Stones for the year of the Dog

11 stones.

Agate Banded chalcedony, translucent to opaque, in grey, white, brown, red and blue layers; a cut slice may show the bands as rings or as a landscape. Agate is the tradition's stone of steadiness. Pliny takes the name from the river Achates in Sicily and reports that it was carried against scorpion and snake bite, and that athletes wore it to keep their nerve. Its bands are the point: the tradition reads a stone that grew in patient layers as an argument for doing the same. Hold the agate and find one band with your thumbnail. Name one thing you will not be moved on today. Put it in your pocket.
Amber Transparent to cloudy honey-yellow through orange to deep red-brown, often with insects, bark or bubbles caught inside; rare green and blue forms exist. Amber is not stone. It is the resin of pine forests that stood tens of millions of years ago, hardened and washed out of the Baltic. Pliny knew this and said so, against the poets who called it the tears of Phaethon's sisters. It has been worn as a protective amulet longer than almost any other material, and Pliny reports it hung on infants for that reason. Warm a piece of amber in your closed hand until it is blood temperature. Say the name of somebody you have lost. Put it in your pocket.
Flint Opaque grey to black, brown or honey, usually inside a white chalky rind. A fresh break is waxy or glassy and shells out in curved flakes, and a thin flake is translucent brown at the edge. Flint is the oldest worked stone. Where ploughs turned up ancient arrowheads, Britain and Ireland called them elf-shot and set them in silver as a guard. Nodules that came out of the ground whole were thunderstones, held to have fallen with the lightning and to keep a house from being struck again. Herodotus says the Egyptian embalmer opened the body with a stone knife; Zipporah used flint in Exodus. Hold the flint against a piece of string and cut the string with scissors while you name what you are ending. Throw the short piece away.
Jet Opaque velvet black to very dark brown, taking a deep polish; unusually light in the hand and warm to the touch, never cold like stone Jet is wood that sank in a Jurassic sea and turned to coal. Pliny calls it gagates, after a river in Lycia, and reports that burning it drove off snakes. Rubbed on cloth it takes a charge and lifts a hair. Whitby cut it by the ton after Victoria's widowhood, so it is the stone of English mourning, and the tradition keeps it for exactly that. Hold it until it is as warm as your hand. Say the name of what you have lost. Then put it in your pocket and go about the day.
Magnetite Opaque black with a submetallic to metallic shine and a black streak. Crystals are often sharp octahedra. The same mineral in sand-sized grains is what makes some beaches grey and clings in beards to a magnet dragged through them. Magnetite is the one common mineral that is magnetic by itself, and lodestone is the rarer thing again: a piece that has been permanently magnetised in the ground, most likely by a lightning strike. Claudian describes a temple where an iron Mars was drawn across to a lodestone Venus and the priests called it a wedding. Folk practice feeds a lodestone iron filings to keep it drawing. Hold a paperclip near it until you feel the pull. Say what you want to come, once, then set the stone down facing the door.
Malachite Opaque green in concentric light and dark bands, silky where it has grown in rounded botryoidal masses; polished slices show rings, eyes and stripes. Pliny calls it molochitis, mallow-green, and writes that it was hung on children's cradles as a guard against danger; that is the oldest protective use we have for it. Egypt ground it for green eye-paint, which we now know was a poor idea. Its banded eyes made malachite the tradition's watcher, a stone held to see trouble coming. Set the malachite by the door you come home through. Look at its rings once, and leave whatever the day did outside.
Morganite Transparent pale pink to peach or salmon, the colour often faint enough that stones are cut deep to hold it. Morganite is pink beryl, named in 1911 by the gemmologist George Kunz for the banker J. P. Morgan, whose mineral collection he had bought. It is the youngest stone in this part of the library, and its tradition is correspondingly plain: the clarity of the beryl family turned towards tenderness. Practice gives it for patience with people, including yourself. Touch the morganite and think of whoever is annoying you most. Give them one more chance than you meant to give.
Red Jasper Opaque brick to brownish red, sometimes veined with darker lines or carrying a grey rind. Completely opaque: hold it to a lamp and nothing at all passes through it. Egypt put red jasper at the throat of the dead. The Book of the Dead's spell for the tyet, the knot of Isis, calls for it in that stone and calls the amulet the blood of Isis. Pliny says the whole of the East wore iaspis as an amulet. Rome cut it for seals. It is the plainest of the Mars stones: no fire, no shine, only holding on. Stand with both feet flat, the stone in your fist, and count backwards from twenty. Put it in your pocket and go back in.
Shungite Matt black to steel grey and dull in the common rock; the noble grade is bright silvery black, lustrous and brittle, and marks paper like a pencil Shungite is nearly pure carbon from Karelia, laid down about two billion years ago. Peter the Great founded a spa on a shungite spring in 1719 and had his soldiers carry lumps to keep their water sweet. That is the tradition it has: a stone of the ground and of water. The modern claim that it screens electronics is not established, and this entry does not make it. Put a piece on the desk between you and the thing you are avoiding. Work for twenty minutes without touching your phone. Then move the stone aside and stop.
Smoky Quartz Transparent to translucent smoky brown or grey, from a faint tint to almost black; six-sided prisms with a pointed termination Smoky quartz is quartz that has stood for ages in the ground beside something radioactive. The colour is the record of that. In Scotland it is cairngorm, set in dirk hilts and shoulder brooches, which gives it a real national history. The tradition gives it to Saturn and keeps it for weight: it is held to take the charge out of a mood without dulling the person. Sit with it in your lap for five minutes, both feet flat on the floor. Breathe out for longer than you breathe in. Then put it down and stand up.
Tiger's Eye Opaque golden brown in bands of light and dark, with a silky sheen that slides across the face as it turns; the blue form is hawk's eye and heated material goes red. Tiger's eye is quartz that grew through blue asbestos fibres, so a band of light travels across it as it turns. The tradition gives it to the Sun in a guarded mood: a stone for watching without being watched. Its own lore is young, because the material was only worked from the nineteenth century, and it stands in for the older eye-agates worn against the evil eye. Turn the tiger's eye until the band of light crosses it. Ask yourself one plain question about a decision you are avoiding. Answer it.