Yesterday, we looked at conceptualizations of lines and the spaces between them by way of Wings’s other medium, photography. Today, we continue with the themes of lines and interstices via his primary one, the silverwork — specifically, through an exploration of today’s featured gemstone, one whose identity is bound up inextricably with lines and bands and the contrasting spaces they create. I’m speaking, of course, of tiger’s eye.
So what is tiger’s eye?
First, it’s one whose name is rendered in any of three ways: 1) tiger’s eye, possessive; 2) tiger eye, singular; and 3) tigers eye, partially plural. We consider the first form to be most grammatically correct, and that is how you will see it spelled here.
Tiger’s eye is a member the quartz family of minerals, but one that manifests in a form very different from what most people think of as “quartz.” It appears (note the word choice there) to be entirely opaque, whereas one of the hallmarks of ordinary quartz is its translucence. It also manifests in multiple hues — usually, although not always, a spectrum of shades of the same base color — a product of its chatoyance. We covered the phenomenon known as chatoyance here a few weeks ago, when we explored moonstone:
It’s a French word, pronounced sha-twah’-yahnse, with a typically nasalized final syllable. It comes from the word chat, French for “cat,” and refers more or less literally to the “cat’s-eye” effect of the stones. English definitions have evolved into meanings such as “to change in lustre or in color,” or, with regard specifically to gemstones, especially cabochons, “to reflect a single streak of light. . . .” It’s much like looking into the eyes of a cat when an external source of light is trained directly on them.
We’ve introduced you to tiger’s eye already, in a post last year. Then, I walked through the current mineralogical dispute over the stone’s origins. I use the word “origins” in a very literal sense: The controversy arose not over how it came to be called tiger’s eye, but rather, how the stone itself is formed. As I wrote then:
It’s a poetic name for a metamorphic mineral: one created through external heat and pressure. There are now two theories of creation, one the long accepted conventional wisdom, the other new and considered controversial. To my mind, neither negates the other; both are possible, and both hint at the animation of new ways of existing brought about by outside stressors.
The accepted theory as to how tiger’s eye develops is one of pseudomorphism: the process by which a new and foreign substance flows into, over, around, and through gaps in another substance, overtaking it; when the space’s original occupant dies off or otherwise disintegrates, the new substance is left in the shape of the old. We’ve encountered this phenomenon already; it occurs with Carico Lake and Lone Mountain turquoise, where over eons, the turquoise is forced into the spaces of clamshells; when the clam itself died and its shell
dissolved, millennia ago, the turquoise remained in its place, unaltered as turquoise, but in the shape of the clamshell. Tiger’s eye has long been thought to form in a similar manner, as a form of quartz that has overtaken a different mineral, fibrous crocidolite (also known as blue asbestos), dissolving and replacing it entirely as a pseudomorph. (The blue-gray stone called hawk’s eye is thought to be an example of incomplete pseudomorphism, where the blue crocidolite has not entirely dissolved, leaving the chatoyant bands of quartz and asbestos layered and merged together.)
There is a relatively new theory as to tiger’s eye’s formation, apparently dating to 2003. Under this framework, the process that occurs is not pseudomorphism, but something that manifest more like the incomplete version described above with regard to hawk’s eye, above — or like the simple formation of matrixed stones like turquoise: via metamorphic pressure, the quartz simply moves into open veins and seams and cracks in what will become the host rock, and the result is a compound of the host mineral and the new quartz, creating the banding effect seen in tiger’s eye.
As I said, neither negates the other. It seems to me entirely possible to have the mineral form either way, leaving a range of “purity” of tiger’s eye quartz, for lack of a better way of putting it. The part of the stone’s origin story that fascinates me is present in either version, and it is the fact of the external pressures creating an animating force that turns what was already there into something new.
The dispute over the stone’s origins also seems to me to make it especially well suited to Wings’s work: While experts with a professional stake in one origin story or the other argue over which is right, each insisting that it must occur in only the one way they believe, he takes the stones, midwifed from the earth by ancient and elemental forces, and turns them into works of art infused with the stones’ actual spirit. It’s a survival technique as old as our peoples, one of the reasons why we are still here.
As also noted above, there are a couple of different forms of the stone, with slightly different names. Tiger’s eye most frequently appears in shades of brown, with chatoyant bands that range from shades of brown to metallic gold and bronze hues to, occasionally, a pearly near-white. Some tiger’s eye, however, manifests in shades of yellow or red, with the yellow sitting along the gold-colored point of its spectrum and the red along the brick- or blood-red point of its own. The bands on these forms likewise take their basic color range from the parent shade of the stone in which they appear, but in some cabochons, the darker parent stones and bands can appear nearly black to the naked eye, while some of the lighter ones assume a gray color that ranges from blued leaden shades to pewter to pale silver. And as is clear from the cabochons in the photos accompanying this section, tiger’s eye and hawk’s eye frequently contain feathery rutiles, needle-like inclusions common to most quartz, but in this form, they take on a fluid quality not usually found in ordinary quartz.
There is, however, one rarer form of tiger’s eye that appears in unusually colorful dress: the blue form. It’s often given a wholly separate name: hawk’s eye, although it doesn’t really look much like the eye of an actual hawk, in either color or effect. Presumably, it refers to the darker color of the raptor’s eyes, a deep, almost liquid pool of black, although without the chatoyance of a cat’s eyes. And hawk’s eye is indeed chatoyant, in some highly unusual ways. Remember when I said, above, that tiger’s eye “appears to be entirely opaque,” and hinted that I would contradict that statement later? This is where it happens.
Hawk’s eye appears in shades of blue, ranging from deepest midnight to a silvery blue-gray. Like tiger’s eye, it appears at first glance to be an opaque stone. Hold it up to the light, though, and you’ll be rewarded with a very different effect: You’ll be able to see through much of the stone. This is true of tiger’s eye, too, of course, but generally speaking, you’ll only be able see the translucence at the edges of the cabochon. With hawk’s eye, the translucence is sometimes evident throughout the cabochon.
Hawk’s eye also differs from ordinary tiger’s eye in another way: While its chatoyant bands usually manifest in shades of the stone’s parent color, this is not always the case. It’s possible to find deep blue hawk’s eye with chatoyant bands in shades of yellow, too. You’ll get to see an example here tomorrow.
One other variant form of tiger’s eye exists, known as tiger iron. It is classified, in a sense, as an “impure” form of the gemstone, because it contains more than simple quartz and crocidolite. Tiger iron is a compound metamorphic iron rock, one that contains the same bands of compressed quartz found in tiger’s eye, but combined with bands of jasper (usually red jasper) and hematite. The resulting gemstone contains bold horizontal bands arrayed in more even and regular patterns, and appear in flame-colored combinations of fiery reds and golds and browns, the bands often flecked with patches of related hues. Some “experts” insist that tiger iron is simply a mineral now known as Pietersite [because it was “discovered” (and you know that word doesn’t mean what they think it means) by a white man of European ancestry whose surname was Pieter, in Namibia in 1962]. It’s not. Pietersite has a different chemical composition, chalcedony combined with fibrous amphiboles of various other co-occurring minerals, and it has a swirling, largely opaque appearance that resembles agate or particularly colorful forms of petrified wood and other fossilized organic substances.
Tiger’s eye has reportedly been found in the earth of six of the world’s seven continents — all of them save Antarctica. In North America, both the U.S. and Canada are sources of the gemstone, but Australia and parts of Africa and Asia possess the most significant known deposits.
As far as we know, none of the forms or colors of tiger’s eye has any particular symbolic associations or significance for Native cultures; it’s simply a beautiful stone. In cultures indigenous to other parts of the world, however, tiger’s eye was reportedly thought to symbolize fierceness and bravery, and thus was said to be prized by warriors as a talisman to bolster their courage in battle. In modern New Age-y traditions, tiger’s eye is regarded as a bringer of money and wealth, while hawk’s eye is regarded by the same traditions as a tool of divination and “astral projection.” None of these interpretations apply to our peoples, of course.
Wings uses it mostly as an accent stone, particularly in his signature series of pins, the Warrior Woman, the Pueblo, and the Spirit Horse. He chose it specifically for a piece commissioned by a friend, a fellow horsewoman. It was a gift for a friend of hers, in memory of the friend’s recently-departed horse. He created a specially-designed Spirit Horse pin, with a tail made of the actual horsehair of the woman’s horse; it appears in the photo immediately above. When it was time to choose the gemstone, he settled on tiger’s eye. It turned out to be an inspired selection: It wound up honoring the memory of woman’s last horse, but also paying tribute to her current one. Both animals were brown, one bay in color and the other the reverse. The particular tiger’s eye cabochon he chose appeared light brown with dark banding on one side; dark brown with light striations on the other.
Besides pins, he also occasionally uses the small tiger’s eye cabochons in earrings and the occasional bracelet. It’s not a terribly expensive stone, but it’s much more affordable and readily available in cabochons of small sizes. At the moment, we have only one such item remaining in inventory: a bangle. It appears in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site under the Gifts collection of bangle bracelets. Its detailed description, however, appeared elsewhere, in an earlier post:
It all begins, as they say, at the beginning: in that period of stasis, that sense of limbo, that comforting but not really comfortable balance that sustains living, but little else.
[Emergence] sometimes requires pressure from without to get things moving. It requires animation.
. . .
But it is in the very stones themselves, placed atop a precious metal formed and shaped as this strand is, that I see the stirrings of new life, of movement.
And here, placed on this particular strand of delicate sterling silver wire, those stones do seem animated. The wire itself is shaped via external pressures, forced into measured facets that gleam in the light, caught by the stones’ own light and fire and enhancing their natural chatoyance, that cat’s-eye quality that gives them their bisected, marbled shine. The wire is its own path, one of full of beautiful distractions and diversions that make the journey longer and sometimes more difficult, yet provide their own animating effects that give fuller life (and lessons) to the whole experience.
It’s beauty created under extreme pressure, born in heat and the weight of heavy burdens carried over long distances of time. It is, to borrow language from our brother and sister Indians from lands on the other side of the earth, an endless cycle of birth and rebirth.
It is the animation that sets us on the next step of our journey.
Animation bangle bracelet: Sterling silver; tiger’s eye. $325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Once in a while, though, there will be an exception to the usual size. He acquired a collection of larger tiger’s eye and hawk’s eye cabs a few years ago, a gift from a dear friend. The larger ones shown a little further above are all a part of that collection. There is a fourth, a hawk’s eye cabochon, that he has used in a showpiece completed only this morning; we’ll be bringing you images of that piece here tomorrow. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a beautiful example of the translucence and color that can be found in hawk’s eye.
And even though it’s not a part of our own traditions, it’s perhaps a visionary way to see the gifts of the soil anew, through other eyes: from the vantage point of our animal relations of earth and sky.
~ 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.
