Heliodor
Also Golden beryl, Yellow beryl
Transparent pale greenish-yellow to warm gold, usually very clean, and often found in long six-sided prisms.
- Crystal system
- Hexagonal
- Hardness
- 7.5-8 Mohs
- Handling
- Hard and safe in water. Beryl is brittle for its hardness and chips along the edges, so have it set protected. Heat can pale the colour and some material is colour-treated; keep it away from steam cleaners and hot windows.
- In water
- Safe
What it is held to be for
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.
Folk tradition; medieval lapidaries on beryl
Correspondences
These are the tradition's ascriptions, not properties of the mineral.
- Planet
- Sun, Moon
- Element
- Fire
- Signs
- Leo, Sagittarius
- Chinese phase
- Fire
- Year animal
- Snake, Goat
- Centre
- Solar plexus Manipura
- Sephirah
- Tiphereth
How it is used
Kept on the desk rather than worn, in the light of the lamp you work by. Some hold it while reading something they must remember, and set it on the page when they stop for the night.
Today
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.
A longer working
Choose a book you have started and abandoned. On a Sunday, put the heliodor on the open page. Read for one clean hour with nothing else running anywhere in the house. When the hour is up, write a single sentence about what you read and slip the paper under the stone. Do this each Sunday until the book is finished, and keep the sentences together.
Works with
- Herb
- Sunflower
- Incense
- Frankincense