Citrine
DESCRIPTION:
A yellow-brown type of quartz sometimes confused with topaz
COMPOSITION:
Silicon dioxide (SiO2)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
Thought to bring happiness and success, especially in money matters. Also used to boost self-esteem and confidence.
In the ’90s, the worst thing you could do was sell out. As a child, I didn’t have anything to sell, much less anyone to sell it to, but I spat the insult like venom whenever someone did something my peers deemed “too mainstream,” even within our eighth-grade halls. You were a sellout if you went to the wrong park, if you shopped at the wrong places, if you got lunch from the wrong deli. I can’t even remember all the rules now.
Though I used the phrase against others too, I was called a sellout for listening to pop punk. Or, rather, the bands I liked were sellouts, and I was a sellout by proxy. Pop punk fit the sellout label perfectly—the genre was just as ambiguous as the insult. It obviously lacked the integrity of anarchy and anti-capitalism, but still sneered at politicians and corporations in a way the pop music of the time wouldn’t. The bands I listened to also complained about sellouts, sometimes dismissing whole genres outright, despite their bank-sponsored tours. This was all too much for a sheltered and privileged teenager to understand, so without a dictionary definition, I gathered that the biggest complaint against sellouts was that these people made money.
No one stopped to specify the difference between making money while maintaining your integrity and completely changing your sound and vision solely for the promise of cash. There was little nuance around the idea that in a capitalist society, you still need money to survive, and only the most privileged or daring could live off the kindness of others. Money, fame, all the traditional trappings of success were viewed with suspicion.
But in 1997, Everclear briefly—and probably unintentionally—complicated the idea of the sellout in their song “I Will Buy You a New Life.” The song is a promise to an ex that things will get better, that he’ll give her the house and the car and the garden she always wanted as soon as he can pay for it. In it, the singer, Art Alexakis, sneers at anyone who’d look down on doing anything for the money, saying they only condescend because they’ve never had to go without, they’ve never woken up to a “welfare Christmas.” His verses imply that only the most privileged can worry about a label like sellout.
Alexakis probably had reason to be annoyed with his pop-punk contemporaries. After his father left him and his four siblings, his mother relocated them to housing projects from the more comfortable suburbs of LA. His brother died of a heroin overdose. Alexakis was abused and raped and tried to kill himself. Money wouldn’t have guaranteed that none of thiswould have happened, but it might have helped. This is one of those instances in which everyone was right. Alexakis was right to call out those who would criticize materialism from their comfortable perches, who didn’t understand everything contained within the promise of being able to provide a “perfect, shiny, and new” house to someone they loved. But money was still the root of all that killed; its existence, and the lack of it, was what led to the “welfare Christmas.” And the conflation of happiness and success with wealth still keeps us all trapped.
Citrine, clear with shades of yellow and brown like a crackling sun, is known as both the “success stone” and the “merchant’s stone” and is used for its properties relating to wealth and prosperity. Most crystals known for their money work are green, for the obvious associations, but citrine feels more like warm gold, the difference between rolling on a bed of dollar bills and diving like Scrooge McDuck into a sea of coins that magically give way to your flesh. Crystal guides encourage business owners to place a citrine in their cash registers to keep money flowing. Money is its own form of energy, and citrine helps you harness it for your benefit, to shift from a mindset of scarcity to one of plenty. At the same time the stone is supposed to emanate joy and positivity. It gives you the power to transform your wildest wishes into reality and radiates such positive energy that it never needs to be grounded or cleansed. If your wishes are related to your finances (and whose aren’t, most of the time?) it will help you not just attract wealth but maintain it. Its properties imply that happiness, money, success, and abundance are all the same. If you want one, surely it will come with the rest. In fact, it must.
As to why this is the case, the history is murky. Some believe citrine to be one of the stones in Aaron’s breastplate in Exodus, but that story doesn’t assign any metaphysical meaning to the citrine, and there are scant other myths about it. The trick of putting it in your cash box has been attributed to everyone from the Chinese to the Brazilians. Even in Hellenistic Greece it was used largely as a decorative stone. But in modern times, crystal healers have all seemingly agreed that citrine brings joy, positivity, and financial abundance.
In our modern capitalist hellscape, it’s hard to know what success looks like without money. Success means graduating from college, which costs money to attend. In my work, I gather that I’m successful the more someone wants to pay me for my words. Success is winning a contest. Success is being able to buy gifts for those you love. Success is a promotion. Falling in love, cherishing a friend, feeling emotionally fulfilled—those are the successes that aren’t quite recognized, aren’t quite believed. Sure, they’re great, but wouldn’t they be even better with money behind them? With a stable job? You wouldn’t have to worry. In other words: you’re happy, but you’d be happier with all that and money, too.
Money magic in modern Wicca and other practices sounds plainly absurd most of the time. Spells designed to draw wealth refer to the “abundance mindset,” an idea that if you act like you have money to burn, the universe will make it so. Radically, these spells remind us that money is not a finite resource, and in fact is societally constructed. But instead of suggesting getting rid of the system altogether, they offer tips on how to game it. In these spells, being generous with your money will inspire the world to be generous back to you. So you tip $20 to your bodega guy, give all your change to the homeless, and light a green candle next to your citrine in honor of your actions, to prove that you’re a giving person. Financial security can be yours as long as you show the spirits you’re worthy.
While it may be ridiculous to think that you’re poor because you haven’t been giving enough money away, it’s slightly better than an even more loaded thesis in American money magic: you’re poor because you’ve sinned. Beginning in the 1880s, Baptist minister (among other things) Russell Conwell began touring America and preaching his sermon “Acres of Diamonds.” It began with a story of a man so obsessed with finding wealth that he searched the world for money and died frustrated and poor, only for others to find out the meager piece of land he lived on was full of diamonds the whole time. You’d think this would set up a sermon about appreciating what you have and how the pursuit of wealth is destructive, but you’d be wrong. To Conwell, this man was “discontented because he feared he was poor,” and thus the solution was a kind of spell—believe you will become rich, and it will happen.
The stakes couldn’t have been higher for Conwell. Getting wealthy wasn’t just possible, it was a duty from God. He railed against straw men who said the rich were greedy and dishonest. “My friend, that is the reason why you have [no money], because you have that idea of people…ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich.” He preached that money is power, and good could only be done with money. “Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers,” he argued. Most importantly, he reminded his audience that if richness was next to godliness, then poverty was a sin. When imagining someone asking him the question of whether we should be sympathetic to the poor, he said, “To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving. While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves—let us remember that there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of someone else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow.”
Conwell grew up poor. In The Life of Russell H. Conwell, a fawning and probably horribly biased biography of Conwell, author Albert H. Smith notes that Conwell’s parents, Martin Conwell and Miranda Wickham, “started life together on a capital [Martin] had earned of $200,” doing stonemason work and farming in the Berkshires. He attributes the minister’s Emersonian self-reliance to his hardscrabble life in the mountains. He paints a picture of a rambunctious, empathetic, misunderstood boy who grew up in a three-room house with no stove. Miranda supplemented the family income by making suspenders and coats, and “no applicant for charity ever went hungry from her door if there was the least evidence of worthiness in his manner.” An apocryphal story says their home was part of the Underground Railroad and that one night Conwell awoke to see his father and Frederick Douglass conversing outside. Conwell attended Wilbraham Wesleyan Academy, and then Yale, and though his parents were too poor to pay for much and he had to work to pay his way through school, he seemed to have the disposition of someone who feels guilty about their place in the world, the child of a self-made man (or the closest you can get to one; no such thing exists) who worries he is living on stolen valor and wants to prove himself worthy.
In our modern capitalist hellscape, it’s hard to know what success looks like without money.
Andrew Carnegie also grew up poor, the son of Scottish weavers who moved to Pennsylvania to escape extreme poverty. Young Carnegie was sent to work in a cotton mill six days a week. He grew up, invested in oil, made an astronomical fortune, and then wrote a foundational text for anyone who thinks greed is good. In “The Gospel of Wealth,” he writes that the world has never seen such an incredible standard of living as it had in those modern times. Who cares if it is only available to a few? “It is well, nay, essential, for the progress of the race that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so,” he argues. “Much better this great irregularity than universal squalor.”
This disparity, to Carnegie, is progress. Society “must either go forward or fall behind; to stand still is impossible.” Carnegie takes it as self-evident truth that men with the talent for running business must do so and must make a profit, and though he implores rich men to donate to charities and open libraries during their lifetimes, he writes that the condition of humanity must be better under this capitalism than it is under any other system. In fact, for Carnegie capitalism is itself civilization, and that is what the anarchists and socialists wish to destroy. We have produced the best life so far under this system, he argues, why uproot it when something better is not guaranteed?
Though “The Gospel of Wealth” is Carnegie’s most famous essay, the one bankers and preachers alike use to justify wealth as a moral imperative, “Popular Illusions About Trusts,” is the essay in which Carnegie lays out his most obvious argument for money as the bearer of happiness. He writes that the overwhelming tendency toward “aggregation of capital” cannot be stopped, so instead of attempting to restrict what wealth can be made, “we should hail every increase as something gained, not for the few rich, but for the millions of poor…. It makes for higher civilization, for the enrichment of human life, not for one, but for all classes of men.” It is trickle-down economics at its plainest—a wealthy few means factories, means trains, means it’s easier for everyone to have things that only royalty used to have. You may never know what a weekend is at your factory job, but at least everyone can afford multiple shirts.
What makes these texts and others that influenced modern prosperity theology—the spiritual belief that your wealth and health are a direct reflection of your positive relationship with God—so appealing is they admit that being poor sucks. They say poverty is a sign that you are unsuccessful and wasting your potential; you are doing society no good by not making more money. But it is also a sign that you yourself are probably not enjoying life as much as you could be. The prosperity gospel is a version of money magic, positive thinking that focuses on finances as the ultimate reward for goodness. There is no valor in suffering when the possibility of riches exists. Why stay poor when you could be rich, yes, but more important, why stay miserable when you could be happy?
The citrine is an affordable stone. Like many gems, it used to be rarer; Queen Victoria favored it, and during the Art Deco period it was a popular choice for ostentatious jewelry. But discoveries of new mines and advancements in technology turned it from a particularly prized stone into something less special. In fact, although natural citrine is still rare, we figured out how to heat-treat amethyst to turn its purples into yellows and browns. Any quartz can be a citrine if the opportunity arises.
It could be that citrine is associated with wealth because of people like Queen Victoria, though if proximity to royalty is all it took for a stone to bring one money, then every gem would be used for it. But yellow is a happy color. Too bright and it can be overwhelming, but the muted yellow of most citrine feels like the warmth of the sun after a long rain. It’s a bright, open daffodil. It’s the peak of summer at six p.m., when you’re still astounded the sun is nowhere near the horizon, and you’re energized anew to stay outside and keep walking and ask your friends what if we did something we’ve never done before? What do we have to lose? Because you’re happy, just so deliriously happy that you’re alive to see a day like this, and it would be a betrayal of the higher powers and ancestors to waste that.
Being rich feels like that, and if citrine brings us happiness, then wealth must be part of the package. Money magic makes sense to me sometimes. On the days I’ve had an influx of cash, I feel like raining it down on everyone I love. I want to be the magnanimous host circling the party, refilling everyone’s drinks. (Is it any wonder citrine is the color of champagne?) I want to tell my friends to treat themselves to whatever they want, don’t worry, it’s worth it. I want to offer them shelter, assistance, a clean slate, and bask in their appreciation at how generous I am. How good I am. The money only enhances my goodness. What a waste to not have it.
The argument from my college counselor was that college was a “match to be made, not a prize to be won.” A gentler way of saying that not everyone was cut out to get an MBA from an Ivy League school. It was also a cousin phrase to the one our loving, liberal parents often told us: nothing else matters as long as you’re happy. Figure out what you want to do, follow your passion; life isn’t worth living unless you do what you love. However, that came with some caveats. What made you happy couldn’t involve not going to college. Figuring out what you wanted to do had to come from declaring a major, studying hard, and at least having a degree “to fall back on” if your passion didn’t work out. You can’t do what you love without money to support yourself, my peers and I were told—and in fact, you’ll know you’re successful when you have enough to quit your job to do just that. This was good, practical advice for the world we lived in. Our parents and teachers wanted us to have options. They wanted us to live happy lives, which to them meant lives free from worry. The happiness would come with security, safety, and the best chance for a fat bank account. We may have all pretentiously wanted to be starving artists, but our parents knew it’s hard to make art on an empty stomach.
I tend to romanticize the years after I graduated from college, with an English degree cum laude, into an economy that was about to crash. I worked as a waitress, spilling martinis onto sidewalk tables and cursing rich men on dates who left five-dollar tips. I became one of those people who asks you if you have time for the environment on the sidewalk, chasing down credit card information so I could make less than minimum wage. I sold olive oil soap to women on the Upper East Side and took odd-shaped ends home for myself so I didn’t have to spend three dollars on a bar of Irish Spring. I got an unpaid writing internship. I shared a too-small apartment with only one closet because it was a steal. I frequented bars offering free popcorn and pizza with purchase of a drink so I could get drunk with dinner. I carried home chairs and side tables I found on the sidewalk without thinking of bedbugs (until I got them). This was how it was supposed to go. Live the starving artist life for a little bit, take any work you can get, save, and pay your bills.
The counterpoint to the prosperity gospel is that money can’t buy happiness, which is generally true. But in those days nothing felt stable, and when nothing is stable, stability starts looking a lot like joy. Joy became leaving a writing job because of burnout for a full-time job in a field I didn’t want to be in but enforced 9-to-5 hours. Joy became having a partner who was miserable at their engineering job, but who made more than I ever would. We’d do what we wanted someday, but for now things were good, we told ourselves. This is what success looks like.
I’m not saying there’s no value in hard work and saving, only that we’ve tied wealth, success, and happiness so tightly together it’s impossible to tell which is which.
I developed nerve pain in my jaw. At first I felt it in just one spot if I tapped it too hard, and then it started to tingle all over my face. I know part of it was stress. I clenched my jaw when I scrolled through Twitter and saw all the ways people were allowed to deny services and resources to marginalized people. It cost twenty dollars to see my doctor about the pain, a few hundred for an MRI, and more for a series of acupuncture sessions to make it go away. I could have ignored it and tried to power through, but if I’m unwell, I can’t focus on work. And if I can’t work, I can’t do the things that make me happy. My health and my happiness are directly tied to my bank account.
Suicide rates have risen in America since 1999, and according to the CDC, nearly half of those who died by suicide had no recorded mental health diagnoses. Instead, the CDC suggests other influencing factors: “job, money, legal, or housing stress.” Access to these things is what brings us stability and safety and happiness, and what’s keeping so many people from them aren’t their choices, but things beyond their control: governments, economies, and prejudices. The sickness is seeping in from the outside. Without a job, without health care for your preexisting conditions, without a safe place to live, without the money to pay for all of those things, how on earth can you be expected to be happy?
There exists the concept of relative happiness, that people in poor societies will find ways to be happy just as people in rich ones do; that money isn’t the deciding factor when it comes to emotional and spiritual abundance. There is truth in that. I can say my partner is happier after quitting engineering and devoting themself to cartooning, though they will never make as much as they did designing HVAC systems. I can say I’m happier pursuing a career in the unstable world of writing than anything else my skill set may have prepared me for. Even when the bottom drops out and the thought crosses my mind, Couldn’t we have just done it for the money? I know that wouldn’t have been right.
This isn’t the whole story, though. The story is that my college counselor was employed by my private high school. The story is that my family and some scholarships were able to pay for private college. The story is that I write every morning from the balcony of the apartment bought for me by inheritance, and though none of this insulates me from the threat of losing a job or a loved one or my health, boy does it help. There is a shame in not earning, but a bigger shame in not having.
I still feel guilty when I am on the receiving end of someone else’s money magic. When I am the one whose drink is being poured, who is being told to treat myself, I feel it is not just generosity coming my way sevenfold. I am a leech accepting handouts, a failure for relying on the kindness of others. How dare I receive help from those who could provide it. Some days, I turn to citrine to alleviate the shame, and some days I know this is just an attempt to ignore my privilege. But the power of citrine is in how it promises to soothe the tension of having in a society where so many people don’t. Money does not buy happiness, but it certainly does not disinvite it. In this crystalline money magic, money is not a virtue, nor is it a sin. It is just a fact, something you need to exist. Under capitalism, we’re all sellouts.
A full moon in Capricorn is a time when many witches call for stability and wealth; to put money and citrine on your altar and cast spells for more. Capricorn is a practical and prudent sign, and those born under it are ambitious in a patient and rule-following way—not wildly creative but measured and careful, never acting without understanding exactly what will follow. A Capricorn moon is a time to consider the pentacles suit in the tarot deck, the one that represents the body and the home, work and stability. It is literally represented by a gold coin.
Magic makes an obvious connection between the spiritual and the tangible, but it also treats money as a condition as natural as family or sex or the human body. Not a man-made object, but an ever-present cosmic truth. I wonder who was the first witch to ask the universe for money. I want to know what other abundances in her life didn’t feel like enough, if she was content in her hut on the side of town with her garden and familiar and knowledge of healing herbs, and suddenly realized the town was changing and she couldn’t just barter her powers for essentials anymore. Maybe she put a coin on her altar as soon as she found one, or maybe the spirits told her the more she wanted (even witches want more) was worth pursuing, and that it wouldn’t come any other way.
Citrine, for all it can bring, also carries the assumption that money is inherent. But if there were no such thing as money, what would this particular magic look like? What is a spell for success if there are no bills to pay? If citrine is supposed to help bring you abundance, what might it bring if you didn’t need wealth? I want to know what it feels like to have resources to share that weren’t gained or bolstered by finances. I want a happiness and peace that isn’t affected by a financial safety net. I want my citrine to remind me of the abundance of the sun, warm and shining and something money can neither bring more of nor take away. I want to know what that kind of success looks like, but I don’t think I ever will.
