Crystals for courage

The crystals people reach for around courage are Aquamarine, Astrophyllite and Bloodstone, 30 stones in all. for the conversation you've been avoiding. Every entry below states what the mineral actually is, how to tell a real one from a dyed or heated lookalike, and what each of the twelve signs is told about it.

• 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…
• Astrophyllite3-4 Mohs · silicate · crown, third-eye, solar-plexusGreek for 'star leaf', and correctly so: a rare titanium silicate that grows in bronze blades radiating from a point, found in alkaline ign…
• 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'…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Crazy Lace Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · solar-plexus, sacralChihuahuan agate that formed in a rock that kept breaking and re-healing, producing banding with no discipline whatsoever. Dealers call it …
• 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…
• 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…
• Magnetite5-6 Mohs · oxide · rootThe mineral that taught humanity magnetism exists, lodestones are naturally magnetised magnetite, and they are how the compass was discover…
• 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…
• Pietersite6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · third-eye, solar-plexusTiger's eye that was shattered by tectonics and healed back together at every angle at once, so the light in it looks like weather. Found i…
• 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…
• Rutilated Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, crownQuartz that trapped needles of titanium dioxide as it grew, producing what looks like gold wire frozen mid-flight. Renaissance Europeans ca…
• 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…
• Tiger's Eye6.5-7 Mohs · quartz · solar-plexus, rootBlue asbestos fibres replaced molecule by molecule with silica, keeping the fibrous alignment and gaining a hard glassy body, the sheen is …

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