Flint
Also Chert, Firestone
Opaque grey to black, brown or honey, usually inside a white chalky rind. A fresh break is waxy or glassy and shells out in curved flakes, and a thin flake is translucent brown at the edge.
- Crystal system
- Trigonal
- Hardness
- 7 Mohs
- Handling
- Hard and safe in water; it lay in wet chalk for eighty million years. The hazard is the edge. A freshly struck flint is sharper than a kitchen knife and cuts before you feel it, so handle worked pieces by the flat and keep them away from children. If you knap it, wear eye protection and do it outdoors, because the flakes fly. If you strike sparks, do it away from anything that can catch.
- In water
- Safe
What it is held to be for
Flint is the oldest worked stone. Where ploughs turned up ancient arrowheads, Britain and Ireland called them elf-shot and set them in silver as a guard. Nodules that came out of the ground whole were thunderstones, held to have fallen with the lightning and to keep a house from being struck again. Herodotus says the Egyptian embalmer opened the body with a stone knife; Zipporah used flint in Exodus.
Herodotus II.86; Exodus 4:25; British and Irish folk tradition
Correspondences
These are the tradition's ascriptions, not properties of the mineral.
- Planet
- Mars
- Element
- Fire
- Signs
- Aries, Capricorn
- Chinese phase
- Metal
- Year animal
- Monkey, Dog
- Centre
- Solar plexus Manipura
- Sephirah
- Geburah
How it is used
Carried loose, or kept on a shelf by the door. Used where something has to be cut off: a habit, a contact, a run of bad luck. Handle a struck edge carefully, because it is genuinely sharp.
Today
Hold the flint against a piece of string and cut the string with scissors while you name what you are ending. Throw the short piece away.
A longer working
Tuesday, after dark, at the kitchen table. Lay the flint down with its edge towards the door. Write on paper the thing you are finished with, in as few words as you can manage. Read it once. Tear the paper along the flint's edge rather than with your hands, twice, so you have four pieces. Put two in the bin tonight and two in the outside bin tomorrow. Leave the flint by the door for a week.
Works with
- Herb
- Rue
- Incense
- Juniper