Yes on both counts, and the second claim is the odd one: bronzite is said to send unwanted attention back where it came from rather than soak it up. That specificity is the useful part of the entry, and what sits underneath it is not what a shelf implies.
Practitioners give the stone two jobs. The first is a settled, unshowy kind of confidence, the sort you have when you are not still replaying a decision at eleven at night, and they file it with the root chakra, the energy centre associated with feeling physically safe, and frequently with the sacral chakra too, the one tied to drive and gut-level choices. The second is the reflection claim. Where black tourmaline is described as absorbing what comes at you, bronzite is described as returning it toward whoever aimed it. Neither claim can be traced to a named author, which is unusual for an idea this particular.
That is a thin entry for a stone with a long paper trail, and the paper trail begins somewhere nobody would look for it.
When the word meant a meteorite
The Natural History Museum in London holds a stone that fell on the town of Pultusk in Poland at seven in the evening on 30 January 1868. When G. T. Prior catalogued the museum’s meteorites in 1923 he described it as a veined grey bronzite-chondrite, twenty pounds of it. The stone is still there under the number Prior gave it, and its class now reads H5. Prior had divided the chondrites three ways, by increasing nickel in their metal and correspondingly increasing ferrous oxide in their magnesian silicates, naming each division after the pyroxene it was full of: enstatite-chondrites, bronzite-chondrites, hypersthene-chondrites. The words held for a long time. The Smithsonian’s own catalogue of its meteorite collection was still printing the equivalence in 1975, in a table with “Bronzite” in one column and “H” in the other.
One of the commonest things there is
Bronzite belongs to the orthopyroxenes, a family of magnesium and iron silicates that are ordinary furniture in the solar system. Brian Mason, cataloguing chondrites in 1962, gave the proportion: the olivine-bronzite and olivine-hypersthene groups “together make up over 90 per cent of all chondrites”. Bronzite and hypersthene sit at two points on one series, so the sentence is saying that nine chondrites in ten are built around this one family of minerals.
On the ground it is no scarcer. The United States Geological Survey’s map of the Stillwater Complex in Montana carries a formal rock unit called the bronzitite member, at most 3,500 feet thick and averaging about 1,200, which is a quarter of a mile of it at the thick end. Lower in the same complex there are bronzite cumulates whose average composition the map gives as 83 per cent bronzite. Neither of those is a vein or a pocket.
Set that beside the way bronzite usually gets introduced, as the stone you find once you are a few stones in, the quieter option for somebody who has moved past the obvious ones. That framing describes a shelf rather than a mineral. How much of something a shop carries is a stocking decision, and it says nothing about the material.
The object in your hand is therefore not a rarity, whatever it cost and whoever sold it to you. It is a piece of one of the commonest mineral families there is, on this planet and off it, and I would rather own that than a rarity.
The cabochons in the drawer
The older record has a good deal to say about bronzite, and what it says concerns cutting.
Max Bauer’s Precious Stones, the standard gem reference of 1904, notes that bronzite “sometimes shows indications of a fibrous structure, and when this is the case its sheen has a certain resemblance to that of cat’s-eye”. A few lines later, having named the localities, he adds that bronzite “is employed even less extensively than hypersthene”. L. J. Spencer, who translated Bauer into English, described the same practice for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica seven years afterwards: cut and polished in convex forms for small ornamental objects.
They were writing about something people were doing, and the Natural History Museum’s gem collection has the evidence in a drawer. Four bronzite gems, and no more than four. One is a brown translucent cat’s-eye from Mogok in Myanmar, 5.65 carats, a centimetre across. Another is a chatoyant brown cabochon from Bayern in Germany, with a cleavage fracture at the back that the catalogue records without explaining. Two of the four are now filed under enstatite with bronzite demoted to a variety line, and two are still filed under bronzite, which tells you how long a name survives after the mineralogists have finished with it.
What is left standing
The material is abundant, the ornamental record runs back about a hundred and twenty years, and the metaphysical entry is recent and unsigned. That is an unpromising combination on paper, and it leaves one thing to act on.
The claim about returning rather than absorbing is more specific than most of what gets said about stones, and specificity stays usable where provenance does not. It names a situation rather than a mood. Somebody has aimed something at you, and you would like it to go back where it came from. Match the stone to that, and leave the generally difficult weeks to something else, because stretching a specific claim to cover everything is how it stops being worth anything. Bronzite is not a species name any more, and enstatite is the name the mineralogists kept; the Crystalance Mineral Library files it under that.
Sources
- Prior, G.T., Catalogue of Meteorites, with special reference to those represented in the collection of the British Museum (Natural History), Trustees of the British Museum, 1923, introduction p. vii, which sets out the three-way division of the chondrites and its criterion and cites his own paper of 1920 in Mineralogical Magazine 19, and the Pultusk entry for “Stone. Veined grey bronzite-chondrite” and specimen 42424 at 9,095 grams, or twenty pounds: archive.org
- Natural History Museum data portal, specimen BM.42424, Pultusk, fall 30 January 1868, meteorite class H, petrologic type 5: data.nhm.ac.uk
- Mason, Brian, “List of Meteorites in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution”, Smithsonian Contributions to the Earth Sciences 14, 1975, p. 72, whose abbreviations table gives “Bronzite H”: govinfo.gov
- Mason, Brian, “The Classification of Chondritic Meteorites”, American Museum Novitates 2085, 1962, for the olivine-bronzite and olivine-hypersthene groups together making up over 90 per cent of all chondrites: archive.org
- United States Geological Survey, Miscellaneous Investigations Series Map I-797, Geologic Map of the Stillwater Complex, Montana, for the bronzitite member at 3,500 feet maximum and about 1,200 feet average, and separately for the bronzite cumulates of the peridotite member at 83 per cent bronzite: pubs.usgs.gov
- Bauer, Max, Precious Stones, translated by L. J. Spencer, 1904, p. 452, for the fibrous structure, the cat’s-eye comparison and bronzite being employed even less extensively than hypersthene: archive.org
- Spencer, L.J., “Bronzite”, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, 1911, vol. 4 p. 641, for bronzite cut and polished in convex forms for small ornamental objects: wikisource.org
- Natural History Museum collection specimens dataset, which returns exactly four Gems records matching bronzite, two of them filed under Enstatite and two under Bronzite: BM.1973,260 (enstatite var. bronzite cat’s-eye, 5.65 carats, 1.1 by 0.8 cm, Mogok, Myanmar), BM.64173 (bronzite, chatoyant cabochon with cleavage fracture at back, Bayern, Germany), BM.51854 and BM.1985,MI23058: data.nhm.ac.uk
- Morimoto, N., “Nomenclature of pyroxenes”, American Mineralogist 73, 1988, pp. 1123 to 1133, the report of the IMA subcommittee, for bronzite and hypersthene having been discarded as subdivision names of the enstatite-ferrosilite series: rruff.net
