Stones for the year of the Tiger

7 stones.

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.
Bloodstone Opaque dark green chalcedony flecked and spotted with red iron oxide, so that it looks like drops of blood on moss. Some pieces are nearly black-green with only two or three marks. Pliny knew it as heliotropium and reports that the magi claimed it made the bearer invisible, a claim he did not believe. Christian Europe renamed it. The red flecks became the blood that fell on green jasper at the foot of the cross, and carvers cut Passion scenes into it. It has been a soldier's stone and a healer's stone since. Wash it under the cold tap, dry it on a clean towel, and put it in the pocket of whatever you will wear tomorrow.
Carnelian Translucent orange to deep red-brown, sometimes banded. Held up to a lamp it glows through like a coal; the darker brown material is usually called sard. Pliny calls it sarda, after Sardis where it was first cut, and notes the practical reason it filled Roman signet rings: hot wax does not stick to it. Egypt cut it into amulets for the dead. Islamic tradition prizes the aqiq ring above other stones. Everywhere it turns up it is a stone of doing rather than dreaming, the one you take to the thing you have been avoiding. Put it on the table beside your work. Do not touch it until you have done twenty minutes without stopping, then pick it up.
Green Tourmaline Transparent green, from pale grass through bottle to a dark olive, in three-sided prisms grooved lengthwise like its black sibling. Strongly dichroic: much darker looked at down the length of the crystal than across it. Tourmaline reached Europe in 1703, brought from Ceylon by Dutch traders, so it has no classical lore; the name comes from the Sinhala turamali, a word for mixed-coloured stones. Green and black are the same mineral family, and practice splits them cleanly. Where schorl is a boundary and keeps things out, verdelite is given to increase: the heart, the garden, the thing that is meant to get bigger. Put the green tourmaline in your pocket and spend one uninterrupted hour on the thing you want to grow. Not planning it — doing it.
Peridot Transparent olive to bottle green, always green and never any other colour, with an oily lustre; large stones show facet edges doubled when you look through them Pliny's topazos, mined at first light on an island in the Red Sea, is our peridot, and the medieval lapidaries called the same stone chrysolite, so the name has moved twice. Marbode of Rennes writes that set in gold it drives off the terrors of the night. It comes out of volcanoes and meteorites, and the tradition keeps it for what grows back. Wear it or hold it, and name one thing that is already recovering. Not a hope, but something you can point to. Say it out loud once.
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.
Turquoise Opaque sky-blue through to green, usually webbed or blotched with the brown or black rock it grew in, which dealers call matrix. The blue greens as the stone loses water or takes up oil. Persia mined it at Nishapur and put it on the bridle: turquoise is the horseman's stone, worn against a fall, and held to crack in the rider's place. Boodt wrote in 1609 that it changes colour with its owner's health, which it does, though the cause is oil and water, not omen. Tibet, the Pueblo peoples and the Dine all keep it as a stone of sky and rain. Put it in the bag you travel with and say where you are going and when you intend to be back.