Collection: Opal

The Opal is Australia's national gemstone.  How lucky is Australia?? 

Scholars differ on where the word opal originated.  One theory is that it is derived from the root Latin word opalus, while others say it actually stems from the Sanskrit word úpala.  And another theory is that it is derived from the root ancient Greek word, opallios.

Upala started to appear in Rome around 250 BC in references to opals being the most highly valued gemstones.  Merchants from Bosporus brought them from India.  

Pliny the Elder, the Roman naturalist and philosopher, 23 to 79 AD, wrote about opals associating them with the fertility, opulence and wealth of the wife of Roman god Saturn.  Her name was Ops, which sounds kind of like a nickname for Opal.

Opallios, the ancient Greek word, had two interpretations.  It could mean seeing or it could mean alias or an alternate choice.   When opallios was used for how one saw something, it was like the English word, opaque.  There's the op again.  Put them together, and you've got seeing alternative colors.  Certainly seems plausible until scholars asserted that this ancient Greek term didn't even show up anywhere until after the Roman seized the Greek states around 180 BC.  Before that, the Romans used the word paederos to mean those things.  That seems to confirm the Sanskrit origin.

From 400 to 1400 AD, opals were super popular as they were considered divine and bringers of good luck.  The rainbow of colors were interpreted as divine virtues and that opals possessed all the positive qualities of other gemstones that were of colors seen in the opal.  

Wicca folks would wrap an opal in a freshly picked bay leaf and hold it to be invisible, more convenient than Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.

Opals fell out of favor due to a popular novel written in 1829 by Sir Walter Scott.  The novel is Anne of Geierstein.  The Baroness character wears a lucky opal that is supposed to have special powers.  All is good until a drop of holy water splashes on her opal which causes it lose all of its color.  Then the Baroness dies.  This book was a bestseller and the readers began to think of opals as bringers of bad luck and even death.  After the book had been out for only a  year, opal sales went down by fifty percent and stayed down for another twenty years.

The Russians used to believe that an opal was omen of evil.  If a merchant showed up with an opal, all trading stopped.  This was going on as in the early 1900's.  

This Australian Fire Opal pendant attracts abundance and allowance.  Fire Opal is also an excellent gemstone for healing for individuals born between July 4th through July 13th and is also a birthstone for October.