Carbuncle has many meanings. Today it most often describes a deep red almandine garnet gemstone cut with a smooth, convex face or cabochon. Besides garnet a carbuncle can be an elusive, shining creature of riches; a lumpy skin infection; or a mystic illuminating stone.
This stone is ascribed healing properties and may be ground and used in medicines. It's described by German-Dutch physician Johann Glauber (1604 - 1670), inventor of Glauber's salts and considered the father of chemical engineering.
Glauber is one of the many who suffer from the toxic elements or effects of their experiments. Alchemical experiment poisoning is a common affliction of alchemists just as toxic paint pigments affect artists, and from mercury in later hat-making arises Mad Hatter's disease.
Some of Glauber's medical recipes use the carbuncle. One especially interesting:
"The carbuncle [re: red stone] is to be beaten to a powder, and the best spirit of wine [ardent spirits] is to be poured thereon, so as to extract the tincture. This tinged liquor is to be drawn off into another glass and more fresh spirit is to be poured upon the matter, that, in heat, it may extract yet more tincture.
"The like labor is to be repeated so often until all the tincture be extracted, and the spirit be no longer colored. Then the spirit, being drawn off by distillation per balneum [through the bath ie bain-marie], leaves behind a most red tincture at the bottom in form of a liquor named C.O.S., for here are present color, odor and taste - the color and odor from the gold and sulfur, the savor from the salt.
"The residue which remains after the extraction of the tincture is to be converted with new or fresh sal mirabilis [Glauber's salt: sodium sulfate (Na₂SO₄)] with coals of vine [charcoal] or other wood into a red stone, by fusion, and to be so long extracted that all the gold be converted, with the vegetable sulfur or carbon, into a medicine. For one only labor serves to extract the whole gold by the spirit of wine, but repeated labors attend to the end proposed."
"Thus hast thou, friendly reader, a medicine of great moment and great efficacy, in which the most pure parts of the gold and vine and conjoined; nor can this be other than a most profitable medicament for men and metals."
Glauber adds,
"A good Sol [gold] of sal mirabilis with equal parts of common salt and oil of vitriol [sulfuric acid] both as strong and pure as possible."
For three millennia, carbuncles as gems are any of a variety of red stones. They don't receive their official names until specific definitions emerge in the late 1700s. Until then carbuncle can refer to stones such as like sardonyx, carnelian, garnet, ruby and spinel.
An Elusive Creature of South America
The Spanish official name for "carbuncle" is a medical abscess. In South American lore, the carbuncle or carbunco is a small enigmatic creature of varying descriptions thought to contain or carry riches.
The little entity may be covered with gemstones or gold. No one sees it close enough to know if it's bird or mammal. Cats, dogs and even hairy mollusks have been described.
It sometimes shimmers in red or green, or appears as an ethereal flame known as guardian of the metals. This spirit does not seek to communicate with people.
Light-Giving Stone
A carbuncle in myth and legend can also refer to a magical stone able to emit light in a dark space. This motif appears in several medieval texts. In a French work c. 1150, a fictional version of Charlemagne discovers this lighting in Emperor Hugo's palace in Constantinople.
In a translation from the Welsh, c. 1200, a golden column is in a chamber. A carbuncle stone shines perpetual light. The legendary Prester John c. 1165 claims carbuncles are used for light indoors, and refers to two golden apples each with two carbuncles on the palace roof.
Another description by Prester John is a carbuncle the size of a large amphora. It illuminates the palace as the sun illuminates the world. Similar divinely bright stones are mentioned in the Book of Mormon.
In legend Prester John is often portrayed as a Christian monarch ruling a kingdom lost to the Saracens during the Crusades. Stories of his feats range in time period and settings from the twelfth to seventeenth centuries.
Skin Infection:
A carbuncle is an infection beneath the skin. When a person has many carbuncles, the condition is called carbunculosis.
A carbuncle manifests as a cluster of boils caused by bacterial infection, most commonly with Staphylococcus aureus or Streptococcus pyogenes. Infection often involves a group of hair follicles.
The infected material forms a lump, which occurs deep in the skin and may contain pus. The presence of a carbuncle is a sign that the immune system is actively fighting the infection.
The word is believed to originate from the Latin: carbunculus, or a small coal; diminutive of carbon-, carbo: charcoal or ember; also a carbuncle stone, "precious stones of a red or fiery color", which are usually almandine garnets. Or maybe the philosophers' stone.
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