Garnet
Also Carbuncle, Almandine, Pyrope
Most often deep red, from wine-dark to nearly black in a thick piece, though the group also runs orange, green and honey. Transparent to translucent, with a glassy, almost resinous shine.
- Crystal system
- Cubic
- Hardness
- 6.5-7.5 Mohs
- Handling
- Safe in water and stable in light. The only real caution is heat: many garnets carry internal fractures, so avoid steam, boiling water and sudden changes of temperature, which can open a flaw into a crack.
- In water
- Safe
What it is held to be for
The ancients had no word for garnet alone. Pliny's carbunculi are the fiery red stones, named for a live coal, and garnet is most of what he means. Out of that came the medieval carbuncle that shines in the dark: the lamp said to have lit Noah's ark. What survives is plainer. Garnet is held to keep a promise burning after the feeling that made it has cooled.
Pliny XXXVII, on carbunculus; medieval lapidary tradition
Correspondences
These are the tradition's ascriptions, not properties of the mineral.
- Planet
- Mars
- Element
- Fire
- Signs
- Aries, Scorpio, Capricorn
- Chinese phase
- Fire
- Year animal
- Horse, Snake
- Centre
- Sacral Svadhisthana
- Sephirah
- Geburah
How it is used
Worn close to the skin, on a ring or a cord at the throat, and worn continuously rather than for an occasion. Given between people who intend to stay: it is a stone about lasting, not beginning.
Today
Hold it up to a lamp until you find the light inside it. Then put it on and do the dull part of the work.
A longer working
Choose something you began and stopped. On a Tuesday, lay the garnet on the unfinished thing itself, the letter, the instrument, the box of tools. Sit with both for the length of one cup of tea and do no work at all. Then move the stone to your pocket and do fifteen minutes. Repeat on each of the next six days. On the seventh, decide honestly whether to go on or to let it go.
Works with
- Herb
- Hawthorn
- Incense
- Clove