Diamond

Diamonds are not usual alchemical symbols, but as the most perfect and most precious stone, they deserve our notice. The root of the word, dama, expresses power. It is related to 'dominate,' 'tame'; 'adamant' means an impregnable hardness, and hard as steel.

Hillman offers the most sustained depth-psychological treatment of the diamond, situating it within alchemical symbolism and tracing its etymological roots to power and adamantine hardness, while connecting it to both Eastern (Vajra) and Western traditions of indestructible luminosity and the dual properties of poison and cure.

Hillman, James, Alchemical Psychology, 2010thesis

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silver, gold and diamonds generally have tremendously positive implications. Think, for instance, of the alchemical symbolism specifying the stages of development and purification of the prima materia. There, diamond or gold is the highest achievement, the goal to be reached. Here, on the contrary, this motif has a completely negative connotation.

Von Franz demonstrates that the diamond's conventional alchemical status as the pinnacle of the opus can be inverted in fairy-tale symbolism, where diamond forests represent a cursed petrifaction — living reality frozen into lifeless, if precious, matter.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 1997thesis

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it is also conjectured that adamant here is the diamond, the auri nodus described by Pliny as a rare gem which was found in gold mines and had been supposed to be formed only in gold. It may have been imagined that the purest and most precious part of gold was condensed in the diamond.

The Cornford commentary on the Timaeus establishes the philosophical prehistory of the diamond concept through adamant, connecting extreme hardness to the condensation of gold's purest essence and providing the classical substrate for later alchemical and psychological diamond symbolism.

Plato, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting

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He who has realized this, has truly found the Philosopher's Stone, the jewel (mani), the prima materia of the human mind, nay, the very faculty of consciousness in whatever form of life it might

Govinda equates the Tibetan jewel-symbol (mani) with the Philosopher's Stone and the primordial substrate of consciousness, providing the Buddhist-Vajrayana context that Hillman explicitly invokes in his diamond-as-Vajra discussion.

Govinda, Lama Anagarika, Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, 1960supporting

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