605 g Chinese Amazonite – Worldly Body

At the beginning, as the scholar Xu Zheng reports in the 3rd century, heaven and earth lay inseparably intertwined like in an egg, and within it Pangu grew. When they separated, the Clear rose up and became the sky, the Turbid sank and became the earth, and Pangu grew between them, eighteen thousand years, until the sky was immeasurably high and the earth immeasurably deep. Then he died, and his body became the world: his breath became wind and clouds, his voice thunder, his left eye the sun, his right the moon. Hair and beard became stars, teeth and bones to metal and stone, his marrow to pearls and jade. This skull bears the traces of that transformation. Its face is white and bony, as if bone had just turned to stone. Where the surface opens, underneath lies something porous, spongy like the marrow inside a bone, pearl-white and delicately jade-green overlaid. Horizontal bands encircle the whole skull, layer by layer, like the layers of heaven and earth pulling apart from one another. At the back of the head, however, where a living person would grow hair, a galaxy swirl turns in concentric rings: threaded with blue nebulae and stardust, with occasional holes dark as the emptiness between the stars, and rust-red tails streaking through like comets. The rather rough, unvarnished surface makes this landscape tangible to the touch. In China, Amazonite is called 天河石, “Stone of the Milky Way,” and the Milky Way is what they call the heavens’ river. Its color is also a product of long time scales: it forms only when plagioclase feldspar contains traces of lead and water bound in the crystal lattice and is exposed to natural radiation that creates color centers. If any of this is missing, the feldspar remains without its blue-green. Thus this skull is bone, marrow, and Milky Way all at once—a piece that does not seek its place but takes it. Material: Amazonite (blue-green variety of microcline feldspar) with white, partly porous areas and iron-oxide coloring Origin: China Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.5 x 7.8 cm Weight: 605 g Special features: Horizontal banding around the skull; concentric ring drawing at the back of the head; partly naturally rough, open-pored surface with natural hollows; rust-red iron-oxide traces and fine brown veins; fine, natural pale vein above the back of the head

Estimation:€5

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