953g Spiderweb Jasper – Atropos’ Scissors

Three sisters hold every life in their hands, as the Greeks told it. Hesiod calls them the daughters of night: the Moirai (the Fates). Clotho, the Spinner, spins the thread of life from her distaff onto the spindle. Lachesis, the Allotter, measures with her staff how long it shall be. Atropos, the Unavoidable, cuts it with her scissors as soon as its time has come. On this skull, their threads lie bare. Deep-black lines run across it from crown to chin. They branch, cross, and lose themselves in pale gray, like the web of a spider that has lost all measure. None of them runs truly straight. Some wander as the very first stroke of a child who holds a pen for the first time, as if Clotho has just begun a new thread. Others flare out like the jagged edges of an ECG or of a device that records frequencies and disturbances that no one else hears, as if Lachesis assigns each line its measure. Over all, that deep black lies heavy, uncanny and at once magical, like the shadow of the third sister. Rust-brown veils sweep over the crown and forehead. And yet this skull tells of life. On every monitor, it is only the straight line that denotes death—the zero line. Here, however, no line comes to rest. No thread is cut, and Atropos has not yet set her scissors to it. That heartbeats today run as a line across monitors is the fault of Willem Einthoven. In 1901 he developed his string galvanometer in Leiden. There, a short, silvered quartz fiber, only a few centimeters long, swung between strong electromagnets in the beat of the heart’s currents. Its movement was greatly magnified and projected onto a moving photographic plate. In 1924 Einthoven received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for this. At the dawn of the modern heart curve, a stone thread trembled. Material: jasper-like rock (trade name “Black Network Jasper,” also “Spiderweb Jasper”) from a light gray, fine-grained base with a deep-black, networked branching pattern and rust-brown veils Origin: China Dimensions: 11.5 x 7.6 x 8.5 cm Weight: 953 g Features: Dense, irregularly branching network of deep-black lines across the entire skull; rust-brown veils over the crown and forehead; fine natural seam running vertically through the chi

Estimate:£1.67

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