Et solet, ut perhibent, deprehendere virginitatem.
Praegnans potest aquam triduo qua mersus habetur
Quo vexabatur partum cito libera fundit.
Gagates burns when washed with water; is extinguished by anointing it with olive oil.
The magnet is especially used in the illusions of magic. The great Deendor is said to have first used it, realizing that there was no more potent force in magic, and after him the famous witch Circe employed it. Among the Medes experience revealed still further virtues of the stone. It is used to test a wife’s chastity while she is sleeping; if she is unchaste, she will fall out of bed when the gem is applied to her head. A burglar can commit theft unmolested by sprinkling it over hot coals and so driving away all the occupants of the house.
In the case of Chelonitis Marbod’s account is very similar to that in Pliny’s Natural History,[3073] citing the Magi for the power of divination it bestows when carried under the tongue at certain times of the moon, according to whose phases its power varies. Of the gems hitherto described only in the case of adamant and gagates was there any resemblance between Marbod and Pliny and there only partial.
Pliny also briefly states that the stone diadochos resembles beryl, but does not have Marbod’s statements that it is employed in water divination to show varied images of demons, “nor is there other stone stronger to evoke shades.” But if by chance it comes in contact with a corpse, it loses its wonted force, since the stone is sacred and abhors dead bodies.[3074]
Liber lapidum was meant to be taken seriously.
The vast powers, not only medicinal and physical, but of divination and magic, over the mind and affections, miraculous and supernatural, even over God, as in the statement that the sapphire can be employed to secure a more favorable answer to prayer, which Marbod assigns to gems without a sign of scruple or scepticism or disapproval on his part, have so shocked some moderns that suggestions have been made, in order to explain away the acceptance of talismanic powers of gems to such a degree by a Christian clergyman who became a bishop, that Marbod must have composed his poem when quite young and lived to repent it, or that he regarded it merely as a poetical flight and exercise, not as an exposition of scientific fact. But wherefore then was it not only widely read in the literary twelfth century but also widely cited as an authority in the scientific and equally Christian thirteenth century? No; everyone else took it precisely as Marbod meant it, as a serious statement of the marvelous powers which had been divinely implanted in gems. And why should not God be more easily reached through the instrumentality of gems, since He had endowed them with their marvelous virtues? Marbod affirms his own faith in the great virtues of gems not only at the beginning but the close of his poem, stating that while some have doubted the marvelous properties attributed to them, this has been due to the fact that so many imitation gems are made of glass, which deceive the unwary but of course lack the occult virtues of the genuine stones. If the stones are genuine and duly consecrated, the marvelous effects will without a doubt follow.