The tradition that when a serpent fixes its eyes on an emerald it becomes blind is echoed from Hebrew philosophy, and Ahmed Ben Abdalaziz in his “Treatise on Jewels” has it that the lustre of emeralds makes serpents blind. As this ancient statement has occasioned some mirth and ridicule amongst those swayed by surface considerations it may be as well to consider the matter from another point of understanding. The symbolist will at once perceive the hidden parable: in astrology, serpents have been classed under the Scorpion of the zodiac, and the Venusian Taurus in the zodiac is opposite to the Scorpion. In the story of the Garden of Eden it is the Scorpion (snake) who tempts Eve, and her fall is held by occult students as a symbol to compel Man to exert his highest strength to enable his triumph over the lowest to be complete. The zodiacal Scorpio is accursed on its lower expression, and is symbolical then of the corruption which can menace virgin purity. Man on the lowest borderlands to which over-indulgence will ever draw him has been faced by serpents and reptiles whose immaterial lives exist only in those dark realms. The story of Circe and the Swine finds its parallel in the power of the pure and beautiful Venus to expel even by her symbolic emerald lust, envy, malice and grossness, to destroy the serpent’s gaze and to call the blind and suffering Man back to his peaceful Heaven again. So, as the Moon in astrological philosophy is exalted in Taurus, Diana the goddess of the Moon is the friend of chaste women. In Cutwode’s “Caltha Poetarium, or the Humble Bee,” written in 1599, Diana adorns the heroine with an emerald ring. It can easily be seen why the emerald is the emblem of true happiness and the preserver of chastity, and why it was said to fracture if chastity were violated: to one taking vows of chastity and breaking them, the emerald could never appear the same again—before his spiritual vision it would be broken and shattered. Leonardus said that the emerald protected women in childbirth, and most old writers are impressive in warning men to wear one as a charm against spiritual and mental weakness. The Peruvian goddess Esmeralda was said to reside in an emerald as big as an ostrich egg, and it was the custom of this little Venus in her symbolic emerald egg to receive emeralds as offerings from her devotees who also, it was said, sacrificed their daughters to her.