ophites

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“
About the church are six hundred pillars of marble, porphyry, and ophites.

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Definitions (1)

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  1. A stone mentioned by various Greek and Latin authors, the word designating Several quite different things. It is impossible to identify with certainty any one of the various substances, some of which were unquestionably fabulous, to which the name ophites was given by Orpheus, Dioscorides, Pliny, and other classic writers. Pliny distinguishes two kinds of ophite, the hard and the soft. The former may have been some variety of granite; the latter, a variety of serpentine, perhaps the Tuscan gabbro or ophiolite. From a very early time, various rounded stones or petrifactions, more or less egg-shaped in form, and called by various names, ovum anguinum, ophites, serpent-stone, adderhead, Druidical bead, etc., have been held in high veneration, and endowed with extraordinary virtues. The ovum anguinum described by Pliny would appear from his description to have been a fossil echinoderm. Glass spindle-whorls, which are known to have been in use within the past four hundred years, have been sold at a recent day as the true ovum anguinum; and fossil echinoderms have also been within a few years treasured as Druidical relics and regarded as possibly possessing a portion, at least, of the virtues attributed by the ancients to the ophites.

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Examples (3)

  • About the church are six hundred pillars of marble, porphyry, and ophites. —  The Cloister and the Hearth
  • Pantagruel soon knew the cause of it, having discovered a small cylinder or roller that joined the gates over the threshold, and, turning like them towards the wall on a hard well-polished ophites stone, with rubbing and rolling caused that harmonious murmur. —  Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5
  • For this here was wholly in compartments of precious stones, all in their natural colours: one of red jasper, most charmingly spotted; another of ophites; a third of porphyry; a fourth of lycophthalmy, a stone of four different colours, powdered with sparks of gold as small as atoms; a fifth of agate, streaked here and there with small milk-coloured waves; a sixth of costly chalcedony or onyx-stone; and another of green jasper, with certain red and yellowish veins. —  Gargantua and Pantagruel, Illustrated, Book 5
 

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Etymologies (1)

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  1. Latin, from Greek ὀφίτης (sc. λίθος), serpentine stone, so called, according to Pliny, because it is spotted like a snake, or, as was fancifully thought, because a person carrying it might walk among serpents with impunity: see ophite.
 

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