Bloodstone
Bloodstone is dark green chalcedony spotted with red. Pliny the Elder called it heliotropium, “sun-turner”, for a belief that it turned the sun’s light red in water; Christian legend later read the red spots as the blood of Christ.
Meaning
Bloodstone, also called heliotrope, is green jasper with red spots of iron oxide, mostly hematite, in GIA’s description. The older name is Greek: GIA gives it as “to turn the sun”, and Pliny the Elder explains that the stone, put in water in full sun, turned the reflected light the colour of blood. Most bloodstone sold today comes from India. It is one of March’s two birthstones (March birthstone).
Origin and history
Pliny’s heliotropium (book 37, chapter 60) is leek-green streaked with blood-red. Besides reddening the sun, he wrote, it reflected the sun like a mirror and showed eclipses as the moon crossed its face. He gives the magicians’ claim that the stone, joined with the heliotrope plant and spoken over with incantations, made its bearer invisible, and calls it a glaring example of their “impudent effrontery”.
Later writers took the sun story further. George Frederick Kunz traces to the old treatise of Damigeron the claim that bloodstone could turn the sun itself red and raise thunder, lightning and storms, and that it foretold the future by rain and “audible oracles”. The Leyden papyrus promised that whoever carried the stone and spoke the name engraved on it would find all doors open, and bonds and stone walls broken.
The blood of Christ
The modern name comes from a Christian reading. Kunz records the legend that the red spots are the blood of Christ, and gems carved so that the spots fall as drops of blood on the thorn-crowned head of Christ. GIA gives the same origin for the name bloodstone.
A stone against bleeding
Red stones were thought to stop bleeding, and bloodstone was prescribed above all of them for it: by its touch alone, Kunz writes, it was supposed to stop the most violent haemorrhage. The Hortus Sanitatis of Johannes de Cuba, printed in Strasbourg around 1483, shows it being tried against a nosebleed.
In crystal healing
Modern crystal healing keeps the stone’s link with health as a belief. The religion scholar Joseph Laycock quotes Colleen McCann, a self-described shaman working with Goop, saying that bloodstones promote good health; he adds that there is no evidence crystals can bring health.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comMarch birthstones: aquamarine and bloodstoneBloodstone is one of March's two birthstonesRead next
- Next in Crystal and gemstone loreMoonstoneMoonstone is a feldspar whose glow seems to move across it like moonlight. Hindu mythology holds it is made of solidified moonbeams, and Kunz recorded the belief in India that, held in the mouth at full moon, it let lovers read their future.
- The same shape in Symbols across culturesSun godsSun gods include Helios in Greece, Ra in Egypt, Shamash in Mesopotamia, Surya in India and Tonatiuh among the Aztecs. The sun is not always male: Japan’s Amaterasu and the Norse Sól are sun goddesses.
See also
Amethyst, Rose quartz, Clear quartz, Citrine, Carnelian, Onyx.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book 37, chapter 60, Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, book 37, chapter 60 (Heliotropium)
- The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, by George Frederick Kunz, 1913, J. B. Lippincott (Project Gutenberg edition), ch. 2 (Bloodstone); ch. 8 (Christian legend); ch. 11 (red stones in medicine)
- March Birthstones: Aquamarine and Bloodstone (GIA), Gemological Institute of America, Bloodstone birthstone meaning and history
- What’s behind the enduring popularity of crystals?, Joseph P. Laycock (Texas State University), The Conversation, 6 July 2022, Religion News Service, Section “Contagious magic”
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from circles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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