747g Howlite skull – ghost warrior

On the beach at Ichi-no-Tani, a monk prays for a dead man, and at night the dead man appears to him as he looked on his last day. Thus unfolds the Nō play Atsumori, attributed to the great master Zeami. The monk had once been the samurai Kumagai Naozane. In 1184, at that very beach, he felled the sixteen-year-old Taira no Atsumori, a boy the age of his own son, and yet killed him. At his belt he found a flute. The remorse drove him to the monastery, and a year after that battle the entire house of Taira had fallen. The spirit tells of the splendor of his house, of its flight and downfall, of the last night in the camp when music sounded once more, and of his own death. Then he recognizes the one who prays as his killer and raises the sword. But the enemy of old prays for his soul. Thereupon the spirit lets the blade fall, no longer calls him an enemy but a friend, and asks him to continue praying for him before he vanishes. This skull bears the face of such a revenant. Its surface is smooth as ivory, of bony, milky white, softly blending at the skull cap into cream. Fine gray veins thread through this white as the cracks of a past that refuses to pass, and across the whole skull runs a long, straight line as if carved by a single blow of a sword. In the face, however, there is no rage left, but calm quietude, as if this warrior too had long since let his blade sink. Even his stone was once unloved. In 1868, workers at a gypsum quarry near Windsor in Nova Scotia drew Henry How’s attention to a white mineral that only disturbed their mining. How named it Silico-Boro-Calcite, and shortly afterward the geologist James Dwight Dana, in honor of its discoverer, gave it the name Howlith. Howlith grows in irregular, often cauliflower-like nodules in evaporite rocks, penetrated by that gray net that gives this skull its scars. From the troublemaker in the quarry to the namesake of a scholar: this stone has found its peace as well. Material: Howlith (calcium borosilicate) Origin: Canada Dimensions: 9.9 x 6.5 x 7.8 cm Weight: 747 g Special features: Ivory-like smooth, milky-white surface with cream skull cap; fine gray netting; prominent natural vein running diagonally through the skull; occasional dark gray inclusions and fine rust-brown speckles

Estimación:€1

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