Crystals for steadiness

The crystals people reach for around steadiness are Ammonite, Aragonite and Black Kyanite, 31 stones in all. for when everything is moving at once. 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.

• Ammonite3.5-4.5 Mohs · organic · root, crownA cephalopod that built its shell in a logarithmic spiral, lived in the last chamber and used the rest for buoyancy, then went extinct with…
• Aragonite3.5-4 Mohs · carbonate · root, sacral, solar-plexusCalcium carbonate crystallised in the orthorhombic system instead of the trigonal one, which is the only difference between it and calcite …
• 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 …
• Dalmatian Stone6-7 Mohs · rock (aggregate) · root, sacralNot a jasper and not tourmaline-spotted: a peralkaline microgranite from Chihuahua whose black flecks are arfvedsonite, an amphibole. The e…
• Desert Rose2-3.5 Mohs · sulfate · root, crownGypsum crystallising out of evaporating groundwater in a desert basin, growing around and through the sand until it forms a rosette. Oklaho…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Milky Quartz7 Mohs · quartz · crownThe plain white filler of a thousand mineral veins, quartz clouded to opacity by trapped water and gas. It is the most abundant gemmy rock …
• 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…
• Moss Agate6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · heart, rootChalcedony that trapped mineral filaments as it formed, producing something that looks convincingly like vegetation and is entirely inorgan…
• 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…
• Petrified Wood6.5-7 Mohs · organic · rootWood in which every cell wall was templated and then replaced by silica, molecule by molecule, so the structure survives while none of the …
• Picture Jasper6.5-7 Mohs · chalcedony · root, third-eyeVolcanic ash and mud laid down in still water, compressed, silicified, and then sliced, so the desert scene you are looking at is an actual…
• 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…
• 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…
• Snowflake Obsidian5-6 Mohs · volcanic glass · root, crownObsidian caught in the act of devitrifying, the white flowers are cristobalite crystals nucleating in glass that is slowly, over geological…
• 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…
• 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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