Primary source
George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones (1913)
Birthstones
Stone & Talisman
Your birth month gives your natal stone; the weekday you were born gives its talismanic companion.
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How this reading is made
Every CrystalCore reading is calculated: the same date of birth always returns the same result, by the arithmetic set out below. Each interpretation follows the literature listed in the bibliography, and where the step from a date to a result is our own convention rather than the source’s, we say so, along with what the reading does not claim to know.
What we calculate
Two things, both read straight off your birth date and both checkable against the book. Your month gives your natal stone, from the table Kunz sets out as the settled modern list — January garnet through December turquoise. The day of the week you were born gives your talismanic gem, from his separate list of the gems of the week days: Sunday pearl, Monday emerald, Tuesday topaz, Wednesday turquoise, Thursday sapphire, Friday ruby, Saturday amethyst. There is no arithmetic to check here and nothing reduced or summed — you were born in a month and on a weekday, and the tables do the rest.
Where the meaning comes from
Kunz spends most of the book on what particular stones were held to do, and those attributions are your reading. The amethyst was worn against intoxication and credited with clear judgement; the emerald was thought to undo enchantments and reveal what was true; the sapphire was a king’s defence against envy; the turquoise was believed to lose its virtue if bought rather than given. Your month stone is the constant — the character of the thing. Your weekday stone is the register it operates in. Where the two happen to be the same stone, which occurs for about one reader in twelve, we read that as concentration rather than as a second influence.
What we don't claim
We report what these stones were believed to do; we make no claim that any mineral does anything. Kunz’s chapter on therapeutic use is a history of belief, and we treat it as one. Nor is his list the only list — he sets out the Jewish, Roman, Arabian, Polish, Russian and Italian traditions side by side, tallies how often each stone was assigned to each month, and declines to rule between them; we follow the canonical table he settles on, and if you have seen a different stone for your month elsewhere, that is why. He records three separate weekday schemes as well, and we use the talismanic gems rather than the phenomenal ones. He is candid, too, that tourmaline sits awkwardly among the birth-stones, being known only since the eighteenth century, and we pass that doubt on rather than hiding it. Finally, this is the coarsest input in CrystalCore: a month and a weekday, not a full date.
Sources
The interpretation is drawn from Kunz — out of copyright, and readable in full at the link below. We worked from that text directly, using AI to draft summaries of each month, number, sign or card, then edited them: the scheme and the attributions are the author’s, the phrasing is ours.
This is a reading of a tradition, not a prediction and not advice.
Kunz George Frederick, “The Curious Lore of Precious Stones”, J. B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia 1913.
Both tables we read from: the settled monthly birthstones (ch. IX) and the talismanic gems of the weekdays (ch. X), together with the lore attached to each stone.
Project Gutenberg