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Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez  and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #31 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Chiastolite crystal meanings, including:
- Working with Chiastolite Crystals during Samhain & Beltane
- Harnessing Higher Truth with Chiastolite
- The history of cross-stones and the magic of the crossroads
Tune in now for a deeper look at Chiastolite meaning!
Podcast Episode 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 a casual chat about all things crystals.
Nicholas Pearson: Hello, and welcome back to Crystal Confab. It’s Nicholas, and I’m joined by Adam and Kyle. Our crystal bestie, Ashley, is elsewhere in the universe today, and she’ll be joining us again soon. And this week, we have, I think, another really underappreciated gemstone that we’re gonna be confabbing about, and this is a stone that I think is probably pretty recognizable. Maybe fewer people can pronounce its name or spell it, and even fewer have worked with it.
And that stone is Chiastolite, which is a really fascinating stone that has been confused with some other stuff throughout history. No surprise there. And it’s a variety of a mineral species called andalusite. I happen to know that Kyle’s a big fan of andalusite more generally speaking. So what do you have to tell us about this mineral species?
Kyle Perez: Well, of course, I was introduced to andalusite doing my gemology degree. You have to cover pleochroic stones, and andalusite is like the poster child of pleochroism in minerals. As you can see, it has this kind of innocuous brown color, but when they are cut and faceted correctly and you see the light correctly through them, they show the traffic light system of colors, yellow, red, and green or like an amber color. And it is incredible that you can turn this stone one way to another and see these incredible colors shift and change. And I was drawn into it immediately, and I find it incredible to shift our perspective.
I think anything pleochroic has that ability to perspective shift, and it helps you to see practical ways of looking at things, energetic ways of looking at things, and kind of cerebral ways of looking at things. It really gives us the ability to look at things in many ways and from many angles and that’s why I really love it and that’s why I think it leads into and is incredible with Chiastolite or ‘Chiastolite’ as it is supposed to be pronounced.
Adam Barralet: I’d love to actually just bring that up. I’ve always said Chiastolite, but it’s the correct Chiastolite, is it Nicholas?
Nicholas: Historically, yes. So it’s taken from the Greek letter, which in English, we often say Kai, but would be kind of a really guttural sound closer to that in Greek. So is marked with an x or shaped like an x, which is how it gets its name.
Adam: I love that. And it is a really interesting stone, is it? Because normally when it’s cut and this is how we find a cut the most, it’s, you know, that beautiful brown stone, really interesting having that black cross throughout it.
Nicholas: Yeah. And that phenomenon has attracted quite a lot of attention over the years. So the earliest textual references, we have to things objects just called cross stones appear in the very late, fifteenth century, so toward the end of the 14 hundreds. And around this time frame, we might encounter an occasional illustration, and they’re mostly just pebbles that are crisscrossed with veins of quartz or calcite in them, and they were known as cross stones or some version of that. There’s like a million permutations of this name, lapis crucifer, from lapis meaning stone and prox brass, ferere, tecere, so literally cross bearing stone.
We have lapis cruciatis. We’ve got the crucis lapillo, the little stone of cross, the lapis cruciformis, and so on and so forth. But eventually, we get Chiastolite taken from the Greek root, but appearing in print for the first time in German. And these stones were initially discovered in a region of Spain, in the Northern part of Spain, and they occur on the Camino De Santiago De Compostela, 1 of the world’s most famous Christian pilgrimage sites, arguably one of the most famous pilgrimage sites of any religion found worldwide. And, allegedly, the the destination of this pilgrimage is said to house the remains of Saint James or Santiago, we call him in Spanish, who was, the very first apostle to be martyred.
When these stones were discovered in this region in the early sixteenth century, they were immediately taken as tokens of the pilgrimage, and they were worn and carried, adopted by these pilgrims. And from about the fifteen fifties onward, they began to circulate throughout a wider part of Europe. However, if we go to a neighboring country, we find another cross bearing stone that was also given the same name, cross stone, in several different languages, and that is staurolite. So staurolite and andalusite are both things that are indicators of metamorphism.
They’re what we call indicator species in metamorphic rocks. They are both aluminosilicate minerals. They’re both pretty darn dense. It just so happens to be that they can both be twinned in a way that is cross like. Although, I mean, we hold them up side by side today, and we’re gonna notice they’re not the same thing.
But imagine you’re a sixteenth century layperson picking up a rock, and it has a cross in it, you’re probably going to think it’s the same thing that, you know, a country or two over someone else is finding. And so these two rocks have gotten, conflated, quite a bit over time. But what I find really interesting is that the folklore around the cross stones at large is often related to some kind of event portraying divine intervention. In some versions of the myth of cross stone, it said that the Chiastolite variety sprang out of the earth where the blood of Saint James or Santiago, touched the earth. We’ve got other examples of maybe the tears of fairies or the tears of the souls of the dead reaching the earth and becoming cross stones.
So we get this kind of magical interface, this event. And truth be told, we recently talked about fossils for the last two weeks. But cross stones are kind of lumped into the same category as fossils. They were called formed stones just like them because they bore these unusual shapes. And so there were a lot of very similar attempts to reconcile how this seemingly perfect, seemingly lifelike, seemingly, human inspired imagery could appear in stone.
In some cases, they fell from the sky. In others, it was related to the water of baptism. But what I really find magical about these rocks that relates back to that initial instance of discovery along a pilgrimage site is, for me, they depict the crossroads in miniature, and that makes them really magical stones for me. If we think about the imagery of the crossroads, when you stand in the middle of it, you’re betwixt and between. It doesn’t matter if you’re headed in this direction or that direction.
You can be in on both and neither at the same time. It is the kind of magical sight that we find in folklore connected to, deals with the devil to procure magical powers, success, wealth, fame, glory. It’s also the place where we might historically dispose of things or bury problematic people we don’t want returning in the afterlife because they’d be trapped in that kind of liminal space. In folk magic in several parts of the world, we find that dirt from a crossroads is a really common ingredient. It’s often used to change the course of direction our life is taking for a reversal of fortune for, you know, harnessing the magic of the in between.
The crossroads is also thought to be a kind of portal to the other world and links it to the fairy folk and to the ancestral abode. And when we see how all of these motifs kind of recurrently point towards the acquisition of power, towards the ability to, like, open a doorway, a gateway beyond ordinary perception. I find that the cross stone, whichever variety we’re working with, becomes this perfect talisman for accessing that same liminal space, that same in betweenness wherever we are. We can make new connections. We can sever them if we need to.
We can jump from one reality to the next. We can dream up new and magical things. And just as the medieval and early modern pilgrims carried the stone for safe journeys in the material, we can also use them for safe journeys in the more metaphorical, whether it’s our kind of big picture journey through life, or those journeys that we take in meditation and in dream time or in ritual or trance to commune with other planes of being, other realities, whether or not we we believe in entities like spirits and fairies and other kinds of unseen forces. This stone can still metaphorically open a way to connect with the more than human world. And so when we work with it, when we carry it, when we place it on the altar, use it in ritual, it’s like having that portable crossroads with you.
Wherever you are is the center of the universe, is the space beyond time and place. It is the doorway to manifesting whatever our heart desires.
Adam: And I think just there is a spiritual stone. You know, when we think about spirituality, a lot of people use spirituality to help them when they come to any crossroads in their life, plus there’s also an interest in connecting with the other realms. And as you just mentioned, Nicholas, Chiastolite is perfect for both of those different functions. So being a bit of a maybe a boring brown stone that people overlook sometimes, what you just shared kind of is a really good case on why everyone should possibly, if they’re not already working with this stone, do that. Would you agree?
Nicholas: Yeah. Absolutely. IÂ think it is such a magical and charming stone, and I think the same of storulite as well. And if you’re lucky enough to find cruciform twins and and other mineral species, we can symbolically treat them very similarly as these kind of doorways into the crossroad space.
Adam: Can you explain a little bit, Nicholas, how that cross actually forms within the stone?
Nicholas: Yeah. Absolutely. So when we are looking at the variety of andalusite that we know as Chiastolite, what we have is, this fairly dense mineral. It is a silicate of aluminum, and what we get are tiny little inclusions of graphite that are oriented along the twinned planes of its crystal lattice. And these patterns are more concentrated in some zones versus others, and they kind of change.
So if we take one of these crystals, they can be quite quite long, in fact, and we slice them in cross section, we’re gonna notice that the the shape of the cross changes from being very dark at one end to with a very, you know, thick, wide, black zones looking almost like a maybe a Maltese cross, to having very thin like mine here has, you know, very, very thin planes separating those those twin crystal zones. And they can range in size from being teeny tiny crystals to I I think the largest ones that have been found are several meters long.
Adam: Wow. Yeah. That’s awesome. And so I know when we were chatting beforehand, you have a really interesting take on how you like to work with this crystal. What do you find really grateful?
Kyle: Yeah. I think it sort of taps into how I work with andalusite as well, like, that perspective shift. For me, with andalusite really comes in the form of truth, and finding your truth, finding the higher truth, finding the big picture truth of what’s happening because we can get very much caught up in our own feelings. We can get caught up in what’s happening in front of us, and we can kind of lose track. As Nicholas was saying, finding ourselves at a crossroads.
What I find useful with it, another pair that I have here, and this one really shows the example of, like, the dark thick sort of at one end, and then this one has a really soft cross on it. So you can really see that difference here. It has been about the Japanese saying that there are three truths. There’s your truth, there’s my truth, and then there’s, like, the whole truth, the higher truth. And I find Chiastolite is like this combination of a judge and a director.
Both of them need information to create a picture. The judge works backwards, forwards before it gets to the judgment, whereas a director sees the picture first and then, like, has to piece it together along the way. And I find it brings both of these ideas together into one stone, together into one energy. You find yourself more able to direct, know where to put your energy, know where to face things, avoid things, leave things, not spend too much energy, bring things inwards, and you know when to gather information, when to listen as a judge, when to be, like, taking on things and putting things in accordance with the laws of what are what’s happening around you. It takes that kind of really emotional side, I think, out of things.
It doesn’t mean you can’t be creative and have a bit of heart in it, but I feel like it takes out that feeling of, like, being in the way of yourself because you can’t make a decision because of what your emotions are saying. And it helps you to see that bigger picture. It goes, okay. This person is behaving in this way because of x y z. I know that we’re having this interaction, but there’s also all of this happening around that person.
So I’m going to have a bit more compassion. I’m gonna detach myself a little bit. I’m not gonna take on what this person is saying. Even though they’re saying it to me, I know it’s not about me. Right?
It helps you to see that people’s actions are often much bigger than the episode, than the thing that you’re seeing, than the thing that’s in front of you. It’s often that we find ourselves stuck, but maybe we’re not stuck. Maybe it’s a pause. Maybe we are literally at a crossroads, and it’s about making the right choice with where your truth is now. As we evolve, our truth evolves.
As we learn more, we become hopefully more authentic, more comfortable with ourselves. We know ourselves more. We can make more grounded decisions. We evolve. We want newer things, different things.
We are ever evolving and changing creatures, and I think that’s what Kiester Light has really aided me in constantly being able to reset my truth, constantly being able to figure things out again, evolve, go, okay. I’ve now been presented with more information. I can now make a different decision. I can now evolve and grow and change. I love having a couple of really cute pieces of Western Australian, Andalusite, and Chiastolite.
One of them goes into the cross. The other one doesn’t. It has this really groundedness. It really gets your feet into the earth. It stops me personally.
Like, it really forces me to stop and look at things. And I think, again, when you harken back to that director energy, if you stop and you go, okay. How can I play this? How can I do this? How can I use my energy?
It’s not about manipulation, but it is about being able to get the right thing out of everyone for you. Like, we’re allowed to try and get the best out of everyone for ourselves. We’re allowed to be our inversion of ourselves and do what we are here to do. Right? The director’s not in their acting.
The director’s not in their filming. The director’s not in there but directing. Right? The judge is there judging. The judge is there watching.
The judge is there taking it all in. And I think when we are able to separate ourselves, stop, and look, we can then take better action. We can then do more with better intention. And as someone who is a feet first person, like, jump in, think later, I realize that doesn’t get you everywhere in life. It’s often a hindrance.
It can often really block things and hurt you. And I’ve been hurt too many times to wanna do that again and hopefully can guide you as well in the same way. Allow yourself to have enthusiasm, creativity. Absolutely. But know that there are times when, like, we need to stop and read the room.
When we need to, like, take in what’s actually happening and go, okay. It’s not all about me even though my life’s all about me. Let’s be a little less attached, see the big picture, and then take some action.
Adam: I wonder if we could possibly nickname this, crystal the scrolling stone because I’m thinking when you’re talking about truth, you know, a term that’s kind of come up in our consciousness over the last few years or so is fake news, and we know that anything can be put on the Internet these days. And I find it really interesting, you know, having a partner who has never lived in the West, who grew up in Asia and lived the last thirteen years in The Middle East, and even just looking at what comes up on the algorithms of our social media is very, very different. And the perspectives on what is true, is often the conversation that, you know, comes up in this household type of thing. And I really love that idea of being able to see different perspectives. And like you said, that Japanese, principle of my truth, your truth, and the whole truth type of thing.
And maybe this with it being a brown crystal as well and being quite grounding is just to, like, kinda ground ourselves because sometimes we get really help in it. I know the truth. And do we? Not necessarily. So it could be great just when we’re scrolling as well.
Kyle: I think it’s all about that word discernment in the end. Right? Whatever you’re seeing, be discerning about what you’re absorbing, where it’s coming from. Like, do a bit of research. Right?
Even with us, and I say it all the time in my readings, like, don’t take everything I say as gospel. Go out there and do your own research. Find what works for you. This is why we’re all confabbing. Right?
Because none of us are perfect. None of us know everything. We’re all learning from each other along the way, and hopefully, you are too.
Adam: Very much so. Kyle and I have been saying she has to light for a few decades, and we just had to change it in the last fifteen minutes or so. So, yeah, very much so. So, yeah, I love that idea. Well, I’m really enamored with, you know, that cross and, you know, I’ve got a few little pieces of it just carved into those little discs, little pendants in the same way.
And, you know, here in Australia at the moment, we’re falling into the autumnal season. Kyle and I live in around the same area. So, Kyle, I’m sure you’re noticing as well. The mornings are a little bit chilly now, and, you know, the evenings are a little bit cold, although the days are still quite nice in temperature. This is a really and I really find this is a really great time to work with brown crystals.
And sometimes I find brown crystals do tend to, you know it’s brown. It’s not a very thrilling color, but it is a really comforting color. And, you know, smoky quartz is one crystal I’ve been working with, but chia sola is another one that I find really great. I find this really has a strong connection to the wheel of the ear. And I guess you could also if you’re involved in tarot, it the wheel of fortune might be a crystal card kind of correspondence there as well.
But we’re about to go into what would be known as our or Halloween. Now people often go, well, hold on. Isn’t Halloween October the thirty first for everyone? But if we go back before it was kinda taken over by the Christian church, it was one of the eight pagan festivals. We have our equinoxes and we have our solstices when we have our long day, our short day, or our equal days, but then we have what is known as the cross quarter festivals, which are exactly halfway between.
Now I will get on my bandwagon for a little minute, and I have arguments with people normally around, the sour wind or the Halloween of the Northern Hemisphere when people start celebrating in October. Now that’s a bit of a habit, let’s say, of the church when it came into Europe and came into the influence in Europe, laying their festivals over the top of pagan festivals beforehand. And we see that with Christmas. We see it with Easter, and we also see it with Samhain, which then kind of evolved into Halloween. And they declared it being on that October 31 date.
But if you actually look and there’s some really great websites out there that will tell you that the equinoxes or solstices are shipped to each year a little bit. That’s why we have to have a leap year because our calendar year isn’t exactly in alignment with the sun’s rotation or our rotation around the sun. And so you will find this little shift in the south wind. So for us, if October 31 is traditional in the Northern Hemisphere, April 30 would be the tradition in the Southern Hemisphere, but it’s actually on May 5 this year. And this is a really great time to help us work with that energy of Samhain.
Samhain is a time when we honor our ancestors, and there’s many different practices that I could go on forever about. But I think this is a really great one to help us to deal with the cycle and the wheels of life. And I find it really interesting at Samhain, which is basically, you know, to put it really, really, really simplistically, it’s a death festival, and it’s a time of honoring death. And we see it in nature. We see things dying around us, trees letting go on their leaves and that type of thing as well.
But I think chias or chiasala is a really great crystal to help us deal with change in our lives. And especially as we get older, we don’t like things to change. We like that reliability and that steadiness in life as well. I think we also struggle in many western cultures of what we are meant to do with death. There are so many other cultures that have big celebrations or rituals or or practices in different ways that they, do things, but we don’t see that in in common you know, I believe, you know, and I may be very wrong about this, but the Jewish have a bit more of a procedure, you know, when when someone passes.
But for those kinda Christian based countries, they die. No one knows what to say. You go to a funeral for half an hour, and then you’re done. And I think this is a really great crystal to help you ground and comfort and let go of death of someone who’s passed away. I love the simple, candle ritual of lighting a candle, holding a castor light, thinking about the light that that person brought into your life, and then as you’re ready, extinguish that candle and just it’s not about forgetting them, but it’s about letting go of that energy.
It’s a really beautiful thing to do, and you may need to do that for several nights in a row or any time of the year as well. But I find with its brown grounding comforting energy, this allows us to just feel comfortable that everything changes. We see things changing with life, with death, with relationships beginning, ending, life beginning, ending, political cycles beginning, ending, money coming and going, all those different things. And I find this helps us to find comfort because we often do find ourselves in ever, I guess, ever changing in the wheel and ever changing in the, in the crossroads of life as well. So I really, really like it for that kind of point.
And I think whether we’d be celebrating Samhain down in the Southern Hemisphere in the coming week or Beltane, which is kind of the opposite one, which for a rough example, it’s kinda like Valentine’s Day. It’s more celebrating new life and that, that beginning and creation of life instead of the ending of life. I think Chiastolite is a really nice one for honoring that all the time. And I love the saying, this too will end. And I think that’s a real reminder.
It can be a really kind of it may be taken morbidly, like, oh, well, everything’s gonna die. Everything’s gonna end. But it also reminds us to cherish things. You know? We often see that there was a tragedy recently in the news of, you know, a car going through and killing lots of people in Vancouver.
Now those people who know what was happening with the hours before with their family? Did they have an argument with their partner? You know? Did they just meet someone that they were going on a first date with? We never know when things will change, and I find Chiastolite helps us to be okay with that change and to really ground in that.
Does that make sense?
Kyle: Everything is temporary. Right? We are attached as humans. We get attached to things as humans, but nothing is forever. Everything is evolving and changing and growing and we are like the smallest blip on this planet of how long we’ve been alive living and doing right compared to how long this planet’s been going.
So things are always changing. Cycles are always happening, and it is evident every day outside of our window. And I think to be connected to whatever cycles are happening wherever you are in the world is really important. I think that is totally, totally necessary and one of those things that we should all do wherever we are. Like here in Perth, I always like to connect to the Noongar, Whadjuk Noongar seasons, which connects to the native Aboriginal indigenous people, and they have six seasons.
And we’re currently in the season of adulthood, which is like autumn, but it’s like it’s broken down differently. So I always find it really nice to work with what’s happening around us. So I think it’s important to always be aware of where you are.
Adam: I was wondering, I was also thinking of I’ve seen a bit of feng shui, use of Chiastolite as well. Is this idea of, like, it is yes. It’s the crossroad, but it’s also about summoning energy from the four directions as well. And, you know, we’re talking about having to deal with these crossroads. Sometimes I’m wondering whether a simple meditation and actually positioning a keister light, making sure it’s exactly pointing to the four directions and drawing that in, whether you’re creating a magic circle or just doing a meditation.
You might see the different realms bringing, you know, different creatures, different angels, that type of thing. You could actually use it as a really empowering stone in the crossroads rather than a, how do I navigate this stress, couldn’t you?
Nicholas: Yeah. This is a stone that I have used quite a lot in, like, ritual and spell craft. You know, historically, it was carried for travel safety, so it makes a really great amulet that way. I love it as a talisman for grief as well when we are going through that kind of emotional journey. I think it’s a phenomenal ally.
We could couple it with a little bit of some dirt from a crossroads and use it as an open road talisman to clear obstacles from our path to make sure that every time we come to an intersection in life, we have free rein to choose what that is gonna look like.
Adam: I love that. So I think, yeah, feeling really empowered amongst us. Amongst the changes it is a good thing to do. And I guess that’s what we’re looking for when we are working with crystals is we reach for them because we need a friend. We need support in helping us with something, don’t we?
And this is a great one for that.
Kyle: Just literally, that made me think of a crystal grid that you could do with a gaslight in the center, a crystal for air, water, earth, and fire at each of the points, and then a clear quartz on top to represent the other, the ether, everything else. And that would be a really great thing to stand over or to sit with, to connect to the different elements and to the different directions, bringing things in, and I’m going to do this soon.
Adam: Also, I have to follow you on Instagram to see how that turns out. Another suggestion I’ve seen is actually placing one in the center of the home to bring those blessings from the four corners. And, you know, I know people that love to even when they get a cement slab put down for the base of the house, they’re kind of, you know, putting different crystals in the slab and that type of thing. Maybe smack bang in the center aligned perfectly. A Chiastolite could be a really great tip as well.
I wanna go off for a little tangent just for a moment before we wrap up today because, Kyle, you send a word that’s sprung something that when I was out out on one of my bushwalks this week, I was like, oh, I have to ask the confabbers about this type of thing. And you said the word attachment. Now there are three crystals in my life that I, well, I haven’t. I feel I have a strong attachment to all of my crystals, and I just wanted to kinda get yours versions of this as well. There are two crystals that are broken for me in a major way throughout my life. One was this beautiful lithium quartz point.
I’ve been to the Tucson gym fair, and then I have to sneakily get all the crystals back into Australia, like, to all the people from customs watching. And everything came back perfectly apart from this big, beautiful lithium quartz wand that had broken in half. I just mustn’t have wrapped it enough for that thing as well. The second one is a beautiful Asengite crystal that when I was living in Bahrain, I took the selection of crystals over there with me, and they’re on its top shelf in a wardrobe, and that shelf gave way. And every crystal fell two meters onto the ground.
It was one of two crystals to break, and I really miss that as well. And the final one is my favorite ring that I’ve ever had. It was a super seven. It was cut in a diamond shape. And when I was in Salt Lake City One Year.
So if there’s anyone watching from Salt Lake City as a diamond shaped super seven ring, it’s mine. But, silly, I lost that ring five years ago. That lithium quartz broke eight years ago, and I think it was over a year ago. But whenever they come into mind, I really grieve that loss of them. And I was really interested whether either of you have had that experience where I don’t know, it’s like I lost a child type of thing.
Kyle?
Kyle: One hundred percent, and I grieve it regularly because I bought it in Glastonbury, and it was a pendant with a little cabochon and a little natural point of unheated tanzanite, and they were together on a little pendant. And I bought it at that magical crystal shop in Glastonbury, and I was wearing it as an earring pendant, like and I ran for a train, and it fell, and I’ve lost it, and I’ve never gotten it back. And I think about it often and regularly even though I have bigger pieces now. Like, I bought that on a really special trip in a really special place, and, like, it still hurts.
It still hurts.
Adam: Where were you running for the train car? Maybe this should be a lost and found episode. Where were you running?
Kyle: Carambine Train Station before it was renovated, unfortunately. It’s since been made over, so I don’t even know it could be buried in the earth.
Adam: Yeah. Oh, well, if anyone knows either of those crystals but meanwhile, I’m back. What about yourself, Nicholas? Have you got any lost and found or any crystals that have just broken that you still feel for?
Nicholas: You know, I think probably the closest to this is a really wonderful piece of this frosty white quartz, gem clear on the inside, but just dusted with a layer of druze, and either a clay or feldspar minerals on top. And nestled amidst that druze were little pockets of specular hematite, and this was from a discovery of them in Inner Mongolia and Hong Kong, the same mines that have produced these really stellar preys or green quartzes and other fun stuff. But I loved this. It was a, like, singing wand. So if you tapped it, it would ring.
And I took it up north for a series of workshops that I was doing. And on the way home, admittedly, I didn’t pack it as well as I could have, but it was in my checked bag, which was sturdy. And I had the notice when I opened the bag that TSA, the travel authority here, had inspected my luggage. So they, you know, got into it, unlocked it, opened everything up, repacked it, and they repacked it worse than I did, and it was broken into, like, a million pieces. And that I bought a replacement, but it’s not the same.
The replacement was, like, only 75% as big and nice and cost me more than twice as much, because in the amount of time that had elapsed, they dried up on the market.
Adam: Yeah. Wow. Horrible.
Kyle: So, so sad.
Adam: This leads me to another question that I get occasionally, and I’d love to know your opinions on it as well. Is when a crystal breaks, am I meant to bury it? And my answer to this is always, well, no. As we’ve kind of talked about, I’ve got some crystals that are worth several hundred dollars and that type of thing just because it gets a chip or a, you know, breaking it. I’m not necessarily ready to hand that back to the earth yet. What I like to explain is that pretty much every crystal that we have in our collection is broken.
A lot of them come from larger specimens. They may have been cut off. They may have been tumbled, polished, or faceted, all the different things. And what makes the crystal powerful is its actual, you know, on a molecular level of what actually is within it. And that’s what we like to explore here in the confab at the start, talking about all this kind of chemistry and structure, and that’s what makes a crystal powerful.
So if it gets a chip, if it’s broken in half, that kind of thing, aesthetically, it may not be right, but I don’t think that you need to give it back. I think the only time really when a crystal does lose a bit of its effectiveness is if you do have a wander point where the point actually becomes damaged. But how do you two feel about that, Kyle?
Kyle: I will show you an example of the very tragic nature of what can happen. A beautiful carved Lemurian quartz dragon dagger traveled safely, going from Brazil to Tucson to Scotland to Australia. And when it arrived, I was like, it’s gonna break. It’s gonna break. And I was careful with it and I was careful with it and I was careful with it and I was careful with it.
And one day I was working with it and I placed it down and it touched another crystal and went, ding, clean in half. Like, handle, dagger, clean in half. And I was instructed not to go back together. I tried and failed, but I was told to keep it. Like, it still works.
I now have one for each hand. I now have two pieces of amazing crystal that I can work with, and I plan to put it back together with something that is like leather or something. Like, I actually have a plan to actually put it together when I can. But do not throw away really special pieces. Reinterpret them.
Reuse them. Right? That Japanese thing where they put the gold into a broken pot, like, things can still be beautiful. We can break bones and still be beautiful. Right?
Like, don’t necessarily throw away crystals.
Adam: What about you, Nicholas? If we go in your backyard, you’ve got tons of crystals that you’ve accidentally broken throughout the years?
Nicholas: No. You definitely wouldn’t find that. Have I given some things back to the earth? Sure. They’ve never really been large or valuable things.
You hit the nail on the head that the majority of the crystal objects people are gonna have are not complete bodies of geologic material pulled out of the Earth in exactly that shape and just cleaned up a little bit. There are, of course, fine specimens that come out like that. If I break one of those, I sure as heck am not burying it. But the only real loss is aesthetic. And the other piece of this that I I like to caution people about is the next question, of course, is, well, what does it mean when this happens?
And almost all of the time, it means crystals are delicate and humans are clumsy. And there’s there’s no further interpretation because when we try to attribute meaning to this, when we try to make sense of the senseless and and over ascribe power and influence where there isn’t any, we’re actually taking that power and influence away from ourselves because it means we are now powerless to do anything about it. And the truth is, sometimes shit just happens. It’s not nice, but it does. And if I try to make it bigger than it really is, then I go into that fear place, and then I spiral, and then all of a sudden, the universe is out to get me, and everyone’s trying to curse me.
And, you know, I don’t know if there’s a big enough castor light in the world to break those kinds of curses because they’re all in here and and you gotta work on that from the inside out.
Adam: I think that’s so true. And I’m glad you brought that up. And I think that’s especially true with jewelry. People go, I was just wearing it one day and it broke. But if we think about when we’re wearing either a ring or a pendant, you know, we’re banging rings against things all the time.
Pendants are hitting things all the time. It may just be little hits time after time after time, but as we know, eventually, that’s weakening the structure. And with Kyle’s dagger there, you know, there’s just one little touch, and that’s the final straw that breaks the camel’s back. So I love that you shared that, Nicholas. That was amazing.
Well, the show has become a little bit morbid, and we’ve been talking about loss and death and things changing. But, luckily, we all have Chiastolite to let us realize that things move on, and this is the wheel of the year, and we can be empowered by that. So we will see you next week for another confab. I think we’re rather excited about the crystal we’re gonna be talking about next week. So until then, take care and blessed be.
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