Stones of the Crown
8 stones.
- Amethyst Transparent purple, from pale lilac to a deep grape, and the colour is usually uneven: it sits in bands, or gathers in the crystal tips and thins away towards the base. The name is Greek and means not drunken. Pliny reports the promise, wear it and you will not be overcome by wine, and says the magi lie when they claim more. The Church kept it anyway: amethyst is the bishop's stone. Agrippa's own tables list it among the things of Mars; the later planetary tables give it to Jupiter, and that is the line taken here. Put it under your pillow before you go out for the evening. When you come home, hold it and decide honestly whether the night was as good as it felt.
- Charoite Opaque violet in swirled, feathery, fibrous bands, lilac through to deep purple, streaked with white feldspar, orange-brown tinaksite and black aegirine. It has a pearly, almost silky sheen where the fibres catch the light. Charoite comes from one place on earth: the Murun massif on the Chara River in Siberia, described in 1978. Sellers like to say the name means enchanting in Russian; the mineralogists say it is the river. There is no old tradition to draw on. What has grown up around it in forty years is a stone for the person who knows the change is coming and is dragging their heels. Hold it and say out loud the change you have been putting off, with a date attached. Any date. Then write the date down.
- Clear Quartz Colourless and glass-clear to milky white; six-sided prisms ending in a pyramid, often holding veils, needles or rainbows from internal fractures The Greeks called it krystallos, ice, and held that it was water frozen so hard in the Alps that it could never thaw. Pliny reports this. Physicians cut it into balls to gather the sun and cauterise wounds, a use for a stone said to concentrate. Agrippa places crystal under the Moon. The tradition keeps it as the stone that takes the shape of the intention put into it. Hold the point and say what you want in one present-tense sentence. Set it where you will see it in the morning. Say the sentence again then.
- Diamond Transparent and colourless at its finest, but also yellow, brown, grey and rarely pink, blue or green; the lustre is unlike any other stone, hard and oily-bright, throwing sharp flashes of spectral colour when it is cut. Adamas means unconquerable, and that is its whole old meaning. Pliny reports that it defeats the hammer and the anvil, and repeats the story that only goat's blood will break it. The lapidaries gave it invulnerability rather than romance: proof against poison and fear. Western tables put it under the Sun, Indian astrology under Venus. Its link with betrothal is modern, built largely by De Beers advertising from 1947. Put the diamond on. Name one decision you will not reverse, out loud, once. Take it off only when the decision has been carried out.
- Howlite Opaque chalk white to grey-white, threaded with fine grey or black veins like a web; nodular and cauliflower-shaped in the rough Howlite came out of a Nova Scotian gypsum quarry and was described in 1868 by Henry How, a chemist. There is no ancient lore behind it and this entry will not invent any. Its tradition is modern and domestic: it is the stone people keep for a mind that will not stop working at night. The veining is why it is dyed so often, since it mimics turquoise. When your thoughts will not stop, hold it and trace one grey vein with a fingertip, slowly, end to end. Then trace another. Stop when you lose interest.
- Opal A white, grey, black or transparent body carrying flashes of spectral colour that shift with the angle; fire opal is orange to red and may show no play of colour at all. Opal is silica that never crystallised, holding water inside its structure. Its flashes come from the way that structure bends light, not from any colour in the stone. Pliny thought it the finest of gems and tells of the senator Nonius, who chose exile rather than surrender his opal to Mark Antony. Its reputation for bad luck is modern, and traces to a novel published in 1829. Turn the opal until a colour appears that you were not expecting. Name one thing in your life that has changed without your permission.
- Selenite Colourless to white: glassy and transparent in blades, silky and fibrous as satin spar, or bladed into rosettes. It splits into thin flexible sheets. Selenite is gypsum grown clear, in blades and sheets that peel apart like glass. The Romans quarried it as lapis specularis and glazed their windows with it, so it is literally a stone you can see through. The later tradition makes it the cleaner of the shelf: the piece other stones are laid against, held to take off whatever they have gathered. Lay your other stones on the selenite tonight and leave them until morning. Keep it dry, and let nothing wet near it.
- Sugilite Opaque purple, running from a soft lilac-grey to an intense magenta-violet, usually mottled or veined and often carrying black manganese oxide or brown patches. Only rarely translucent at an edge. There is no lapidary behind sugilite. A pale form was found in Japan in 1944 and named for the geologist who described it; the deep purple that made its name came out of the Wessels Mine in South Africa in 1979. Everything ascribed to it has been ascribed since about 1980, and mostly by people working with the dying and the bereaved. That is a young tradition, said plainly. Put it in the hand of someone who is having a bad week and say nothing about crystals. Let them keep it.