Crystal Grimoire
Agate
Zodiac: All Zodiac
Planets: Jupiter, Moon
Elements: Earth
Summary
Associates with Chakra based on color. Strength & stability, sense of composure & maturity. Aids in finding resolutions to problems. Smooth energy that washes over the aura to ease tensions or imbalances. Calming/grounding, finding inner-tranquility. Gentle support through deep, old emotional pain.
Keywords
Often associated with: strength, stability, inner tranquility, calming energy, grounding, gentle support
Spiritual meaning
In crystal tradition: Finding inner-tranquility and grounding
Emotional meaning
Often associated with: Sense of composure and maturity, easing tensions
History and lore
In history and lore: Kunz records that the writer Cardano judged agates of every variety to make their wearers 'temperate, continent, and cautious,' and that the stone made him more prudent in his own actions. Centuries earlier, Marbodus, the eleventh-century Bishop of Rennes, declared that agates made their wearers agreeable and persuasive. In Egypt, as the Egyptologist Wallis Budge recorded in 1930, grey agate amulets worn on the neck were held to prevent stiff-neck and ward off colic and diarrhoea.
About the sources
- George Frederick Kunz (1856 to 1932), Tiffany & Co.'s chief gemologist and author of The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913) and The Magic of Jewels and Charms (1915).
- Girolamo Cardano, author of De subtilitate, who, as Kunz tells it, tested gems by wearing them in turn and noting the good or ill fortune that followed.
- Marbodus, Bishop of Rennes, whose poem on the virtues of precious stones, written at the end of the eleventh century, Kunz calls the lapidary of the Middle Ages.
- E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptologist, sometime Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, author of Amulets and Superstitions (Oxford University Press, 1930), which covers Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hebrew, Islamic and Christian amulets.