578 g Pyrite Cthulhu Octopus Skull – Idol

Seven to eight inches tall was the idol that Inspector Legrasse brought to the annual meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis in 1908. So runs H. P. Lovecraft's tale in “The Call of Cthulhu.” The scholars saw a figure with a cephalopod-like head, its face a single mass of feelers. It crouched on a rectangular pedestal full of indecipherable signs, and clung to its front edge with long, curved claws. No one in the hall could even remotely imagine with what language those signs might be related. Legrasse had seized the figure months earlier in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans. On November 1, 1907, All Saints’ Day, the police had received a desperate plea for help from that swamp-and-lagoon country, and his men there stumbled upon an ancient cult. This skull is such an idol, all in golden glory. An octopus has wound itself around it. Its arms flow down from the face like a beard of feelers, wind around the base, and curl along the sides. They are lined with rows of suction cups, and at their tips are fine, articulated patterns cut as if the marks of a forgotten script. Already the form is a gift. The pyrite is masterfully worked, with wide, mirror-polished surfaces that are traversed by only a few accompanying minerals, delicate light veins like tides’ lines. It is precisely this mirror gloss that lends a surprisingly pure, almost graceful quality to the dark figure. Pyrite has its own link to the depths. In oxygen-poor mud, at the bottom of ancient seas, microorganisms decompose the remains of buried animals and release sulfide. Where iron is present, pyrite precipitates: it coats shells, fills their inner cavities, and replaces even delicate structures. Thus arise gold-glittering fossils, such as ammonites from the early Jurassic. These are extinct cephalopods and thus distant relatives of the octopus. What the depth holds, it sometimes turns to gold, though only into fool’s gold. Material: Pyrite (iron disulfide, FeS₂) with fine pale veins and scattered dark accompanying minerals Origin: Peru Dimensions: 5.8 x 6.4 x 11.0 cm Weight: 578 g Special features: Sculpture of a skull with an octopus, whose arms flow down from the face and wind around an oval pedestal; finely cut rows of suction cups and patterned tentacle tips, some with drilled holes; large areas of mirror-polished surfaces; fine pale veins and a fine natural fracture pattern, inter alia across the face and arms; Care: store dry, do not clean when wet 631 g Green Moss Agate

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