Prehistoric Messages of the Widmanstätten Cursive

Widmanstätten Pattern – Seymchan Meteor Fragment

Widmanstätten Patterns, found in Octahedrite Iron meteorites appear in isometric configurations – their cursive lattice-work is reminiscent of the calligraphic paintings of both Mark Tobey and Brion Gysin. It was Austrian printer-scientist Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten who noted their patterns after removing rust from the Hraschina meteorite in 1808. This cryptic wildstyle of extraterrestrial origin was actually discovered 4 years earlier by an English Geologist G.Thomson, who treated the Krasnojarsk meteorite with nitric acid, similarly in order to clean it from rust. His claim to its discovery was obscured by, and lost in the ruins of the Napoleonic war.

Drawing by M. W. Haidinger drawing depicts the fall of the Hraschina meteorite based on eyewitness accounts

In his book The Writing of Stones, Roger Caillois prompts us to read the inclusions and patterns of gemstones and minerals as if they were a secret cypher or as an aid to scrying. He asks us to delve into their unconscious symbolism in the same way Hermann Rorschach hoped to trigger psychological insinuations aided by the well-known symmetrical inkblots.

Widmanstätten Pattern

According to Marina Warner in her excellent essay, The Writing of Stones, material mystics such as Caillois ‘do not search for self-knowledge, nor for foreknowledge of their destiny or the sirens’ secret; but they emphatically investigate hidden meanings and scan the deepest horizons of time into infinity where the world turns into an inexhaustible book written in hieroglyphs’

What kind of messages might the Widmanstätten cursive encode? If Caillois was looking for the infinities of time contained in such hieroglyphs he would have come close to finding them here. Channelled through the language of exogeology we find that these scripts tell a very old story – as old as our solar system itself. The Widmanstätten figures of the Gibeon Meteor, which were formed in near zero-gravity conditions, are up to 4 billions years old. Here is a story of crystal patterns generated by an intergrowth of nickel-rich taenite and nickel-deprived kamacite during an extremely slow cooling process of one degree in every one thousand years. This means that were formed inside the dying core of a protoplanet.

Widmanstätten Pattern at 40µm, 80µm, 400µm & 400µm [clockwise from top left]

The lithic meditations of the tribes of the Kalahari Desert, where the Gibeon Meteor impacted upon Earth in prehistoric times, may well have resulted in interpretations of a different kind. English Captain and Explorer Sir James E. Alexander, who was the first Westerner to discover the Gibeon, noted that these tribes used pieces of meteor to make tools and weapons. Most likely they may have also worshiped fragments of these fallen stones, as has been noted in many instances, making the Widmanstätten cursive the oldest sacred text in Solar System.

Widmanstätten Pattern

Widmanstätten Pattern – Gibeon Sphere

Further Reading:

The Stone As A Witness Of Time in which Rohit Gupta explores the concentric geometry of Banded Agates as ‘encoding imprints of eclipses, occultations and syzygys’ and as the ‘etched memory of every single diurnal rotation of the planet on its solitary axis’. Furthermore his entire blog Compasswallah provides excellent reading.

The Writings of Stones – Images, annotations and quotes from Roger Caillois’s out-of-print book at 50watts.

The Worship of Meteorites – Hubert A. Newton

Related at Dataisnature:

The Lost Kingdoms and Scripts of the Lichens
Hypogean Wildstyle: Dominik Strzelec’s Byzantine Geology
Banded Agates, Sonic Hydrodynamics & the BZ Reaction
The Wave – Earth Waveform Oscillations