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JASPIS.
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209
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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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