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Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #24 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Red Garnet meaning, including:

• Red Garnet for tuning into Mabon energies
• Powerful & protective nurturing with Red Garnet
• Red Garnet’s connection to Goddess Brigid
• The chemistry and energy of Red Garnet

Tune in now for a deeper look at Red Garnet meaning!

Podcast Transcript:

Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren’t sure how to use them? Join four crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for crystal confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.

Kyle Perez: Hello, and welcome to another Crystal Confab. I’m Kyle, the Crystalline Mage, and I’m joined by Ashley Leavy, Nicholas Pearson, and Adam Barralet, my crystal besties as we confab about a different crystal every single week. Now this mineral in particular, I would argue we all have a very good relationship with. I think everyone loves a bit of this, and this is, of course, our red garnet. Red garnet has few different variations, and we’re going to dive straight into Nicholas who’s going to share a bit of the chemistry, a bit of the magic, and a bit of the energy that it entails.

Nicholas Pearson: So I wanna preface this by saying I’m as we’ve probably discussed in the past, I’m like an Uber Capricorn. I’ve got a big stellium there. I’m a January baby. Garnet is my birthstone. I’m also red-green colorblind.

I have never been excited about a red garnet in my life. And I’d heard that there were such things as green garnets and never laid my eyes on them. You know, I’d seen orangey reds and pinky reds, but it was mostly the dull, earthy, browny kind of reds that I just don’t think my eyes perceive that color well. So I grew up not loving my birthstone, a story that sounds similar to others out there. And when I was a freshman at university and I started working for the Earth Science Museum, I found out that garnets could come in other colors, not just kind of, you know, green was an option and then variations on red, but they actually came in a a wide variety, and it dealt a lot with their chemistry and trace elements and things.

And I was really mystified to learn that unlike quartz, which comes in so many different colors but is fundamentally the same substance, garnets are a whole family. In fact, they’re like two two series that share a common element, and it blew my mind. Furthermore, that particular year, this would be, like, early, maybe mid two thousands, the discovery of the Japanese rainbow andro garnets from Tenkawa Mine in Nara Prefecture was just blowing up all over the place. It was on the front of, like, Rockin’ Gym and the neurological journal. And the museum I worked for, of course, got all these publications, and I saw this vivid multicolored thing.

And I was like, what is this? And my boss goes, oh, well, those are the Japanese rainbow garnets. You like rocks. Really, you’ve heard about these. They’re everywhere.

I’m like, I know nothing. So I learned everything I could about garnet. It turns out at that point, the textbook said garnet came in every color of the rainbow except blue. Not long later, I found better, better data, more up to date information that said garnets could come in every color of the rainbow except blue garnets were usually microgarnets, and they were found in things like kimberlite pipes. And they were good indicators if you’re looking at thin sections under polarizite that you might have diamonds nearby.

So you wanted to find them. They just weren’t exciting to look at. And then sometime in the last decade, there was a find in Tanzania. I don’t know how well this is gonna show up on camera, but blue garnets exist. They’re kind of more blue violet than, like, a true blue.

But my white whale is out there in college. I convinced myself when I changed degrees to earth and environmental science, I was gonna discover blue garnets and name them after myself. No. I failed. Someone else got there, thankfully, because I was never gonna fund that trip.

But it has always gotten me really interested in how garnets work. So, garnets, because they are a family of two closely related series, there’s quite a bit of variation, not just in color, but also in chemistry. They belong to a category of silicate minerals that we call mesosilicates, which are island silicates. You’ve got, like, a blob of silica surrounded by what feels like a sea of metals. And because we don’t get the hollow framework or a complex sheet or a ring like we find in so many other silicates, there’s a lot of dense stuff packed around that silica.

And so garnets, like many mesosilicates, are very, very heavy. The way their molecules come together, they form in the isometric or the cubic crystal system, which means that they have the least bending of light. What you see is what you get. They can have a higher refractive index in other ways. In fact, maybe I’ll mention something fabulous about one of my favorite garnets.

But the real magic for me doesn’t come in examining their relationship with light because they’re not gonna do what our other crystal systems do. It’s looking at the complexity of their makeup. So most of the red garnets that we know belong to what’s called the pyralspite series, which is just a funny word made out of pyropia, almandine, and spessartine, stuck together with -ite on the end because that’s how we do rocks, as opposed to our ugrandite series, which is the uvaroic, grossular, and androdyte. But, you know, grossular form the bridge between the two. We can honorarily kinda stick them with both.

And our, pyropia, almandine, and spacerteine group is where we’re gonna get most of the reds, but also pinks and oranges and occasionally a few other colors here or there, but, you know, it tends toward the the reddish side of the spectrum versus the yellow green side of the spectrum. And a lot of our garnets are formed through one of two processes, liquid magmatic, which means molten rock cools. We see it in garnets. One of the reasons that we picked this house to rent was the jumbo, and I mean jumbo garnet that is in the granite countertop in our kitchen. There is one major garnet, and I saw it and said, okay.

I think I could live here. And, you know, we find smaller bits of them everywhere. But the other kind of category of their birth, the ones that I think are a little bit more geologically interesting, are those that are made by metamorphic processes. These are tertiary minerals. They’re, you know, bent and broken down.

We often find them in things like schist, which is what we’ve got here, some almandine schist. So it’s sparkly from all of the mica, and then those bright red garnets kinda get squished out of it. And they appear to be grains inside that that host rock. But when we start to examine all of these things, like, together, like telling the story of garnets, most of the time with silicates, we get these kind of expansive, open minded, open flowing, we might say amplifying kind of energies, but the denseness of garnet, thanks to it being a mesosilicate with all those heavy metals in there, lots of manganese and iron and sometimes magnesium with our red garnets, they’re gonna confer a little more stability. They’re a little bit more anchoring.

Nicholas: When we see the presence of stability. They’re a little bit more anchoring. When we see the presence of, like, iron and manganese in particular, those minerals tend to feel a little bit more fiery and earthy at the same time. That structure of that island, that silica, is going to give us resistance to outside forces. There was a German lithotherapist by the name of Michael Ginger.

When I was in college, I fell in love with his work because he was a geologist first and then went the crystal healing route because he started to see trends and started to map those trends out. And he tells us that nezosilicates, like garnets, grant resistance to outside forces and encourage us to structure our lives according to our ideal vision. You know, think of it as the defense you get by having your own deserted island, and then you get to make that your paradise. I think that’s maybe a good metaphor for how that might work. I think of them as representing individuality.

They help us stay true to our beliefs. They help us really get a clear picture of what our ideals can look like, and they also address feelings of isolation. Any one little blob of silica appears to be separate, but it’s actually not separated by an expanse of that sea of metal ions, but they bridge those separate islands of silica. So we can work with mesosilicates to kind of get that magic coming in. When we take a look at our red garnets that are, you know, rich in things like magnesium and aluminum or iron and aluminum or some combination of the two, with or without manganese, we we see at once a kind of earthy stabilizing influence as well as this really centering kind of heart centered quality that they bring.

Whether they’re born of, you know, cooling molten rock or by regional metamorphism where we’ve got mountains formed by the crashing together of crustal plates. There is a kind of heat in the birth of them that also lends us fire, creativity, and inspiration to what garnet brings. And so over the years, I’ve really grown to appreciate them. I have a small collection of natural garnet from India. This one comes from, like, a biotype matrix.

It actually got little bits of mica in there. So this is one of the metamorphic processes. Some almending garnets in feldspar. Some come from out west here in The States from California. Of course, we’ve got, you know, things like rosolar, which comes in so many colors and varieties.

We’ve got our black androdites, which are colored by trace amounts of titanium and other stuff. But my other, like, truly, truly weird garnet, like, you have to do a double take, are these guys. They’re sometimes referred to as leuco garnets, and they are colorless. This is near pure grossular garnet. So there’s just a tiny, tiny trace amount of manganese in there, which makes it do something most garnets won’t do, and it will fluoresce under ultraviolet light.

Because there’s so little manganese, it acts as a fluorescent activator too much, and it quenches that. It also gives us brighter colors. So, I’ve over the years learned to appreciate the kind of individuation of every different species and varietal of garnet. And, you know, garnets sometimes surprise us. They come in colors we don’t expect.

Some garnets will attract strong enough magnets because of their metallic ions that are present. And then we also get beautiful displays of light like our rainbow androdites or our demantoid, another variety of androdites, so named for its diamond-like brilliance, vivid green, so green. I can appreciate it. And they outperform diamonds. So, yeah, I think garnets are really magical.

I warmed up to them over the years. All it took was that photograph on the cover of Rock and Gem or the Mineralogical Journal, whichever it was twenty years ago, and I’ve been a garnet fan ever since.

Ashley Leavy: So I wanna say I got one of those actually, a few very tiny of those Japanese rainbow garnets, and they are phenomenal stones to work with. There is something so uplifting and so inspiring about them, and they are quite hard to find now. Still possible to find for sure, but they’re a little pricey. And, you know, if you want one of any decent size, expect to pay, like, a small fortune because they’re highly collectible at this point. But I was sitting here kind of listening and thinking about what you were saying, Nicholas, and going through all these different amazing varieties of garnet that we have available to us.

And I wanna sort of pose a question to the group. Like, when you work with, say, red garnet, are you specific and intentional about what type of garnet you’re working with? Because so often, we’re looking in our crystal books. We’re reading articles online, and someone will just say red garnet. Red garnet for this or that or whatever.

And same thing sometimes, green garnet for this or that. But we have so many different varieties. Does it matter? If so, why? And if you were gonna have a go to red garnet, like, what would it be?

Adam, do you have thoughts on that?

Adam Barralet: I would say I guess, when saying with different types of red garnets, it’s like going, well, I wanna date, parties kind of thing. But then they’re all gonna be kind of the same, but when you get to know them, they’re a little bit more. I must admit, I’m in the garnet camp. You three all seem to have drunk the garnet Kool Aid, and I haven’t yet. I think it’s got some really powerful uses, and I will talk about them especially, for our time right here and now.

But if I was going for a kind of a fiery red crystal, I’d actually go for a ruby nine times out of 10 over a garnet in that way. So I probably haven’t dived into getting to know each of the red garnets differently. What about you, Kyle?

Kyle: I am a for me, color’s very important in the way I see things, and I generally stick to almandine pyrope as my red reds. For me, spacetine goes into the orangey browns, and it comes with a different more creatively driven energy. I find the deeper reds, the more burgundy reds of almandine and Rhyolite, tinges into purple sometimes. This is a really cute little wire wrapped one that I made myself that I wear that’s tiny and you can see it when the sun goes through it, but it’s too hard on camera. It has this depth of quality, of connection, of grounding with the fire.

I find the orangey brownie ones bring fire on fire, maybe a little bit of earth, but they seem to push more on the fiery edge where these deep burgundies, you see them. This is one from the heart’s range, real beautiful natural faces. This is an African, Tanzanian piece that has a really beautiful color. It’s a rhyolite, rhodolite. My goodness.

I’m confusing rhyolite and rodylite. Let’s just get that out of the way. Sorry. Rhodylite is rainforest jasper. Rhodylite is a type of garnet.

Red garnets for me bring this depth. I don’t know. That’s where I come at it. That’s where I come at it. And I think as you go into the blacks, they take you, like, right down into the depths into infinite possibilities below our feet and what exists outside of our range of what we can see.

Ashley: Awesome. Nicholas, what about you being the Capricorn who didn’t really connect with your January birthstone? Have you grown to, like, form a solid relationship with any one particular type of RedGarnet?

Nicholas: You know, the challenge is that without, like, really good testing, we just don’t know. So it is a safe bet to call our fairly assertive reds pyropia almandine. They’re somewhere on the spectrum between the two, and that is usually as specific as I will guess unless something has a label or I I happen to know better. So we’ll say pyropia almondine, and we’ll leave it at that.

Adam: And, Nicholas, people that maybe aren’t so into the structure and the different varieties of Ghana, when they go to a shop and they buy a pendant or a tumbled stone, it just says red red Ghana, is it probably that’s what it’s gonna be?

Nicholas: It’s probably gonna be somewhere on that spectrum. So think of it as like a triangle, pyropia, almandine, and spessartine. And if we just plot out those main points, they all have aluminum in them, but they could have magnesium or iron or, you know, other trace things in the other spot. And it’s just about how much magnesium or iron will give us the difference between pyropia and almandine respectively. Rhodolite garnet is usually somewhere in the middle between them.

And then when we look at the spessartine, it’s got manganese and aluminum, but you can also form a series that is, you know, between pyropine and spessartine or between almandine and spessartine. So if you have an orangey brown one, it would be closer to that manganese side versus to the iron or magnesium end of the spectrum. And that’s why most of our crystal shops just say, garnet.

Adam: What about you, Ashley? You posed the question. Do you think it matters, or do you have a favorite?

Ashley: So I always run into the same problem exactly like Nicholas mentioned where we can’t always know exactly. So I have some things in my crystal toolkit that are just red garnet. Right? But sometimes they come labeled, which is really helpful, and you get to kind of tap into those subtle differences. But I wanna show one of these is my new favorite garnet, that I just got from the Tucson Gem Show this year, and this is a rhodolite garnet, like, was confirmed by the seller.

It doesn’t look like too much here, but let me just backlight it so you can see if I can do it. Look at the color. It’s like the most reddy red garnet ever if you are watching it on video. It is something else. I mean, it really is just the most delicious juicy red.

It looks like a little gumdrop. And there is something about this that has that very red violet sort of color to it, that I really resonate with. It feels somehow really sort of soft and really nurturing. Like, I love garnet because it’s one of those stones that kind of just, like, envelops you really slowly. It kind of brings me down and creates that sort of ocean of calm, which you wouldn’t think of associating with the color red.

But in particular, that rhodolite garnet really feels like that’s what it does for me as opposed to maybe that pyrope almandine sort of energy, like, especially the pyrope garnet. This is, like, this is the anchor. Get me in my body. Get me grounded. Also, get me a bit motivated.

Like, I feel a lot more energizing quality from this. So it’s a really interesting kind of exploring those, which is why I was wondering if anyone else had, yeah, sort of thought about that a little bit. Like, what, how does that express itself to us when we’re working with those different varieties?

Adam: Yeah. It’s really interesting hearing how everyone’s kind of the different ways that they relate to energy. What about yourself, Kyle? What type of energy do you find red garnets in this umbrella term have for you?

Kyle: For me, I love that they feel protective, that they feel nurturing, and they feel powerful in both making you feel powerful and helping you to see that there is power out there. One of my favorite examples that I found in 2019 is a mala made entirely out of garnet that I bought in Bali, with a couple of stones for the chakras there. And I was drawn to it immediately, like, in the daylight sun. It just looked like black stones. And I knew as soon as I picked it up, I was like, it’s not tourmaline.

Like, I know it’s heavy, but it’s not tourmaline. There’s a brightness to it. And I saw that it was garnet, That was an immediate, like, yes. I need this. And what I have done since is I will always wear it when I do big work, when I do workshops, when I do meditations, when I do group work, when I do, places where I’m holding space for a lot of people in a lot of time, I am able to manage and work with my energy.

I’m able to protect myself. I’m able to stay energized throughout the day and moderate it and utilize it correctly. I find myself really able to manage. I find myself not burning out, and I know that I can keep doing and delivering along the way. I find myself finding nice, rich red garnets to wear often and regularly.

And as I said, the road light that I wrapped myself has that same red color that Ashley showed when you get the light behind it. That’s why I had to wrap it to where it’s that immediate feeling of, like, I’ve got you. You’re safe. Now why don’t you express yourself a little bit? Why don’t you do something a little bit exciting?

Why don’t you do something that motivates you? Why don’t you do something that lights you up a little bit? You are safe to do so. You are ready to take that risk. You are ready to take that next step.

I find it encouraging and supporting like a really great friend that’s not going to let you sleep and go come on. Don’t let this opportunity pass you by. You’re better than that. Like, don’t let yourself wallow in self pity. Let yourself be excited about life.

Yes. There is time for grief. Yes. There is time for sadness, but there’s also time for action. There is time for doing.

There’s time for giving to yourself by giving. There is time to receive by giving like being out in the exchange of the world. As Nicholas explained in the chemistry, it really makes sense to me that feeling of not being isolated anymore. Actually knowing that you are yourself and unique and weird on this spectrum of triangles or whatever and you are perfect as that version and then there are others that are different and you can connect to them and be separated from them. Have your own space.

Take care of your inner child, your inner needs, your emotions, your physical body. Whatever it is, take care of that. But also don’t hold yourself back from living and existing and being a human that exists in the plane that can hold up space. Don’t feel like you can’t hold up space. I think that’s a really important lesson that comes from Ghana is knowing that you can put yourself out there.

There is this beautiful ring that I wear, that is oh, just showing a little bit of the red. This is a little vintage ring I found on Portobello Road in London and it I’ve with my loupe, I’ve found it’s made in the seventies. And it just fits perfectly. It sits there. And on my right hand, it’s a reminder that I’m moderating what I’m putting out, but I’m putting it out there.

I’m not gonna stop putting it out there. I’m not going to stop hiding. I’m not going to hide. I’m not going to stop myself from showing myself. I’m not going to listen to the words that come from negative places out there because it is something that we all face and it’s something that I have faced every week of my life that I can remember.

And every week of my life that I go live on Sunday, on one of the three platforms, there’ll be someone that says something I’m doing is the devil or the demon’s work or something to that effect because I’m working with cards online. And it’s I love being able to go, well, guess what? This is my house, block mute. Like, I don’t even have to engage with the people. I don’t even have to connect.

Like, this is not what I need to do. You are not a part of my life. If it’s not for you, move on. You don’t have to say nasty things. Garnet allows you to be empowered, to feel safe, and to know that you don’t have to take any ish from anyone and from any direction.

I think it’s so, so important to feel that empoweredness, feel like you can, and feel like people don’t have the right to put you down. People don’t have the right to say that you can’t or you shouldn’t just because they don’t think that they can. Like, how rude. Excuse you. Mind your business.

Like, it’s not your business to tell me how to live my life if I’m not hurting anyone, especially if it’s just from how I look, especially if it’s just from me holding up space or holding space somewhere that maybe makes you feel a bit uncomfortable. I think an important lesson with Garnet is knowing that you feeling comfortable may make others uncomfortable. You being in your light, you being like that. And that’s why we hold ourselves back. It’s like, I don’t want the people to look at me.

I don’t want to be judged. I don’t want to be questioned for my actions. And it’s like, they’re gonna judge you and question you for your actions anyway. Do it. Right?

Why don’t you give them something to talk about? Give them something to look at. If they’re focusing on you, they’re not focusing on themselves. And I think that, like, the brightness that Garnet brings will draw a little bit of attention and I think that’s okay. I think it’s a good thing.

I think it means that you’re doing the right thing if you’re having a few eyes come to you because of what you’re doing. It shows that there are people that are otherly focused, but it gives you the right to focus on you. I think it’s so important in today’s day and age. And as I was writing my info on this, I was like, there everything that I’m writing feels a little bit selfish, but it’s like, no. It’s self full.

It’s important that we take care of our own needs. It’s important that we know our limits and our boundaries. It’s important that we give and receive, and it’s important that we hold space for ourselves wherever we go.

Adam: I love that. I love that. And, you know, just to say on the, you know, to go off on a slight tangent where you’re getting the you’re doing the devil’s work kind of thing. I’ve been trying to find an accurate number, and it’s somewhere around a million of how many actual gods are honored around the world today. And I saw an interesting post going, and you’re sure that your god’s the right one?

Kind of quite interesting. And, you know, that’s also including the goddesses as well. So speaking of goddesses, I believe you really find a really beautiful connection between Brigid and Red Garnet, Ashley.

Ashley: I do. This is so it was this connection that I felt between the goddess Bridget and Red Garnet that really helped me appreciate Garnet in a bigger way because I will say there was this long period before I really had connected with Garnet and started working with it that it was almost like I thought I knew what Garnet was really about. I kind of had this, like, assumption in my head. I had this, I guess, like, surface understanding, and I almost looked at garnet as being this really, really serious stone. And I was exploring, like, where did that come from?

Where did that understanding come from? And it was because all these super serious older women in my life always had, like, garnet jewelry on. And I really think that’s where that, like, connotation came from. Like, oh, no. That’s for, like, older, serious women.

That’s like a, you know, it’s and that was the vibe I always had from it. And so I didn’t really connect. I thought it was just this, I don’t know, kind of old fashioned, like I don’t know. I didn’t. I wasn’t feeling it. But then I had this amazing experience where I went to Ireland in 2019, and I’ve talked about this before.

I went with my mom. We were doing, like, a reconnection trip. My mom is adopted. We have, like, family history there. We went to have this amazing mother daughter trip together, and we drove around the country.

It was a phenomenal experience of, like, bonding and connection and healing and nurturing, and it was great. And Garnet ended up being this big part of it, Garnet and Carnelian. And so we were driving around to a lot of different sacred sites. We visited a number of holy wells especially, and there was a particular holy well associated with Brigid, not the main one at Kildare, strangely enough, but one out on the West Coast. And we stopped there, and I had the most phenomenal experience, just sitting at this sacred site, listening to the birds, feeling like the breeze on my skin, feeling so fully present and immersed, and found myself with you know, I had brought a few crystals with me just in a little pouch, for travel.

I had brought this garnet for, like, grounding and helping with my anxiety on the plane and that sort of thing, and and I found myself just, like, twirling this little garnet in my hand, sitting there feeling this connection with the land, with the birdsong, with the water, and holding this garnet. And and that is where this feeling of that really being held, like Kyle just talked about, really being held and supported, really leaning into, like, my purpose and my truth and and what I am, like, put here to do, not as a career, not as a but, like, as a human being experiencing life. Right? Like, it just had this deep impact and impression on me. So over the next, you know, quite a few years after that, really connecting deeper with goddess Brigid, who I had always felt this call toward, this pull toward.

And that was one of the reasons, you know, specifically, I wanted to stop at quite a few of her holy sites on this road trip with my mom and digging deeper into goddess Brigid and understanding her different aspects and that sort of thing. I started to understand how the different crystals that I was feeling drawn to at that time where I was really opening up to her energy and her presence sort of related to her different aspects. So Garnet, I sort of connect with her aspect as the healer. And in a past episode, when we were talking about Carnelian, I talked about the connection to Brigid as hearth keeper. But in Brigid’s aspect as healer, Brigid was, like, known to have this amazing knowledge of herbs and herbal medicine.

She was one that could talk with and connect with the bees. And if we think about the importance of honey for healing, right, honey is so powerful. It has amazing antiseptic qualities. We connect with it. Even still, when we, you know, have a scratchy throat, a sore throat, we’ll have a cup of tea with honey.

And Brigid was like this keeper of the bees, this amazing goddess who could communicate with the bees, speak with the bees. And if we think about, you know, what the bees are really representative of is community in so many ways. And so here is this amazing goddess who is able to inspire community action and orchestrate community action. And so it’s through community often that we find healing as well. So it’s not just in the plants and the land.

It’s not just in the honey, but looking at the symbolism in that, it’s where we find healing in community. And that for me is so much of what garnet is because when we are present in our truth and what we’re supposed to be here doing as humans, so much of it revolves around connection and collaboration, and that is where I feel some of garnet’s strongest gifts lie. Like, this is where it’s at. So if you’ve been feeling that feeling of being disconnected and separate and you wanna come back together as part of that bigger whole, like Nicholas was talking about with just the chemistry of garnet. Like, this is a stone that can really help you do that in big ways.

And so if you, like me, feel really connected with goddess Brigid or if you don’t and you’d like to explore that, one of the best ways I feel like we can work with Garnet to get close to her is to let Garnet be sort of a muse, to inspire you, to inspire poetry, song, dance, music. Like, let those sparks of inspiration fuel you and help you find your place in the community and the things that you can do to make the world a better place.

Adam: So, actually, you’re saying just by kind of having garnered around you and then creating those opportunities for those kind of muse-like experiences, that’s a good way to work with this, Crystal?

Ashley: Yeah. For me, it’s almost like a tuning in and a listening. Like, I’m so often taken back to that exact moment of, you know, sitting at the holy well and hearing the birdsong and feeling so inspired by that, so connected. And we don’t have to have, you know, made a pilgrimage to a sacred place to do that. You can literally just sit where you are in this moment.

Hold that garnet, wear it as jewelry, and tune in and sort of listen. Just listen to what’s alive and what’s present for you, and you can start doing that by just engaging your senses. So there’s, you know, just a really simple practice of holding that garnet and thinking about what you can see, what you can smell, what you can hear, what you feel, maybe what taste is in your mouth, all of those things. But engage those senses to get you really present in your body and then just sort of see what comes up for you from there.

Adam: I love that. I love that. I must admit, today, I’ve been sitting here in the background kind of smiling like a Cheshire cat. I hope everyone’s kinda noticed that you know, one of the things I love about crystal confab is that we all bring different ideas, but there’s really been an underlying theme today of this kind of self fullness as I think Kyle put it in. And Nicholas is talking about being on that deserted island and that type of thing as well.

There’s a bit of method to our madness here on this podcast. So, yes, we have to choose a different crystal each week, and you may notice that I try and tie it into something that’s happening astrologically. And the reason that Red Ghanet was selected for this time is there’s about three different astrological events that are actually happening where I think Red Garland is absolutely perfect. The one that ties in so beautifully with what we’ve all been discussing today is the retrograde of a major asteroid by the name of Vesta, another goddess. She’s known by the Greeks as Hestia.

Now to tell you a little bit about this goddess, she was known as the goddess of the heart and the home. So if you think about it, she was the fireplace that, you know, was honored in the past, And we maybe don’t honor our fires much these days, but think in times gone by, it was a source of warmth. It’s where you cooked your food. It was where the family gathered. It was a really key part of that.

But when you kind of look at her, the honoring of this goddess is that she had these vestal virgins, which were her priestesses. Now when we hear the word virgin these days, we think that someone has yet to experience sexual intercourse. But virgins were different. The definition was slightly different. These preceptors were actually ones who decided not to take a husband.

So not to go down the normal, you know, heterosexual route of, you know, we find a lover, we get married, we have children, and we build a home and that type of thing as well. In fact, these preceptors were often in different fertility rights throughout the year, be, you know, be the portals of the goddess and would make love to many different people in that type of thing as well. So what Vesta kind of represents is not just that fireplace that we kind of think and, you know, basic descriptions will be about her, but it is about honoring that fire within you. And so what happens, this asteroid that is in an asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, when she goes retrograde, which is happening in the coming days, you’re going to find that your self integrity or relying on yourself will be compromised. And this is where Red Garner is the perfect asset to have by you because people will ask you to like, oh, do you think you could just could you help me out with that when you’ve already decided?

No. I’m having a night off or, you know, a one more hour or, you know, those little things were like, oh, and for me, why I love Red Garner is it has this real warrior energy, not in an aggressive assertive way, although I do find it quite fiery, but more so in if you were a warrior, you need to make sure you’re at your best so that you can give your best. Do you mean if a warrior was going to battle, they’re trying to prepare themselves to be in tip top shape? And that’s exactly what we’ve been talking about today. This is a crystal to make sure that you are looking after yourself.

Again, as Kyle said, it’s not selfish. It’s being selfful because you can give your best as a partner, as a parent, as a colleague, as just a contributor to this world. If you’re in a bad shape, you become a drain on society rather than a contributor to society. So really look at where your boundaries are gonna be pushed in the next few weeks. Are people trying to get you to do things that are beyond what you actually want to do?

And then keep Red Garland nearby you and either sit and ponder each night and go, did I bend too much? Why did I bend too much? Was it that I needed to try and get other people’s approval? But as I often say, it doesn’t matter if you’re Donald Trump or Lady Gaga or Mother Teresa. You’re gonna have people that love you and people that hate you.

But only you get to decide how you feel about yourself. Investing in retrograde is a really great time for you to kind of get those personal boundaries a little bit stronger as well. So that’s one thing that’s happening really soon. Now I’m gonna talk to my Southern Hemisphere friends because we also have an equinox happening. Now it’s going to be different.

It’s going to the spring equinox, which is known as Ostara in the Northern Hemisphere. This is a really great time for getting back into action, planting seeds of desire. But for us in the, Southern Hemisphere, and, Kyle, I don’t know if you’ve noticed it, we’ve stopped our scorching hot 40 degree or a hundred Fahrenheit days, and it’s starting to cool down slowly and you start to get a bit of chill in the morning. We’re going into that autumnal weather. Remember that humans are the only species on this planet that ignores the cycles of the sun, the moon and the seasons.

When the sun goes down at night, trees and plants will change their behavior and so will animals. Humans, we flick on a light and keep going. And, you know, that’s why we throw out our, you know, our melatonin, our serotonin cycles, our circadian cycles. That’s why cortisol keeps us up late into the night. All these different things.

With the seasons as well, do you behave differently in the summer and the winter? With our climate control, a lot of the time, we still do a lot of the same stuff a lot of the time. Mabon or the autumn equinox is a really great time to start slowing down, to get into that more introspective time. And for me, this is a really beautiful time. We don’t get it so much in the Southern Hemisphere, but in the Northern Hemisphere, 1 thing I love is you have all the autumn leaves.

The trees realized that actually I no longer need this except for the leaves. And for my survival and introspection in these colder months, I need to let go of excess. So this is a really beautiful time to focus on your base chakra. And, of course, the base chakra is about feeling grounded, feeling safe and secure. And a lot of the time why we feel overwhelmed is because we’re trying to stretch ourselves in too many different directions.

And this is a great one for Mabon to kinda go, no. I need to come back to what I need and focus on that and and build those boundaries around that as well. Now the final thing, I’m a little bit too late for this one, but I’m also wearing mine now. And it’s a special type of gun that we haven’t talked about yet, which I’m gonna throw back to everyone in a moment, the blood moon. So we talked about the blood moon last week with bloodstone and the blood moon, by the time you listen to this, has already happened.

But I’m giving you one year’s warning because we have another blood moon in Virgo in 2026 as well. And the crystal that I’d love you to get is not just a red garnet for that, but a star red garnet. And I wanted to ask the gang, you know, asterism is this kind of effect you get on certain crystals such as garnets, rubies, rose quartz, sapphires, dioxides, where when you shine the light on it, you get either a four rate or six rate star that kind of glides across it. And I’d love to know from everyone, what does that do to the energy of that crystal when it’s gotten and I think I’ve seen a few people grab different crystals off camera for a second. What does that do to the energy?

And what’s your feeling on star crystals? And, you know, I’ll come back a little bit and talk about star garnets. Nicholas, I thought you’d grab yours first.

Nicholas: So in the case of our garnets, it’s usually, either titania, so something like rutile. Although it could also be, you know, tiny little fibers of other minerals that are in there. But, you know, that titanium influence that we find in rutile is so connective. It is strong. It forges great boundaries and things as well, helps us reach across distance while still protecting our light, and I find it so enlivening.

I have a star garnet sphere, which was not labeled a star garnet sphere. It was just in a basket of regular garnets. And, I never go crystal shopping without a bright light. So, like, you know, my mobile device, I have to look at everything under a bright light to see what’s happening inside it. And, I mean, the moment I turned the torch on, it was right there, this perfect four rayed star.

I went through every one of them categorically to find the best, but it was the first one. It’s always the first one. And I love that it brings a greater sense of movement to the otherwise somewhat kind of stabilizing or anchoring quality that Garnet has. And, yeah, I think they’re really, really sweet.

Adam: Kyle, so you grab one as well?

Kyle: I have also had a very similar experience, but with a pendant. I bought this really beautiful garnet pendant, took it outside, the sun hit it, and it went ping with a four star. I was like, yes. I’m so, so excited. Like, it brings life this energy, this, like, richness the same way that, like, golden rutile, star rose quartz, star dioxide.

I find anything with a like, an asterism, a star in it just brings this party. Yes, do, amplify, can, like, depending on the situation, it’s like a yes for me.

Adam: I have started to doubt myself this week as well. I was just doing some Google searches for images as well, and I wanted to. I’ve always been very certain and confident in teaching this, but I wanna double check with everyone now. When it comes to you’ve got star garnet, you’ve got star rubies. Now they look very, very similar. They’re both kind of that red.

There will be different kinds of variations. But as both Nicholas and Kyla mentioned, it’s a four grade star with Garnet, but it will be a six grade star with Ruby. Please confirm that I am always correct. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because it is quite when I did a Google image of the star, Garnet, some of the images had a four rate star and some had a six rate star. So I do wonder sometimes whether in sales, people are getting a little bit confused on what they’re selling. But, yeah, that’s obviously because of the layout of the structure of the crystal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Nicholas: Exactly. There is a really great exception, though, although it is rare. Corundum can produce a 12 pointed star if we have the right spacing of the rutile inside them.

Kyle: Just when I told The fact that garnet is cubic, cubic, you know, four sides. Yeah. Ruby, hexagonal, six sides. Like, right there, it shows you that that’s the orientation that the curve the other minerals within the mineral are going to form under that structure. It’s simple maths.

Adam: Yep. Yep. How about yourself, Ashley? Have you worked much with Stargardens?

Ashley: Yes. Actually, I found a really beautiful one from this amazing ethical vendor a number of years back now. But it’s just a massive cabochon, and so it just perfectly displays that asterism. But I think in general, when I think about an asterism, I don’t think of, like, necessarily, like, star garnet versus star ruby versus a starry rose quartz or something like that compared to a regular one. I almost think of the asterism as, like, this extra qualifier, like, this extra type of energy.

And for me, kind of across the board, anything with an asterism, so good for focus, and just an amazing amplifier of whatever that crystal is already doing. Like Kyle was saying, like, yes can do this. Like, it’s that amplification of whatever that stone is already doing, like, taking it up times 10, but also really, really good for enhancing focus on that aspect of your life.

Adam: Yeah. I I find as well, asterism kind of gives like the spiritual level of that thing. So, you know, with rose quartz, rose quartz is about that general love. The star rose quartz kinda gives that more kind of soul love in that way. I love blue star sapphires for that real love, for me, that’s one of the best stones you could use for soulmate work.

If you’ve got a soulmate, you know, I think star sapphire engagement rings would be probably the best, would be my call. If someone’s like, if I could choose any stone, I’d probably say star sapphires would be amazing for that. With the rubies, it’s that real fire in us and garnets, when we come back to that blood moon, it’s that spiritual work as well, Davide.

Ashley: I really like that, and I agree with you on the star sapphire. It’s such a beautiful stone. But this is making me think of there is this, lapidary worker who is as famous as you can be for that kind of thing, I guess, here in The States, but he did a lot of lapidary work and a lot of mineral sourcing for Melody, the author of the Love is in the Earth series of books, and his name was Bob Jackson. And he would make these chakra healing sets, very, very few of them. It took him a lot of time, but he would use the metamorphosis quartz from Brazil, which is, like, the trademark name for quartz from Brazil with an asterism in it.

Sort of almost like a gyrasol according to Melody’s literature, different from a gyrasol, but looks very much like a gyrasol, but then containing the asterism. But he would actually create doublets where he would put that astrated quartz on top of different, like, what are considered usually more like high vibrational stones. So you would have, like, a beautiful ruby with this asterated quartz on top, a sugilite with asterated quartz on top, and a dioptase with the asterated quartz on top. I mean, very, very cool doublets where these are bound together. And then he would create, like, these chakra stone sets out of them, and I was lucky enough to have a few of these throughout the years that I was able to work with.

But that’s where I really, really learned to appreciate that asterism as, like, its own formation and what else it kinda brought to the party. So, if anyone is out there, do a quick image search and see if you can find, like, Bob Jackson metamorphosis quartz chakra sets and just look at them because they’re very, very cool.

Adam: That is awesome. I love that. I always love in our conversations to kind of leave our listeners and our viewers with the kind of practical things they can do with their red gun. And, actually, with Bridget, you gave us a classic example of that. I would say with this kind of vesta retrograde and this kind of integrity that we’ve all been talking about, I think it’s valuable to you know, we have these little pockets in our jeans.

People often call them, I think, coin pockets. What? Lead crystal pockets. That’s a really nice place to kind of fit your red gun at the moment. But I think it’s also nice to even place one where distractions tend to come.

So if you place one with your phone, if you find that’s where it pulls you away from who you are or if at work, you won’t get pulled away. Maybe you’re laying one on your desk and that type of thing. Is that kind of energetic but also a visual reminder of honoring yourself as well? But I’d love to ask the other gents as well. You know, Kyle, do you have a way that you could kind of suggest to people they’ve got their egg on it.

What do they do with it? Whilst

Kyle: I was sitting, I wrote down a couple of questions and I think sitting with yourself, sitting with a piece of gun and asking yourself these questions could be really, really useful. The first one is, what is going to be my best course of action that takes care of my own needs as well as everyone else involved? Sit with that. How much can you do for yourself as for everyone else? Find that balance moving forward.

And another one, do I just need a hug or maybe a conversation with a close friend? Like, sometimes it’s just that acknowledgement that you need a bit of support and sitting with that garment going actually okay I’m gonna reach out to that friend because I need a hug. I’m gonna give myself that little bit of support. I think what can you do? How can you use your energy?

And what support do you currently require?

Adam: I love that. Very very in line with vesta Retrograde as well. I love it. Nicholas, what about yourself?

Nicholas: You know, garnets feel so corporeal, so kinesthetic to me. Like, I wanna play with the physical bodies. And so, oftentimes, when I wanna, like, integrate crystal energy into my lives, I try to find we’ll call them therapy windows rather than just calling them energy centers. It’s not necessarily about a map of the energy body, but about how our bodies relate to space and time and ourselves and our rocks. And three zones that I really love integrating garnet, but also lots of other crystals with is just head, heart, and belly.

And there’s something about bringing us into communion with our physical bodies this way. The heft of the garnet, you know, kinda anchors the mind when we hold it up to our brow or to the top of the head. So we’re not, you know, spinning out in there. We’re bringing it to the heart, and it’s got that stabilizing centering influence like we see its nezosilicate structure do for us. Then the belly, usually for me, that’s a little lower than the belly button, but, you know, somewhere in that abdominal region would be nice.

And it’s it’s about kind of feeling at home in your body and doing that with a stone that brings us in touch with the material world that allows us to have that kind of energetic relationship, I think, is really useful, but it’s also just a fun exercise for any crystal you wanna get to know.

Adam: I love that. I love that. One other novel thing that I’ve heard, some people find that putting a red garnet in your socks will actually help or in your gloves will help with circulation. So if it gets colder in the, you know, in the Southern Hemisphere, maybe we all need to put a little garnet in our socks so that and see if that works as well. Maybe let us know in the comment if that’s worked for you.

But we’ve given you enough to kinda Google today, whether it be that that lapidrist or whether it be asterisms. Go out and search, and hopefully, you’ve also found some new love for garnets as well. We’ll be back next week to discover another great amazing crystal, another gift from Mother Earth. Have a bit of contact with it. Thanks for joining us today.

Until then, take care and be blessed.

Are you interested in becoming a Certified Crystal Healer? Find out more about the CCH and Advanced Crystal Practitioner Program HERE!