481g agate skull – Angel & Demon

In Nineveh, as the Book of Tobit recounts, which presumably arose around 200 B.C., there lived a devout man who buried the slain of his people, even when he had to flee before the king. One night Tobit slept outdoors. Bird droppings got into his eyes, a white veil settled over them, and he became blind. At the same time, in distant Media lived the young Sarah, who had been married seven times. Each of her bridegrooms had the demon Asmodeus killed on the wedding night. Then God sent the archangel Raphael, whose name means “God heals.” In the guise of a companion named Azarias he accompanied Tobit’s son Tobias on a long journey. When Tobias washed himself in the Tigris, a large fish leapt from the water and would have swallowed him. On Raphael’s instruction, Tobias caught it and took its heart, liver, and gall. When he later took Sarah as wife, he burned the heart and liver. The smoke drove Asmodeus to the far corners of Egypt, and Raphael pursued him and bound him there. At home Tobias rubbed his father’s eyes with the gall as a salve, and Tobit could see again. Only at parting did the companion reveal himself: He was Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who carry the prayers of the saints before God. This skull bears both sides of that story within it. Its right half radiates almost angelically in creamy, softly banded agate, which, even on contact, as a salve calms the hand. White and softly bluish bands run from the crown over the forehead to the jaw and lay themselves like a veil over the right eye. Further back on the right side of the skull lie concentric rings like a quiet, watchful eye. The left half, by contrast, is chaos. Its quartz sometimes looks as deep as three and a half centimeters. These insights appear suddenly and are ringed by chambers around them, each forming its own structure, each of a different purity and clarity. Here the veil has fallen: the left eye sees clearly, deep into the wilderness where the demon was banished. From below, the same arrangement spreads as veins or massive root balls extending in all directions, as if something were still bound down there. That agate and quartz meet in this skull tells the story of a single cavity in the rock. Agates form when silica-rich solutions fill such a cavity layer by layer from the edge toward the center. First bands of chalcedony grow, a lattice of microscopically fine quartz fibers. If the solution is low in silica, quartz crystallizes into large, distinct crystals, often only last, in the center of the cavity. The angelic, gentle half and the chaotic half thus consist of the same material, silicon dioxide. They differ mainly in how much of it the solution carried with it during formation. Thus balm and crystal chaos, angel and demon, have grown in this stone from the same source. Material: Banded agate transitioning to macrocrystalline quartz (partly milky, partly clear), with dark, branching inclusions Origin: Brazil Dimensions: 9.0 x 5.9 x 6.8 cm Weight: 481 g Special features: Two-phase skull: the right half consists predominantly of creamy white, softly banded agate, the left predominantly of quartz with chamber-like interior structure and insights up to about 3.5 cm depth; banding from crown over the right forehead and the right eye to the jaw as well as across the underside and the right occipital bone; concentric ring markings on the right side of the skull (rear area); dark, branched inclusions on the skull cap; occasional ocher to rust-colored iron oxide traces, e.g., at the right eyebrow and the jaw joint; fine, sometimes iron-oxide-tinted natural hairlines, e.g., at the right eyebrow, the right temple, and the back of the head

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