The name confusion around peridot has a well-known and instructive consequence.
The collection of large green stones in the Three Kings shrine at Cologne Cathedral, long described as emeralds, is peridot. So, on the standard account, was a significant amount of the material called emerald in medieval European treasuries. The mistake ran in the other direction too: Cleopatra's emeralds, from the Egyptian mines of the Eastern Desert, were emerald in at least some cases, but Zabargad peridot circulated in the same markets and the two were not reliably separated by anyone before the modern period. Green was the operative category.
This should govern how any pre-modern gem correspondence is read. When a lapidary assigns virtues to a green stone, those virtues attach to greenness and to a name, not to a mineral species, and the species behind the name may vary between manuscripts, regions and centuries. Reconstructing a stable ancient tradition for a specific mineral is usually not possible, and confident modern statements that a particular species was sacred to a particular people or planet in antiquity are generally doing more than the evidence permits.
Peridot's modern associations (the Sun, Leo, warmth, renewal, the release of resentment), are twentieth-century, drawn from the colour and from the classical epithet gem of the sun. The classical epithet itself is real: the stone was reportedly mined at night, when the material is easier to spot, and worn against night terrors, which Pliny mentions.
Peridot is the August birthstone on the 1912 list; spinel was added alongside it in 2016.