Crystals for Aries

The best crystals for Aries are Black Kyanite, Bloodstone and Blue Apatite, the first of 28 stones tradition ties to the sign. Each entry names the mineral it actually is, the physical test that separates a real one from a treated lookalike, and what the stone means for a Aries chart.

• Black Kyanite4.5-7 Mohs · silicate · root, throatIron-darkened kyanite from Brazil, growing in splayed fans that the trade decided look like a witch's besom and priced accordingly. It beha…
• Bloodstone6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, heartDark green chalcedony spattered with hematite, and one of the very few stones whose Christian folklore is fully explicit, the red was said …
• Blue Apatite5 Mohs · phosphate · throat, third-eyeThe mineral your teeth and bones are made of, and the Mohs scale's definition of hardness 5. Its name comes from the Greek for 'to deceive'…
• Blue Kyanite4.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, third-eyeAn aluminium silicate that forms only at high pressure deep in the crust, so its presence in a rock tells a geologist how far down it has b…
• Bumblebee Jasper3-5 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · solar-plexus, sacralNot a jasper at all: banded calcite and anhydrite laced with native sulfur and arsenic sulfides, deposited in a fumarole near Papandayan vo…
• Carnelian6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · sacral, rootIron-stained chalcedony the colour of a low fire, and one of the oldest worked gemstones on record, Egyptian, Roman and Islamic carvers all…
• Cherry Quartz5-6 Mohs · man-made · heart, sacralColoured glass, marbled with white and cut into points and spheres, sold with a fruit name and a quartz claim. There is no natural material…
• Citrine (Heat-Treated Amethyst)7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, sacralAmethyst that has been through a furnace and come out the colour of cheap brandy. Nothing dishonest has happened to the mineral, it is stil…
• Citrine (Natural)7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, sacralActual citrine is a quiet, weak-tea yellow and it is genuinely uncommon, most of what the trade calls citrine has been in an oven. The natu…
• Clear Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crown, third-eyeThe default specimen of the entire trade, silicon dioxide, geometrically perfect, and so common it is nearly worthless by weight. Its appea…
• Emerald7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · heartBeryl coloured by chromium, and one of the four traditional precious stones, mined at Cleopatra's Egyptian workings, then in vast quantity …
• Fire Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralChalcedony that grew in stacked layers alternating with films of iron oxide only nanometres thick, so light interferes with itself and the …
• Garnet6.5-7.5 Mohs · silicate · root, sacralNot one mineral but a family of six-plus species sharing a cubic structure, ranging from the black-red almandine in every schist to the gre…
• Goldstone5-6 Mohs · man-made · sacral, solar-plexusSeventeenth-century Venetian glass in which metallic copper is crystallised out of the melt under controlled oxygen starvation, a genuinely…
• Green Aventurine6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · heartA quartzite glittering with chromium mica, mined chiefly in southern India and sold in more starter kits than almost anything else. The nam…
• Hematite5.5-6.5 Mohs · oxide · rootIron oxide, the mineral that makes Mars red and rust red, named from the Greek for blood because of the streak it leaves. Polished it looks…
• Magnesite3.5-4.5 Mohs · carbonate · crown, heartMagnesium carbonate, mostly an industrial refractory mineral, and the second great blank canvas of the crystal trade. Where howlite has bla…
• Magnetite5-6 Mohs · oxide · rootThe mineral that taught humanity magnetism exists, lodestones are naturally magnetised magnetite, and they are how the compass was discover…
• Mahogany Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, sacralObsidian stained red-brown by iron oxide, giving the least severe of the volcanic glasses, the swirls are a frozen record of how the lava w…
• Moldavite5.5-7 Mohs · volcanic glass · heart, third-eye, crownGlass formed roughly 14.7 million years ago when an asteroid hit what is now Nördlingen in Bavaria, throwing molten terrestrial rock 400 ki…
• Nephrite Jade6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heartThe jade of ancient China, Māori Aotearoa and neolithic Europe, an amphibole so tough that stone-age cultures made axes of it before anyone…
• Pyrite6-6.5 Mohs · sulfide · solar-plexus, rootIron sulfide that grows in perfect cubes with striated faces, and has been fooling prospectors so reliably that its nickname is older than …
• Red Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · rootSilica clouded opaque with iron oxide, the plainest, oldest, most universally available amulet material on earth, worked from the Nile to t…
• Rhodonite5.5-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootA manganese silicate that runs pink until oxidation writes black through it, which is most of its aesthetic and all of its symbolism. The U…
• Ruby in Zoisite6-9 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, rootRuby crystals grown inside green zoisite, found in 1949 in the Longido district of Tanzania and named anyolite from the Maasai word for gre…
• Sardonyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacralStraight-layered agate in red-brown and white, and the standard material for Roman cameos and signet stones because the layers can be under…
• Shiva Lingam6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacral, crownCryptocrystalline quartz cobbles from one stretch of the Narmada river in Madhya Pradesh, collected annually under ancestral rights by spec…
• Sunstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · sacral, solar-plexusFeldspar that trapped sheets of copper or hematite platelets while crystallising, so it flashes metallic orange when the light finds the ri…

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