SQ (shqip)
At a glance
- What it is
- Fossilised wood, a form of lignite coal
- Age
- Around 180 million years, Whitby material
- Main British source
- Whitby, North Yorkshire
- Weight
- Very light for its size
- Static
- Holds a charge when rubbed, like amber
- Peak industry
- Victorian mourning, 1850s to 1890s
What it is
Jet is fossilised wood, specifically monkey puzzle driftwood that sank into seabed mud and was compressed. Geologically it is a form of lignite. The Whitby material is Early Jurassic, around a hundred and eighty million years old.
It is black, it takes an extraordinarily high polish, and it is remarkably light: a large jet bead weighs almost nothing compared with the same shape in glass or stone. Like amber it is warm to the touch, holds a static charge when rubbed, and burns, giving off a coaly smell. The Latin and Greek name, gagates, comes from a place in Lycia, and it is the root of the English word jet.
The combination is what made it interesting to ancient users: a black substance that is warm, light, burns, and attracts things to itself is a very odd object indeed.
The amuletic career
Bronze Age Britain used jet for beads and spacer plates, some of them in high-status graves. Roman Britain worked it intensively, particularly at York, producing pendants, hairpins and bracelets.
The most telling Romano-British use is the Gorgoneion: a miniature Medusa head carved in jet and set as a pendant. These turn up disproportionately in the inhumation burials of young women, which stacks two protective claims on one object. The material was already held to repel the malign, and the Gorgon's face is the most emphatic apotropaic image the classical world had, put to work guarding a body that had died young.
Classical and medieval sources put jet to work against a long list: snakes, demons, the falling sickness, and to detect witchcraft or virginity by burning it. Pliny and later lapidaries repeat the tests. Anglo-Saxon and medieval English burials contain jet crosses and beads, and pilgrims bought jet objects at Whitby, where an abbey provided the traffic.
The recurring themes are protection against the malign and the diagnostic use of its smoke, a strand of belief that depends entirely on the fact that a black stone should not burn.
Mourning
Jet's largest chapter is Victorian. Court mourning etiquette permitted only black, matte jewellery in the deepest stage of grief, and jet was the material that fitted. After the death of Prince Albert in 1861 and Queen Victoria's long mourning, demand rose to industrial scale.
Whitby had over two hundred jet workshops at the peak, employing well over a thousand people in a small town. The industry collapsed nearly as fast when mourning conventions relaxed and cheaper imitations flooded the market.
That episode changed what jet means. For most people it now reads as a mourning material rather than a protective one, which is a shift of roughly a century over a use of four thousand years. Both readings are real, and a jet amulet carries the older meaning whether or not the wearer knows it.
Telling it apart
Jet is imitated by black glass, sometimes called French jet, by vulcanite and gutta-percha, by black onyx, by bog oak and by modern plastics. The Victorian trade produced these in bulk and they are common in antique markets now.
The distinguishing tests are the ones that follow from what jet is. It is warm and very light; glass is cold and heavy. It gives a brown streak on unglazed porcelain, where glass gives none and onyx gives white. It holds a static charge on rubbing. Under a hot needle it smells of coal, which damages it and is not a test to run on anything you value.
Whitby jet is soft, around two and a half on the Mohs scale, so it scratches easily and should be kept away from other jewellery.
How jet is worked and kept
The craft has been continuous at Whitby, at very different scales.
- Cut and carved rather than faceted; jet is soft and takes detail well, then polishes to a mirror black.
- Worn as beads, crosses, cameos and pendants; in Roman Britain often carved with protective subjects.
- Set in silver or worn on a plain cord. Jet's blackness is the point, so settings are usually restrained.
- Kept dry and away from heat. It can crack with humidity changes and will dull in bright light over years.
- Cleaned with a soft dry cloth only. Water, solvents and ultrasonic cleaners damage it.
Genuine Whitby jet is worked by a handful of makers today and is sold with provenance. Most black Victorian jewellery on the market is glass or vulcanite rather than jet, and this affects price by an order of magnitude.
What jet belongs with
Its properties and its relatives.
- Amber Material The pair. Both are fossil organics, warm, light and static, and European practice used them as light and dark counterparts.
- Protection and warding Purpose Its consistent role from the Bronze Age through the medieval period, against demons, snakes and illness.
- Health and healing Purpose Classical and medieval sources prescribe it against the falling sickness and a range of complaints, generally by burning it.
- Witch bottle Charm Jet's diagnostic use, burning it to detect witchcraft, sits in the same counter-magical world.
Questions for reflection
- A black stone that burns and attracts. Which of its strange properties would have struck you first?
- Four thousand years as a protective material, then one century as a mourning one, and the second is what we remember. How does that happen?
- Would you wear a charm that had been worn for grief by somebody else?
Frequently asked questions
Postimet e fundit
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