Posses enormous serenity and is the key to spiritual attainment. This stone harmonizes the physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual levels. Lapis Lazuli encourages taking charge of life. It reveals inner truth, encourages self-awareness, and allows self-expression without holding back or compromising. This stone brings the enduring qualities of honesty, compassion and uprightness to the personality. Lapis Lazuli helps you to confront the truth, wherever you find it, and to accept what it teaches. Lapis Lazuli bonds relationships in love and friendship and aids expressing feelings and emotions.
Lapis lazuli is a rock, largely formed from the mineral lazurite. The main component of lapis lazuli is lazurite (25% to 40%), a feldspathoid silicate mineral with the formula (Na,Ca)8(AlSiO4)6(S,SO4,Cl)1-2. Most lapis lazuli also contains calcite (white), sodalite (blue), and pyrite (metallic yellow). Other possible constituents: augite; diopside; enstatite; mica; hauynite; hornblende, and nosean. Some lapis lazuli contains trace amounts of the sulfur-rich löllingite variety geyerite. Lapis lazuli usually occurs in crystalline marble as a result of contact metamorphism.
Lapis lazuli is found in limestone in the Kokcha River valley of Badakhshan province in northeastern Afghanistan, where the Sar-e-Sang mine deposits have been worked for more than 6,000 years. Afghanistan was the source of lapis for the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, as well as the later Greeks and Romans. During the height of the Indus valley civilization about 2000 BC, the Harappan colony now known as Shortugai was established near the lapis mines.
In addition to the Afghan deposits, lapis has been extracted for many years in the Andes (near Ovalle, Chile), the Lake Baikal region of Russia; Siberia; Angola; Argentina; Burma; Pakistan; Canada; India; and in the USA in California and Colorado.
Hardness: 5 - 5.5
