The Strange Virtues of Stones
Wodiska wrote a sober trade handbook — and then, being an honest reporter, recorded every impossible thing his stones were ever believed to do. Gathered here from across the book’s eighty chapters: the strangest powers, curses, and marvels ever pinned on a mineral, each with a link to the page where the book tells it in full.
The stone that gives you nightmares
Nearly every gem in the old lapidaries protects its wearer from something. Onyx is the great exception: the book’s catalogue of superstitions states flatly that onyx caused nightmare. It remains the only stone in the book with a purely hostile résumé.
An accident policy you can wear
“The wearer of a turquoise will require no accident insurance,” the book reports, “the stone having that power.” Topaz, more modestly, merely averts sudden death, and zircon — besides stimulating the appetite — takes away sin.
The gem that glows under radium
Kunzite, America’s brand-new gem of 1909, was the toast of the physics laboratory: Sir William Crookes found that a few milligrammes of radium bromide brought near it made it glow with a fine yellowish light that lingered after the radium was taken away. Powdered, mixed with radium, and warmed, it became incandescent.
Invisibility, by prescription
Rub a bloodstone with the juice of the heliotrope plant and its wearer turned invisible — a recipe the medieval lapidaries gave in earnest. If invisibility was not required that day, the same stone would settle your dyspepsia.
The curse that started as a novel
For most of history the opal stood for every possible good. Then, in the nineteenth century, it abruptly became “unlucky” — a panic the book traces to Walter Scott’s novel Anne of Geierstein. It took a queen to break the spell: Victoria pointedly gave opals to each of her daughters at marriage, and the Australian opal trade was saved.
Dishonest dealers and the vanishing fire
Part of the opal’s evil reputation was earned: a mediocre stone moistened with oil or water will blaze with colour until it dries — a “peculiarity,” the book notes drily, “utilised for profit by dishonest dealers.” Brilliant opals have lost their fires forever; dull ones have suddenly caught light.
The sober stone of Bacchus
Amethyst means not drunken: a nymph fleeing Bacchus was turned to purple stone, and the baffled god decreed its wearer could never be intoxicated, however extensive his libations. Cleopatra’s signet was an amethyst; so is a stone in the British crown, taken from the ring of Edward the Confessor and credited with warding off contagious disease.
Proof against hailstorms and locusts
The same purple stone did double duty in the fields: worn as an amulet, the book records, the amethyst was “a puissant preventive of hailstorms and locusts” — and a favourite of crusaders, who hung one beside the rosary for safety in battle.
When diamonds were poison
In Burma — and in medieval Europe — the diamond was believed to be a poison akin to arsenic. The same catalogue credits powdered diamond as an excellent dentifrice and a cure for insanity and epilepsy. Choose your century carefully.
Donkey hair, sold separately
Chalcedony prevented and cured melancholy — but to be safe in a tempest it had to be worn in contact with the hairs of an ass. Jasper, meanwhile, guarded against scorpions, spiders, and drowning, and jet cured snake bites.
“Vital ore,” still on sale in 1909
Lest the reader think such beliefs safely medieval, the book reports that plain quartz sand — marketed as “vital ore” — was enjoying a vogue in northern New York State as the book went to press, advocated for sore eyes, hemorrhoids, carbuncles, giddiness, and blood poisoning. Crystal balls, it adds, were still being used “with great profit” by mystics, astrologers, “and other like fakirs.”
The gem that is a skeleton
Coral earns its place in a book of precious stones despite being no stone at all: it is the skeleton of a tiny sea animal, harvested by the ton off Italy and carved into charms — for centuries a fever cure and a defence against the evil eye.
Every claim above is reported — and, mostly, gently doubted — in the book itself. For the full catalogue of gem magic, begin with the Folk-Lore chapter: Gems of the Bible · Birthstones and the Zodiac · Talismans and Superstitions.