of nickel-heavy sulfide minerals, including millerite, nickeline, pentlandite, and violarite, weather over time and are transformed into a carbonate form.
Gaspeite sometimes resembles serpentine, in both color and matrix, and in one reported deposit in Australia, it is said to form in deposits containing serpentine. It is, however, a distinct mineral, one containing not only nickel, but also iron, magnesium, carbon, and oxygen. The nickel gives gaspeite its distinctive color, which ranges from chartreuse to the fruit-inspired colors of apple green to lime green to dustier seafoam shades.
Most of the gaspeite used in gemwork tends to look like the cabochons shown immediately above, manifesting in various shades and intensities of apple green. Smaller pieces are sometimes nearly free of matrix, giving the stones a bright electric appearance. Most gaspeite contains at least some matrix, however — usually swatches and streaks in the warm golden brown of the earth itself. A few years ago, Wings created a pair of earrings for a friend who commissioned them as a gift for her grandmother, who has passed the century mark in a long and wonderful life. I have not been able to find the photo of them, but they were beautiful asymmetrical teardrops of brilliant green, somewhere on the spectrum between Granny Smith apples and ripe limes, shot through with wispy bits of golden bronze.
Occasionally, however, gaspeite will appear with a darker matrix, a brownish-gray to charcoal color that, to the naked eye in natural light, often looks black. It is this form of gaspeite that Wings has used more frequently, and while I suspect that the market sees it as less “pure” and less desirable because it doesn’t fit the classic profile of the stone, it’s a form that we both love.
Several years ago, he came into possession of two pairs of large matched teardrop cabochons in this form, and he turned them into earrings. One set appears at the top of this post, each stone paired with three small round onyx cabochons to pick up the matrix color. The second pair is shown immediately below, accented with sterling silver ingot:
Like the onyx, the silver ingot picks up the gray-black hues in the matrix. However, if you look closely at the photo of each pair, you’ll see wisps and whorls of the warmer bronze and brown shades. This pair reminded me of Easter eggs: the spring green of fresh new grass and leaves, marbled with delicate bits of rich earthy soil. They went to a dear friend whose tradition is rooted in just such European Pagan symbolism.
Some gaspeite is a turquoise pretender, a mimic of sorts. As part of our Turquoise Tuesday series last year, we looked at the Skystone in all of its major manifestations, including the electric green forms found largely in some areas of Nevada. Orvil Jack, Carico Lake, and Damele turquoise are all notable examples, types of turquoise with, generally speaking, a heavy zinc content that provides the stones’ brilliant lime green color. Like gaspeite, the stones range from chartreause to seafoam, with some of the highest grade (and most popular and desirable) sitting at the apple and lime green points along the spectrum. As a result, it is sometimes used in Native jewelry as a substitute for turquoise — for example, a strand of solid apple-green beads made with gaspeite will be pricey, but will not be nearly as expensive as the same beads made with Orvil Jack turquoise (something unlikely to be found at any cost, considering Orvil Jack’s scarcity). Some Native artisans and smiths use it as a focal point, either as beads or in larger cabochon form; more often, you’ll find it used as an accent, as one element in a multi-stone inlay work or strand of beads. As you can see in the collection of cabochons immediately below, the color can be widely variable, and it’s easy to see how it can be mistaken for turquoise:
Although it’s now used semi-regularly by Native jewelry artisans, particularly here in the southwest, gaspeite has, as far as we know, no particular spiritual connotations for our peoples. There may, of course, be symbolism attached to it for the peoples indigenous to the part of Canada where it is most frequently found, but here, the symbolism lies in its beauty and color. Among New Age “crystal traditions,” it’s said to be a stone of healing and the heart, of love and friendship. Of course, most of those same sources erroneously assert that it is an “Australian stone,” completely ignoring the fact that it is found in small deposits the world over, and that its very name comes from Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, where one of its most significant deposits was newly [re]discovered in the 20th Century.
Despite being named for the Quebec deposit, gaspeite is actually found worldwide. Perhaps the largest (and certainly the most numerous) known deposits are in Western Australia, with a couple additional ones in Tasmania. It’s found in multiple areas of Africa, including South African, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. In Europe, it’s found in locations that stretch from the Catalonia region of Spain to Italy and Greece, northward to Germany, and thence east to Bosnia And Herzegovina. And although most sources identify the Quebec deposit as the only one in North America, there have been reports of findings in Michigan, as well.
At the moment, Wings’s inventory of stones contains only the small gaspeite cabochons shown in the two groups above . . . and possibly the large cabochon shown below:
It’s a large stone that he’s had for years, so long now that he no longer remembers when, where, or how he acquired it. It is not turquoise, and it bears all the hallmarks, in color, feel, and opacity, of gaspeite, but with the spiderweb matrix common to much turquoise. I suspect that the matrix is what originally attracted his attention, highly unusual in appearance for gaspeite, delicate and bold simultaneously and wholly beautiful. In actuality, it’s a light apple-green shade, the matrix a dusky black that seems to combine tints of sepia and charcoal into a new and distinctly webbed hue.
It’s an exemplar of the unique beauty of gaspeite: embodying the fruits of the earth, in the green of new life and the warm tones of the rich dark soil itself.
~ Aji
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