Been off on another one of those intellectual adventures… this one investigating and seeing if I can find out the true history of the moonstone. Like the moon herself, which shows us a reflected form, the true moonstone of the ancients turned out to be something of an illusionist….
Many of the classical-era writers on gemstones mention moonstone, well that is to say they mention a stone called selenites…. great confusion has this caused as there is a selenite mineral in our day; only that is the crystalline form of gypsum. The selenites mentioned by Pliny, Dioscorides et. al., (I’ve yet to find it in Theophrastus but then I haven’t looked hard yet) is described in general as a stone that is white / clear, and shows an image of the moon inside it. It sounds like it could be moonstone to me; is there any other stone that is so reminiscent of the moon’s silvery whiteness? They do however describe a few “file under weird” qualities, such as that the stone is found when the moon is full…. etc
Then we move on to the medieval writers, and they certainly have some out-there ideas. From the 13th to the 17th century, a great number of them state that the silenites is a stone that shows the likeness of the moon, only it changes, waxing and waning, according to the actual phase of the moon! I’m most puzzled by this… either there was some phantasmal force around in those days, which we can no longer perceive… and a magical stone which has been lost…. or they are superstitious and prone to believe anything they are said, rather than their sense… or they all simply copied from Bartholomew’s 13th century “On the nature of things”, the first source that appears to have mentioned this curious quality of moonstone. I can’t figure it out.
One thing that got interesting was when I found out that Dioscorides Materia Medica is extant in several Latin versions, which feature extended commentaries. This appears to have been the case with ancient herbals and such.. the scribes copying the manuscripts and users of the works often added annotations, which gradually grew. turns out that these annotations may never have been translated into english….. the working field notes from 2,000 years of using such a classic work? The temptation is too great. My latin is crap, but who knows, one day I’ll find a scholar and put out a master version of Dioscorides, complete with original illustrations and the greatest of the commentaries……. fun stuff!