Crystals: Faith, Fear, and the Stones Beneath Our Feet
I’ve collected rocks for as long as I’ve been able to walk. Every outdoor foray found me with my little blonde head bent low, scanning the ground for “treasures.” As I grew, my fascination evolved, first pretty rocks, then fossils, and eventually crystals.
Growing up in the Missouri Ozarks gave me endless opportunities to hunt. I found sparkly stones, iron nuggets, limestone “chalk” rocks, and the occasional arrowhead. One of my earliest memories is visiting an older woman who collected unusual stones and somehow embedded marbles to give them faces, a form of folk creativity that captivated me! A few years later, my elementary school class walked a few blocks from school to visit a local man who tumbled rocks in his basement. He placed smooth chunks of polished petrified wood into our little hands, and I was hooked!
For a time, I even considered becoming an archaeologist or a paleontologist. That dream was gently discouraged by a junior high teacher, not because I was a girl or lacked ability, but because, as she put it, “everything has already been found.” I won’t comment further on that advice now that I’m a grown woman living in the age of LIDAR.
Somewhere in my secondary school years, I became aware of crystals. I hadn’t encountered many firsthand. I lived deep in the Bible Belt; there were no crystal shops, in fact, there wasn’t even a Walmart yet. What I had heard was uniformly negative. Crystals were firmly rooted in the New Age movement, and getting too close to them was believed to be spiritually contaminating. Everyone I knew frowned upon them. But I was interested, because they were so pretty!
Eventually, I made my way to college. In geology class, we studied rocks and crystals side by side, and my professor made no distinction between “good” and “bad” stones. It was there that I learned quartz crystals are essential components of watches, used in brickmaking, and relied upon across a wide range of industrial applications. That knowledge quietly set me free. Crystals, I realized, were neither inherently good nor evil. They were simply another part of creation, ancient, useful, and waiting to be understood.
Fast forward to my “wilderness years”, the years I spoke about in my introductory post, where I left the established church and began seeking the truth. Imagine my surprise when I came across Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval Catholic nun who went on to become one of only four female Doctors of the Church (more on her in a later post). Her teachings on crystals for healing and spiritual protection are still studied today.
Hildegard lived in the 1100s and served as a Benedictine abbess in Germany. Among her many talents and gifts, she was a healer and medical writer. Her first medical work, Physica, described the scientific and medicinal properties of plants, elements, stones (think crystals), fish, reptiles, and animals. Besides having scientific properties, she wrote that each of these classes of creation has “subtleties”, which she defined as hidden powers placed there and revealed by God for the benefit of humans. She made no distinction between a good ginger ointment and a warm quartz crystal, as both would help heal cloudy vision.
In fact, an entire section of her medical book was dedicated to stones and crystals, addressing a wide range of issues, including physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns. I’ll write much more about that in a future post. Here are just a few of her treatments to give you an idea of the gist.
Onyx: She recommended soaking an onyx in good wine in a metal vessel for two to four weeks. The resulting liquid would then be used as eye drops to clear up eye conditions.
Sapphire: She recorded that sapphires had numerous uses, several of which were spiritual in nature.
For someone demon-possessed, she recommended that a friend should place a sapphire on the dirt, collect that dirt into a leather sack, and put the sack around the possessed person’s neck. The friend should also pray, saying, “O you, most wicked spirit, quickly go from this person, just as, in your first fall, the glory of your splendor very quickly fell from you.” This would exorcise all but the most powerful spirits.
Or, if a woman had a stalker, she could pour wine over a sapphire three times and each time say, “I pour this wine, in its ardent powers, over you; just as God drew off your splendor, wayward angel, so may you draw away from me the lust of this ardent man.”
If this sounds fantastical to you, it did to me, too. However, given that Hildegard is held in high esteem in Catholicism, one of the most ancient branches of Christianity, and that our modern knowledge continues to grow, I cannot dismiss it out of hand. Herbs, sound therapy, and acupuncture were also once rejected by modern medicine but are now considered effective treatments by many mainstream health practitioners. Science has a long history of needing to catch up with ancient or intuitive practices, so crystals could one day be better understood or validated by science.
We know crystals vibrate. They are made of atoms arranged in very regular, repeating patterns. These atoms are constantly in motion, vibrating slightly. Think of it like a tuning fork or a bell that rings when struck. The shape and structure of the crystal determine how it vibrates; each type has its own unique "frequency" or rhythm. They have exceptional physical properties like piezoelectricity (they generate electric charge when squeezed, quartz does this and is used in watches and electronics). These vibrations are real at the atomic level. Could they interact with human biology in a healing way? Is it possible they interact with the electromagnetic field of the body (what some call our “aura” or biofield)? Future discoveries in quantum biology or subtle energy medicine might reveal effects we can’t currently detect.
From the spiritual perspective, is it possible that crystals are helpful to humans because they are repulsive to the fallen angels and demons (more on them in later posts too)? Why were precious stones part of the Jewish High Priest’s breastplate? Early Christian teachings say that Lucifer, before his fall, had every precious stone as his covering. This list of stones varies by source, but often mentioned are carnelian, topaz, diamond, beryl, onyx, jasper, sapphire, emerald, and turquoise. When he fell, that splendor was taken away; he was stripped of his jeweled covering, symbolic of his loss of heavenly status. Is this why Hildegard was able to use stones to help and protect humans from the fallen ones?
I don’t have any answers, but I do have plenty of questions! What if what we were taught in our Protestant Evangelical upbringing isn’t true or is incomplete? What if crystals aren’t evil tools in the hands of the New Agers? Could crystals be a whole world of knowledge, both physical and spiritual, just waiting for us to discover? Could the Creator be calling us to him in a different way than we expected? Could this flat, secular world we inhabit have far more spiritual dimensions than we ever imagined?
While I don’t know the answers, I do know that little blonde-haired girl who still lives inside me plans to keep exploring, still oohing and aahing over the beauty and wonder of creation. She’ll keep walking this path, no matter how strange it may seem, and she’ll keep searching for sacred truth. If you have questions too, I invite you to walk this path alongside me. Grace and light to you all.