This is medieval death trip for Wednesday, January 6, 2021.
Episode 86 concerning the meaning of stones.
Hello, and welcome to medieval Death Trip, the show where we explore the wit and weirdness of medieval texts.
I'm your host, Patrick Lane.
As we close out the holiday season and move into this brand new year, we're going to take a little hiatus from our true crime miniseries to revel in the materialistic afterglow of the gift giving season and ponder ways to manipulate your fate in a month of resolutions and the design of self improvement regimens.
So, were going to hear some medieval thoughts on the qualities, natural and supernatural, of precious stones.
Well, I say medieval, but as with many things of the period, these are more like the classical thoughts that medieval natural historians and alchemists lightly remodeled and occasionally decorated with some christian wallpaper.
The value of precious stones was, and still is, multiplex.
They have a monetary value as a rare luxury commodity, and they, of course, have an aesthetic value as natural objects, but especially as crafted ones.
And it's easy to forget, I think, that most diamonds and gems don't just fall out of the walls of the mine with their characteristic rpg dice shapes, as many a cartoon would have us believe.
They have to be cut and worked by artisans to reach most of that aesthetic value that is prized in them.
But beyond these top two categories, wealth and beauty, they also have value as a form of social capital, as kind of the sum or maybe the product of the two previous values.
However, the metaphorical math ought to work.
Adorning yourself with expensive and beautiful things conveys, or at least tries to assert I one's status in the social hierarchy.
Similarly, they have cultural value and can broadcast other kinds of social messages based on the traditions and images associated with them, such as a diamond ring indicating that one is engaged to be married, or a stone set in a necklace revealing the month of your birth, or other astrological affiliations.
And with that last point, we begin to slide over into one of the values that was far more significant in the pre modern world than it is today, though it's far from extinct in our world.
And this is the supernatural value of a stone, its power to work magic, to protect from harm or enhance abilities or influence events in our text.
For today, these latter qualities receive far more attention than anything else about the stones.
Indeed, these sources mostly cover just a little bit of natural history, of what the stones look like, where they can be found, and how they come into existence, with this third item often being highly imaginative and scientifically inaccurate, folkloric fantasy usually lifted straight from classical writers, and from there you move on to a much more extensive list of the uses of the stone, which are occasionally practical but more often take the form of bad medical treatments and magical charms.
As with many a medieval astrological discussion, it can feel a bit strange in these descriptions to see largely unmodified pagan magic presented without commentary or criticism alongside christian symbolic interpretations.