IThe Lapidaries
The oldest surviving Western treatise on stones is Theophrastus's On Stones, written around 314 BC by Aristotle's successor at the Lyceum. It is almost entirely naturalistic: stones are classified by their appearance, their behaviour in fire and their uses, and the only occult property Theophrastus takes seriously is that of amber and the lyngurium to attract light objects. Three and a half centuries later Pliny the Elder devoted the last two books of his Natural History to stones and mixed the naturalism with every report of their virtues he could collect, while telling his reader which ones he thought ridiculous.
The magical lapidary as a genre descends from late antique Greek texts attributed to Damigeron and to the Orphic poet of the Lithica, and in Latin from the Liber lapidum of Marbode, bishop of Rennes, a verse lapidary of about 1090 describing some sixty stones and their powers, translated into every vernacular of medieval Europe. Hildegard of Bingen in her Physica of the twelfth century gives stones as medicines. Albertus Magnus, around 1260, wrote De mineralibus, the great scholastic treatment, reporting virtues on the authority of others with careful notes on which he had tested himself. Alfonso X of Castile commissioned the Lapidario, an astrological lapidary in which each stone belongs to a degree of the zodiac.
IIThe Twelve Stones of the Breastplate
Exodus 28 describes the hoshen, the breastplate of judgement worn by the High Priest, set with twelve stones in four rows of three, each engraved with the name of one tribe of Israel. It is the most influential list of stones in Western history: the foundation stones of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21 echo it, Josephus and Jerome linked its twelve stones to the twelve months and signs, and every later scheme of zodiacal stones and birthstones descends from it. The problem is that nobody knows which minerals the Hebrew words name, and the Greek of the Septuagint, the Latin of the Vulgate and the English of the King James Bible each guessed differently.
| Row | Hebrew | Translations |
|---|---|---|
| First row | odem, pitdah, bareqet | sardius, topaz, carbuncle (King James); identifications uncertain |
| Second row | nophek, sappir, yahalom | emerald, sapphire, diamond (King James); sappir was probably lapis lazuli |
| Third row | leshem, shevo, achlamah | ligure, agate, amethyst |
| Fourth row | tarshish, shoham, yashpheh | beryl, onyx, jasper |
The modern birthstone list has an exact date. It was adopted in 1912 by the National Association of Jewelers meeting in Kansas City, to standardise the trade, and amended by jewellers several times since, most recently to add stones that were in stock. It has a biblical pedigree of a very distant kind and a commercial one of a very close kind.
IIIToadstones, Thunderstones and Bezoars
Some of the most prized stones of the tradition were not minerals at all, and the misidentification is itself historical evidence. The toadstone, believed to grow in the head of an old toad and to change colour in the presence of poison, was usually the fossil button-shaped tooth of the Jurassic fish Lepidotes. Snakestones were ammonites, sometimes with a snake's head carved on. Thunderstones, thought to be the heads of lightning bolts and kept against fire, were Neolithic polished stone axes or the fossil guards of belemnites. The bezoar, a concretion from the stomach of a goat or cow, was set in gold and dipped in the cups of kings as an antidote; in 1575 the surgeon Ambroise Paré tested one on a condemned cook given poison, and the cook died in agony.
IVThe Stone That Did Something
In 1880 Jacques and Pierre Curie discovered that certain crystals, quartz among them, generate an electrical charge when mechanically stressed, and a year later confirmed the reverse: an applied voltage makes the crystal deform. Piezoelectricity is the only occult-seeming property of any stone that turned out to be a measurable physical fact, and it is now in every watch, phone and radio: a quartz resonator, first used in 1921 and in clocks from 1927, vibrates at a precisely stable frequency when voltage is applied. It does not do what the crystal shops say quartz does. It does something real, and the story of how the tradition's favourite stone came to keep the world's time is told stone by stone at crystals.guru.
Modern crystal healing is a creation of the New Age of the 1970s and 80s, drawing selectively on the lapidaries and on Theosophical ideas of vibration. In controlled comparisons, including a study by the psychologist Christopher French presented in 2001, people holding fake crystals reported the same sensations as people holding real ones. I report that result and use stones anyway, for the reasons a maker uses them: weight, clarity, hardness, beauty and history.
VPlants, Resins and Metals
The materia of the art was never only mineral. The mandrake, Mandragora officinarum, whose forked root resembles a human figure and whose alkaloids are genuinely narcotic and hallucinogenic, gathered legends of shrieking when pulled from the ground and of growing beneath gallows. Frankincense and myrrh, the resins of Boswellia and Commiphora from southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa, were burned in every temple of the ancient world and are named in the grimoires for purification. Dragon's blood, the red resin of the dragon trees of Socotra and of the rattan palm Daemonorops, was a pigment, a varnish and a medicine; it colours instruments still.
The metals had their planets: gold the Sun, silver the Moon, iron Mars, quicksilver Mercury, tin Jupiter, copper Venus and lead Saturn, the correspondences on which both alchemy and talismanic magic rested. Antimony, whose glass and regulus fascinated Newton, and orpiment, the golden arsenic sulphide, were the alchemists' most dangerous materials, and some of them died of it.