Crystals for Scorpio

The best crystals for Scorpio are Apache Tears, Aquamarine and Black Kyanite, the first of 39 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 Scorpio chart.

• Apache Tears5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, heartObsidian nodules that survived when the surrounding glass hydrated into crumbly perlite, mineralogists call them marekanite. The American n…
• Aquamarine7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartBlue beryl, the same species as emerald with iron instead of chromium, and the traditional talisman of sailors, the Romans considered it Ne…
• 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…
• Black Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · rootLava that cooled too fast to organise itself into crystals, a natural glass, and the sharpest edge available to any pre-metal culture. Meso…
• Black Onyx6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · rootGrey agate boiled in sugar and acid until it turns black, a treatment Pliny already knew about, which makes it one of the oldest continuous…
• Black Tourmaline7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · rootIron-rich tourmaline, common as gravel in pegmatite country, and the single most-recommended protective stone in the modern trade. It is ge…
• 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 …
• Botswana Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · crown, sacralGrey and dusty-pink banded agate from the Bobonong district, famous for band-per-millimetre fineness that makes cut slabs look like topogra…
• 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…
• Charoite5-6 Mohs · silicate · third-eye, crownFound in exactly one place on earth, a small area of the Murun massif on the Chara River in Siberia, and formed by a syenite intrusion cook…
• 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 …
• Galena2.5-2.75 Mohs · sulfide · rootLead sulfide in perfect silver cubes, the principal ore of lead, the source of Roman plumbing, Egyptian kohl and a great deal of historical…
• 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…
• Jet2.5-4 Mohs · organic · rootFossilised driftwood from Jurassic monkey-puzzle trees, compressed in the shales below Whitby, and the definitive material of Victorian mou…
• Kunzite6.5-7 Mohs · silicate · heartPink spodumene, identified in 1902 and named for Tiffany's gemmologist George Frederick Kunz, who found it in the pegmatites of San Diego C…
• Labradorite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, throat, crownA grey plagioclase feldspar whose internal layering is spaced at exactly the wavelength of visible light, so it throws aurora colours from …
• Leopardskin Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralAnother trade name that lies: this is orbicular rhyolite from Chihuahua, a volcanic rock in which silica crystallised into spheres as the m…
• 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…
• Malachite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · heart, solar-plexusCopper carbonate in concentric green bands, ground into eyeshadow by the Egyptians and into pigment by everyone since. The Russian tsars pa…
• 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…
• Mookaite6-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, sacral, solar-plexusThe silicified skeletons of Cretaceous radiolaria, single-celled plankton with glass shells, from the Windalia Radiolarite in Western Austr…
• Nuummite5.5-6 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, third-eyeAn amphibole rock from Nuuk, Greenland, first collected in 1810 and roughly three billion years old, among the oldest material anyone sells…
• Orthoceras3-4 Mohs · organic · root, third-eyeStraight-shelled nautiloids from Devonian and Ordovician seas, quarried by the tonne in the Erfoud region of Morocco and cut into slabs, sp…
• Phantom Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownA crystal that stopped growing, got dusted with chlorite or iron, and then resumed, leaving its own younger outline sealed inside like a fo…
• Rainbow Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crown, sacralThe best-selling moonstone in the world is not moonstone: it is white labradorite from India and Madagascar, flashing blue by a different o…
• Rainbow Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, third-eyeBlack glass with layers of aligned nanoscale crystals inside it, spaced closely enough to interfere with light and throw a spectrum out of …
• 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…
• Rhodochrosite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · heart, solar-plexusManganese carbonate, banded pink and white where it grew as stalactites in old Inca silver workings at Capillitas in Argentina, and blood-r…
• 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…
• Septarian3-4 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, solar-plexusA mud concretion that formed around decaying organic matter on a Cretaceous seafloor, dried, cracked from the inside out, and then had ever…
• Serpentine2.5-6 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootThe rock that forms when seawater cooks peridotite deep in the crust, California's state rock, the world's asbestos problem, and the crysta…
• 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…
• Shungite3.5-4 Mohs · organic · rootA roughly two-billion-year-old carbon rock from the Lake Onega region of Karelia, containing genuine fullerenes, the only significant natur…
• Smoky Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · rootOrdinary quartz darkened over geological time by natural radiation acting on trace aluminium, a stone that is literally a record of the rad…
• Spectrolite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crownLabradorite that shows the whole spectrum rather than just the blue end, found in quantity at Ylämaa in south-eastern Finland after quarryi…
• Synthetic Opal4.5-6.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, heartReal opal chemistry assembled by people, silica microspheres stacked into the same diffraction lattice nature builds, then consolidated, of…
• Tourmalinated Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · root, crownQuartz shot through with black schorl needles, so the two most common protective stones in the trade end up in the same piece. Collectors l…
• Turquoise5-6 Mohs · phosphate · throat, third-eyeA hydrated copper aluminium phosphate that has been mined in Sinai and Iran for over six thousand years and in the American Southwest for a…
• Unakite6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, third-eyeGranite that got hydrothermally cooked until its feldspar went salmon-pink and epidote grew through it in pistachio patches, named for the …

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