Amethyst

Amethyst is the violet variety of quartz, silicon dioxide, and its colour has an unusual cause: it requires both iron impurities and natural irradiation from surrounding rock over geological time to produce the colour centres responsible. Heat destroys them, which is why amethyst fades in strong sunlight and why heating amethyst produces citrine, a very large proportion of commercial citrine is heat-treated amethyst, generally undisclosed.

The name is Greek, amethystos, and it means not drunken. This etymology is secure and is one of the few gem etymologies that is not disputed. The belief attached to it, that the stone prevented or delayed intoxication, is attested in antiquity, and drinking vessels of amethyst and amethyst-coloured glass were made. Whether the belief generated the name or the colour did is less clear: wine-coloured water in a cup looks like wine and is not, which is at least as good an explanation of the association as any pharmacological claim.

The romantic myth usually printed, the nymph Amethystos turned to stone to escape Dionysus, the god pouring wine over her in remorse, is not ancient. It was written by the French Renaissance poet Remy Belleau in the sixteenth century, in a collection of poems about gems, and it is his invention. It appears in gem books as Greek myth constantly. This is a checkable point: the story is absent from every classical source and its author is known.

Amethyst was a costly stone until large Brazilian and Uruguayan deposits were opened in the nineteenth century, after which it became inexpensive. Its status in older sources reflects the earlier scarcity.

Amethyst's ecclesiastical career is real and is the source of much of its modern reputation. It was the customary stone of a bishop's ring in the Latin church, and the association with sober spiritual authority followed from the name and from the colour, purple being the liturgical colour of penitence and of episcopal rank. This is a documented usage with a long continuity, not a folk claim.

The modern crystal-healing profile (calm, sobriety, protection against addiction, meditation, the third eye and crown), is a twentieth-century construction built on the ancient etymology. The step from not drunken, meaning a stone that lets you keep drinking, to a stone that helps you stop drinking is a substantial reinterpretation, and it inverts the original use. That inversion happened in the modern literature and is worth naming, because it is presented as continuity.

Amethyst is the February birthstone. It was on the 1912 National Association of Jewelers list and has survived every revision without change, which distinguishes it from months that have accumulated alternatives for commercial reasons. It also appears in the older breastplate-derived correlations, where the Hebrew ahlamah was rendered amethystos by the Septuagint, though the standard scholarly view is that ahlamah was more probably a red jasper, so even the apparent continuity of the name across two and a half thousand years may not be a continuity of the stone.

Modern metaphysical writing associates amethyst with the crown and third-eye centres. The chakra system as applied to gemstones is a twentieth-century synthesis and is not found in the Indian sources from which the chakra material itself derives.