The Lore of Gemstones (Continued)

A West Pakistani folktale, "The Ruby Prince," is both kin to "Psyche and Eros" and one of those stories where the hero is born from a stone. It begins with poor Brahmin walking along a dusty road and finding a beautiful sparkling red stone. He presents the ruby to the King who pays him handsomely for it. The King then locks the ruby in a chest and forgets about it until years later when he opens the chest. The ruby has vanished, but out steps a handsome young man. When the King demands to know what has happened to his jewel, the young man replies "I am the Ruby Prince." He refuses to give any other answer and the irate King has him tossed out of the palace. Fortunately, a guard takes pity on him and gives him a horse and a few weapons and the Ruby Prince rides off. The Ruby Prince comes to the King's attention again when he slays a flesh-eating monster. This time, the grateful King offers him his daughter's hand in marriage. The Princess and the Ruby Prince live quite happily until the Princess becomes curious about her husband's origins. Each day she asks the Ruby Prince where he comes from and each day he begs her not to ask, saying he can't tell her. She finally asks the question when they are standing by a river, and the Ruby Prince disappears into the water. For a moment a green serpent — its scales covered with gems and a ruby in the center of its forehead — emerges and gives her sorrowful look, then it, too, is gone. The young Princess is instantly contrite. Contrition soon gives way to grief and then desperation when months pass without any sign of her husband.

A serving woman finally comes forward and sends the Princess to the forest where every night a tiny king and his equally tiny retinue emerge from a hole in the earth. The retinue is made up of musicians who play music and dance for the king, but among them is one who wears a ruby in the center of his forehead and sits staring morosely into the distance. Spying on this magical company, the Princess becomes sure that the tiny depressed courtier is her Ruby Prince. Eventually, she wins him back by dancing for the king and getting him to grant a wish, which is the release of her husband and the restoration of the Ruby Prince's full size. The Princess and Prince then live happily ever after, and the Princess never asks about his origins again.

This story follows the pattern of many of the classic Animal Bridegroom tales where the wife breaks the husband's taboo and must then prove her love and win him back. Here, though, it is not the husband's animal nature that must not be questioned but his stone nature, which is every bit as magical — and as the ruby is a gem that first appeared to the Brahmin, I suspect the transformation of stone to man is also meant to be seen as a gift of the Divine. (Though perhaps this is not really unusual. According to D.G. Brinton's 1896 book, Myths of the New World, it was a Mexican belief that all men have been stones.) "The Ruby Prince" is also another example of gems being connected with serpents, a pattern that turns up in stories from almost every culture.

Another gem transformation story is "The Diamond Tree," a variant of "Hansel and Gretel" told by Moroccan Jews and retold in The Diamond Tree: Jewish Tales from Around the World by Howard Schwartz and Barbara Rush. It's the story of a witch who possesses a tree whose branches are filled with diamonds, and who kidnaps children. First she changes them into eagles and sends them off in pairs to bring her barrels of fresh water. When the young eagles inevitably become too weak to serve her, she changes them into diamonds on her tree. Eventually, the eagles steal water barrels from a poor man named Nissim too many times. So Nissim hides himself in an empty barrel and the eagles carry him to the diamond tree. There the eagles explain their sad story and Nissim vows to help them. He does so by tricking the witch, daring her first to turn the eagles back into children, and then the diamonds back into children. Finally, he challenges her to turn herself into a diamond. Too proud and foolish to refuse his dare, she turns herself into a blood-red diamond, which he plucks from the tree and hurls into the sea. Faced with dilemma of how to get all these children home to their parents, Nissim manages to cut down the diamond tree and make a boat of its timbers. Inside the hollow trunk he finds a cache of real diamonds. The good man gives each child a diamond of their own (keeping one for himself), and the children all return home with the means to keep them comfortably. There are two distinct types of gems in this story: those that are made of pure witchery, created from other's misfortunes; and the real gems, which must be allocated with justice.

Trees whose branches are filled with gems also appear in "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp," a story from Richard Burton's version of The Arabian Nights. Sent underground by a wicked magician to retrieve the magic lamp, Aladdin stumbles through a gem-filled garden. A true innocent, believing the trees' pretty fruits to be made of glass, he stuffs his pockets with them, and returns home a rich man.

As story cycles go, The Arabian Nights tales are as jewel-bedecked as the French court fairy tales, with gems often the reward for both the innocent and the resourceful. In a well-known sequence from "The Second Voyage of Sinbad the Seaman," Sinbad uses his turban to bind himself to a legendary bird called a Rukh. The Rukh brings him to a strange island, where the soil is made of diamonds. Since the island is also swarming with vipers Sinbad knows he must escape. Binding himself to the meat of a dead sheep, he is picked up by a Rukh in search of food and conveyed safely to the massive bird's nest. In the end, of course, Sinbad returns home with his clothing stuffed full of diamonds.

Sinbad's island of diamonds is a barren and savage place, but Arabian mythology also tells of the jinn, ancient shape-shifting spirits created from fire, who according to some sources live in Jinnistan, or the country of the Jinn. Jinnistan not only has a town called Amberabad, or Amber City, but a capital called The City of Jewels. Other sources say the jinn reside in Kaf, the mystical emerald mountains which surround the Earth. In these instances gems signify the Other Realm, the primal place of gods and spirits and power. Along similar folkloric lines, King Solomon's body is said to rest on an emerald isle at the end of the seven seas, and Merlin's body, in some versions of Arthurian lore, lies in a crystal tower.

One final account of a miraculous stone comes originally from the Midrash, the commentaries on the Five Books of Moses. "The Palace Beneath the Sea," Howard Schwartz's gorgeous retelling of a 19th–century story attributed to Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, begins with an account of the tzohar, a luminous stone that is actually the last bit of the primordial light of creation. The history of the tzohar bears a resemblance to the legend of Ho's jade, though it's not quite as bloody. It's said that when Adam sinned, God withdrew the gem from the world, hiding it away. Some commentaries claim that the angel Raziel then gave the tzohar to Adam after the Fall, and Adam passed it on to his children. Another version says that a compassionate God wanted to hold out hope to Adam and Eve and so encased some of that primordial light in a white crystal and gave it to them as a source of comfort. Others say the gem didn't return to earth until Enoch ascended into Paradise in his fiery chariot, and the stone was given to him as a sign that his pure soul had been accepted into Heaven. In any case, the radiant stone eventually found its way onto Noah's ark, where it illuminated the ark during the darkest days of the flood. Noah proved himself less than righteous, however, and the stone fell into the floodwaters, lodging in an underwater cave. When the waters finally receded, the cave emerged in an Egyptian valley. This was the same cave that the infant Abraham was brought to, and so the stone passed into the hands of Abraham, Issac, Jacob, and Joseph. It's believed that Joseph used the stone to divine the future and interpret dreams. The tzohar was later buried with Joseph, only to emerge from his coffin into the hands of Moses in a most miraculous way. Like Ho's jade, the tzohar continued to change hands, disappearing for centuries and then miraculously reappearing to the righteous. Also like the jade, the tzohar had powers beyond its steady, almost celestial illumination. A stone of divination and wisdom, it showered blessings on whomever possessed it, and those who actually experienced its golden light knew what it was to be in the presence of the Divine.

"The Palace Beneath the Sea" then goes on to tell of a king who had an amazing golden lamp that blessed and protected his kingdom, and contained, of course, the tzohar. A soothsayer tells him that if the lamp is ever lost, his kingdom will be destroyed. The king then constructs a labyrinthine cave beneath the sea to protect the lamp. He closes off the cave with a metal door "locked with seven locks and sealed with seven seals." When the king asks the soothsayer if the lamp is sufficiently protected, the soothsayer consults the stars and gives a disconcerting answer: The door to the labyrinth must have the secret of its opening engraved upon it or the king's actions will be regarded by heaven as selfish, and the gifts of the lamp lost to him. The soothsayer does offer one bit of comfort: The king can conceal this secret in code. The king then searches for an unbreakable code, which is provided to him by another soothsayer, this one who understands that it is the tzohar the king is protecting and thus gives him the key to opening the labyrinth in a Kabbalistic code. The king's bountiful reign thus continues, and his descendants, too, are blessed and protected by the hidden lamp. But generations pass, and the sea rises and covers up the king's palace and his city. The waters finally recede, revealing only a thick layer of fine white clay, leaving no hint at all of the palace and cave beneath it.

Another kingdom eventually rises and exiles its Jews to the claylike stretch of land that conceals the old palace. There, a potter while digging for clay for his fine white pottery, finds the door to the labyrinth. He tells his Rebbe, a great Hasidic master, who recognizes the Kabbalistic symbols, and indeed is able to utter the Ineffable Name that releases the seals and locks. Together the potter and the Rebbe enter the underground cavern, which is filled with crystalline light and miraculously flourishing carob trees. Schwartz gives a truly magical account of their travels through the miraculous cave in which they follow a voice through the labyrinth to an underground waterfall, with the glowing light becoming stronger and stronger. Eventually, they are led to the tzohar itself. I highly recommend Schwartz's version of this story, which can found in his Miriam's Tambourine collection, for the sheer beauty of language as he describes the moment when this holy man encounters the divine light. Although there's no proof that J.R.R. Tolkien was familiar with the legend of the tzohar, parallels have been drawn to the three crystal jewels of the Silmarillion, which contain the imprisoned light of the world.

When you write about stones an odd phenomenon occurs. There seems to be a correlative manifestation of them in your life. A small community of crystals now inhabits my desk, with others perched on the shelves in my office and bedroom; larger rocks have found their way to the hearth and garden. I've come to see that each one has a distinct and unique presence, in much the same way that individual trees do. They are beings. As for the stories about them, perhaps these tales are the human imagination struggling to make sense of the magnitude of geology. Perhaps they are simply the language of our spirit connection to the Earth. And perhaps, like all myths, each one contains at least a grain of truth. For millennia now, humankind has been seduced by gemstones. At the most basic level that seduction seems to be an instinctive recognition of beauty and an almost universal desire for that which glitters. Perhaps it all comes down to light itself, without which life on this planet would not exist. We are light-seeking creatures, and in gemstones we get to hold a piece of the Earth which draws light in and reflects it back, often transforming that light into dazzling color. They contain secrets, these stones — echoes of lava flows and oceans, traces of ice and stream and wind. They are reminders that the Earth we inhabit is molten, ever-changing, and alive. One only has to look closely at a crystal to see that it contains a world of movement and light. So we pick them up, examine them, take them as mementos and talismans, and the exchange begins: our curiosity probing their beauty, their beauty informing and illuminating our world. As our ancestors have been since time immemorial we're drawn toward that which lets light through.

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