The Underworld Meathook

Magic Rocks: Tiger's Eye

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:22:41 GMT

If malachite is my long-time partner, then tiger's eye is the childhood sweetheart that I never really broke up with, but just moved away from.

I have loved tiger's eye for as long as I have been working with crystals. For a long time, it was the stone I would inevitably pick up in a store, play with, and eventually buy. Other stones might catch my eye, but tiger's eye would be the stone to come home with me. I believe I have lost more tiger's eye than many other people have ever bought.

It was with immense joy that I discovered both red tiger's eye and hawk's eye sometime in the early 90s. I began shifting away from the golden-brown stone and acquiring the red stuff and the blue-green stuff almost exclusively, and that began our long, fond estrangement. It has reached a point now where I don't believe I have any tiger's eye close at hand -- I'm not certain that even searching through my caches of stones would produce a single tiger's eye. I may have to remedy this situation.

I find the energy of tiger's eye to be immensely soothing, comfortable, and easy to work with. As I sit here and consider my old friend at a distance, I am a little teary and emotional with nostalgic fondness. I'm not certain why I've stopped acquiring tiger's eye over the past 10 years or so, though I did notice that my eye was being drawn to it when I recently attended a rock and gem show. So maybe we'll have a little reunion, tiger's eye and me.

In summary: warm, soothing energy that's easy to use. I seem to be very fond of a lot of the stones that are easy for me to use. Coincidence? Nah.

Magic Rocks: Hematite

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:48:47 GMT

Hematite and I have had a long, bizarre relationship. I enjoy hematite a great deal: it is very attractive both visually and in a tactile way. I like the polished sheen of hematite, as well as a the silver-grey metallic color. I like the weight of the stone in my hand, and the smooth feel of the high polish. I like the look of hematite beads for jewelry.

Yet I hardly own any hematite, and when I consider a piece of the stone, I rarely buy it.

There was a brief period of time where I used a chunk of hematite as a grounding stone. The weight and density of it makes it feel like it ought to be an ideal grounding stone. It feels like it ought to be really useful for working the root energy nexus too. But there's something... slippery about the energy. My energy just sort of slides off the stone and continues to bounce around without grounding at all. This slipperiness also makes it difficult for me to use the stone for any other purpose.

Maybe some people's energy has enough traction to use hematite for grounding. I know people who love the stone, and talk about how grounding or useful it is. More power to them. I'll probably continue to use the stone in jewelry -- sparingly -- and occasionally buy myself one or another polished chunk of it. I don't think it will get permanently added to my magic rock toolkit, except as something to use for someone who likes the stone, since I can't use it very well myself.

In summary: nice stone, utterly unusable for me, probably usable for other people. I'd be curious to hear how other people like the stone and if other folks are able to use it for anything.

Magic Rocks: Carnelian

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:37:56 GMT

Carnelian is another stone to which I have found myself attracted lately. This means that I've been thinking about it, though I haven't had a chunk easily at hand to play with, so I may end up with some impressions that I'll later change. (Of course, this caveat stands for anything I write; magic is nothing if not change.)

One of the the things I enjoy about carnelian is that, like citrine, its color is highly variable and mostly come in shades that are sufficiently saturated to please my eye. Carnelian tends to be more opaque than citrine, so it has very different visual qualities, and when I can find one with a certain amount of translucence, I'm generally very pleased. This means, of course, that carnelian beads often catch my eye, since bead-quality stones are often translucent or even transparent.

Just as I find that citrine warms and smooths energy, I find that carnelian warms energy even more, near the edge of too-hot. If citrine is the sitting down with a cup of tea, carnelian is the hot jacuzzi bath. It's an active heat, a moving heat, a flexible heat... a heat that effervesces and relaxes and refreshes. You want to get some energy moving fast without being jarring? That's carnelian.

In terms of usability, carnelian is as flexible as its energy. I've used it for cleansing and for certain types of grounding. I've used it as a magical focus for anti-fire charms and as a meditative focus for speeding action in mind and/or body. I really like the feel of it for jewelry, though I still haven't found the Right Design for the stones I've bought for that purpose. I expect I'll stumble on it eventually.

In summary: carnelian is another excellent all-purpose stone if you need active energy.

Magic Rocks: Auras and Other Energy Work

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:09:35 GMT

I had to cut this for length. Vaaaaast length.

Aura Blindness

One of the early things I hit when I started exploring New Age magic in college was talk about "aura reading." I continued to be fascinated by the concept for years and years, and it was the source of terrible frustration for me. Everyone talked about seeing auras and learning to see colors, currents, whatever in a person's aura. Barbara Brennan's Hands of Light showed lovely color illustrations of the auras she perceived, and how she saw energy moving, and such like.

Me? I couldn't ever see an aura. It just wouldn't appear. I can't see energy around a person's body or head, whether in color or grayscale. It just. doesn't. happen.

Later, I also got interested in broader energy work, particularly chakra work. I encountered a number of people who did such work, and their views helped solidify the way I perceive the movement of energy in the human body. Didn't help me see an aura, but it helped me work at self-cleansing rituals and meditations.

A Short Diversion

And here I have to divert briefly, because using the term "chakra" makes me wince with recognition of recreational ethnicity. Chakras are one tiny piece of a larger spiritual tradition that I do not practice and with which I am not connected culturally or ethnically. The New Age and neopagan movements absconded with chakras and various levels of discourse about kundalini (Arf!*) and other bits and pieces of related concepts.

After a number of years of absorbing and using these and other concepts lifted liberally from non-white cultures, I've spent the last decade trying to scrub them out of my practice. I think I have successfully shed all the pseudo-Native-American-isms, but the "exotic" Eastern pieces were ingrained earlier and more deeply into the fabric of the particular flavors of neopaganism that I've encountered and absorbed. (I will avoid diverting even farther into a rant about how some authors and practitioners have attempted to place some concepts originally nabbed from non-white cultures in the relatively undocumented pre-Christian Irish culture in order to minimize the recreational ethnicity of those concepts and make them more palatable for embrace by associating them with the romance of Celtica.)

"Chakra" is one of the lingering items, and I'm going to start making a concerted effort to scrub this unfortunately useful term from my own use because what I talk about when I refer to "chakras" are most certainly not chakras in the full context definition. I'm not even certain what chakras, in their home spiritual tradition, actually are. I have accepted the rather dubious "facts" given out by New Age energy practitioners, along with their colorful diagrams.

Therefore, I'm just going to refer to the concept as an "energy nexus" for now. Until I can come up with a spiffy marketing term that I can sell to the masses, of course.

Of Course I Have an Explanation

I spent many years, as I said, trying to see auras and attempting to see energy flow and energy nexuses on the human form. I was frustrated and convince that I was somehow broken because I couldn't see these things that other people claimed to see, and even drew, for heaven's sake.

It took me nearly 15 years of believing I was broken before I realized that I can perceive auras and energy nexuses perfectly well. What I can't do is see them with my physical eyes. What no one ever really bothered to say in any of those books or meetings or tutorial session was that everyone perceives magic and energy differently. It's perfectly normal not to see auras.

Our magical senses are just like our physical senses: they differ from person to person. I can, for instance, see an outline of brilliant and vivid blue-purple light around the nimbus of white light from a mercury vapor lamp, and can likewise see a green outline around the pink light from a sodium vapor lamp. I have never found anyone else who can see these things. Some people can see a little further into the ultraviolet or the infrared than the "average" human. My wife can smell when I've had a difficult and upsetting day; I'm lucky if I can smell dinner.

There is a persistent myth that when someone loses one sense, their other senses become sharper to compensate. I understand that this perceived "sharpening" is mostly learning to pay more attention to the other senses. And that is exactly what developing one's magical senses is about: learning to pay attention to information that has been there all along, but to which one may not have had the need or desire to attend previously.

What I eventually realized was that while I couldn't physically see an aura, as some people can, I had all the information about it that I needed; I just had to pay attention to it.

So Just What Is This 'Energy Nexus' You Speak Of?

According to my perceptions (and, as with anything magical, your mileage may vary), there is a line of energy nexuses that follow the center energy flowline of the body. A nexus is a pair of matched vortices of energy -- think of water draining out of a bathtub, then imagine that vortex matched with another on the opposite side of the drain, both of them draining into some center point.

The center point of the vortices of an energy nexus is the center energy flowline. Like the vortex at a drain, this is where energy from outside (say, the faucet) and energy from the body and aura (say, the tub) drains into that center line for recirculation and filtration. Like the vortex of a tornado, there is a lot of energy inherent in the spinning motion, and therefore some stuff -- energy, debris, whatever -- gets thrown off as well, potentially out of the gravitational pull of the aura.

I perceive two nexuses clearly: one at the top of the head and one at a low point on the body -- depending on the person and any number of variables, this base or root spot could be at the bottom of the torso or at the feet (or conceivably anywhere in-between). These two are actually a matched pair of vortices representing the top and bottom of the main body of the aura (which is why, I think, the location of the lower one varies, because the boundaries of people's auras vary), meeting somewhere in the middle of the torso.

I perceive three other major pairs: one in the upper center of the face (third eye)/back of skull, one in the center of the chest/thoracic spine (heart), and one in the high-center of the abdomen (solar plexus, though I generally perceive it a little low to be the solar plexus). There are a few less major pairs that I usually perceive: the throat/cervical spine (throat), the lower abdomen/lumbar spine (sex or visceral), and the hands. I know I've seen books where people talk about the nexuses in the feet, but I don't perceive them.

I think that perhaps these nexuses are not only pumps that keep the energy moving within the aura as well as into and out of the aura, but they may also act as basic filtration mechanisms. As I said, the motion not only serves to move the energy, but also serves to fling stuff (yes, I'm certain that's a technical term) out of the aura.

I'm also relatively certain that this filtration mechanism isn't particularly efficient: a lot gets through. One's energetic being has to be pretty resilient to cope with the level of crappy energy one encounters on a daily basis. This would explain the need for the common magical practice of shielding (or whatever it gets called in a given spiritual practice). While most people envision their shields as being ironclad and resistant to everything, psychic shields are, by necessity of the medium in which they are crafted, pretty darn porous. The best one can hope for is a refined sifting of incoming energy.

As we carry on the metaphor of pumps, drains, and filters, if the filters aren't very good, there's always going to be an accumulation of crud. Crud, of course, will eventually clog the filters, pumps, and drains, and thus the circulation will slow or stop, and pooling and puddling and backups in unpleasant places ensues. The whole concept behind the area of energy work in which I'm most interested is, essentially, drain cleaning.

(I pause to hold my head in my hands as I have just declared myself to be a spiritual plumber. But magic is work, after all, and a great deal of magic is devoted to spiritual housekeeping. It is right and proper that in addition to the usual maintenance of sweeping and dusting and scrubbing, occasionally, one needs to work on the plumbing, the electrical system, or the roof.)

Magic Rocks and the Aura

"But where do magic rocks come into this?" I hear you cry.

Right here. With the plumbing.

In my discussions of individual magic rocks, I occasionally talk about what happens to the energy moving through the stone -- it becomes crisper or softer, for instance. This happens when the stone is brought within the aura, so the energy of the aura as it moves through the stone is altered. Why might you like holding a particular stone at a particular time? I think it's because the way it alters the energy moving through it -- your energy -- feels good, or needful, or in some other way is attractive.

So, theoretically, one could put a rock on an energy nexus and just let the energy cycle through it over time: spiritual dialysis, if you will. A lot of people accomplish this by wearing a stone that happens to hang over one of the major nexuses, like, say, the heart or throat nexus. This is great for ongoing maintenance. Sometimes, though, one of the pumps cruds up and you need to do something more active.

Doing something more active generally involves moving energy in a way that frees up the nexus and helps get energy moving into the vortex correctly. Using magic rocks can speed up the energy motion, filter the crud, and provide a focus for restoring the vortex motion. Different types of stones can help in different ways, and some people like to use particularly types (or colors or shapes) of stones for work on particular nexuses.

Everyone has their preferences for favorite stones, colors, or shapes to use for such work. Some people just use rough or polished chunks of stone. Some people prefer more crafted tools, such as carved wands, spheres, prisms, or pendulums. Some people will only use one stone for everything. Some people will have an entire toolbox full of stones to try in any given situation.

The first and foremost person one should practice on is, of course, oneself. (I give a spiritual raspberry to all the books I remember encountering that said that you shouldn't ever practice on yourself or try to do any sort of energy work at all until you were Trained And Initiated By A Trained Practitioner.) You know yourself best of all, and you know what you're thinking or what is occurring to you, even if you may not know exactly what's going on in your head at a particular moment.

So I use myself as an example. (Therefore, your mileage WILL vary.) When I work on myself, I find that I generally have to de-crud my solar plexus nexus (oh, dear, perhaps I didn't think this terminology through completely) and my throat nexus. When I'm paying attention to my own signals, the need to de-crud may manifest itself by an overweening attraction to green stones, particularly fluorite, as I identify green with the throat nexus, or yellow stones, particularly citrine, as I identify yellow with the solar plexus. I will sometimes meditate with one of these stones either in my hand or on the problematic location, and I will consciously move my own energy around, with the help of these stones, in order to get the vortex moving correctly.

Once I'm done clearing things up, of course, I belatedly remember to do the back vortex as well as the front vortex, and have to go back and start again. Occasionally, I remember to work on both simultaneously, which is most efficient.

I generally envision a vortex moving correctly when it is round and swirling in a clockwise fashion with regard to the plane of the body it extends from. So the front and back vortices circulate in opposite directions.

I do find that I lean rather heavily toward stone color as an identifier with a particular nexus. My personal list of favored stones (which have changed over time) include:

Top vortex: clear quartz, rutilated quartz
Head: amethyst, purple fluorite
Throat: green fluorite
Heart: rose quartz (so very cliche, sorry), occasionally citrine
Solar plexus: citrine
Visceral: carnelian
Base vortex: hematite

If someone else asked me to work on them, I would have to think about that person and what stone(s) might work best, and I would have to talk to them about where they felt most stuck or backed up. The stones might be the same, or might be completely different. I might go out and find myself a fluorite pendulum: pendulums are particularly useful for working on other people -- especially if one is aura blind and may not have enough internal data to work with -- because you can use a pendulum to visually describe what you're perceiving non-visually; is the vortex moving at all? is it deformed? is it moving backwards? is it off-center? et cetera.

In Summary

People are complicated. Auras are complicated. Recreational ethnicity is complicated and annoying. Rocks are nice, and pretty, and useful, but can also be complicated.

You can probably guess how I feel about most of the books and authors I looked through on this subject when I was younger.

*This is a reference to Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For. In one comic several years ago, there was a discussion taking place in the home of Ginger, Sparrow, and Lois wherein the word kundalini (Arf!) came up a number of times, and every time the word was said, Ginger's dog barked.

Magic Rocks: Pendulums

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:58:08 GMT

When I was a child, I spent a great deal of time devouring the occult/weird things section of our local public library. Recall that this was the era of Leonard Nimoy and "In Search Of...", and do not wonder at the fact that I devoured every book about the Bermuda Triangle, every grainy photo of a purported UFO, and every dull Hans Holzer ghost story. I pored over the Patterson film stills when I reached the cryptozoology shelf, and boggled at stories of the orang pendek and similar spectacular cryptids. As I exhausted the resources, I started checking out the fortunetelling books (reading regular playing cards, for instance, or palmistry). And then on to the less flashy dregs of the books.

When I was about 12 or 13, I found an extremely intriguing section of some book or other that talked about not only dowsing, but the use of pendulums, rather than forked sticks, for dowsing purposes. The book talked about how different lengths of the string/chain for the pendulum could be used for locating specific types of objects. My youthful empirical mind was engaged by this.

I first needed a pendulum to use for my experiments. I could hardly ask my parents for such a thing, and certainly nothing so grand as the metal or crystal pendulums shown in the book. My father was not a fisherman, so no sinkers lurked in hidden corners of the basement. I finally settled upon a broken keychain I'd received in a comic/junk swap in 3rd grade, reputed to have a Real Piece of Petrified Wood as its fob. I fetched a length of string from the Unending Cone of String in the basement, tied it to the bale of the keychain, and off I went.

I amused myself for a solid week working out lengths for detecting different items. I used a 14K gold baby ring as my source of gold, and spent a long time out in the yard, tracking the three lines of water that ran through my parents' 2 acres (I didn't really know about aquifers back then, and it seemed reasonable, given the fact that our well was behind our house, the neighbor's well was out near the street, and then there was a third one running under the hill in the back, I was certain). I think 31" was the length needed for detecting water. I can't remember the others, but I had a notebook full of notations.

While I am uncertain now as to whether I was actually accurately dowsing the underground water closest to the surface, I continue to believe that pendulums are useful tools for magical work.

My most recent use of the pendulum was to go over every box I moved when I left an abusive relationship. I was having problems because I kept finding things that belonged to or were written on by the Toxic One, and I would dissociate or otherwise react badly to the find. I used a pendulum to determine what boxes contained such items, and then, fortified by the presence of my significant other (now wife), I would delve into the box and root out the item or items in question. It worked very well; since that time, I have only encountered about 3 caches of such items (which were all paper with the Toxic One's writing on, and they were all used to line the catbox). I don't recall what, specifically, I used as a pendulum -- for all I can recall, I may have found my Genuine Petrified Wood keychain again.

I have, over the years, thought about buying one of the very pretty pendulums tipped with some sort of magic rock -- fluorite is one of the most common stones I've seen used for the purpose. While fluorite pendulums are very attractive and shiny, I don't find the stone itself to be useful for what I occasionally need from a pendulum.

I can't even remember if I finally caved and bought a magic rock pendulum. I don't think I have, because I don't really recall stumbling across one that screamed ME! ME! I AM THE RIGHT ONE!. I could have forgotten, I admit.

What would I use a pendulum for? Well, there's a number of applications, but three leap to mind:
- locating something (it could be anything, as long as I've got a good image of it in my head)
- divination (I'd only really use it in a pinch, when I had no other methods of divination at hand)
- ascertaining energy flow in a human body, particularly when working to determine the status of the main line of chakras

What magic rocks might I like to use as a pendulum? I think it would depend greatly on my mood and what application for which I was using it. For chakra work, I would want a stone that I really liked and felt comfortable with -- probably a citrine crystal, because I'm fond of them and because I like the way that energy feels through them.

Overall, I think the pendulum is an underrated and underused magical tool, and the association of a magic rock with a pendulum can facilitate any application of the tool.

And if you're interested in a broken keychain with a Genuine Petrified Wood fob, let me know, I'll go looking for it.

Magic Rocks: Citrine

Thu, 29 May 2008 15:58:39 GMT

Citrine is one of the stones that I loved about fifteen years ago. I found it extremely calming, and so, when a chunk of it set in a cheap necklace called to me, I found a way to buy it. I wore that necklace for many years as a sort of personal focus, so I like to think I'm fairly intimately acquainted with the properties of citrine as they apply to me.

There are innumerable versions of what citrine is good for: concentration, opening various chakras, healing, et cetera. I think that the takeaway message there is that it's good for whatever you need it for. If you find citrine calming and centering, then it will be useful for calming and centering. If you find that it opens your head chakra, then it'll open your head chakra. Citrine is an extremely versatile stone, like its more boring cousin, clear quartz.

I find the energy of citrine (and energy filtered through citrine) to be warm and settling, and smooth in the sort of way that I sometimes describe types of sake as smooth: it goes down like pleasantly flavored water, but there's a power behind it. There's a floral feel to it, almost, in the same way that some excellent wines have floral overtones. It's rich, but hidden, just waiting to be pointed at a purpose.

Still, I didn't find citrine very programmable back then -- it would take for a while, but then would wash clean after some use and time. It's useful, I think, for short-term magics that use it as a focus, but I wouldn't ever use it for the long-term.

I like citrine for its variety of colors and the flaws often found in the crystals. Back then, I preferred the pale yellow types, but now, I find that only the dark amber colors draw my eye at all -- overall, I have a preference for richer colors now, though. I liked the flaws in the crystals for scrying or meditation.

In my own mental magical toolbox, citrine is linked to the solar plexus chakra, which is the link between the instinct self and the emotional self. I also associate it with solar energy, so I guess that in a Tarot association, it would be with the card of The Sun.

In summary: citrine is immensely useful for pretty much anything you need, but it will probably be useful for short-term magics rather than long-term installations of magic.

Magic Rocks: Rose Quartz

Mon, 19 May 2008 16:04:48 GMT

Rose quartz is a stone that suffers from chronic overexposure. Whenever one walks into a store that sells any sort of crystals or inexpensive crystal jewelry, it is inevitable that one will find a pile of rose quartz hearts of various sizes, strung on rat tail if they're strung at all. Like any fad, the attraction and utility has faded into obscurity under the weight of kitsch or overfamiliarity.

Despite the ubiquitous presence of rose quartz, I have found some utility in it. I use unworked chunks of it, which are generally fairly cheaply bought in larger sizes than most stones.

My hardest-used piece of rose quartz was chipped off an enormous mass of it that had been dug up by the owner of a crystal shop in Virginia. It was a lovely rough pink piece with some smooth planes that fit nicely into my hand. I used it during a time when I was doing a lot of chakra work -- mostly self-balancing my chakras and doing very light trance work. My life was very rocky, and on many levels, I was aware that I was taking daily -- sometimes hourly -- damage in the emotional department. No wonder the rose quartz was so attractive and useful! Almost every night for a year or two, I would lie on my back with the piece sitting in the center of my chest, and I would focus on opening the heart chakra (front and back -- it's so easy to forget the back) and get energy flowing smoothly. I would also use it as a focus to relieve my menstrual cramps -- this was also a time of financial challenge, and I could not afford the pain relievers I needed every month.

Interestingly, my memory of the stone makes it much larger and more vividly pink than it turned out to be, when I relocated it in my boxes several years later. I do feel that the very intense energy work has, in fact, altered the stone in some ways, but it has also altered my memory of the stone. I don't use it, and, in fact, do not enjoy handling it any more. I think I should probably put the stone outside -- return it to the wild, as it were -- and not have it around, but it's hard to make that decision about something with so much sentimental value.

I have subsequently gotten some smaller pieces of rose quartz to work with, though I have very little attraction to the stone these days. My impression of the energy of rose quartz is that it is very much like any other opaque quartz piece -- a good deal of energy without any specific flavor that is easily directed.

Rose quartz, of course, has the New Age cultural overlay of being good for love, emotions, and the heart chakra... mostly due to it being pink and therefore girly, I suspect. However, I cannot deny the usefulness of a cultural or psychological construct in terms of working magic, so I suspect that rose quartz can be very useful to people doing heart chakra work or making love charms. Because of my longtime exposure to this interpretation of rose quartz, I think of it as a stone for the suit of Cups in Tarot work.

(Actually, thinking about it, a carved rose quartz chalice/goblet might make an interesting addition to the altar of someone who likes the stone.)

In summary: rose quartz is as useful in a general sense as any quartz, and may be more useful in terms of emotional work due to its association with such work.

Magic Rocks: Peridot

Sun, 18 May 2008 17:52:13 GMT

Peridot is a strange stone for me to like. Its usual bright olive-green color is one that I generally avoid -- I am notoriously picky about my green colors, and generally prefer less yellow and more blue. I do, however, often find peridot to be a striking stone, and I believe in many ways I am reacting far more to the energy of the stone than the color.

Many years ago, I read that peridot has the property of increasing the speed of change in one's life (being a scientist by training, I can't help but try to put this into a mental equation involving deltas and acclerations). I have since found that this is true for me, and is one reason I avoid peridot, even when I find it attractive! For I am even more notoriously averse to change than I am to olive-green.

However, sometimes, peridot's attraction will not be avoided. During times when I apparently need change, I have, in fact, dreamt of the stone (or what I have interpreted as being the stone, even when, upon waking, I find that the stone in the dream didn't really resemble peridot all that much). One dream drove me to acquire two vials of peridot gravel, far more affordable than the usual stones available, under the pretext of using it to make a gift for a friend. I have never completed that gift, and I retain most of the gravel, as well as an urge to run my fingers through it.

Peridot is possessed of a very subtle energy: it is neither immediately perceivable to my hands nor my internal envisioning of the energy. It seems invisible, as well as magnetic in the sense of attracting energy that requires its services (so one could think of it as being active energy attracted to more passive energy, I suppose). Its presence is catalytic, so I suppose that in addition to the magnetism metaphor, I could extend into an enzymatic metaphor, where it binds to energy that has the proper "antigen" on its surface and makes the reactions (changes) move faster. This metaphor would suggest a cascade of other energies interacting to further the reaction, and might account for my observations that peridot alone does not accomplish everything -- an attraction to peridot is often accompanied by other attractions to different stones.

In my younger days, when I was more inclined to "program" my stones, I found peridot very amenable to such treatment. At one time, I gave a necklace to a close friend -- one of those very typical crystal necklaces of the late 80/early 90s, with the center piece carved and polished into a "proper" hexagonal, pointed crystal with a stone of a different type affixed to the front of the setting band -- with clear quartz as the main crystal and peridot as the smaller chip affixed to the band. I programmed it for travel safety (this was before my discovery of the usefulness of malachite in this office) and it seemed to take this directive very solidly. In fact, when I had the opportunity to observe the necklace again some years later, it still appeared to be in place, and that was my friend's observation as well.

In summary: peridot is a powerful catalyst, but amenable to direction. Used with the right mindset, I think peridot could be used as a means of directing change in a specific part of one's life.

Magic Rocks: Fluorite

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:33:31 GMT

I have found fluorite to be an extremely high-energy rock. What I mean by that is, to me, fluorite appears to focus and collect ambient energy like a lens with light. The energy feels, to my impressions, cold, brittle, bright, and angular. When I try to envision the energy, I see sharply-delineated jagged lightning bolts as blindingly white as burning magnesium. There is no heat from this energy, just the overwhelming sensation that there is energy at hand.

I don't mean to give the impression that fluorite's energy is bad in any way (which, I know, some people may think from my impressions of it as "cold" and "brittle"). I love having fluorite around. I love holding fluorite and tossing it up and down in my hand -- I find myself tossing this stone more often than just about any other kind of stone, as if I don't want to keep it quite still in my hand. When my own energy is dragging, I often want to pick up a chunk of fluorite.

The variable textures of fluorite are also attractive. I have some highly polished pieces that I've kept for years. I have developed, however, more of an attraction for the matte-polished pieces that are fairly frequent in the stone trays in crystal shops. For a while, I had a real attraction for the octahedrons; I found that they were particularly useful as pendulums if one could find a way to attach a silver chain to one end (either by drilling or gluing a clamp in place on one of the points). I never managed to obtain one for myself, but I used one belonging to a friend, and I found the pendulum configuration very pleasing.

Of course, another attraction of fluorite is the visual quality: it comes in a variety of colors, and sometimes, and individual stone may have several colors at once. I started out very attracted to the purple stuff, but as time has gone by, I've come to prefer the green (a trend, I have to say, that encompasses most of my stone choices these days). I have sometimes successfully used a well-polished piece of fluorite with many attractive flaws as a meditative/trance focus.

Fluorite feels somewhat like a magical battery, and I frequently use it that way, whether I need to liven up my energy at the end of a long day or to help me focus power into a spell. As I said above, I think it actually works more like a lens through which one can focus and draw the ambient energy. One side effect of this drawing is like using the Sharpen filter on Photoshop: the energy becomes more fluorite-flavored, and other influences are hammered flat. You can then turn the energy toward your own intentions, though sometimes the energy may feel, to extend the metaphor to breaking point, a tad pixelated.

Because fluorite is always energetic, it can, however, be irritating to frayed nerves, like too much caffeine. I can't use fluorite as a grounding stone -- it's too jumped up for that -- and if I'm too tired, it annoys me rather than allowing me to perk up my own energy levels.

In summary: fluorite is an immensely energetically useful stone. But use with care, as the energy may feel too stark and/or sharp-edged on tender (or, as it were, tenderized) sensibilities.

Magic Rocks: Malachite

Fri, 16 May 2008 18:01:31 GMT

Malachite is one of my all-time consistent favorite stones. The rich greens swirled and mixed together, the high polish that the stone takes, and the voluptuous rounded shapes of many of the unworked stones combine to make this feel -- to me -- like a stone with a great deal of female energy. I am a texture fiend as well as appreciating bright, highly saturated colors, and malachite consistently feels marvelous in my hands.

I like the weight of the stone, and the large chunks of it that are frequently quite affordable makes this a stone I often use for grounding. I have a large, flattish piece that sits atop my desk at home, and when I am scattered and having trouble concentrating, it's this stone that more often draws my eye and hand than, say, the slab of rhodochrosite that is supposedly specifically for such things.

I will generally put a chunk of malachite in my pocket or my car before starting a road trip. A source I encountered long ago suggested that it was good for travel safety, and I have found it a reliable companion. The twisting lines of color suggest roads and paths to my mind, and so the symbolic association seems natural.

Sometimes, I think about stones in the context of any number of magical concepts. When I consider malachite, I find myself thinking about the High Priestess card of the Tarot deck. My interpretation of the High Priestess -- female energy that is directed and directable toward any number of magical ends -- fits my "jane of all trades" feeling about malachite. I think that malachite is an excellent, all-purpose magic rock, useful for grounding, directing energy, storing energy, or as a talisman of just about any sort.

For those people who prefer "programming" their magic rocks -- that is, visualizing and "implanting" a directive structure for moving the stone's energy at all times -- malachite is probably not a very good stone. I find that it is possessed of as much of an ego as a stone can be. It does not like to be directed or commanded for more than a single instance. Using it as a talisman is a very different sort of psychological/magical concept than programming. Talismans are associated with a particular purpose by the mental symbology of the magician, and therefore, the magician's subconscious is doing the work of moving the energy toward a given end. More of an asking of the stone than a commanding.

In summary, malachite: excellent stone, particularly for providing and helping along female energy. Very much a stone that one could grab in a rush and be able to use for nearly any magical purpose, though much less biddable than, say, a clear quartz crystal.