The red ray

Where the association came from

Long before anyone worked a gemstone, people used red ochre, which is powdered hematite. It appears at Blombos Cave in South Africa over a hundred thousand years ago, processed in abalone shells with a recipe, and in burials across every inhabited continent, packed around the body. Nobody knows what it meant to the people who used it, but the association between red mineral and the continuation of life is the oldest documented symbolic act we have.

From there the reasoning is short. Blood is red; blood leaving the body is death; a red stone is blood that cannot leave. Egyptian funerary practice makes this explicit in the tyet amulet, the knot of Isis, which the Book of the Dead specifies should be of red jasper or carnelian and which was said to carry the blood of Isis and her power.

The classical writers connected red to Mars and therefore to iron, war and the choleric temperament, which is a neat case of a symbolic system agreeing with the chemistry by accident: most red stones are red because of iron.

What the traditions claimed

Egypt used red jasper and carnelian in quantity, for funerary amulets, for the tyet, and for scarabs. Its red stones were about protection at the moment of transition rather than about aggression.

In Ayurvedic and Jyotish tradition ruby is the gem of the Sun, the ratnaraj or king of gems, prescribed for authority, vitality and the father, and specifically not prescribed to everyone. A weak or afflicted Sun in the chart may make ruby the wrong stone, and the tradition is quite serious about this. Red coral answers to Mars in the same system, worn for courage and for the strength of the body.

Medieval European lapidaries follow Marbode in giving red stones staunching properties, said to slow bleeding and calm inflamed wounds, which is a doctrine of signatures argument in its purest form: like treats like. Bloodstone, green flecked with red, was assigned the same job and tied to the blood of the Crucifixion.

In Burmese tradition rubies were carried into battle, and the strongest form of the practice held that a ruby inserted beneath the skin made a warrior invulnerable. That is worth reporting as history rather than repeating as advice.

The stones of this ray

• Red jasper (Chalcedony & jasper, Mohs 7). Opaque, dependable and everywhere. Egyptian tyet amulets, Roman signet rings and the fourth-century lapidaries all name it for steadiness rather than brilliance.
• Ruby (Corundum, Mohs 9). Red corundum, the ratnaraj or king of gems in Sanskrit, assigned to the Sun in Jyotish. Burmese stones carried into battle were said to be set under the skin.
• Garnet (The gem silicates, Mohs 7). A whole family, not one stone, named for the pomegranate. Bohemian garnet jewellery, Anglo-Saxon cloisonné and January's birthstone.

Working with the ray

Red is the ray for anything that needs starting rather than sustaining. Traditions used it before an ordeal, not during a recovery, and modern practice is broadly consistent with that: the red stones are the ones people reach for when they need to act and find themselves stalling.

Because the ray is about heat, several traditions warn against it. Ayurvedic practice would not prescribe ruby to someone already running hot in temperament, and medieval writers said much the same about anger. If you notice that a red stone makes you restless rather than steady, that is a reasonable signal to switch to the brown or blue ray.

The practical form is usually carried rather than placed. Red jasper is the cheap, tough, honest choice for a pocket, garnet the one for a ring, and ruby the one that carries a genuine prescription tradition behind it if you are working with an astrologer.

Colour you can trust

Heat treatment is nearly universal in this ray and mostly undeclared at the low end. Carnelian is routinely heated to deepen and even out its colour, a practice the Romans already used, and much orange-red agate on a market stall was pale grey before someone baked it. This is not a defect, and it is stable, but it should be disclosed.

Ruby is the hard case. Glass-filled ruby, made by flooding fractured low-grade corundum with lead glass, is sold widely and is worth a small fraction of untreated stone. It can be identified by gas bubbles and blue flash inside the fractures under magnification. Lab-grown ruby is chemically identical to natural and honest when labelled; the trouble is only ever in the labelling.

Red coral, though it is not in this catalogue, deserves a mention because it is the most conservation-sensitive material in the ray. Much of what is sold is dyed bamboo coral or reconstituted powder, and the genuine article comes from slow-growing colonies under real harvesting pressure.