History & Culture
Known as the Cursed Amethyst, this jewel inspired the plot of Anthony Doerr’s “All The Light We Cannot See.” What was it—and do we always imbue gems with such dark meanings?
ByErin Blakemore
Published November 21, 2023
• 6 min read
In Anthony Doerr’s bestselling novel All the Light We Cannot See, the chaos of World War II is reflected in the eyes of the book’s blind heroine—and represented by a shimmering, supposedly cursed gemstone at the heart of the story. The Sea of Flames jewel, a crucial plot point in the novel and the Netflix series based on the book, is entirely fictitious. But the author based it on a real-life gem, known as the Delhi Sapphire or simply “the cursed amethyst.”
Was the sapphire really cursed? Its owner, Edward Heron-Allen, apparently thought so. In a letter entrusting the real-life gem to the Natural History Museum in London, the polymath and author called the stone “trebly accursed and stained with blood” and advised its future owners to cast it into the sea.
They didn’t—and to this day, the jewel retains a spooky reputation as a stone with the power to curse anyone who touches it. But is the “curse” real—or does it simply reveal a society grappling with guilt over its colonial past?
A cursed amethyst
The jewel, and Heron-Allen’s 1904 letter, are still housed at the Natural History Museum. In the note, the author claimed the amethyst was looted from the Temple of the God Indra at Cawnpore during a 19th-century mutiny in which Indians revolted against British colonists. During the violence, Heron-Allen claimed, a Bengal cavalry officer, W. Ferris, took the jewel and brought it to England, only to be afflicted with ongoing misfortunes that then affected his family and friends, spurring suicides, ill health, and other tragedies.
Eventually, Heron-Allen wrote, the gem came into his possession—and so did the curse. Heron-Allen wrote that he attempted to give it away and even to “neutralize” it by setting it in a piece of jewelry alongside other ancient loot —including two ancient Egyptian scarabs and a ring he claimed belonged to a famous English astrologer. But try as he might to get rid of it, the stone kept coming back into Heron-Allen’s possession and causing even more misery. Frustrated, he then threw it into a London canal—only to have it returned after the canal was dredged.
(Ancient Romans lost these gemstones—down a bathhouse drain.)
“I feel that it is exerting a baleful influence over my new born daughter so I am now packing it in seven boxes and depositing it at my bankers, with directions that it is not to see the light again until I have been dead thirty three years,” Heron-Allen wrote. He advised that whoever came into possession of the gem cast it into the sea.
A museum mystery
As it happened, Heron-Allen’s daughter didn’t abide by the wishes expressed in the letter—in 1944, less than a year after her father’s death, she gave the gem and the letter to the Natural History Museum in London, which holds his vast scientific library.
The eerie letter, and Heron-Allen’s tale of a powerful ill-gotten gem, are compelling. There’s just one problem: The letter was likely part of a complex hoax Heron-Allen designed to draw attention to The Purple Sapphire, a 1921 novella he penned under the pseudonym Christopher Blayre.
(These are 6 of history’s most infamous scams and hoaxes.)
The story is presented in the guise of a “manuscript” that has been discovered by a university registrar entrusted with secretive papers by eminent scholars. The gem in the book shares a remarkably similar backstory to that of Heron-Allen’s real–life letter, from its supposed looting to the misfortunes it brought on its owners.
Curators at the Museum of Natural History in London have suggested that Heron-Allen’s posthumous bequest may have been designed to draw attention to his fiction—which explains its erroneous dating of the real-life insurrection in Cawnpore (now Kanpur), which occurred in 1857, not 1855 as Heron-Allen’s letter claimed.
“Edward Heron-Allen may have met an aged ex-army Colonel or General either in the course of his work in London, or in some gentleman’s club in Lewes, and heard tales of army life in India, and decided that these would make a good story,” writes museum marketer Amy Freeborn on the Natural History Museum’s website. “Then, years later when he wrote the story, he had the amulet created to make his tale plausible, but perhaps couldn’t afford or wasn’t able to obtain a large sapphire, so made do with an amethyst.”
An ongoing curse?
Over the years, the “purple sapphire” became known as “the cursed amethyst,” and it is still housed in the museum’s glittering Vault gallery alongside other famous rocks and minerals, including one of the world’s largest emeralds and a collection of 296 rare colored diamonds known as the Aurora Pyramid of Hope.
(An ancient curse could be evidence of female Israelite priests.)
Though not currently on view, it re-entered the public consciousness with Doerr’s bestselling book, and has even spurred tales of other misfortunes, like a curator’s brushes with bad weather and repeated illness while attempting to transport the stone to a meeting of a society dedicated to preserving Heron-Allen’s memory.
“I’m always interested in how I behave around little valuable things,” Doerr told the American Booksellers Association in 2014. “What is it about us that covets these things, finds beauty in them? And isn’t it arbitrary that we decided diamonds are so valuable in the first place?”
Scholars have spilled plenty of ink on Western responses to jewels and antiquities looted from colonized lands in the East during the 19th century and beyond, suggesting that gemstones came to represent cultural anxieties about the consequences of such plunder.
Narratives of other “cursed” gemstones like the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a massive gem confiscated from its Indian owners in 1849 and eventually appropriated as one of the United Kingdom’s crown jewels, proliferated during the same period. And rumors that stolen gems have the ability to ruin lives persist to this day—proof of our tendency to assign meanings to material objects that reveal more about our insecurities, interests, and social taboos.
As art critic Hettie Judah writes, “the suggestion that riches and power are founded on something dark and rotten is irresistible; the enigmatic diamond dazzling as a crystalline emblem both of magnificent wealth and of wickedness.”
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