Hematite is a root chakra stone. You will find charts that add the solar plexus, and charts that add the third eye instead, and they disagree with one another with nothing behind them that could decide between them.
The British Museum holds a small oval of haematite, cut in the third century, with a pregnant woman squatting over a birthing stool on one face and a coiled serpent swallowing its own tail around the edge. It holds an older one too, a stamp seal from the first century BC carrying a scarab and five eight-pointed stars, which the entry records as perforated and threaded with a suspension ring in what it marks as possibly gold.
Three hundred years separate those two objects, and about two thousand separate the older one from you, and not one line of either entry helps with the question you came here with. None of which is a complaint, and it is most of the answer.
Two gems, and what they do not settle
The museum’s entry for each gives the material, the date, the culture and a description of the carving, and then it stops. The younger one is haematite, cut in the third century under Roman rule. One face carries the birthing scene, with a uterus symbol and a seven-bitted key set below it and the serpent running round the outside. The reverse carries another uterus, drawn with limbs coming off it so that the cataloguer reaches for the word octopus. The older gem is haematite as well, and what is cut into it is a beetle seen from above, its antennae crescent-shaped and resembling a crab, with four pairs of legs where a beetle has three.
Whatever the people who commissioned those objects believed they were doing, the belief did not get carved onto the stone, and the catalogue does not supply it. Nobody at the museum is guessing on your behalf. That is the correct way for a catalogue to behave, and mildly frustrating if you came looking for meaning.
Hold that next to the modern question. Root or solar plexus, and the disagreement between the charts that assign them has no referee. No body certifies a chakra correspondence, no register holds the correct version, and no earlier authority is the thing the competing charts are both trying to reproduce. Two charts can differ and neither of them is wrong in any sense that could be checked by opening something.
That makes the root-against-solar-plexus argument something other than a hard question with a buried answer. There is nothing there to be right about, which means you can stop looking for the chart that settles it. That search is the thing costing you time, and it can absorb a fortnight without producing a single fact.
What to do with a stone the charts disagree about
Follow the instruction and let the label above it be whatever it is.
The label wobbles. The instruction attached to hematite does not wobble in the same way: the stone goes at the base of the spine and downwards, and the charts that quarrel over the naming still agree on that. Where exactly it goes, and in what form, is a longer answer than this article needs, and where do you put hematite on your body sets out the placements properly, including the two that people reach for without being told to.
The second listing arrives with nothing attached to it. Next time you meet a chart that files hematite at the solar plexus, or at the third eye, look for what it asks you to do differently. In the ones I have opened, the answer is nothing. The placement is the same and so is the length of time. The root listing arrives with an instruction, and an instruction is the part of a tradition you can practise.
One thing I would push you on, and it is the practical cost of everything above. Pick a version and stay with it for a fortnight before you decide anything.
There is no measurement here. Nothing about this practice produces a reading you could hold against last week’s, so the only evidence you will ever have is your own sense of how a fortnight went, and changing the variable halfway through destroys it. Three days of one thing and then three days of another tell you nothing at all, and they feel exactly like having tried.
The chart-hopping is the version of that I would watch for, because it does not feel like quitting. It feels like research. You read that hematite is a root stone, you work the root, nothing obvious happens in the first week, and somewhere in the second week you come across a page filing it higher up and think, well, perhaps that is the missing piece. The solar plexus page is not the missing piece. What you have found is a different word in a column in somebody else’s table, and chasing it costs you the one thing this practice asks for, which is staying put long enough to notice anything.
Composition, varieties and care all have settled answers, and the Crystalance Mineral Library carries them, which makes it a pleasant place to go after an argument like this one.
Sources
- The British Museum, magical gem; intaglio, H.1986,0501.32 (haematite, oval, 3rd century, Late Roman; a pregnant woman squatting over a birthing stool with ram-head armrests, a uterus symbol and a seven-bitted key below, encircled by an Ouroboros; an octopus-like uterus on the reverse)
- The British Museum, magical gem; stamp-seal, H.1986,0501.119 (haematite, 1st century BC, Late Roman; “perforated and threaded with gold(?) suspension-ring”; a scarab from above surrounded with five eight-pointed stars, “four pairs of legs, its antennae are crescent-shaped, resembling a crab”)
