Aquamarine is what a jeweller will offer anyone born in March. Bloodstone is the other correct answer, and the older one, and the reason it now comes second is not written down anywhere.
Pliny the Elder, in the first century, describes a stone he calls heliotropium. It comes from Ethiopia, Africa and Cyprus, it is leek-green, and it is streaked with blood-red veins. Put it in a vessel of water in full sunlight, he says, and the reflected light turns the colour of blood. Lift it out and it mirrors the sun well enough to show the moon crossing the disc during an eclipse.
Then he loses patience with his own subject. The magicians say that if the stone is combined with the plant of the same name and certain incantations are repeated over it, the person carrying it becomes invisible, and Pliny calls this a most glaring illustration of their impudent effrontery.
The stone is bloodstone, and Pliny was already impatient with it two thousand years ago.
The jobs a green stone was given
Pliny describes an appearance and a party trick. What piled up afterwards was work.
The fullest medieval version sits in the verse lapidary written by Marbode, bishop of Rennes, in the late eleventh century. His heliotrope entry runs twenty-one lines, and it opens by putting Pliny’s bowl back on the table, sun turning blood-red, an eclipse poured out over the earth. Then it goes past anything Pliny wrote: the vessel begins to boil, and a sudden rain scatters out of it as though the air had clouded over. From there the stone calls down showers and holds off fair weather, gives its wearer a great deal to prophesy about, decorates those it is given to with a good name, keeps them whole and lengthens their lives, staunches the flow of blood, drives out poison, and leaves its carrier impossible to deceive. Marbode closes on the look of the thing again, a stone sprinkled with drops of blood and resembling an emerald.
That last line describes the stone without explaining it. The drops are what the surface looks like. Neither Pliny nor Marbode says anything about where the red came from, and the answer both of them lacked is unremarkable. Bloodstone is a dark green chalcedony, a form of quartz too fine-grained to show crystals, and the red splashes are concentrations of iron oxide, most likely haematite.
There is a Christian legend too, that the red spots stand for the blood of Christ. George Frederick Kunz prints it in 1913 in the passive voice: “The red spots upon the bloodstone were said in Christian legend to represent the blood of Christ.” He attaches no text, no century and no manuscript to the saying. People have told the story for a long time, which makes it a real tradition and an undated one.
Byzantium, Milan, and a Gandharan ox
The carving, by contrast, is dated and numbered and sitting in cases.
A flat circular bead of dark green bloodstone flecked with red, engraved with a humped ox, was made in the Gandhara region at a date the Victoria and Albert Museum gives as uncertain but probably the first or second century of our era. A cameo of Christ Pantocrator, cut in Constantinople in about the tenth century, is in the same collection. A Byzantine bloodstone cameo of Saint George from the following century is in Cleveland, where the museum’s note records that the stone was believed to carry magical medicinal powers to stop haemorrhages and increase blood circulation, which is Marbode’s staunching being written down on the other side of Europe at roughly the same time. An enamelled gold signet ring of about 1580, its bezel a bloodstone intaglio of the head of John the Baptist, opens to reveal a compass and dial inside. Something like fourteen hundred years separate the Gandharan bead from the Elizabethan ring, and across all of it somebody kept deciding that this particular green stone was the right material for a small carved thing meant to be held.
Bloodstone kept turning up in that particular job for a plain reason. A seal has to take a fine engraved line and hold it against wax without wearing away. Bloodstone runs about 6.5 on the Mohs scale, slightly below quartz, and has no cleavage to split along, so it breaks in the smooth curved fracture that lets a lapidary cut in any direction without the stone telling him where to go. Then there is the opacity, which does more work than it sounds like doing. An engraved design in a transparent gem competes with everything visible behind it, while a dark green ground throws a carved figure forward. The red flecks land wherever they land, and a carver either works around them or works with them.
Somebody in Milan worked with them. A small bust of Christ crowned with thorns, carved in Italy and probably in Milan in the middle or later seventeenth century, is in New York, and the Metropolitan Museum’s catalogue explains the choice of material in one sentence. The red iron-oxide specks that occur in heliotrope encouraged the artist to evoke droplets of blood.
That is the legend working as a design brief. A carver looking at a green stone with red flecks makes a Passion subject, and the stone does half the work. The undated legend and the dated objects are two different kinds of evidence, and only one of them can be looked up.
Bloodstone goes second
The list that put bloodstone in March is the American one adopted in 1912. Its March line gives bloodstone, with aquamarine printed alongside in a second column headed as an addition. Bloodstone was the stone. Aquamarine was the alternative on offer.
Forty years later a revised list appeared in the jewellery trade press, in August 1952, printed as twelve plain lines with the second column gone and the alternates folded in beside the stones they had been standing behind. March now gave aquamarine first and bloodstone second, with nothing on the page to say which of the two had previously been which.
Between those two printings the order reversed. The 1952 report set out what it had changed, and what it named was June and December. Bloodstone appears nowhere else in that August issue. Aquamarine is widely said to have been promoted over bloodstone in 1952, the 1952 document is where that story comes from, and the 1952 document does not say it.
That takes nothing away from anyone. Neither stone was ever removed, both are correct, and a March birthday can have whichever it likes. What it does mean is that the older stone is not the lesser one, and that the pale blue beryl at the front of the queue got there without an argument or a vote or a line of print.
Bloodstone is a chalcedony, and the Crystalance Mineral Library files it with the rest of that family, alongside the properties that made it a seal-cutter’s stone in the first place.
Both printings are short and both are public. The 1912 list and the 1952 list each occupy about a third of a page, and reading March’s line in one and then in the other takes under a minute. For a claim that has been repeated in one direction for decades, the evidence against it is unusually easy to reach.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, book 37, chapter 60 in the Bostock and Riley translation, on heliotropium: perseus.tufts.edu
- Marbode of Rennes, De lapidibus, section 29 “De heliotropio”, verses 429 to 449, in Beckmann’s edition of 1799: archive.org
- George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, 1913, on the red spots and Christian legend: gutenberg.org
- Victoria and Albert Museum, bead seal with humped ox, bloodstone, Gandhara, accession IS.36:1, 2-1948: collections.vam.ac.uk
- Victoria and Albert Museum, Christ Pantocrator cameo, bloodstone, Constantinople, accession A.160-1978: collections.vam.ac.uk
- Cleveland Museum of Art, bloodstone cameo with Saint George, 1000 to 1100, accession 1959.41: clevelandart.org
- Victoria and Albert Museum, signet ring with bloodstone intaglio of John the Baptist, accession M.218-1975: collections.vam.ac.uk
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bust of Christ crowned with thorns, heliotrope, Italian, probably Milan, accession 39.22.11: metmuseum.org
- Geology.com, bloodstone, for composition and hardness: geology.com
- The Jewelers’ Circular and the Horological Review, 14 August 1912, the adopted list: archive.org
- Jewelers’ Circular-Keystone, August 1952, p. 219, “Changed Birthstone List Receives OK From Trade”: archive.org
