Stones of Jupiter
9 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.
- 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.
- Iolite Transparent violet-blue, and famously two-faced: turn the stone and it shifts from blue to a smoky straw-yellow or almost nothing. That pleochroism is the whole character of it. Iolite has no ancient name; it was described in 1813 and called after the Greek for violet. You will read that Norse navigators used it to find the sun through cloud. Treat that carefully: the sagas mention a sunstone without saying what it was, and no iolite has been found in a Norse burial. The modern tradition is milder, a stone for keeping your bearings. Turn the stone slowly in a window until the blue goes pale. Ask yourself which of the two colours today has been, and answer.
- Lapis Lazuli Deep blue to violet-blue and completely opaque, dusted with brassy gold pyrite and veined or clouded with white calcite. The best material is even and dark with only a scattering of gold. Lapis was the sky brought indoors. Sumer gave its gods lapis beards and sent Inanna into the underworld wearing a lapis rod and necklace. Egypt cut it for the heart scarab. Pliny's sapphirus, sprinkled with gold, is this stone and not the corundum we now call sapphire. Ground and washed for weeks it becomes ultramarine, the costliest pigment in Europe, kept for the Virgin's robe. Hold it and say the difficult sentence to the empty room three times, changing a word each time, until it is short enough to mean it.
- Prehnite Translucent pale yellow-green to apple green, with a soft inner glow and a fibrous grain; often botryoidal, sometimes crowded with black epidote needles Prehnite came into the record too late for Pliny. It was described in 1788 and named for a Dutch colonel who brought a specimen back from the Cape, the first mineral named after a person. Its lore is modern, and honesty requires saying so. The tradition keeps it as the stone of the settled mind: the one held to quiet the noise around a decision before the decision is made. Hold it in a closed hand. Name the decision aloud, once. Then say nothing for a full minute and notice which thought arrives first.
- Sapphire Transparent corundum in every colour except red, which is called ruby instead. Classically cornflower to inky blue, but also yellow, green, pink and colourless, often with fine silk that can throw a star. In the Middle Ages sapphire was the stone of bishops and kings: Marbode holds that it keeps the limbs whole and makes peace between enemies, and clergy wore it to cool the body. Two cautions. The sapphire of the Bible is almost certainly lapis. And Agrippa lists the saphir among the things of Saturn, though the later tables and this library place it under Jupiter. Wash it under the tap. Put it on and say one true thing you have been softening, in the plainest words you have.
- 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.
- Turquoise Opaque sky-blue through to green, usually webbed or blotched with the brown or black rock it grew in, which dealers call matrix. The blue greens as the stone loses water or takes up oil. Persia mined it at Nishapur and put it on the bridle: turquoise is the horseman's stone, worn against a fall, and held to crack in the rider's place. Boodt wrote in 1609 that it changes colour with its owner's health, which it does, though the cause is oil and water, not omen. Tibet, the Pueblo peoples and the Dine all keep it as a stone of sky and rain. Put it in the bag you travel with and say where you are going and when you intend to be back.