Labradorite was formally described by European scientists in 1770 on the Labrador peninsula of northeastern Canada. The name is geographic. The stone, however, had been present in the mythology of the region's indigenous peoples for far longer than European naming systems had existed.

Inuit oral tradition held labradorite to be pieces of the Aurora Borealis — the Northern Lights — that had fallen to earth and become frozen in rock. The optical phenomenon visible inside the stone, the iridescent flash of color that moves as you tilt it, was understood as the light still trying to return to the sky. This is not a naive reading. It is a precise description of what the stone does, framed by a cosmology that had observed it for generations.

In Finnish mythology, a similar origin: a warrior struck the aurora with his sword, sending sparks into the ground. The sparks became labradorite. The Finnish word for the stone's inner light is labradorescence. The myth predates the scientific naming of the phenomenon by centuries, and describes exactly the same thing: light caught inside matter, visible only when conditions are precisely right.

What the stone actually contains is alternating layers of feldspar with slightly different compositions and refractive indices. When light enters the stone and encounters these internal boundaries, it undergoes interference — the same physical process that creates the colors in soap bubbles and oil slicks. The specific colors visible depend on the angle of incidence, the thickness of the layers, and the particular composition of the sample. Different angles, different colors. The stone does not glow in darkness. It requires light to respond to.

Two physical explanations for the same phenomenon, centuries apart. The scientific description and the mythological one agree on the essential qualities: the light is inside the stone; it is not always visible; it requires the right conditions to appear; and when those conditions are met, what you see is something that was always there but previously hidden. Whether that is called labradorescence or frozen aurora is a matter of vocabulary, not of accuracy.