Magical Gems: The Other Half of Ancient Medicine

Among the engraved gemstones that survive from the Roman Empire there is a recurring design that takes a moment to parse.

At the centre is a vessel, something like a cupping-glass, with a key or lock at its base. Around it stand gods, often Egyptian, often armed. Above it, frequently, a lion-headed serpent with rays coming off its mane. The whole thing may be encircled by a snake eating its own tail.

The vessel is a womb. The key is exactly what it looks like: an instruction to open or close.

These are uterine gems, and they are one of the largest identifiable groups of magical gems we have. They were carried by women with gynaecological complaints, in a world where such complaints regularly killed. They are not curiosities. They are medical equipment.

A catalogue of ordinary suffering

Several thousand of these stones survive, and once catalogued they sort themselves into a surprisingly narrow set of concerns.

The biggest group is digestive. The lion-headed serpent above the womb, Chnoubis, appears constantly on gems for the stomach, so consistently that the association is unmistakable across hundreds of examples. Then gynaecological bleeding and childbirth. Then eye disease, fever, sciatica, and pain in general.

What is notable is what is not there. Protection against envy and the evil eye exists on the gems, but it is a smaller category than the reputation of ancient magic would suggest, and that anxiety had its own dedicated objects anyway. Love magic is rarer still. Curses barely appear, because curses had lead, which was cheap, and this is carved semi-precious stone.

The gems are where people spent real money. They spent it on their guts, their pregnancies, and their eyes.

Why that stone for that ailment

The choice of material is not decorative, and the logic is legible once you see it.

Haematite dominates the bleeding and womb gems. It is an iron ore, dark and metallic, and when ground it produces a red streak: a stone that bleeds. For a complaint about blood, you carry the stone that visibly does what you want controlled.

Green jasper clusters on stomach gems, usually with Chnoubis. Yellow stones turn up for jaundice.

This is sympathetic reasoning: like affects like, and appearance indicates power. It is not evidence that ancient people were stupid. It is a working theory of pharmacology in a world with no way to test one, and it is the same theory that produced the recipes in the magical papyri, which specify materials with the same fussy precision.

The physician who tried it

Here is where the tidy division between medicine and magic falls apart.

Galen of Pergamon was the most systematic medical writer of antiquity: an experimentalist, a dissector, a man who argued with everybody and wrote millions of words. He is the last person you would expect to endorse an amulet.

In his work on simple remedies he discusses a green jasper stone worn against the stomach. He notes that some people engrave the radiate serpent on it. He reports that he tested the thing, hanging stones on patients, and that it appeared to help.

His scepticism is aimed somewhere very specific: he doubts the engraving matters. The stone he is prepared to credit. He is not endorsing magic and he is not dismissing the object. He is doing something recognisably empirical, which is separating the component he can test from the component he cannot.

That single passage does more damage to the modern boundary than anything else in the literature. The categories we use, real medicine here and superstition there, were not the categories they were working with.

The words nobody could read

The gems also carry text, and the text is frequently not language.

Alongside recognisable divine names (Greek, Egyptian, and a great deal of Jewish material, with Iao and Sabaoth appearing constantly) you find long strings of syllables belonging to no tongue at all. Some are palindromes. Some recur across gems made hundreds of miles apart, which means they were being copied accurately from something.

These are the same voces magicae that fill the magical papyri, and they behave the same way: they are meant to be got exactly right rather than understood. A gem-cutter reproducing a string of nonsense letters correctly is following a specification, not expressing a belief.

Which tells you there was a body of written technical knowledge behind these objects, recipe books or pattern books of some kind, connecting workshops across the Mediterranean. Almost none of it survives. The papyri are the fragment that made it through, and they are Egyptian because Egypt is dry.

Objects from the worst day

It is worth being clear about what these things are, because "magical gem" makes them sound whimsical.

Each one was commissioned by somebody who was frightened. A woman bleeding and not knowing why. A man in the kind of abdominal pain that in antiquity had a decent chance of killing him. A pregnancy in a world where pregnancy was among the likeliest ways for a young woman to die.

They went to a craftsman, paid for a cut stone, and carried it. Sometimes for years: many gems are worn smooth from handling.

The medicine available to them could set a bone and had opium, and beyond that was largely guesswork with good bedside manner. Against that, a stone chosen on a coherent theory, inscribed with names of power, prescribed by tradition and, in at least one documented case, tested by the finest physician of the age, was not an unreasonable purchase.

They are among the most human objects antiquity left behind: small, expensive, carefully made, and bought by people who had run out of better options.