Description
White agate tower, cut and polished, 33cm tall and 1444g. Creamy white through the body with open druzy pockets where the cut has opened cavities in the stone. One piece only, photographed exactly as it is.
White agate tower, cut and polished, standing 33cm tall and weighing 1444g. The stone is a soft creamy white throughout, closer to bone than to bright white, with faint grey shadowing in places and a scatter of small darker flecks.
What makes this piece is what the cutting opened up. Several cavities run through the body of the stone, and the saw has cut straight into them, leaving open pockets lined with small pale crystals.
The druzy pockets
The largest pocket sits just below the point and runs a good way down one face. Smaller ones open lower down and around the base.
Inside them the surface is completely different from the rest of the tower. Where the cut faces are smooth and softly polished, the pockets are rough with tiny crystal terminations that catch the light at certain angles and go flat at others.
If you like a piece you can feel as well as look at, this one earns its keep. Running a fingertip from a polished face into a pocket is a genuine change in texture, from cool and even to sharp and irregular.
What white agate is
Agate is a banded form of chalcedony, which is quartz in a microcrystalline form, meaning the crystals are too small to see individually. It forms inside cavities in rock, layer by layer, as silica rich fluids seep in and deposit over a very long stretch of time.
The pockets in this white agate tower are the parts of those cavities that never filled. The banding filled inward from the cavity walls and stopped before it met in the middle, leaving a hollow that the cutting has now opened.
White agate is the plain form, without the iron and other traces that colour the banded varieties. No locality has been declared for this piece, so none is claimed here, and no treatment or bleaching has been declared either.
About this piece
The tower in the photographs is the tower that arrives. Nothing is swapped for something similar.
No two of these are alike, and with a piece like this the cavities make that literal. Where the saw met the hollows decided what this tower looks like, and that will not happen the same way twice.
At 33cm and close to a kilogram and a half, this is a floor or low shelf piece rather than a windowsill one. It needs a level surface.
Traditional correspondences
White agate is worked with for clearing in traditional practice, and for steadiness rather than lift. It sits with the plainer end of that work, the settling of something rather than the raising of it.
The tower form is traditionally used to hold a focus in one place in a room, and a piece of this weight will stay exactly where it is put.
There is something in a stone that is solid on the outside and hollow within, and that has been opened rather than filled. What that means is yours to decide rather than mine to tell you.
Correspondences are traditional and are offered as part of a practice, not as a substitute for medical or professional advice.
Caring for a white agate tower
Agate sits at 6.5 to 7 on the Mohs scale, hard enough for ordinary handling.
The pockets are the vulnerable part. Those small crystal points will snap off if the tower is knocked or dragged across a surface, so lift it rather than sliding it, and set it down on its base rather than laying it on its side.
Dust collects in open pockets and is awkward to get out. A dry soft brush or a puff of air clears it. Do not poke at it with anything hard.
Avoid soaking the piece. Water sits in cavities like these and takes a long time to leave.
Since no treatment has been declared, keep it out of prolonged direct sun as a precaution. Bleached and colour treated agate is common in the trade and does not hold up to strong light. Ordinary room light is fine.
To cleanse, use sound, breath or moonlight.
What you receive
The white agate tower shown in the photographs and nothing else. Wrapped and posted from Shropshire by Royal Mail Tracked.
Browse the rest of the crystal towers, or see what else is in stock in agate.
For the mineralogy behind the material, Mindat holds the reference data on chalcedony.
