Opal and tourmaline are both correct for October. Opal is the older of the pair, and it is the only stone on the calendar that arrives with a warning attached to it. That warning is nineteenth century.
Sir Walter Scott finished Anne of Geierstein; or The Maiden of the Mist on 29 April 1829. It was published in Edinburgh on 20 May and in London five days after that, and it is not one of the books anyone reads now.
Much of what is said about opal being unlucky runs back to that book, and a belief with a book behind it can be checked instead of repeated. There is a date on it, and a text anybody can open.
What the book says
The opal belongs to Baroness Hermione of Arnheim, and the tale about her is told by a character inside the novel as a legend, not narrated as fact. The Baroness wears the stone in a blue riband drawn through her auburn hair and secured by a gold clasp, and Scott describes it as displaying, amid the changing lights peculiar to that gem, a slight tinge of red like a spark of fire.
What happens to it happens in a chapel doorway. Her husband dips his finger in the font, offers her holy water in the ordinary way, and then, in a mood of sportive familiarity that Scott flags as unwarranted by the time and place, flicks a drop or two at her forehead. The opal, in Scott’s words, “on which one of these drops had lighted, shot out a brilliant spark like a falling star, and became the instant afterwards lightless and colourless as a common pebble”. Hermione sank to the chapel floor with a deep sigh of pain. She was carried to her chamber, and when the door was opened two hours later there was nothing on the bed but a handful of light-grey ashes, such as might have been produced by burning fine paper.
Taken as written, the tale is about an enchanted woman and about her token, not about a class of gemstone. The opal is bound to her life because she is a creature of enchantment and it is her token. Nothing in the scene suggests opals in general do this, and nothing suggests the stone caused anything. It goes out when she does.
Who joined the two together
The attribution to Scott is not something modern crystal writing invented. It goes back to George Frederick Kunz, whose 1913 book is where a great deal of gem folklore was first written down in English, and the sentence people quote him for is the opposite of the sentence he wrote.
Kunz writes that “much of the modern superstition regarding the supposed unlucky quality of the opal owes its origin to a careless reading of Sir Walter Scott’s novel”. Careless is his adjective, and he spends the next paragraph explaining the carelessness. The tale, he says, contains nothing to indicate that Scott really meant to represent the opal as unlucky. Hermione’s gem was an enchanted stone just as its owner was a product of enchantment, and its peculiarities depended entirely on its mysterious character, which might equally well have been attributed to a diamond, a ruby, or a sapphire. He finishes by saying that we are perfectly justified in returning to the older belief in the manifold virtues of the opal, remembering only that this gem is a little more fragile than many others and should be more carefully handled and guarded.
The earliest authority for the story turns out to be the earliest person to call it a misreading. GIA now says much the same in one line, that the superstition comes from a novel written in the 1800s and not from any ancient belief or experience.
Kunz also answers the question of why Scott reached for an opal in the first place, and his answer is deflating in a useful way. All that can have determined the selection of the opal rather than any other precious stone, he writes, is the fact of its wonderful play of colour and its sensitiveness to moisture. A novelist wanted a jewel that could plausibly go dark, and picked the one gem a reader would already half expect to do it.
None of this is an argument that the belief does not exist. People have held it, and a belief does not need a good reason to spread. The sentence that fails is the other one, the one that calls the belief ancient.
The other name on October’s line
Tourmaline joined October on the American list adopted in 1912 and has aged well as an option, and hardness is most of why. Elbaite comes in at 7 in the Handbook of Mineralogy, and a stone at that level can be worn daily and forgotten about. GIA credits it with one of the widest colour ranges of any gem, which means a jeweller can offer an October customer almost anything without leaving the month.
The oddity is that tourmaline is not one mineral. Tourmaline is a supergroup, a family of related minerals built on one structure, with different ions occupying particular sites inside it, and the family has enough members that the International Mineralogical Association needed a formal nomenclature to keep them apart. The version published in 2011 sets out how a tourmaline species gets its name from whichever ion dominates the relevant site, and how the species divide into alkali, calcic and vacancy groups.
In practice that means the three commonest names in a shop belong to three different minerals. Elbaite carries lithium and aluminium, and the pinks and greens come from it, including the watermelon crystals that are pink in the middle and green at the rim. The magnesium member is dravite, which runs brown to black. Black tourmaline is schorl, the iron one. Each has its own formula and its own entry in the reference works.
Nothing on a price ticket says which of them is in the tray. A birthstone month whose second stone is a family rather than a species is unusual, and it means an October birthday is entitled to a stone in almost any colour, since somewhere in the group there is a species that comes in it.
Crazing, and what causes it
GIA calls opal generally stable and then names what it is not stable against. Heat from intense light can produce the fine network of fracture lines called crazing, and so can high heat or a sudden change of temperature. GIA’s advice on cleaning runs to one sentence: warm soapy water is the only safe way. That is the whole caution, and the luck story has been crowding it out since 1829.
Tourmaline asks for nothing in particular, which is part of why it makes a practical second option for anyone who wears a ring daily and would rather not think about it. Choosing between them is a question about what you want out of the stone, not about what it might do to you. Anyone reaching October through the sign instead of the calendar meets opal again, and the Libra list examines how well the names on a shop’s tray hold up under a mineralogist’s eye.
Colour will identify most tourmaline before anybody opens a book, and the species entries in the Crystalance Mineral Library are where the formulas sit for the rest.
If you own an opal and have been slightly wary of it, the wariness has a bibliography. Scott published an enchanted woman in 1829, readers took the wrong thing from the book, and Kunz wrote the misunderstanding down in 1913 while saying it was one. The stone in the drawer had no part in any of it.
Sources
- Walter Scott Digital Archive, University of Edinburgh, on the first edition and publication dates of Anne of Geierstein: walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk
- Sir Walter Scott, Anne of Geierstein, volume 1 of 2, the Hermione passages: gutenberg.org
- George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, 1913, pp. 143 to 144 on the opal and the novel: gutenberg.org
- GIA, opal history and lore, on the superstition’s origin: gia.edu
- GIA, opal care and cleaning, on crazing and on warm soapy water: gia.edu
- GIA, tourmaline, on its colour range: gia.edu
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, 14 August 1912, the adopted list with tourmaline as October’s addition: archive.org
- Henry, Novak, Hawthorne, Ertl, Dutrow, Uher and Pezzotta, “Nomenclature of the tourmaline-supergroup minerals”, American Mineralogist 96 (2011), 895 to 913: repository.lsu.edu
- Handbook of Mineralogy, elbaite: handbookofmineralogy.org
- Handbook of Mineralogy, dravite: handbookofmineralogy.org
- Handbook of Mineralogy, schorl: handbookofmineralogy.org
