Zodiac crystals grew out of older lists that matched stones to the sky, the stones of the months and the stones of the planets. Crystal practice adds a third way in, reading a stone by its look and its element.
Open the second book of Cornelius Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, printed complete in 1533, at the chapter on the number twelve, and you meet a table that runs from heaven to the underworld. Near the top are the names of God and the orders of angels, then the tribes of Israel and the apostles. Further down come the twelve signs of the zodiac, Aries first, and under the signs the twelve months, starting not in January but in March. Under the months sit twelve plants, and under the plants twelve stones, with the parts of the body following from the head down to the feet.
Find your own sign in that row and read straight down. Taurus stands over April and over “A Carneol”, a carnelian. Gemini stands over May and a topaz, and the columns go on round the year in the same way.
A king’s book of stones and stars
Earlier still, in thirteenth-century Castile, a book of stones, the Lapidario, was translated from Arabic for Alfonso X, the king remembered as the Wise. Books of stones were, in the words of a University of Florida exhibit, “extremely popular in the Middle Ages”, and this one set its stones out by the sky. The first part is titled, in its Castilian, a book of the stones according to the degrees of the signs of the zodiac. The prologue gives Aristotle’s teaching that everything below takes its virtue from the heavens, openly in plants and animals and more hidden in stones and metals, and that all the things of the world are bound together, the lower taking their virtue from the nobler. The manuscript is richly painted, with the animals of the signs in its miniatures and hybrid beasts along its borders, and it is kept in the library of El Escorial.
In the book’s way of thinking, a stone has its place in the heavens, and since the heavens turn through the year, a stone can belong to a time as well as to a sign.
The planets and their stones
Each sign also has a ruling planet in astrology. Ptolemy set the rulers out in the Tetrabiblos, the Sun and the Moon taking one sign each and the other five planets two: Mars Aries and Scorpio, Venus Taurus and Libra, Mercury Gemini and Virgo, Jupiter Sagittarius and Pisces, and Saturn Capricorn and Aquarius. Crystal practice still reads a sign through its ruler, and a stone kept for a planet is held to carry something of that planet to the signs it rules.
Writers gave the planets stones of their own. Marsilio Ficino’s De vita, in its third book, passes on the natural philosophers’ advice to study the powers of stones and metals and to remember which fall under which planet, and among the stones it sets the carbuncle that flashes in the dark under the Sun, the sapphire under Jupiter and the emerald under Venus, Mercury and the Moon. Agrippa went further in his first book, where each of the seven planets has a chapter of the things under its power: its metals and plants, its animals and its stones.
Put that beside Ptolemy’s rulers and every sign has a second store of stones, its planet’s. Whatever Mars was given, Aries and Scorpio could reach for. A Gemini could look to the stones of Mercury, and a Leo to the stones of the Sun, which no other sign shares.
The planets’ shares were not equal. When the American gem writer George Frederick Kunz came to the planetary stones in 1913, drawing on a treatise printed at Frankfurt in 1633, he listed under the Moon the beryl, the rock crystal and the pearl, and under Jupiter the emerald, the sapphire, the amethyst and the turquoise, and he remarked that Jupiter “has the richest assortment of gems”.
Signs and months in one table
Back on Agrippa’s page, the signs and the months sit together. Western astrology starts the signs at the spring equinox, so Aries begins in March, and a table that starts its months in March lets each sign share a column with the month it opens in. One stone stands under both. The same columns give each sign a part of the body as well, the head for Aries and the feet for Pisces.
A Spanish book printed at Valladolid in 1604 gave the signs a list of its own, which Kunz reprinted in 1913 as “an old Spanish list” that “probably represents Arab tradition”. Kunz printed a list for the signs as well, in The Curious Lore of Precious Stones. He gave each sign a stone of the month in which it begins, following the month lists he had gathered, and he set each one out with its dates and a four-line verse, Aries running from March 21 to April 20. The child of Aries “shall be wise / If always on his hand there lies / A bloodstone”, and Gemini’s verse promises health and wealth to those “Who wear their rings on either hand / Of agate.” The verses ask little of the reader beyond wearing the stone, and one of them can still be copied onto the card that goes with a gift of the sign’s stone.
The month list in use now is kept by Jewelers of America, and it goes back to the birthstones its predecessor chose for each month. The Lapidario‘s idea carries over to the signs, since a stone that belongs to a stretch of the year belongs to the people born in it.
Choosing for your own sign
Crystal practice keeps both of the old routes, by month and by planet, and adds a reading by the look of the stone.
Start from the birthday if you want the month’s stone. A sign straddles two months, and each month has birthstones of its own on the Jewelers of America list, so two people of one sign, born four weeks apart, can each keep a different month stone and both be right. Some months on that list have more than one stone, June three of them, so a single birthday can offer a choice. This is the route that changes with the list in use, so check which list a jeweller is using before you buy.
Or go by the stone’s look. Crystal practice reads the element in a stone’s colour, and a stone that looks to you like your sign has a claim of its own.
The ruler’s route means reading across books, Ptolemy’s for the planets and the later writers’ for their stones. Ficino set the sapphire under Jupiter, and the treatise Kunz drew on put it under Venus too, a stone that, in Kunz’s words, “unites the influence of Venus and Jupiter, the two especially propitious planets”. Read beside Ptolemy’s rulers, the two placements make the sapphire a ruler’s stone for four signs at once, Taurus and Libra through Venus, and Sagittarius and Pisces through Jupiter.
Sources
- Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book II ch. XIV, the Scale of the Number Twelve, in Peterson’s edition of the 1651 English translation of the 1533 original: esotericarchives.com
- The Lapidario of Alfonso X in the University of Florida Libraries exhibit Animals in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic Illustrations from the Middle Ages: exhibits.uflib.ufl.edu
- Alfonso X, Lapidario, Escorial MS h.I.15, modernized edition, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes: cervantesvirtual.com
- Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos I.17, Robbins translation, on the houses of the planets: penelope.uchicago.edu
- Marsilio Ficino, De vita libri tres, Book III, Lyon 1560 edition: archive.org
- Cornelius Agrippa, Three Books of Occult Philosophy, Book I chs. XXIII to XXIX, the planets’ chapters, in Peterson’s edition of the 1651 English translation: esotericarchives.com
- George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, 1913, the planetary stones, the zodiacal gems and the Spanish list of 1604: gutenberg.org
- Jewelers of America, birthstones by month and the 1912 origin of the list: jewelers.org
