1.34 kg orange calcite skull – Sun Wukong

At the summit of the Hill of Flowers and Fruits, a rock once split open, and out sprang a monkey from stone. Barely born, two golden rays shot from his eyes up into the sky. Thus begins the “Journey to the West,” one of the great classical novels of China. Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, became the boldest daredevil between heaven and earth. He called himself “Great Sage Equal to Heaven,” ate the peaches of immortality, and alone routed the heavenly host. As punishment, Laozi sealed him in his Oven of the Eight Trigrams to burn him to ashes. But the monkey crouched beneath the sign of the wind, for where wind blows, no fire burns. When Laozi opened the oven after forty-nine days, the monkey sprang out alive and toppled him. Only his eyes were forever inflamed by the smoke, and ever since they glow as fire eyes with golden pupils. He was, as one says in German, let off with a blue eye—indeed with two. Even this skull seems to have picked a quarrel with heaven and narrowly escaped. A gray-brown shadow lies over his right eye and across the temple: a violet, what one here calls a blue eye, and with it a spring flower. Everything else glows in a wild, innocent yet stormy orange. It is the color of the first spring blossoms that burst forth before all others out of impatience and anticipation, giving their beauty a distinctly own expression. The surface is polished and yet entirely crystalline. Every millimeter is its own crystal with its own smooth face, catching the light at its own angle, as if every grain had its own head. Calcite is difficult to pin down to a single form, just as the Monkey King with his seventy-two transformations: around eight hundred different crystal attires are known to belong to him. If you break it, it splits in three perfectly smooth directions and always falls into skewed little rhombohedral cubes. In this skull lie countless such grains packed densely, each grown in its own orientation, and each reflects light according to its own order. It is a stone full of stubborn individuality, tailor-made for someone who dares nothing. Material: Calcite (calcium carbonate), orange, coarse-crystalline Origin: Mexico Dimensions: 12.5 x 8.1 x 9.5 cm Weight: 1.34 kg Special features: Luminous orange calcite with clearly visible crystalline structure; gray-brown zone around the right eye and over the right temple (“blue eye”); natural color boundary between gray and orange zones across the mid-forehead; occasional dark specks (natural inclusions); Care: clean only dry or with clear water, as calcite is sensitive to acids

Estimation:€1

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