I suppose this is where indigo's story really begins...

Newton was smart. Like wicked smart. By any measure we use, he would be in the supra-genius category. He thought of himself as a ‘Natural Philosopher’, but that moniker- that descriptive- really does not give the man his proper due.

He developed Calculus, worked on the Universal Laws of Motion and Gravity and was one of the first to experiment with prisms and the properties of Light.

Newton was a religious man but was at odds with the Church of the time. He was even labelled a Heretic. He proved that the Earth was not at the center of the Solar System and so many at the Church, in their mercy, wanted him excommunicated, imprisoned and/or killed.

Because of his religious views, he was convinced that many things in the World, or Universe, stemmed from a Divine Plan of some sort. He applied this thinking to his study of Light. To learn more of his perspective we need to go back a bit further, to ancient Greece...

In 700 BC, there was a tribe of people in the mountainous Northeast of Greece that were known as Dorians and their lands became known as Macedon.

There was a musical mode that they developed that became known as the Dorian or Doric Mode.

If you are a musically inclined person, the scale that they developed has a perfect

Fourth and Fifth, a minor Third and Seventh, and a Major Second and Sixth.

If you are not a musically inclined person, the Dorian Scale can be heard in many songs passed down to us. In more recent times, the Sea Shanty ‘Drunken Sailor’, ‘Scarborough Fair’ and ‘Billy Jean’ by Michael Jackson all use the Dorian Scale.

As the Macedonian people spread and conquered neighboring lands, their culture and music spread as well.

A far-flung and distant result of this was young Sir Isaac Newton growing up listening to chants and songs played in this Doric Scale for his entire life.

Songs written in this scale and hymns and chants performed in this scale sounded ‘right’ to him, sounded divinely inspired. He took those notes of that scale and applied them to his theories of Light and Prismatic Division.

We talk about what was going on in his mind and in the world while he was conducting his experiments and living his life. One of those things that was going on was an economic war between Woad and Indigo.

Woad, as a source of blue dye, had been grown in temperate regions for thousands of years BUT the new Indigo could dye thirteen times more fabric using the same processes of extraction.

And so the color Blue, or Blew, as it was known at the time, went from being a color only the rich or even royalty could afford, to being something that everyone could afford. Merchants and dealers made millions on the Indigo trade.

With these things going on in the world and his religious upbringing and the music that was used for worship ringing in his ears, Newton forced his bias on the scattered light that the prisms showed him and Indigo was born.

Modern scientists agree— there is no reason for indigo to be there as part of the rainbow. It should have never been there. Blue, as an umbrella, already covers Indigo completely.

But he was famous and brilliant and no one really could— or wanted to— step forward and tell him he was wrong. And so our rainbow was born with seven colors instead of six, not because of what the data showed him, but because Newton felt it should mirror the divinely-inspired Dorian Scale of music.

Just in the last few years scientists, rather collectively, have amended their teachings so that the corrected rainbow, the one our kids and grandkids will come to learn and know, is ROYGBV.

These kids will grow up knowing the world slightly differently than we do. We will age and pass and future generations will wonder how we ever could have been so silly for so long, pretending that there was such a thing as "indigo".

Based on the biased word of just one man, the entire world embraced a falsehood for over 300 years. So what does this have to do with rocks? Well I'm so glad you asked...

Think about the gemstones that you know. How many can come in ANY color?

Consider just how rare it is for a mineral to be expressed in more than even ONE color.

Beryls would be one type that can come in a variety of colors. Following the list from our Rainbow we have red beryls, bixbite. Bixbite is a red beryl and also one of the rarest gemstones in the world. Next would be orange and for that the beryl family has morganite and after that comes yellow and a beryl called heliodor.

Green was the heart of the rainbow and where beryls really shine. For green we have emeralds. For blue we have aquamarine in the beryl family and for violet the family has Maxixe or some types of morganite again.

But what about a gemstone that can come in ANY color?

They Are Few

We are lucky enough, in the Great Lakes Region, to have several gemstones that can come in a seemingly myriad of colors. One that immediately leaps to mind is the agate. I believe agates can come in any color and in almost any shade. For that reason, agates are one of the most interesting gemstones on the planet.

Like snowflakes, you will never find any two that are exactly alike. But our luck is strong here and we have even more options. From the volcanic flows around the Western end of Lake Superior, we also have a gemstone known as...