Lodestone

Lodestone is naturally occurring magnetite that has already been magnetized, most likely by a lightning strike, before anyone finds it, which made it a genuine curiosity in every culture that encountered it: a stone that visibly and repeatably attracts iron with no human intervention required. Chinese sources from as early as the Han dynasty describe lodestone's directional property, and by the eleventh century Chinese texts describe magnetized needles used for navigation, a practical application that spread west and underlies the maritime compass still in use today.

The property was well enough known in the ancient Mediterranean that "magnet" itself likely derives from Magnesia, a region of Asia Minor associated with the stone in Greek accounts, though which specific deposit the name refers to is not fully settled among historians of the term.

The eleventh century text usually credited with the earliest clear account is Shen Kuo's Dream Pool Essays, which describes magnetising a needle by rubbing it on a lodestone and suspending it so that it can turn freely, and which also notes that the needle does not point exactly south, an observation of magnetic declination made centuries before the effect was recorded in Europe.

Lodestone's behaviour made it a natural subject for early natural philosophy in the West as well. William Gilbert's De Magnete of 1600 worked outward from lodestone experiments to the conclusion that the earth is itself a great magnet, which is the point at which the stone stops being a marvel and becomes a piece of physics.

Lodestone occupies a specific and well-documented place in African American hoodoo and rootwork, a folk-magical tradition distinct from any organized religion that draws on African, European and Native American sources developed in the American South. Practitioners typically work with a matched pair of lodestones, one described as male and one as female, fed iron filings to "feed" their drawing power and kept together to draw a desired outcome toward the practitioner, whether love, money or influence, or kept apart and worked separately to draw two parties toward each other or, in some workings, to separate them.

The practice treats the stone's literal physical magnetism as a working metaphor for the influence it is asked to exert, a directness of symbol shared by relatively few materia in comparative magical practice, where correspondence is more often associative than physically demonstrable in the way lodestone's pull on iron plainly is.

Much of what is documented about the practice comes from interview collections rather than from any written tradition of its own. Harry Middleton Hyatt recorded thousands of interviews with practitioners and clients across the American South in the 1930s, published decades later as a multi-volume compilation, and lodestone appears throughout that material in the words of the people who actually used it rather than as described by an outside systematiser.

The stone also has a commercial history that forms part of the record. Lodestones and magnetic sand were staple stock of the mail-order spiritual supply houses that served Black customers across the South and in the northern cities in the early twentieth century, which is one reason the working is comparatively well attested: it left invoices as well as testimony.