Stones of the Solar plexus
8 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.
- Calcite Transparent to opaque in almost any colour: glass-clear as Iceland spar, and commonly honey yellow, orange, green, pale blue, pink or chalky white. Clear pieces show every line beneath them doubled. Calcite is the commonest carbonate on earth: limestone, marble, chalk, shell and stalactite are all this one mineral. It has little old lore, because it was never rare. What practice it has is modern and follows colour — yellow and orange to the Sun, green to Venus, blue to the Moon and the voice. Clear Iceland spar doubles anything seen through it, which Bartholin described in 1669. Wipe the dust off your calcite with a dry cloth. Name one thing in the house you have been meaning to throw out, and throw it out now.
- Citrine Transparent pale lemon through golden to a smoky madeira brown; most stones on sale are heat-treated amethyst and carry a faint reddish cast. Citrine is the tradition's stone of the open hand. It belongs to the Sun and, in later folk practice, to trade: dealers called it the merchant's stone and kept it in the till rather than wearing it. The lapidary line groups it with the yellow stones held to lift a heavy mood and steady anyone who has to ask other people for money. Put a citrine where you keep your money. Handle it once, name aloud one thing you intend to earn, and leave it there.
- 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.
- Heliodor Transparent pale greenish-yellow to warm gold, usually very clean, and often found in long six-sided prisms. Heliodor is golden beryl, named in 1910 from the Greek for gift of the Sun. The name is new but the family is not: beryl was the scrying stone of the medieval lapidaries, gazed into for what the eye could not otherwise reach. Heliodor keeps that use and turns it outward, and is held for study, for long reading, and for staying awake to a hard thing. Set heliodor beside your work. Read one page you have been putting off, aloud and slowly. Then put the stone away until the next page.
- Pyrite Opaque brassy metallic yellow, often in sharp cubes or flat radiating discs; tarnishes with age to a dull brown iridescence. Pyrite grows in cubes so square they look cut. Its name is Greek for fire-stone: struck against steel it throws sparks, and both Theophrastus and Pliny record it doing exactly that. That is the whole of its tradition, a stone holding fire in a cold form. It is kept for nerve rather than for luck, and its likeness to gold earned it the name fool's gold. Set the pyrite where the light catches it. Name the task you have been circling for weeks. Do the first five minutes of it now.
- 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.
- Topaz Transparent and glassy: colourless, pale blue, sherry-yellow, gold, and rare pink; the golden-orange imperial topaz is the most prized. Topaz is the hardest stone in this group and the tradition treats it as the Sun's cold side: judgement rather than warmth. Medieval lapidaries hold it to quiet anger and make the wearer plain-spoken. Pliny's topazos is a different stone, a green one from an island in the Red Sea and almost certainly peridot, so the name has moved across the centuries. Hold topaz up to the light and look through it. Say the fairest true sentence you can manage about a person who has wronged you.