Things I learned while looking up other things, 2024.09.11
Dear friends,
There was a truly epic opal in the Dearest newsletter this week; even if you think you don’t care about jewelry (and I put myself in that category, most of the time) you should really check it out. For a long time I thought that there was an ancient superstition that opals were unlucky (or at least unlucky to purchase for yourself) but it turns out that, in the West at least, the idea of opals being unlucky only dates back to (possibly) Sir Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein, where a mysterious character is reduced to a heap of ashes (!) after her opal talisman is sprinkled with holy water.
An opal was (somewhat) unlucky for the Roman senator Nonnius, who (according to Pliny) went into exile rather than give up an opal to Marcus Antoninus.
The (sadly un-footnoted) The Magic and Science of Jewels and Stones (heavy on the magic, light on the science) tells us that opals are good for eyesight (wrapped in a bay leaf, by preference), were thought to have fallen from the sky during thunderstorms, and that (perhaps) the association of opals with bad luck came from their popularity in Venice during the Black Death (does a thing have any superstitions, really, if there’s not one attributed to the Black Death?). Supposedly, opals are more brilliant when warm, sick people have fevers, so the brilliance of the opals (which departed when their wearer died) was considered a harbinger of death.
Napoleon gave Josephine an enormous (five ounce!) black opal, named the Burning of Troy, which disappeared after Josephine’s death, reappeared in Vienna in the early 1900s, and then disappeared again at the start of WWII. (If you have it, I’d love to see a picture. I won’t tell anyone.)
If superstitions pertaining to natural gemstones are a little too fuzzy for your liking, you might be interested in those pertaining to engraved gems. Works of lapidaria, in the Middle Ages, would list the images and their benefits—for example, if you wore (on your right hand) a stone engraved with a bird, with an olive-leaf in its bill, cut on pyrites and set in silver, you would “be invited to every feast, and those present shall not eat, but shall gaze upon thee” (which sounds really uncomfortable).
There is so much opal lore that I could make every link in this issue opal-related, but then I couldn’t tell you that evidently Piet Mondrian didn’t like to look out the window at trees when he was in a restaurant. Or that when the letterform of the letter ‘g’ has both the top and bottom closed, it’s called a ‘binocular’ form. And did you know that the numbers people choose when asked to choose a series of random numbers can be used as a biometric identifier, or that Harriet Martineau might have influenced Charles Darwin by introducing him the works of Thomas Malthus?
Okay, last link: “Over a fourteen-day period, all of Landy’s personal belongings were systematically destroyed by a team of ten operatives using a constructed facility modelled on a material reclamation factory.”
Stay well!
Your friend,
Erin