Opal: Meaning, Properties and How to Use It
Opal is the stone of imagination and mood. Because it holds every colour at once and never shows the same one twice, traditions credit it with amplifying whatever a person already feels rather than steering them. Roman writers called it the gem that carried the virtues of all other gems inside it.
What tradition says
What is Opal known for?
Australian lore, where most opal comes from, keeps it close to dreaming and to country. European sources of the nineteenth century gave it an unlucky reputation after a single popular novel, and jewellers spent a century undoing that. Older writing is far kinder. Opal is read as the stone for people who create, who feel in colour, and who need permission to be changeable without calling it a fault.
The practice
How do you use Opal?
Keep it for making things.
Writers and painters set one where the light hits the desk, because the flash moves as you move and pulls the eye back.
Worn as a ring it is a daily stone for a gentle season, not for physical work.
Look into it for a minute before you start, without asking it for anything.
Read here as a language of symbols. Medical, legal and financial questions belong with a professional.
Two more
What does Opal pair with?
Stones are kept in small sets rather than alone, and these two are the usual company for this one.
What it is kept for
What do people reach for Opal for?
The same stone, read through the thing you came here with.
Questions
What else do people ask about Opal?
Is opal really unlucky?
No. The superstition traces to Walter Scott's novel Anne of Geierstein in 1829, where an opal loses its fire as its owner dies, and the European market collapsed for decades afterwards. Every tradition older than that book treats opal as fortunate. Buy it if you love it.
Should I store my opal in water?
No, that is the overcorrection. Solid natural opal needs ordinary humidity, not immersion, and soaking can loosen settings and ruin glued doublets. A cotton pouch in a normal room is right. Only very dry storage for long periods is the real risk.
Next in the library
The stones beside this one.
Two ways on
One stone is a reminder, a library is a map.
A hundred and four stones and sixty four everyday uses, sorted the way a week arrives. If you came here through the body rather than the mineral, the seven chakras are the other way in.
- 104
- stones, each with what tradition says
- 64
- everyday uses, six stones under each
- 7
- centres, the same set read through the body