the.com/morion
black quartz so dark it swallows light, named for either helmets or pure misunderstanding
means A dark, nearly black variety of smoky quartz; the word also names a high-crested, brimmed helmet worn by 16th- and 17th-century soldiers, especially Spanish infantry and conquistadors.
from Two threads tangle here. The helmet 'morion' came into English from Spanish 'morrión' (related to 'morro,' a rounded crag or snout), passing through French. The mineral 'morion' is the curious one: it traces to Pliny's Latin 'mormorion,' a dark gem — but the modern spelling may owe itself to a printer's or scribal slip, possibly a misreading of 'mormorion' in early editions of Pliny. So the stone's very name might be a beautiful accident, frozen into the lexicon.
- natural color
- darkened by natural radiation over geologic time
- the helmet
- morion is also a 16th-century open Spanish helmet
- smoky cousin
- opaque extreme of the smoky quartz family
- heat trick
- gentle heating fades black back toward brown
- name mixup
- likely a Latin misreading of mormorion