SOME CRYSTAL HEALING FAERY STORIES - LARIMAR AND MOLDAVITE : A BIT OF A PISS TAKE

Crystal Healing is a bit like Catholicism in the Middle Ages, and for countless millions still the same across so much of the world today. Once you’re into all the father, son and holy ghost shit there’s no coming out. If you think of the numberless little old ladies in black across Mediterranean Europe, Ireland and Poland along with their husbands, to say nothing of the same throughout Central and South America you’ll know they’ll stay Catholic till their dying day no matter how many scandals come to light about priests molesting children and teenagers who were taught to trust them. No, once bought into that’s where people stay, bell book and candle. It’s not a case of wanting to believe, or believing as an act of faith, or, as in the case of the Middle Ages being taught by the priests that if you didn’t believe absolutely you’d go to hell when you died and suffer endless fiery torments. It’s actually much more than that. It’s a case of believing because you WANT to believe, which actually means that you’ve got nothing else bigger or better to believe in!

In short, Catholicism, with all the father, son and ghost stuff, has become the essence of their spirituality. Now, for an increasing number of people, it’s become the same thing with crystals and crystal healing. There’s a new kid on the block. A new kind of religion in the making, and it’s simply no use telling people or trying to make them understand that it’s all bullshit. Such a thing is utterly futile because its practitioners and believers have exactly the same kind of need as the billions of people who believe in sons, ghosts and prophets; one god or many. It is something they desperately want. It provides them with spirituality. Something outside and above their own human essence. Throughout so much of historical time it was a case of HAVING to believe. In later centuries it became a matter of WANTING to believe.

That’s how it is with crystal healing adepts today. It’s like the underclass and their dogs or the lower middle class and their bikes. In recent decades both have become passions. If some wretched dog attacks an adult or child it’s simply no good whatsoever taking its keeper to task. You’ll be told it’s no fault of their beloved pet but that of the child who goaded it or the adult who was behaving badly. In other words that the problem with their vicious dog lies elsewhere. The animal has become their spiritual extension. Its violent behaviour could never be its fault let alone theirs which in all truth it is as dogs take on the temperament of their keepers. No, playing the blame game is necessary displacement activity in this act of spiritual bonding with the beloved, the family treasure, in this case a dog. With cyclists it’s different, it’s a spiritual bonding with a machine. A belief in the virtue of ‘healthy’ outdoor activity that in their reasoning gives them mobility and freedom. However theirs is a demanding and challenging faith! It’s part of their resolute dedication to the free outdoor life. Perhaps that’s why they all ride around looking so grim! They don’t give a shit about anyone else, riding on pavements and going through lights. Theirs is a commitment to the One True God, in this case their BIKE! They’re a fast rising new group of adepts. Peddlers to the fancy of the lonely outdoors.

Just as the neurotic- aggressive underclass dog owning fraternity worships its deity so too do cyclists worship theirs. Neither dog nor machine can do any wrong. If someone gets bitten it’s all their own fault; if they knock someone over it’s the fault of the hapless stranger! Both groups may best be classified as believers, same as those of the faith of crystal healing. They’re also believers. They too have their faith… That crystals provide for all kinds of human needs from the physical and psychological to that which is the most important of all, the spiritual. For these people the healing power of crystals is a fundamental article of faith, the essential heart of their being. They are true believers not simply because they believe, but because what they believe in is true and that they have been shown this truth. In short, it does for them absolutely. The power of crystals to heal and make whole has become a divine revelation and you can no more tell them it’s bollocks than a catholic priest would tell his parish of believers that all the stuff about a holy ghost is a piss take on plain common reason.

Throughout the history of humankind people have had a need for delusion. One of the most splendid is the belief politicians have that they’re in it because they genuinely think they can make a difference. Be a force for the good that can make people’s lives better. Go ask any of them in the established ‘democracies’ and they’ll all tell you the same. With the religious it’s because they think they can see into people’s souls, divine their troubles and send them on their way with the word the way and the light. With politicians it’s a more personal thing. Generally speaking, believing in confidence trickery is one of the most institutionalized characteristics of the human condition and so it is with crystal healing. It’s certainly interesting that the new faith made its appearance at a time of great economic uncertainty and crisis when old religious values have increasingly been challenged by those of science. With the ever increasing permeation of people’s lives with uncertainty and anxiety there has been an ever increasing need for new ways of looking at things, new methods of interpreting events and alternative ways of understanding our individual personal problems. Crystal healing, fast evolving in the hands of its hard-nosed money conscious adepts into a pseudo-science thinks itself seriously up for the job.

Crystals shops and a crystal healing literature are fast entering our culture full of all knowing adepts. Priests if you will of the new faith and like the practitioners of all the well-established religions they’ve got their own well-rehearsed circle of logic. Once you’re in, round and round you’ll go, riding the carousel of a moronic tautology.

That said, crystals and minerals have a great charm of their own. They’re often a delight to the eye and one of the treats of the natural world we live in, that is, until a crew of pseudo-scientists came along and decided they could turn the ever changing geo-chemistry of rocks into something spiritual, with each piece of geo-chemistry having a meaningful function in human lives. Look at the books on crystal healing and you’ll see what I mean. I could use any of literally countless examples to demonstrate, as I’ve previously done in the case of Sugilite, one of the ‘wonder’ minerals of crystal healing of recent decades, but the two I’m choosing today are Moldavite and Larimar.

Crystal healing of necessity needs to continually reinvigorate itself for its ever self-indulgent adepts always on the lookout for something new and special by discovering new things. In most cases, this ‘newness’ goes hand in hand with rarity to stimulate demand at exorbitant prices. A historical case in the scarcity racket involved Zeolites, volcanically formed highly attractive alumino-silicate minerals which up to the 1960’s were found primarily in Iceland and were extremely rare and expensive, most working wonders for the spiritual needs of enthusiasts. Now, after the opening up of the vast ancient lava fields of the Deccan Flats in Central India they’re available to everyone in endless volume and the bottom’s dropped out of the market so it became important to replace them! Today Moldavite and Larimar have taken their place among others as the new wonder minerals. Essential for each troubled spirit if you can get hold of them that is. And you can, for a price! That said let’s take a look.

Larimar is a pale blue mineral hydrothermally formed in alkaline volcanic rock with a sodium-calcium silicate chemistry containing additions of iron and manganese. Typically, until recently it was found only in the Dominican Republic, an impoverished package-tourist holiday hole in the West Indies specializing in toxic hotel meals next to one of the world’s chief death and disease dumps, the Republic of Haiti. Perhaps it was inevitable then that it was ‘discovered’ there as a little moneymaker for the locals!

Remembering the colour it is worth mentioning that throughout history light blue has been traditionally associated with the sky and from that a sense of tranquility, calm, peace and contemplation, much the same as red has been associated with fire, from which activity, dynamism and passion. It is no accident perhaps that light blue Larimar should, for crystal healing emotionalism, be associated with inner peace, helping people stay calm in the face of serious upheaval and change while acting to remove any fears and doubts associated with it. Light blue… calm and soothing! Question! Now why for crystal healing should the mineral do that if it wasn’t for its colour? In short, take the colour, add to it some cultural tradition and lo and behold you’ve got the emotional side of its healing function. So what then was the special input of crystal healing itself in forming such judgement. In a word, nothing. It was all lazily extracted from popular culture, no more than that!

Emotionality however is only the base line of the deception. From their own personal ‘feelings’ the adepts moved towards spirituality. That at least was logical. The mineral they say helps us take control of our lives, removing those things that encourage suffering. Not for me to ask perhaps but could these be problems of real life such as cheating spouses and rising energy bills? But here now the clincher for those obsessed with existence on a higher plane, with matters spiritual, (not of course with the bank balances of those who make money out of crystal healing). Given that we’re all supposed to have our own spiritual spectrum, Larimar is thought to give us an awareness of how effective it is, telling us where its boundaries are! It must all sound fantastic if you’re a glassy eyed believer but what I’d like to know is upon what basis such judgements are made? Obviously there are those who’d say, well who cares, it all sounds right to me and anyway, I’m absolutely sure I’VE got my own spiritual spectrum even if you’re not sure about yours!

Well if you need to have one so badly you’re welcome. Unfortunately however, those making money from crystal healing have now intruded on the science of medicine and Larimar is a case in point. The mineral it is claimed, stimulates the body’s self-healing properties by helping us make decisions about how healthy we are. Alas there are some real problems here. Unless it’s a simple cold or a stomach ache, we ourselves are not the best people to make qualified judgements about complex medical ailments. That’s why the science of medicine evolved and why there are doctors. And just as important, any belief that there’s a connection between any so called ‘judgements’ we make about our state of health and our body’s ability to heal itself   is a dangerous fantasy. It’s as if crystal healing through claims such as these seeks to present an alternative to medical science.

It’s another form of quackery, much like homeopathic medicine. If you feel really ill go and see a crystal healing doctor and he’ll sell you a bit of blue stone, not available on the National Health right now, but then you never know what the Tory-Lib Dem Coalition might have in mind. Shut down all the hospitals and surgeries and flog everyone a nice little bit of blue Larimar. Mind you its seriously pricey right now but if they encourage competition the price will be bound to go down! Right now it’s sold in crystal shops mainly in jewelry such as pendants and rings, the supposed rarity of the mineral making these things expensive. Oh yes, the price will come down all right, when the natives of some other holiday package paradise go digging around some other volcano and come up with something else for the healers.

The greatest current whizz in this respect is Moldavite. Now here we’re talking serious money. I saw a piece in a shop recently. A little flat round thing the size of a tuppeny piece. Yours for £425 I was told by the attractive pre-Raphaelite looking shop assistant who assured me it was cheap. That a gentleman from Munich had obtained a dozen or so pieces and the one they’d bought was kind of by special invitation or something like that. What I’m saying is that she made it seem like a privilege to have obtained it which for me meant that it would be a real privilege to buy it. I mean, let’s get it straight dear customer, this is NOT about money, it’s about you being here at this time and on this day not only to look at it, but to be in its presence! Selling it to you is only incidental! And to drum home the point she told me that it had only been received in the store yesterday. The £425 was incidental! It’s like this. If I’d said the price was staggering I’d have revealed my parvenu status as a miserable worm, let alone someone who knew nothing about crystal healing, but then, having revealed the fact that I was both a crystal healing aficionado as well as having a staggering bank balance and definitely wasn’t a member of the underclass she allowed me to pick it up which I did, with a studied carefree manner that made her gulp for a moment!

Quite wonderful I said in hushed tones, you can see the bottle green depth of colour only if you hold it up to the light. She concurred and we both sighed. Her waiting for me to get out my card, me telling her I’d be back tomorrow and thinking as I left, £425, pull the other one! These dealers from Munich! Well actually Munich does have a reputation for being one of the mineral dealing hotspots of Germany. It’s well known for it but then it’s also well-known for Nazis, Hitler being its favourite. And therein lies a most interesting connection. Many of the top Nazis were seriously into the occult, which is what the pseudo-science of crystal healing actually is. As for the man from Munich, I guessed he’d probably got hold of his horde from the Czech Republic where most Moldavite is found.

Wikipedia has plenty to say about it that’s useful. The mineral probably has a cosmic origin and was formed by a large meteor impact in southern Bavaria, molten rock cooling while airborne and falling some distance away, mostly in southern Bohemia around the Vlatava River area where 99% of the world’s supply is to be found, the remainder lodged in Moravia. Isotope analysis shows it to be of a beryllium 10 composition . The result is a crusty dark green translucent silica dioxide containing various chemical additions from aluminum and calcium to iron, potassium and sodium. It’s all a bit of a mystery really. There have been many seriously big meteor impacts across the planet over many millions of years but none seem to have replicated the hit in ancient Bavaria, Munich’s very own little province! There’s supposed to be only 275 tons of it left, a ten year supply then the world and crystal healing will run out its cosmic gift. Today most of it is commercially extracted from a sand pit in Bohemia which no doubt saw a recent visitation by a gentleman from Munich!

An important consideration is that it comes in two distinct grades. The Regular is of a darker more saturated green colour with the surface of the mineral more pitted and weathered than that described as Museum grade which has fern like patterns on its surface and is considerably more translucent in appearance. That makes it considerably rarer and more collectable, giving it greater cult status. That said the piece I saw for £424 quid had semi junk status! But then the healing qualities of a mineral, its adepts would claim, doesn’t depend on its rarity or collectability. Oh no, none of that! It all has to do with its powers! To put it all into context, here we have a new and ultra-expensive healing mineral that’s probably close to replacing Sugilite as a must have latest thing in healing!

And now the reasons behind its Warp Factor Nine rating on the desirability scale. Firstly perhaps most of it comes from only one place in the world, added to which is its established reputation in history for bringing good fortune, not only as a fertility charm but also because of its connection with the Holy Grail. Fertility, the Holy Grail, Everlasting Life… Say no more! I’ll buy the piece in the window and mount it in silver! In your dreams, lady in the crystal shop! But seriously, let’s look at why so many healing adepts would give their year’s Christmas bonus for it… if anyone ever gets a bonus at Christmas these days apart from being told they’ve got a job to go into on Boxing Day!

Moldavite, it is believed, allows its possessor to experience a vast range of across the board spiritual dimensionality which in each person facilitates the realisation of what the full attainment of spiritual perfection might be. It sounds a really great and clever idea. Something that anyone into crystal healing would really want, knowing just how spiritually great and fulfilled they could be. It’s a perfect must have. Something that only a hard-nosed psychologist could have dreamed up. But then how did they know the connection between that particular geo-chemical formation of rock and the fabulous spiritual propensity it contained, particular with regard to its ‘human’ side, relieving us from our anxieties about the future and giving us insights into our own personal maladies.

Here again, Moldavite, like Larimar, offers spiritual healing as an insight for physical causation, again as a challenge to the ideas of conventional modern medicine very much like homeopathy. However what I have especially done in this post is use examples of two currently popular ‘buzz’ minerals in crystal healing to examine its evolution into a pseudo-science from its basis in the science of geo-chemistry as originally formulated by scientists but later turned into something else… a kind of spiritualist intuitive art form masquerading as a genuine science which of course it is not. In a broader philosophical sense it is a kind of metaphysics. And while its practitioners and adepts may consider it to be much more than that, others have the right to disagree. After all, the Nazis turned race into a pseudo-science on the basis of their own racial doctrines and called it a science!

But one thing is sure. If there is any parallel here of any kind the subject should be open to free intellectual debate in the name of science itself. Something that will be beneficial to both sides in any intellectual argument giving them equal opportunity to air their views. Time will make sense of the debate in an atmosphere of free discussion as opposed to the dictatorial and dogmatic expression of any faith or ideology in circumstances of oppression and ultimately abhorrent intellectual control as happened throughout history and its dark times, and lately during the twentieth century in even darker decades.

No-one should debunk crystal healing because they simply don’t like it, and the same goes for any other dogma or faith. The point above all is to understand it, challenge it and move forwards, not simply fall into the trap of becoming the same kind of dogmatists ourselves and wind up like all the others down the long centuries, barring free expression and promising those who disagree or are different or don’t want to conform the promise of hell or the death camp. If those who develop and expound new faiths or beliefs wind up as prophets they should beware the judgement of history and have in mind the consequences of their ideas that is, should they have any thoughts or ideas about becoming gods or dictators themselves!

Above all, we need to proceed in our own free and fair British way, not be subjected to any form of spying, stifling regulation or pernicious control, all of which curtails our most precious, most ultimate of aspirations. That is freedom itself.