Stones for Grounding
18 stones.
- Agate Banded chalcedony, translucent to opaque, in grey, white, brown, red and blue layers; a cut slice may show the bands as rings or as a landscape. Agate is the tradition's stone of steadiness. Pliny takes the name from the river Achates in Sicily and reports that it was carried against scorpion and snake bite, and that athletes wore it to keep their nerve. Its bands are the point: the tradition reads a stone that grew in patient layers as an argument for doing the same. Hold the agate and find one band with your thumbnail. Name one thing you will not be moved on today. Put it in your pocket.
- Apache Tear A rounded pebble, black and opaque by reflected light, but clear smoky brown all through when held up to a lamp; often frosted grey where the enclosing rock has weathered off An Apache tear is a nodule of obsidian weathered free of its rock. Black in the hand, it is clear brown when held up to a lamp. The name comes from a nineteenth-century Arizona story of women weeping for warriors lost at the cliff, their tears falling as stone. It is folk tradition and no older. It is kept for grief carried while ordinary life goes on. Hold it up to a window or a lamp until you can see light through it. Then close your hand and let yourself feel whatever that brought up.
- Black Tourmaline Opaque glossy black, in three-sided prisms with deep grooves running the length of the crystal, like a bundle of rods fused together Schorl was a miner's word long before it was a magician's. Dutch traders in the eighteenth century called tourmaline the ash-drawer, because a warm crystal pulled pipe ash across the table. The stone really is electric when heated, and the tradition took its character from that: something that gathers what is loose and holds it away from you. It is the plain protective stone, given to thresholds. Set one piece on the floor beside your front door tonight. Each time you come in, touch the frame and leave the day's argument on the other side of it.
- Bloodstone Opaque dark green chalcedony flecked and spotted with red iron oxide, so that it looks like drops of blood on moss. Some pieces are nearly black-green with only two or three marks. Pliny knew it as heliotropium and reports that the magi claimed it made the bearer invisible, a claim he did not believe. Christian Europe renamed it. The red flecks became the blood that fell on green jasper at the foot of the cross, and carvers cut Passion scenes into it. It has been a soldier's stone and a healer's stone since. Wash it under the cold tap, dry it on a clean towel, and put it in the pocket of whatever you will wear tomorrow.
- Hematite Steel-grey to black with a bright metallic shine when polished; earthy and botryoidal masses are a dull red-brown. Whatever the surface colour, it always leaves a red-brown streak, and that is the test. The Greeks named it from haima, blood, because it bleeds: grind it or saw it and the water goes red. Pliny prescribes haematites for the eyes and for bleeding. It is iron ore, the ore Mars is made of, and it was polished into some of the earliest mirrors, so it carries both meanings, the weapon and the true reflection. Modern practice uses it for one thing above all: weight. Sit down. Rest one in each palm, hands on your knees, and breathe until you can feel their weight and nothing else.
- Jade Translucent to opaque. Jadeite runs from emerald green through lavender, white and orange; nephrite from creamy mutton-fat white through spinach green to near black. Two minerals answer to jade, jadeite and nephrite, and both are so tough that the ancients made axes and blades of them. That toughness is the whole of the tradition. Confucius, in the Book of Rites, reads the virtues of a good man in jade: its warmth, its evenness, the fact that it will break before it bends. Spanish sailors called it the stone of the flank, for colic. Put the jade on and leave it on. Each time you notice it today, finish the thing in front of you before starting another.
- Jet Opaque velvet black to very dark brown, taking a deep polish; unusually light in the hand and warm to the touch, never cold like stone Jet is wood that sank in a Jurassic sea and turned to coal. Pliny calls it gagates, after a river in Lycia, and reports that burning it drove off snakes. Rubbed on cloth it takes a charge and lifts a hair. Whitby cut it by the ton after Victoria's widowhood, so it is the stone of English mourning, and the tradition keeps it for exactly that. Hold it until it is as warm as your hand. Say the name of what you have lost. Then put it in your pocket and go about the day.
- Magnetite Opaque black with a submetallic to metallic shine and a black streak. Crystals are often sharp octahedra. The same mineral in sand-sized grains is what makes some beaches grey and clings in beards to a magnet dragged through them. Magnetite is the one common mineral that is magnetic by itself, and lodestone is the rarer thing again: a piece that has been permanently magnetised in the ground, most likely by a lightning strike. Claudian describes a temple where an iron Mars was drawn across to a lodestone Venus and the priests called it a wedding. Folk practice feeds a lodestone iron filings to keep it drawing. Hold a paperclip near it until you feel the pull. Say what you want to come, once, then set the stone down facing the door.
- Malachite Opaque green in concentric light and dark bands, silky where it has grown in rounded botryoidal masses; polished slices show rings, eyes and stripes. Pliny calls it molochitis, mallow-green, and writes that it was hung on children's cradles as a guard against danger; that is the oldest protective use we have for it. Egypt ground it for green eye-paint, which we now know was a poor idea. Its banded eyes made malachite the tradition's watcher, a stone held to see trouble coming. Set the malachite by the door you come home through. Look at its rings once, and leave whatever the day did outside.
- Obsidian Glassy jet black with a bright wet lustre; also brown, or grey-flecked as snowflake obsidian, or with a gold or rainbow sheen when turned to the light Pliny records obsidian as named for Obsius, who found it in Ethiopia, and notes that it was cut into mirrors giving back the shadow of a face rather than a likeness. Later scryers used the same black glass, John Dee's speculum among them. The tradition holds it to show what is there rather than what is wanted. It is given to anyone asking to see plainly. Set it somewhere you will pass. Each time you pass it today, say one true sentence about the thing you are avoiding. Keep the sentences short.
- Onyx Opaque black, or straight parallel bands of black and chalk white; sardonyx bands brown and white. Waxy lustre, takes a mirror polish The Greeks called it onyx, fingernail, for the pale band running through the dark. The story ran that Cupid cut Venus's nails with an arrowhead and the Fates turned the clippings to stone. Pliny knew it as a carving stone, and cameo cutters have worked its layers ever since. Agrippa sets it under Saturn. It is held to hold a thing steady rather than to lighten it. Put it in your pocket before a conversation you expect to be difficult. Touch it once before you answer anything. Then answer more slowly than you want to.
- Petrified Wood Opaque brown, red, honey, grey and black in bands and streaks, with the growth rings, grain and sometimes the bark still readable; takes a glassy polish Petrified wood is a tree replaced cell by cell with silica. What you hold is quartz in the shape of timber, with the rings and often the bark still legible. The tradition takes it exactly as it looks: the past made solid and still readable. It is kept for ancestry, for long patience, and for anyone weighing whether a thing is worth another twenty years of their life. Find the growth rings and count ten of them with a fingertip. That is ten years of a life. Then say what you want your next ten to hold.
- Prehnite Translucent pale yellow-green to apple green, with a soft inner glow and a fibrous grain; often botryoidal, sometimes crowded with black epidote needles Prehnite came into the record too late for Pliny. It was described in 1788 and named for a Dutch colonel who brought a specimen back from the Cape, the first mineral named after a person. Its lore is modern, and honesty requires saying so. The tradition keeps it as the stone of the settled mind: the one held to quiet the noise around a decision before the decision is made. Hold it in a closed hand. Name the decision aloud, once. Then say nothing for a full minute and notice which thought arrives first.
- Red Jasper Opaque brick to brownish red, sometimes veined with darker lines or carrying a grey rind. Completely opaque: hold it to a lamp and nothing at all passes through it. Egypt put red jasper at the throat of the dead. The Book of the Dead's spell for the tyet, the knot of Isis, calls for it in that stone and calls the amulet the blood of Isis. Pliny says the whole of the East wore iaspis as an amulet. Rome cut it for seals. It is the plainest of the Mars stones: no fire, no shine, only holding on. Stand with both feet flat, the stone in your fist, and count backwards from twenty. Put it in your pocket and go back in.
- Rhodonite Opaque to slightly translucent rose-pink to red, nearly always webbed and patched with black manganese oxide. Rhodonite is rose-pink shot through with black, and the tradition never separates the two. This is the stone of love that has been damaged and is being kept anyway. Russia mined it as orlets and cut it for the imperial court. Practice gives it after a betrayal or a family falling-out, and to anyone who must forgive without pretending nothing happened. Hold the rhodonite and trace one black vein with your thumb. Name the harm honestly. Then name one thing you will still do for them.
- Serpentine Waxy or greasy-lustred green, from pale olive to nearly black, mottled and veined like a snake's back; the finer bowenite is translucent Pliny calls it ophites, the snake stone, for the mottling that runs across it like a skin, and the old lapidaries hung it against venom and headache. Because a serpent sheds and then carries on, the tradition took the stone for whatever is being shed: an old habit, an old post, an old name. It is held for moulting rather than for change in general. Name one habit you are finished with. Say when it ends, giving a date and not the word soon. Write the date where you will see it.
- Shungite Matt black to steel grey and dull in the common rock; the noble grade is bright silvery black, lustrous and brittle, and marks paper like a pencil Shungite is nearly pure carbon from Karelia, laid down about two billion years ago. Peter the Great founded a spa on a shungite spring in 1719 and had his soldiers carry lumps to keep their water sweet. That is the tradition it has: a stone of the ground and of water. The modern claim that it screens electronics is not established, and this entry does not make it. Put a piece on the desk between you and the thing you are avoiding. Work for twenty minutes without touching your phone. Then move the stone aside and stop.
- Smoky Quartz Transparent to translucent smoky brown or grey, from a faint tint to almost black; six-sided prisms with a pointed termination Smoky quartz is quartz that has stood for ages in the ground beside something radioactive. The colour is the record of that. In Scotland it is cairngorm, set in dirk hilts and shoulder brooches, which gives it a real national history. The tradition gives it to Saturn and keeps it for weight: it is held to take the charge out of a mood without dulling the person. Sit with it in your lap for five minutes, both feet flat on the floor. Breathe out for longer than you breathe in. Then put it down and stand up.