What Does Science Have to Say?
In a crystal we have clear evidence of the existence of a formative life-principle, and though we cannot understand the life of a crystal, it is none the less a living being.
—NIKOLA TESLA
LONG BEFORE PRESCRIPTION DRUGS, hospitals, and talk therapy existed, our ancestors turned to stones and crystals to recalibrate energy in the body, as preventative medicine, and to heal on a mental, physical, emotional, or spiritual/energetic level. Ancient babe-bosses wore crystals for knowledge, protection, healing, personal power, guidance, creativity, and connection. The Sumerians are the first early society known to use crystals for healing purposes, as far back as 4000 BC. Let’s talk about who wore what, and who wore it best, in the cradles of civilization.
EGYPT
Cleopatra never left home without her wig or her Malachite eyeliner! The ancient Egyptians were big proponents of healing crystals, and Queen Cleopatra actually had an arsenal of crystal cosmetics on her vanity. She used bright green Malachite paste to line her lower lids, and a blend of shiny gold Iron Pyrite and electric blue Lapis Lazuli on her upper eyelids. Cleo and her crew wore makeup made of Lapis Lazuli to honor the goddess Isis and to promote enlightenment. But Cleo wasn’t all flash. She also started the very practical trend of wearing black kohl pigment around the eye to protect from the bright midday sun. Ancient Egyptians were also equal makeup opportunists. Both men and women were known to wear copious amounts of gem-tastic makeup, which they believed conjured up the protection of the gods Horus and Ra as well as being antibacterial and warding off illnesses.
Crystal love in ancient Egypt didn’t stop there. The Egyptians buried their dead with quartz on the forehead to help guide the departed safely to the afterlife. Pharaohs and priests also carried cylinders filled with quartz to balance energies within the body. Dancing girls and ladies of the night in ancient Egypt wore rubies in their belly buttons to increase their sex appeal. The Egyptians wore crystals over their hearts to attract love, and royalty wore crystal-laden crowns to stimulate enlightenment and awaken their third eyes. The most coveted stones in ancient Egypt were Carnelian, Clear Quartz, Emerald, Lapis Lazuli, Peridot, and Turquoise.
CHINA
In ancient China, healing crystals were commonly used in Chinese medicine, including crystal-tipped needles in acupuncture healing sessions, fêng shui, adornment, home décor, musical instruments, and armor and weapons. Some of these crystal traditions in China go back as far as eight thousand years, and many are still in use today. Jade was and still is the fave!
GREECE
The word crystal is derived from the Greek word krystallos, which means “clear ice.” Legend has it that ancient Greeks believed Clear Quartz crystals were ice sent from the heavens. Ancient Greek warriors rubbed crushed Hematite on their bodies as a pre-battle ritual to make themselves invincible. The myth of how Amethyst got its name is a story about Dionysus, Greek god of wine and the grape harvest, and his obsession with a girl named Amethystos. Amethystos wasn’t interested in Dionysus and opted to “swipe left,” praying to the goddess Artemis to keep Dionysus away from her at all costs. Artemis’s solution was to transform Amethystos into a white stone as permanent protection. It is said that Dionysus then poured wine over the stone as an offering, dyeing the crystal purple (an alternate legend has it that he was so upset about losing Amethystos, he cried tears of wine, staining the stone purple). The word amethyst comes from the Greek amethystos, meaning “without drunkenness,” and in modern-day crystal medicine, it is used to help people with addiction issues.
INDIA
Ayurveda, the traditional Hindu system of medicine, considers crystals invaluable for healing emotional and metaphysical imbalances and to counteract the effects of our personal astrology and karma. We can find reference to this within the pages of one of the oldest Hindu scripts, the Vedas, which reference each stone’s specific healing abilities.
JAPAN
In ancient Japan, Clear Quartz crystal balls were used by Buddhist monks in the art of scrying. These practitioners believed Crystal Quartz held the powers of the “dragon heart,” allowing its user to harness the power and wisdom of the dragon for increased “second sight” through prophecy and spirit communication.
NEW ZEALAND
The Maoris of New Zealand have long worn Jade pendants to honor ancestor spirits, and they still consider Jade to be a stone of luck today.
THE AMAZONS
The legendary Amazon women of Greek mythology were supposedly man-hating matriarchs. The women would visit nearby tribes once a year to procreate, and they sent all baby boys away to be cared for elsewhere. To prepare for battle later in life, the right breasts of all Amazon infants were seared off to improve their archery skills. That’s hard core! However, these fearless female warriors still took the time to enjoy the beauty and benefits of crystals. Archaeologists believe the Amazons descended from the Scythian people, and they discovered the ancient burial mound of a Scythian woman they dubbed the “Siberian Ice Princess.” Covered in tattoos and wearing a silk shirt and jewelry, she appeared to be a decorated warrior, a well-dressed princess, and a holy woman to boot. Buried with her were a wig, a cosmetic compact, and—you guessed it—makeup pigments made of ground crystals. The blue-green stone Amazonite, known as the “Stone of Courage and Truth,” is named for these ancient lady-warriors. Legend says that these warrior babes would rub their wounds with crushed Amazonite to avoid infection, and they would decorate their armor with the stone and carry it with them at all times for increased protection.
NATIVE AMERICANS
The indigenous people of the Americas considered crystals to be important teaching tools and used them for healing, and in burial rites, ceremonies, celebrations, and life-marking events. They also believed that each gemstone represented a different Spirit Animal.
WHY CRYSTALS ARE SO POWERFUL
People have been attracted to crystals since the dawn of time for burial rites, divination practices, healing rituals, spiritual advancement, and as decoration to connote power. Our ancestors intuitively knew that crystals could bring about energetic shifts and changes, whether worn as adornment, kept in close proximity, or used in ritual. People have also long gravitated toward sites like Stonehenge and Sedona because these massive rock formations are powerful energy vortexes.
Let’s put some facts behind the “ancient woo” by discussing how science and mysticism intersect. We know that crystals are millions of years old, forged during the earliest part of the earth’s formation. I believe that crystals are a timeless database of knowledge, because they retain all the information they have ever been exposed to. Crystals absorb information, whether a severe weather pattern or the experience of an ancient ceremony, and pass this information along to the next person who comes into contact with them.
Scientifically, crystals are the most orderly structure that exists in nature. Crystals are structured in such a way that they respond to the different energies that surround them by oscillating and emitting specific vibratory frequencies. The way they are balanced, the frequencies they emit, and their ability to store a tremendous amount of information makes crystals essential to modern technology. This is why crystals are used in computers, TVs, cell phones, satellites, electricity, and just about every tech-y item that exists in the modern world.
GOING VOGEL
The crystal shape I find to be the most powerful is the Vogel-Cut, a multifaceted Clear Quartz crystal named for its creator, Marcel Vogel (1917–1991). The Vogel crystal is considered by crystal practitioners to be an instrument that can amplify, convert, and store subtle energies. Vogel was a research scientist at IBM for twenty-eight years, and his areas of expertise were liquid crystal systems, luminescence, phosphor technology, and magnetics. He retired from IBM in 1984 and founded his own laboratory, Psychic Research, Inc., where he delved into crystal research and more esoteric fields of study, and spent the last years of his career studying the relationship between quartz crystals and water. His theories on crystals have often been dismissed as “metaphysical” by the scientific community, but it is interesting to note that IBM donated more than $500,000 in equipment to fund Vogel’s independent crystal research after he left the company. Vogel’s greatest goal in his work was to prove that the scientific and metaphysical were not only compatible, but could work and play together for the greater good of humanity.
Interview with a Silicon Valley Engineer on Crystals and Technology
I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH to meet with a Silicon Valley engineer at a leading technology company whose job is soooo top secret that we had to maintain his anonymity. He’s an inventor who has helped bring us some really cool products. This technologist is not only one of the loveliest, coolest, and most talented people I have ever met but also happens to be one of the smartest. Besides his pedigree with his company, his accolades include being one of the key inventors of the GPS technology used in cell phones, being one of the smartest physicists in the world, and designing guitars in his free time. Mind officially blown! I must admit, I was a little nervous about our convo. How were a man of science and a girl from the mystical fringe going to “communicate” about crystals? The first thing he said to me when we met was, “If it weren’t for crystals, we would still be living in the 1950s.” I relaxed and knew we were about to have an epic conversation. Do you recognize these hands?
What do you do professionally?
In a nutshell, I get to play with some of the most brilliant people on the planet, and as a result, we help create products that we’re crazy passionate about.
When we met, you said something quite impactful to me: “If it weren’t for crystals, we would still be living in the 1950s.” Can you explain why crystals are important in technology?
Colleen, how can I put this? Crystals are not important in technology. They are technology. Without our use of crystals and crystal structures, which constitute every single microchip ever made, humanity as we know it today would not exist in the same way. My precious cell phone and computer would not exist. Our flat-screen TVs and computerized cars and autopilot planes and intelligent software that it takes to create our modern roads and complex distribution systems would not exist. Our state-of-the-art buildings and cutting-edge architectural structures and mind-blowing advancements in medicine and the sequencing of the human genome and everything in between: We would not have these things today without our use of miniaturized high-speed computing systems, and at the heart of every computer there is at least one microchip. And guess what. A microchip is a sliver of a man-made crystal with elaborate structures built on it. So to put it bluntly, crystals are a fundamental building block to our civilization as we know it today.
The advent of the microchip is much more profound than most people realize. Up until the 1950s, we built computers out of vacuum tubes, punch cards, and levers, which meant computers were physically large. It wasn’t until humanity created solid-state transistors that we were able to shrink the vacuum tube from the size of a Popsicle (without the stick) to the size of a Tic Tac. But even that wasn’t enough to be able to get us to where we are now. It wasn’t until the 1960s that pioneers at Texas Instruments and Fairchild really paved the way to building transistors on germanium and silicon crystal structures, respectively.
Today, Wikipedia states that a cell phone’s microprocessor contains 4.3 billion transistors in it, on crystal substrates that are essentially about 88 square millimeters. That is smaller than the area of your thumbnail. If we were to try to create the same computer out of 4.3 billion Popsicle-size vacuum tubes that are 1.5 inches in diameter by 4 inches tall, it would require a space of about 16.8 million cubic feet. That’s a room measuring 256 feet wide by 256 feet long by 256 feet tall. Nobody would be able to store this thing.
Today, I pay between $30 and $80 for a vacuum tube for one of my guitar amps. Even if I could get a vacuum tube for a penny, this vacuum-tube-based system would cost me $4.3 million. But that’s just the main processor. These calculations don’t take into account all of the other supporting circuitry—microchips and components and assemblies and whatnot. Without crystals, almost every computer that we use today would be unaffordable, unable to be mass-produced, rendering them unobtainable and incapable of being stored by the average person. And did I forget to mention how much power it would require to operate such a beast? You’d probably have to sell your home for a month of use.
So when I hear people say that their computer-based product is expensive or too big or doesn’t hold as much of a charge as they’d like it to, they just don’t have perspective on where we came from and where we are now. It’s because of the use of crystals that modern-day technology is what it is today.
Where else do we find crystals? Energy drinks, electric guitars, etc. Places people wouldn’t normally think of . . . like, aside from an altar ; )
I’ve come to realize that the word crystal refers more to the ordered structure of an object or system rather than the object itself. Metals can be crystallized. Elements in a gaseous state can be formed into crystals. Even certain ceramic materials can have their molecules arranged in such an orderly fashion that they exhibit some piezoelectric properties just like real crystals.
One might even go so far as to say that a crystal is the thing that nature has revealed to us as being as close to our concept of perfection as we can currently observe. It is because of this extreme intimacy with perfection that mankind creates crystals today. Due to the highly ordered structure of a crystal, we are capable of precisely predicting the events, movements, and locations of the molecules that constitute that crystal. This allows us the ability to mathematically model and alter these ordered objects with a very high degree of accuracy. As a result, we are able to design and manufacture technological devices that make use of crystals with high degrees of reproducibility, repeatability, and reliability; companies worldwide do it in the billions. Crystals in technology have indeed already helped almost every living human on the face of this earth in one way or another; it’s just not that evident to people that that’s what’s been going on.
If you were a crystal, which crystal would you be?
I’d have to be a sugar crystal.
CRYSTAL BATHING: SCIENCE WRAPPED UP IN A MYSTICAL BOW
How do modern day healers work with Vogel crystals? They primarily use these crystals for healing, meditation, channeling, and to remove mental, physical, emotional, and energetic toxins from the body. These toxins may be described by healers and clients alike as dense, tense, sticky, negative, dark, nagging, or heavy feelings. A Vogel crystal is cut with the intention to amplify, coalesce, and focus any energies you wish to direct into someone’s body or mind. The design of the crystal allows for your thoughts and energy to enter the crystal at the receptive end, be amplified and focused as it travels in a circular pattern through the crystal, and be transmitted like a laser beam from the focal end.
The most remarkable example of how Vogel crystals are used is in crystal beds, also known as John of God beds or crystal bath therapy. These beds were originally created by world-renowned healer John of God, and used by his team of spirit doctors at the Casa de Dom Inácio in Brazil. The beds have also been adopted by other healers around the world and are used for alignment, rejuvenation, and balancing of energy fields, which in turn aids energetic and physical healing.
What is a treatment with one of these beds like? The client lies on a massage table, and a metal arm with seven clear, highly polished Vogel quartz crystals suspended from it swings over the client’s body. Each crystal is cut to a specific frequency and is energetically aligned above one of the seven main chakras. Colored lights, which match the vibrational frequency of the chakra colors—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and purple—radiate through each crystal onto the client’s body in blinking rhythms to cleanse, balance, and align energy. The individual receiving the session lies faceup, with eyes closed, bathing in the energy for 10 to 60 minutes. I have had crystal bed treatments many times and can best describe what I have felt as tingles and vibrations throughout my body.
CRYSTALS ON THE BRAIN AND IN THE BODY
Crystals are not only vital to operate our iPhones. Incredibly, they may also be essential for our bodies to function. Dr. Joseph Kirschvink, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, claims we actually have crystals in our brains! According to Dr. Kirschvink, human brain cells possess a highly magnetic mineral known as Magnetite, which acts like a tiny internal compass to help us find our way. Magnetite can also be found in animals that use magnetoreception to guide them: homing pigeons, migratory salmon, dolphins, honeybees, dogs, moths, and bats. Scientists at the California Institute of Technology discovered that humans have a tiny piece of Magnetite in the ethmoid bone, which is located between our eyes, just behind the nose. Magnetite is the most magnetic substance on the planet, and this piece is coincidentally located within the nose at the exact location where mystics believe our telepathic senses sit. Science has even acknowledged that Magnetite could be linked to telepathy. This also happens to be the same region where the pineal gland, aka the Third-Eye Chakra, is located.
We also keep our balance thanks to calcium carbonate crystals, aka “ear rocks,” embedded in our inner ear. If these tiny inner crystals become dislodged, it can lead to vertigo. Additionally, we are able to stand up straight because of calcium phosphate crystals that reinforce our skeletons. And we have crystals to thank for our smiles—our pearly whites are made of apatite microcrystals. Not to mention that piezo crystals are found in your teeth, bones, intestines, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage as well as in record needles and electric guitars.
WE ARE ALL BECOMING X-MEN BECAUSE OF CRYSTALS!
Both scientists and mystics alike believe we are moving from carbon-based beings to crystalline-based beings because our “junk DNA” is activating. Puzzled? Let me explain?
Science
Geneticists believe we are going through an evolutionary leap. The human body has the potential to carry four to twelve strands of DNA. The more strands of DNA we carry, the more intelligent or intuitive we become. A convention of geneticists from around the world stated that soon, we will be developing twelve-strand DNA helixes. Each extra strand of DNA will grant us “superhuman” abilities that might be considered paranormal. Scientists suggest that there is more to DNA than just storing our genetic info—that by activating our DNA beyond the current two strands, we become connected to higher frequencies and activate dormant abilities, such as clairvoyance, telepathy, and multidimensional consciousness.
Mystics
Spiritualists believe that the activation of our higher strands of DNA will allow our bodies to process more data and expand our consciousness. A healthy human brain processes 400 billion plus bits of information per second. Currently we are only using two thousand of those 400 billion bits daily. Our conscious mind currently allows us to be aware of 1 percent of reality, leaving the rest of the information to be processed by our subconscious mind. As we evolve, we will continue to activate all the functionalities associated with our sixth sense in a more present manner.
If both camps are correct, we may be quickly evolving and activating the higher DNA strands that could be the key to enlightenment. So what does it mean to have a “crystalline body”? A great example is when a log burns down and all that remains is the element carbon. If a diamond is placed in a fire, its structure is retained. Our cells must be transformed from carbon to a silicon crystal so that we can withstand the tremendous amount of “light,” as spiritualists would say, or energy, as scientists would say, that our bodies can hold. Internally, all our cells are being changed from an organic structure to a crystalline structure, which is the perfect prism through which light can pass. As we evolve, we will be able to hold and process more light in our bodies, becoming higher-frequency beings.
Are scientists and mystics both picking up on the same hot spots in the body, but communicating about the subject in different ways? Are crystals not only helping us with practical, linear functions like balance and eating, but also acting as a built-in generator for telepathy and following our inner compass?
Now that you know the who, what, where, when, and how of your most precious, magical gems, let’s RSVP YES! to curating an entire runway-worthy collection in the next chapter.