An Egyptian funerary spell prescribes a knot of red jasper at the throat, for the protection of Isis. In crystal practice red stones are read for life, courage, passion and protection, and they belong low on the body, at the root.
Carnelian goes into a pocket on the day something frightening has to be done, and red jasper stays with you through a long stretch of steady effort. Red is the colour of blood, and red stones are taken to carry life force: warmth, the nerve to act, the strength to begin something and keep going. Carnelian’s orange-red sits a little higher, at the sacral centre below the navel, where it is carried for creativity and an appetite for life alongside courage. Red jasper is the stone for endurance, carried through months of training for something or of looking after someone who is ill, and its earthy red is read as the steadiest of the reds.
Red is the first of the seven centres on the chakra charts, at the base, the one closest to the ground. The root’s stones are carried in a trouser pocket or at the hip, or set on the floor beside you while you sit, and how to use crystals for the root chakra covers lying down with them.
An Egyptian instruction for a red stone
Chapter 156 of the Book of the Dead is a spell for a knot amulet, the tit or Isis knot. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gives its purpose: the spell prescribes a tit knot of red jasper at the throat of the dead person, to give them the protection of Isis. University College London’s Digital Egypt gives the rest. The words of the spell are to be spoken over the knot after it has been sprinkled with water from the ankh-imy plant and threaded on sycamore fibre, and it is set at the neck on the day of burial.
The Met holds one of these knots, made some time between 525 and 30 BCE, from the Late Period into the Ptolemaic. It is red glass, blocky, its shape only roughly finished. The museum suggests it was meant to be wrapped between the bandages of the mummy, where it would do its work however finished it was, and it notes that red was the preferred colour for the tit knot.
Making a red-stone ritual
The old spell is a complete ritual, and its parts can be carried over to a red stone of your own: one stone, one place, one occasion, and a preparation repeated each time.
Start with the stone: carnelian when you need courage, red jasper when you need to last. If you are deciding between carnelian and red jasper, carnelian vs red jasper shows how to tell them apart.
The spell’s knot had one place, at the neck, and your stone can have one too. On the day it is needed it goes in the same pocket, low on the body where red belongs, and between those days it rests on one corner of one shelf.
The spell gave its knot one day, the day of burial. A red stone can be saved for one kind of occasion, the morning of an exam, and come out for nothing else, held in the hand in the corridor before you go in. Other reds suit other occasions: a first night on stage for carnelian, the last month of a long job for red jasper.
Then prepare it the same way every time. The spell’s knot was to be sprinkled with plant water and threaded on sycamore, and your preparation can be as simple: a few drops of water from a glass over the stone, then into the pocket or onto a cord. If it is worn, give it a cord kept for that stone alone, a cotton or linen thread. When the occasion is over, it goes back to its corner of the shelf. Keep the ritual as simple as the spell: the four parts above, and nothing added to them.
Red at the heart and the hearth
Red has a softer side. Beside pink, at the heart, red is passion, and a garnet kept with rose quartz is given to a couple whose love has cooled. Garnet is read for devotion and love kept faithfully over time, and it is worn on the hand, in a ring.
By the hearth, red is a guard in crystal practice, watching over the house and the people who come home to it. In winter a red stone can be set near the stove or the fire for the warmth of the home as much as for its safety. The Egyptian spell named red jasper, and a piece of it on the mantel above the hearth gives that old stone a place in the house.
