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Jaspis, Jasper, Quartz-gems

Jaspis, Jasper, Quartz-gems Page of 453 Jaspis, Jasper, Quartz-gems Text size:minus plus Restore normal size   Mail page  Print this page
JASPIS.
209
variety is a beautiful dead apple-green, only found in India, such as the stone employed for the famous signet of Cleopatra in the Marlborough Gems. The material commonly used for the Phenician scarabs found in Sardinia, though greatly resembling this, is of a totally different nature, yielding to the knife-point and apparently a fine Serpentine. Either of these would be aptly described by a comparison of their colour to verdigris.
4.  A light green, mottled with yellow, after the manner of the Moss-Agate, but quite opaque, also serves frequently for Mith-raic and Basilidan talismans. This would seem to be the Tree-Agate of Orpheus (230) which insured fertile crops if tied round the ploughman's arm, or the horns of the oxen that ploughed the field.
5.  A pale opaque yellow, exclusively used for talismans, astrological or gnostic, and certainly Pliny's Cerachates, of which Solinus observes " those that are of a waxy appearance being vulgarly plentiful are despised." He may, however, have bad in view here that variety of the Calcedony now known as the Yellow Sard, a colour in the species that had quite gone out of fashion with the Romans of the Empire.
No stone held so high a rank in the alexipharmaca of both ancient and mediaeval physicians as the Jasper. Pliny and Epiphanius have been quoted above as to the virtue of the Grammatias. Even the sober Galen records (Simp. Med. ix.) : " The Green Jasper benefits the chest and mouth of the stomach if tied upon it. Some set it in a ring and engrave upon it a serpent with radiated head, just as King Nechepsos prescribes in his 13th book. Of this gem I have had ample experience, having made a necklace out of such stones, and hung it round the neck, descending so low that the stones might touch the mouth of the stomach, and they proved to be of no less service than if they had been engraved in the manner prescribed by King Nechepsos." What Galen understood by his " Green Jasper" is made apparent by the multitude of Plasmas belonging to his age, engraved with the serpent Chnuphis, surrounded by a long Coptic legend, and, in one instance, explained by an invocation in Greek " that he would keep in health the chest of Proclus." Such amulets are con­fined to the Plasma and the yellow Calcedony. Orpheus again (264)
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