An amethyst is a purple kind of gemstone.  It’s a grapey kind of purple.  It’s this color that lead to its name.

The word is an old one that came to English in the usual way.  The Normans brought it across the English Channel with French after 1066 and they in turn had gotten it from the Latin of the Romans.

The Romans in turn had adopted it from the Greeks.

That’s as far as we can trace the word back, but the tradition surrounding the word may well go back even further.

The first document in which amethyst shows up in English is an old poem called The Land of Cokaygne.

Now that’s not the land of cocaine.

Cokaygne was a mythical place dreamt of in the Middle Ages where everything was easy.  Geese flew already roasted into your mouth.  Pigs walked around already cooked with a convenient carving knife protruding from their back so you could slice off some lunch.  It rained pies.

Of course with all that good eating you’d want a little good drinking too.

That’s when it was handy to have some amethyst around because the Greek etymology of amethyst gives it a meaning of “not intoxicating.”

We think of wine as white or red but red wine only turns red with age.  It usually starts out pretty purple.

This then is the connection with the stone.

The ancients figured since these stones were the same color as wine they must have some magical affiliation with wine.

Since one of the first things that goes when you get drunk is your ability to tell whether you’re drunk or not, they never seemed to notice that their theory that this kind of gem prevented drunkenness was pure fantasy.  Consequently they associated all sorts of convenient attributes to the stone.

Drinking vessels made from amethyst or decorated with amethyst let you enjoy yourself without the embarrassment of stumbling on your toga or being sick behind your host’s marble statuary.

Wives liked to have a little amethyst around because even when their husbands went out on a tear, the amethyst kept them from having their inhibitions suppressed and thus prevented affairs.

These hopeful notions make it particularly appropriate that this word first appeared in an English document dedicated to an imaginary land of pleasure.