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The Religious Use of Various Stones: Cross

An ecclesiastical jewel of great beauty and remarkable historic interest is known as the Cross of Zaccaria. It was secured in 1308 by Ticino Zaccaria at the capture of the ancient Greek colonial city Phocaea, in Asia Minor, and was donated to the Cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa. This cross is of silver gilt, measuring 64 cm. in height and 40 cm. in width, and within it behind a crystal is set a piece of the Holy Cross. It is profusely adorned with precious and semi-precious stones, there being 57 good-sized rubies, emeralds, sapphires, carnelians, malachites and amethysts, besides 44 smaller stones and 299 of still lesser size. The jewel is now preserved in the Palazzo Bianco, Genoa.

The greatest treasure in the Cathedral of Chartres was the "Sacred Shrine." It was made of cedar-wood covered with gold plates and was adorned with an immense number of precious stones including diamonds, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, jacinths, agates, turquoises, opals, topazes, onyxes, chrysolites, amethysts, garnets, girasols, sardonyxes, asterias, chalcedonies, heliotropes, etc. These had been presented by many different donors during a long period of time. In front of this shrine was a cross composed entirely of precious stones, comprising 56 rubies and garnets, 18 sapphires, 22 pearls, 8 emeralds, 8 onyxes and 4 jacinths. When this was first placed in the cathedral is not known, but it was there in 1353, as it is noted in an inventory made at that time. An uncut diamond weighing about 45 carats, and constituting one of the adornments of the shrine in 1682, was said to have been the gift of a marshal of France; another ornament, an oval agate engraved with the Virgin and Child, may now be seen in the Louvre where it forms part of the Sauvageot Collection. That all trace has been lost of an emerald engraved with the head of Christ and given to Pope Innocent VIII by Sultan Bajazet II about the year 1488, is greatly to be deplored, even though there be no truth in the legend or report that it had been engraved in the time of Christ by the order of Tiberius Caesar. The evidence of two medals with Latin legends and of certain old paintings with English inscriptions of the sixteenth century seems to prove the existence of the gem in the Vatican treasury about the time specified, and it has been conjectured, with some probability, that the emerald had been engraved by a Byzantine artist at some time before 1453, when Constantinople fell into the hands of the Turks, and that this gem formed part of the booty they then secured. A print, often copied photographically and otherwise, purporting to be a representation of this emerald portrait of Christ, has no evidential value, and has either been freely worked up from the details of the spurious letter of Lentulus to Tiberius, giving a personal description of the Saviour, or still more probably from a Rafaelesque type of Christ's head. The beads of rosaries, when blessed by the Supreme Pontiff, or by one of the dignitaries of the Church, are considered to be endowed with a certain special virtue in favor of the individual for whom the blessing is imparted. However, should this person loan the beads to another with the intention of making him a partaker of this special blessing, or indulgencing, they lose their virtue. It is prescribed that these beads should be made of stone, glass, or some other durable material not easily broken, in order that the effects of the blessing should not be lost, or perhaps that the object so blessed should be less liable to injury. Various precious stones as well as pearls are used for this purpose, there being generally groups of ten small spheres, each group separated from the other by a larger sphere, the ten smaller beads serving to numerate the paternosters while the large bead is passed through the fingers when a credo has been recited.

A legend very popular in the Middle Ages has been conjectured to be the source of the word "rosary" as applied to a chaplet of beads for counting prayers. This legend tells of a pious youth, who on each and every day wove a garland of roses for the statue of the Virgin in the parish church. His religious zeal soon induced him to become a monk, and as the restrictions and duties of monastic life forced him to discontinue his floral offerings, he was much troubled in conscience, and was only relieved when the abbot told him that by reciting 150 aves at the close of each day, he would please the Virgin as much as by the gift of flowers. The prayers were faithfully said and they eventually became the occasion of a miracle. One evening, as the young monk was traversing a dense forest, it suddenly occurred to him that he had forgotten to recite his aves. He knelt down quickly and began to pray; all at once he saw a radiant and beautiful figure standing before him, and he immediately recognized in it the Blessed Virgin. Graciously she bent over him and drew from his lips one rose after the other, until fifty roses of supernatural beauty lay upon the ground. Of these she then made a garland and placed it upon the head of her faithful servant.

The first literary allusion to rosaries in India is in a Jain treatise written about the beginning of our era. The Prakrit name here employed, ganettiya, is equivalent to the sanscrit ganayitrika, or "counter," and it is enumerated among the ten utensils of a Brahman ascetic. The other nine are the tridanda-stick, the water jar, the Bramanical thread, the earthen vessel named karotika, the bundle of straw used as a seat, the clout, the six-knotted wood, the hook, and the finger-ring. It is said that no mention of rosaries has been found in Indian Buddhist literature.