THE BLESSING STONE

A history of the world in eight chapters, from 3,000,000 b.c. to the present, as Wood (Sacred Ground, 2001, etc.) follows the trail of a magical blue stone that fell to earth from a meteor.

The author sounds like someone who has read a lot about the Knights of the Round Table and decided to go one better than the Holy Grail—which, after all, only went back to the time of Christ. She begins her tale some 3,000 millennia ago, when a meteor crashed in Africa and left a small blue gem in the residue of its ashes. From Africa, the gem passed to the Near East, where it broke the curse that kept the women of the Laliari tribe from conceiving. When it later came into the possession of the Chanaanites, its powers of fertility caused the patriarch Avram to make the connection between the cycles of the moon and female ovulation. In Imperial Rome, the gem fell into the hands of a wealthy Christian lady who suffered martyrdom, and it then became part of her relics and was venerated for centuries. It helped save an English convent from destruction during the Viking invasions of the 11th century, and in the 16th century it protected a German pilgrim who lost her way and ended up in Tibet rather than Jerusalem. It made its first appearance in the New World—in Martinique—during the 18th century and showed up in California in the middle of the 1840s’ Gold Rush. Afterward, it fell into obscurity and was lost until a New Age scholar discovered it in a junk shop some twenty years ago. It’s for sale today, in case you’re interested.

Cheap mysticism narrated in wooden prose (“He felt connected to all of humankind and all of nature in a way he never had before”).