Stones for Prosperity
10 stones.
- Aventurine Opaque to lightly translucent green, sometimes peach, grey or blue, with a soft glitter from flecks of mica scattered through it. Aventurine's name comes from an accident. Venetian glassmakers spilled copper filings into a melt in the seventeenth century and got a glittering stone-like glass they called avventurina, by chance. The mineral was named after the imitation. Tradition took the glitter as a sign of fortune, and made aventurine the stone of the chance you have to take yourself. Put the aventurine in your hand. Say out loud the one thing you want and have not asked for. Then ask for it today.
- 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.
- 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.
- Emerald Transparent to translucent deep green, almost always with visible internal fractures and inclusions; the trade calls that internal world the jardin, the garden. Pliny holds that no colour is more pleasing to the eye than the emerald's, and reports that gem-cutters rested their sight on one after fine work. From that comes its whole tradition: the stone of the long look and the patient love. Lapidaries gave it to lovers as a truth-teller, and said that it clouded when a vow was broken. Look at the emerald until your eyes rest. Then look up, name the promise you are still keeping, and go and keep it today.
- 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.
- Jade Translucent to opaque. Jadeite runs from emerald green through lavender, white and orange; nephrite from creamy mutton-fat white through spinach green to near black. Two minerals answer to jade, jadeite and nephrite, and both are so tough that the ancients made axes and blades of them. That toughness is the whole of the tradition. Confucius, in the Book of Rites, reads the virtues of a good man in jade: its warmth, its evenness, the fact that it will break before it bends. Spanish sailors called it the stone of the flank, for colic. Put the jade on and leave it on. Each time you notice it today, finish the thing in front of you before starting another.
- Magnetite Opaque black with a submetallic to metallic shine and a black streak. Crystals are often sharp octahedra. The same mineral in sand-sized grains is what makes some beaches grey and clings in beards to a magnet dragged through them. Magnetite is the one common mineral that is magnetic by itself, and lodestone is the rarer thing again: a piece that has been permanently magnetised in the ground, most likely by a lightning strike. Claudian describes a temple where an iron Mars was drawn across to a lodestone Venus and the priests called it a wedding. Folk practice feeds a lodestone iron filings to keep it drawing. Hold a paperclip near it until you feel the pull. Say what you want to come, once, then set the stone down facing the door.
- 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.
- 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.
- Ruby Transparent to translucent red, from pinkish through to the deep tone dealers call pigeon's blood. Fine silk-like inclusions are common and can give a six-rayed star when the stone is cut domed. Sanskrit calls it ratnaraja, king of gems. Medieval lapidaries, Marbode among them, hold that it drives off sadness and that it darkens to warn its wearer of coming trouble. Note the disagreement: Western planetary tables give ruby to Mars, while Indian astrology gives it to the Sun and will not let a weak Sun wear one. Both traditions agree it is a stone of rank. Put it on. Stand up straight, say the first sentence of what you have to say, out loud, to the mirror. Then go.