The Journal

The correspondence tables assign red jasper to fire. Mars rules it, the old lists say, because the stone is red and Mars is red and iron belongs to both. The assignment has been copied from book to book for a century, and it is wrong in a way worth examining, because the error hides what the stone does. Red jasper is opaque chalcedony colored by iron oxide. The red is rust, not flame. It is what earth does to iron given enough time and enough contact. A stone whose color come