Crystals for calm

You want your chest to stop feeling like a closed fist.

This book lists 59 crystals tied to calm, from Amazonite to White Sapphire. For when your chest is tight. They run A to Z, not best to worst, because nobody measures that. Every entry says what the mineral really is, how to tell a real one from a dyed or baked copy, and what each of the twelve signs is told about it.

• Amazonite6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · heart, throatAmazonite grew in cooling granite, in the last pockets of melt to harden. The green comes from a trace of lead locked in it. Nobody dyed…
• Amber2-2.5 Mohs · organic · solar-plexus, sacralPick it up. Four seconds in your palm and it is warm. Glass and plastic never manage that. It is not a stone. It is tree resin that ran…
• Amethyst7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, crownAmethyst started out as ordinary quartz. A trace of iron got caught in it, and the faint natural radiation of the rock around it worked…
• Angelite3.5 Mohs · sulphate · throat, third-eye, crownAngelite is a salt left behind where an ancient sea dried up. Burial and heat drove the water out of it. It wants that water back. Leave…
• Apache Tears5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, heartIt is not a stone. It is glass, lava that cooled too fast to become anything else. Hold one up to a lamp. The whole pebble glows smoky…
• Aquamarine7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartNearly every blue aquamarine in a shop window has been in an oven, at around 400 degrees, to burn the green out. It is permanent. No…
• Aragonite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · root, sacral, solar-plexusAragonite builds itself out of mineral water in caves, in rust orange spikes that all shoot from one centre. It is on borrowed time…
• Aura Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crown, third-eye, throatThe quartz is real. It grew in rock like any other piece. Then a person put it in a vacuum chamber and bonded a film of vaporised metal…
• Bismuth2-2.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, third-eyeA person made this one. Bismuth metal gets melted at around 271 degrees, cooled slowly so it grows in stepped squares, then the liquid…
• BBlue Aventurine6.5 to 7 Mohs · quartzite · throat, third-eyeBlue aventurine is a rock, not a crystal. That is the right place to start, because almost everything written about it starts somewhere…
• Blue Lace Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · throatThe message is typed. You have read it four times and it is still sitting there. Blue lace agate built up in a lava cavity the same way…
• Botswana Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · crown, sacralBotswana agate built itself inside bubbles in old lava. Water came in, left a layer, dried, came back. Every grey and pink line is one…
• Calcite (Coloured Varieties)3 Mohs · carbonate · sacral, solar-plexus, heartCalcite is lime that water carried and put back down in a hole in the rock. It is soft. A copper coin marks it. Drop vinegar on it and…
• Celestite3-3.5 Mohs · sulphate · throat, third-eye, crownCelestite is losing its colour while you look at it. A sunny sill bleaches the blue out and it never comes back. It grew from strontium…
• CChalcedony6 to 7 Mohs · quartz · throatChalcedony is quartz that never grew up into crystals. Instead of one clear six sided prism, it is billions of quartz fibres, each…
• Cherry Quartz5-6 Mohs · man-made · heart, sacralSomebody melted silica in a factory, stirred in gold or copper for the red, and pulled the whole thing into a rod. The white swirls are…
• CChrome Diopside5.5 to 6 Mohs · pyroxene · heartMost of this mineral never gets anywhere near the surface. Diopside belongs to the dense rock under the crust, and it stays there. The…
• Chrysocolla2.5-7 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartRain got into a copper deposit and worked on it for ages. It broke the ore apart and left this blue-green crust in the cracks. It is the…
• Chrysoprase6-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heartChrysoprase lives through almost anything except a sunny sill. Strong light pulls the apple green out of it, and it does not come back…
• Crazy Lace Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · solar-plexus, sacralHold it up and follow one band with a fingernail. It doubles back, folds over itself and starts again. That is because the rock cracked…
• Dalmatian Stone6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralThose black spots are not tourmaline. The trade has said so for forty years and the trade is wrong. They are arfvedsonite, a softer dark…
• Desert Rose2-3.5 Mohs · sulphate · root, crownA shallow desert pool dried out. As the water left, gypsum crystallised in the wet sand and stacked into petals, closing around the…
• Fluorite4 Mohs · halide · third-eye, throat, heartFluorite survives almost nothing. A steel knife cuts it. One knock splits it clean along a flat plane, and long sun pulls the purple…
• GGolden Healer Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, crownQuartz grows out of hot silica-rich water working through cracks in rock. Where that water is carrying iron as well, the iron comes out…
• Green Aventurine6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · heartIt began as plain sand on a seabed. Buried, pressed and cooked, the grains welded into one hard rock, and flecks of green mica got…
• Howlite3.5 Mohs · silicate · crown, third-eyeSomeone dyed it blue and sold it as turquoise. That is not gossip. It is the trade's default move. Howlite formed in old salt flats…
• Jadeite Jade6-7 Mohs · silicate · heartIn China, jade has stood for virtue for thousands of years. Not luck. Virtue. Mesoamerican carvers valued it above gold. Most fine…
• Kunzite6.5-7 Mohs · silicate · heartLight takes the colour out of it. Leave kunzite on a bright sill and the pink drains away, quite fast, and it never comes back. It grew…
• Larimar4.5-5 Mohs · silicate · throat, heartSunlight takes the blue out of it, slowly and for good. Salt and long soaking dull it too. It filled gas bubbles in volcanic rock in one…
• Lepidolite2.5-3 Mohs · silicate · heart, third-eye, crownSomebody told you this one holds lithium. It does. The lithium is locked into the rock and it stays there. It cannot reach your blood…
• Magnesite3.5-4.5 Mohs · carbonate · crown, heartSomebody dyed this. Most of the cheap turquoise in a mall case is plain white magnesite that was soaked in blue until it took. Undyed it…
• Milky Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crownThis is the cheapest thing in the case and it will outlast almost everything beside it. Milky quartz is plain quartz clouded by water…
• Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · sacral, third-eye, crownTilt it under a lamp and a blue-white light slides over the surface. Stop tilting and it is gone. Moonstone is feldspar that separated…
• Morganite7.5-8 Mohs · silicate · heartAlmost every morganite in a case went into an oven at about four hundred degrees. The heat pulls the yellow out and leaves a cleaner…
• Moss Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, rootThe moss in this is not moss. It is mineral threads that grew inside the silica before it hardened, sharp and three dimensional when…
• Nephrite Jade6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heartIn Aotearoa New Zealand, pounamu is nephrite. Māori tradition holds it as taonga, treasure that carries everyone who held it before you…
• Ocean Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, throatIt is not a jasper. Silica soaked into old Madagascan lava and replaced it, keeping the little balls of crystal that grew while the lava…
• Opalite5.5-6 Mohs · man-made · crown, third-eyeSomebody made this in a furnace. Molten glass with a little tin and titanium stirred in to scatter the light blue, then poured and…
• PPearl2.5 to 3 Mohs · organic · heart, sacralA pearl starts as a problem. Something works its way inside a mollusc and cannot be pushed back out, so the animal covers it. Layer…
• Petrified Wood6.5-7 Mohs · organic · rootThis was a tree. It fell into mud or water and got buried before it could rot. Then silica in the groundwater moved in and swapped…
• Picture Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, third-eyeThose are not hills. They are layers of volcanic ash and fine mud that settled in still water, one on top of the next. Silica soaked…
• PPink Tourmaline7 to 7.5 Mohs · tourmaline · heartPink tourmaline grows in pegmatite, the last wet pocket of a granite as it cools and gives up whatever the rest of the rock would not…
• Prasiolite7 Mohs · quartz · heartNearly every green quartz sold as green amethyst was purple amethyst until somebody put it in an oven at around 500 degrees. The iron in…
• Prehnite6-6.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, solar-plexusHold it up to a lamp. The green is cloudy rather than clear, and inside it fine fibres run outward from a centre. It grew in gas bubbles…
• Rainbow Moonstone6-6.5 Mohs · feldspar · third-eye, crown, sacralThis is white labradorite, a feldspar. It is not moonstone at all. Moonstone is a different feldspar. Somebody in the trade renamed it…
• Rose Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · heartRose quartz is plain quartz with microscopic pink fibres caught inside it. It grows in the coarse heart of granite. It is mined by the…
• Satin Spar2 Mohs · sulphate · crownThat silky white tower is not selenite. It is satin spar, the fibrous form of gypsum, carved by the container load in Morocco. Same…
• Selenite2 Mohs · sulphate · crown, third-eyeYou were told to rinse your stones. Do not rinse this one. Water dissolves selenite. Salt etches it. A humid bathroom shelf pits the…
• Septarian3-4 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, solar-plexusIt started as a lump of mud on an ancient seafloor. The mud hardened into a nodule, then cracked from the inside as it dried out. Then…
• Seraphinite2-2.5 Mohs · silicate · heart, crownSeraphinite is softer than your own fingernail. A key or a dropped coin will scar it, and water gets into the layers and ruins it. It…
• Serpentine2.5-6 Mohs · silicate · heart, rootSerpentine is what happens when seawater soaks into rock from far below the ocean floor and turns it into something slick and green…
• Snowflake Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, crownBacklight a thin edge and it glows brown. That is glass. Lava cooled too fast to make crystals and froze the way it was. The white…
• Spirit Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crown, third-eyeHold it up. Hundreds of small crystals stand off one big one, pointing every way at once. That is a second life. The first crystal…
• SStrawberry Quartz (Glass)5-6 Mohs · man-made · heartThis is glass. It was melted in a factory, mostly in China, with copper stirred through it. The red threads are real metal flakes. They…
• SSynthetic Opal4.5-6.5 Mohs · man-made · crown, heartSomebody built this on purpose. Spheres finer than dust were settled into stacked layers and pressed solid. It is real opal, grown in a…
• Turquoise5-6 Mohs · phosphate · throat, third-eyeTurquoise is central to Navajo, Zuni and Puebloan life. It is worn, inherited and made into work by living artists right now. The stone…
• Unakite6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · heart, third-eyeUnakite was granite. Hot water got into it and took it apart from the inside. It did not become rubble. The pink held, and green grew in…
• Watermelon Tourmaline7-7.5 Mohs · silicate · heartHold a slice to the light. Pink in the middle, green around the outside, one crystal. It changed colour partway through growing. The…
• WWhite Sapphire9 Mohs · corundum · crown, third-eyeWhite sapphire is corundum with nothing much in it. Aluminium oxide, the same species as ruby and as blue sapphire, but the iron…

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