The Keeping of Stones

Says who?

Every crystal book on your shelf tells you what the stone means. This one tells you who said so, where they said it, in which century, and where to go and read it yourself.

$27 · instant PDF · 230 pages · 16 chapters · 3 appendices

See what is inside — $27

Instant download after payment. Reads on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and prints. Two books in print cover half of what is in here and cost $56.99 between them — the arithmetic is further down. 60-day Check Me Guarantee.

The Keeping of Stones is a 230-page book that prints, beside every belief, the person who held it, the place, the century and the source — and keeps that entirely separate from the material column: what the stone is made of, what water and salt and sunlight do to it, what is unsafe to grind, heat or swallow, and what is sold under its name that is not it. It does not tell you what to believe, and it does not tell you whether crystals work; it takes no position on that, and it says so in its opening chapter.

Cover of The Keeping of Stones — Who Believed What About Each Stone, Where, and in Which Century, With the Source Named
230 pages · 16 chapters · 3 appendices
2026 edition · instant PDF

Six things nobody put in the book you already own

Each of these is a real complaint, quoted the way it was written. Beside it is the chapter of this book that answers it, by its number and its actual title.

“I already did it, and nobody told me.”

“i literally just cleaned my new celestite by water, returned to my laptop and YouTube recommended this video to me on the homepage.”

— a comment with 83 likes, under a video about crystals and water

Further down the same thread, the question underneath the whole problem: “can you just tell us what we CAN put in water.” Running water is the method recommended ahead of all the others in this hobby, and it is the one that costs the object the most. When the advice is wrong, the failure belongs to the advice.

→ Chapter 11 · What the Water Actually Does. The five routes by which a stone loses, so the list stops being something to memorise. Then the table: stone by stone, the Mohs number, what happens to it and the verdict. Salt gets its three mechanisms. Sun gets its casualty list. And the answer to what CAN go in water is given straight, with its limits named.

“Says who?”

“I do wish we learned a little more about the history and backstory of crystals. Why do certain crystals hold specific energies? Says who? Some of the information seems random.”

— a four-star review of a beginners’ crystal book, Goodreads

That was not a sceptic. That was a customer who bought the book, kept the stones, and wanted a footnote. Two more, about the standard reference of the field: “none of that can be fact-checked” and “there are no citations, not even a further reading page, and I dislike a dead-end book.”

→ Chapter 1 · Says Who? The method, set out once and worked end to end on the amethyst you already own: four attributions with four dates and four sources — Pliny in AD 77, Hildegard in the twelfth century, a bishop’s ring documented in 633, a jewelers’ convention in 1912 — then the material box, then one honest gap where a number should be and isn’t.

→ Appendix A · Check Me is the footnote those three readers were asking for: every source in the book by author, work and date, with the public-domain ones marked, because checking those costs nothing.

“Is it even what they said it was?”

“When buying stones at Shows, be aware. Some of those Sellers will sell whatever they have, that buyers may ask for, knowing that they will be gone in a few days.”

— a jeweler, 126 likes

And the one that names the feeling: “I wasted hundreds on fakes.” Nobody in those threads is asking for purity. The most upvoted comment of the lot was somebody glad it had finally been said out loud what a certain material actually is — and who still buys it when the price is right. They are asking to be told.

→ Chapter 14 · Sold As Something Else. Three things that get swept into one word and are kept apart here: a declared treatment, which is legitimate; an undeclared treatment, which is fraud; and total substitution, which is a different problem. Then the cases — moldavite and its price history, the four different frauds that move under the word turquoise, the oven behind most citrine, the flecks that are all one size. And the fastest test in the book, which takes four seconds and a refrigerator magnet.

“I found out by accident that some of these are genuinely dangerous.”

“I love gemstones and have never heard precaution regarding any gemstones before. This is most enlightening.”

— 82 likes. The most upvoted comment on that same video was a correction, not a thank-you: “Every stone is not healthy if you inhale its powder — even quartz.” — 323 likes

The video’s own creator later pinned a note explaining that he had been talking about mining, cutting and grinding raw material, and that finished, properly polished stones used as intended are a different context. He was right to, and that distinction is the whole subject.

→ Chapter 12 · Grind, Heat, Swallow. Written with dose, route and context, and it opens by saying that most of these stones are not dangerous on a shelf. The hazard lives in three verbs, and in a fourth that applies only to the radioactive ones. A polished piece on a wrist is not the same object as the same mineral on a dry sanding disc.

→ Chapter 13 · What Is Actually in the Glass is the one about gem water, because people are drinking it today: three mechanisms kept separate, the indirect method named, and one published precedent from a first-rank medical journal.

“Every book says the same thing, and calls it ancient.”

“The direct connection between specific crystals and specific chakras is mostly modern.”

— written by a source inside this field, not by a sceptic

The color table in the front of every crystal book cannot be ancient, because the color scheme it hangs on has a birthday. So does the birthstone list. So does most of the vocabulary you were handed. None of that makes any of it worthless. It makes it datable, which is a different and far more useful thing.

→ Chapter 9 · The Rainbow Is Forty Years Old. Leadbeater put chakra colors into Western print in 1927 and they were his own; the red-to-violet spectrum was fixed in two publications of 1977. The chapter does not tell you to stop using the table. It tells you its date.

→ Chapter 8 · Kansas City, August 1912 does the same for your birthstone, and → Chapter 10 · Where the Meanings Actually Come From names the two American shelves, 1985 and 1991, that most of today’s meanings actually come from — with the authors named, and without contempt, because naming an author and a year is what this book does with everybody.

“How much money did you spend on all these rocks?”

“What is all this crap?” · “How much money did you spend on all these rocks?” · “None of this stuff works, when are you going to learn?” · “Why are you so gullible?”

— collected by an author inside this field from what her readers were hearing at home

Three answers are in general circulation and each is right for its own situation: the one that closes it kindly, the one that tells the plain truth about your own experience, and the one that answers him on his own ground. None of the three is built for the common case — he is not asking, there are four other people at the table, and the subject has already been set as how much you believe.

→ Chapter 16 · What to Say When They Laugh. The asymmetry, which is the only one you need: he probably knows more than you about rocks — some geology is taught in school, and none of this is — and almost nobody alive has read a line of what people have actually done with stones. Pliny the Elder wrote it down in the year 77 is not a belief anyone can laugh at. It is a fact about a book, and the book is still in print. The chapter ends with five dated sentences, ready to say, none of which requires you to claim that any stone does anything.

Before you spend anything: the free sheet. What the Water Actually Does — twelve pages on one method, water, and the five stones on your shelf it damages, each with a paragraph on how to tell tonight whether you own one. If something of yours is standing in water right now, start there.

The sixteen chapters, and what you take out of each one

Four movements: how the tradition was actually made, the century that invented what you were told, the stone in your hand, and the market and the argument.

How the tradition was actually made

  1. 1 · Says Who? — The method, worked once end to end on the amethyst you already own: four attributions, four dates, four sources, one material box, and one honest gap where every other book prints a number nobody has measured. Also its section What this book does not contain, and does not claim — in the opening chapter, before you have read anything, instead of somewhere in the last third.
  2. 2 · Before It Was Magic — Theophrastus, around 315 BC. The oldest surviving European book on the subject sorts stones by how they behave in fire and is close to free of fable. You leave knowing the tradition did not begin magical — and where the word crystal comes from.
  3. 3 · Pliny Wrote It Down and Then Called It a Lie — Rome, AD 77, the gem book of antiquity and the source almost every later European text drinks from. He records the beliefs and denounces them. And chapter 76 of the same book is a fake-detection manual, written by a man who called gem fraud the most lucrative fraud practised against society.
  4. 4 · The Century the Stone Got a Job Description — and the Man Who Was Weighing Them Instead — Marbodus of Rennes around 1090 and Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century give the European stone its virtues, with an explicit theory behind them. Meanwhile al-Biruni, dead by 1048, is measuring specific gravity on a hydrostatic balance and getting values close to the modern ones. Two methods, one century apart, both named and both quotable.
  5. 5 · Nine Stones, Nine Planets — The Indian system, named and dated: the ratna-pariksha material of the Garuda Purana, Varahamihira in the sixth century, Buddhabhatta. Nine gems to nine navagraha — and the structural difference that matters: here the stone is assigned by birth chart, not by birth month. The month calendar is a different thing entirely, and it comes three chapters later.
  6. 6 · The Jade That Does Nothing — Classical China, and the cleanest counter-example in the book. The six ritual jades of the Zhou li, the virtues of jade recorded in the Li ji, the Han burial suits sewn by rank. In that tradition the jade does not act on the wearer at all: it stands for what the wearer is supposed to embody. It is documented in a museum catalogue, and it is older than anything the shop invokes.
  7. 7 · The Twelve Stones Nobody Can Name — Exodus 28 and Revelation 21, and the honest answer nobody gives: no one knows with certainty which twelve minerals those were. Includes the worked case that changes how you read every ancient quotation — the Greek sappheiros was almost certainly lapis lazuli, not blue corundum, and the confusion ran to the thirteenth century.

The century that invented what you were told

  1. 8 · Kansas City, August 1912 — Your birthstone is a commercial standard, adopted at a trade convention to replace the inconsistent regional lists then circulating, and revised in 1952, 2002 and 2016. Nothing here is an accusation. It is a date, and it is probably the most useful page in the book to have read.
  2. 9 · The Rainbow Is Forty Years Old — The stone-to-chakra color table cannot be ancient, because the color scheme it hangs on is from 1977. Leadbeater in 1927, then two publications of 1977, then the scholarly account in 2016 and the line that settles it. The chapter does not tell you to stop using the table; it tells you its date, which is all you need to stop being embarrassed by it.
  3. 10 · Where the Meanings Actually Come From — The modern canon, named without contempt: two American shelves, 1985 and 1991, that most of today’s meaning lists descend from. The opal’s bad luck, invented in a novel in 1829. And the roster of stones named between 1770 and 1868 that cannot carry an ancient tradition, because in 1770 nobody had named them yet.

The stone in your hand

  1. 11 · What the Water Actually Does — The five routes by which a stone loses. The table, with the Mohs number and a verdict for each. Salt and its three mechanisms, which is why burying a stone in it is the worst instruction in the hobby. The fading list. The sunlight figure this book refuses to print, and why every figure you have seen was invented. And the question of the stone that cracked with nobody near it, answered without taking anything away from you.
  2. 12 · Grind, Heat, Swallow — Toxicity with dose, route and context, and it says up front that most of these are not dangerous on a shelf. Stone by stone, the exposure that is actually the problem. The asbestos distinction almost no blog gets right. And pyrite disease, which is the one failure in the book that spreads to the stones stored beside it.
  3. 13 · What Is Actually in the Glass — Gem water, and the one chapter where the book is unambiguous, because people are drinking this today. Three mechanisms kept apart, the indirect method named, and a published precedent for what happens when a tradition ingests minerals. In the chapter’s own words: it will not tell you whether crystal water works; it will tell you what is in the glass.

The market and the argument

  1. 14 · Sold As Something Else — Declared treatment, undeclared treatment and total substitution, kept in three separate boxes. Moldavite and its price history. The four frauds that move under the word turquoise. The oven behind most citrine. Glass that was always glass. And the four-second test with a refrigerator magnet.
  2. 15 · Where It Came From, and Why Nobody Can Tell You — The provenance chapter no book in this field has. A named report with a date on Afghan lapis, and the documented child labour behind mica. Written without guilting you: not your lapis is blood lapis, but the industry cannot tell you, here is the report that explains why, and a seller who can answer the question is worth more than one who cannot.
  3. 16 · What to Say When They Laugh — The mockery, written down the way it was actually said. The three answers you already have and what each is for. The fourth, for the situation the other three were never built to cover. The asymmetry. And five dated sentences you can say at a table without claiming anything about any stone.

And at the back, in the same PDF

Appendix A · Check Me — Every source in the book by author, work and date, with the public-domain ones marked as such, because those cost you nothing to go and read.

Appendix B · What I Could Not Verify — The printed list of claims this book went looking for, could not confirm from a source it could name, and therefore refused to make. Several of them are famous. No competitor prints this page.

Appendix C · Your Own Shelf, and Where to Find Things — Every action the book asks of you, gathered off the sixteen chapters into one page and ordered by damage, so it can be done in a single evening with the collection in front of you. Then the stone index, and the index of people and texts.

What this book does not contain, and does not claim

It is fairer to say this here than to let you find it out three quarters of the way in. It is the same list the book prints in Chapter 1, in the section of that name.

It is not an A–Z directory of meanings. That product already exists and it is free — one metaphysical site gives away more than three hundred stones as a downloadable file. Anything shaped like it is competing with zero, and this is not that.

It is not a field guide. It never goes outdoors, it never reads ground, it never opens anything, and it will not teach you to identify an unknown mineral by hardness, streak or crystal habit. There is no collecting law in it and no locality to go to. In this book the stone has already been bought and it is already in your house.

It does not value your pieces and takes no investment view. Where a price appears at all, it is there to explain a wave of forgeries, not to tell you what anything is worth.

It makes no medical, psychological or therapeutic claim of any kind. Where it reports that a person, a text or a culture held a belief about a stone, that is a statement about what was believed, by whom, and when. It is never a statement that the belief is true, and never a statement that the stone does anything.

And it does not tell you whether crystals work. It neither affirms it nor denies it. That is not modesty, it is scope: this book is built out of claims that can be checked against a text, an excavation or a laboratory measurement, and it stays out of the argument it cannot settle. It says so once, near the front, and then gets on with the sixteen chapters.

We do not sell stones.

This book has nothing to sell you but itself. There is no shop behind it, no affiliate link inside it, no commission on any mineral named in it, and no trademarked variety invented for it. Where a mineral is named, it is named because a source names it. Where a treatment or an imitation is described, it is described so that you can recognise it — never so that you buy a particular alternative from a particular seller.

That matters more here than it would anywhere else, and for a reason you can check in an afternoon. There is no book written for you about which stones are unsafe to grind or soak, what water and salt and sunlight destroy, and what is sold under a name that is not its own. All of that content lives on blogs — and the blogs belong to the shops. The only available source on “don’t buy this, it isn’t what they told you” is the person selling it to you.

This guide is produced with the assistance of AI writing tools and is edited and fact-checked against the named sources listed at the back. No professional credential, laboratory, gemological certification or personal collecting experience is claimed for its authorship. Its authority is the sources it cites, each one named with its date so that you can check it yourself — and many of them are in the public domain, which means checking costs you nothing.

What the same ground costs in print

Two books between them cover about half of what is in here, and both are worth owning.

The Book of Stones — Robert Simmons and Naisha Ahsian, Destiny Books $29.99
A Lapidary of Sacred Stones — Claude Lecouteux, Inner Traditions $27.00
Together $56.99

List prices, checked 5 September 2026. Both are linked so you can check them yourself.

Buy both and you still do not have the material half: what water, salt and sunlight destroy, what is genuinely unsafe to grind, heat or soak, and what is being sold under a name that is not its own. Lecouteux is a Sorbonne emeritus compiling from the earliest sources and it is the best history in the field — it has 58 ratings on Amazon, against 18,257 for the standard reference, because it is packaged as a medievalist’s dictionary with nothing after 1900 in it and not one line on keeping the object. The Keeping of Stones is the two halves in one volume, written for the person who owns the stones.

Read this before you pay

IMPORTANT — PLEASE READ THIS FIRST. This is a book of history, culture and mineralogy. It is not medical, psychological or therapeutic advice, it is not a substitute for care from a licensed professional, and it does not diagnose or treat anything. Nothing in these pages claims that any stone heals, cures, treats, relieves, prevents or affects any illness, symptom, mood or condition, and nothing here is offered as an alternative to medical care. Where this book reports that a person, a culture or a text held a belief about a stone, that is a statement about what was believed, by whom, and when — it is never a statement that the belief is true or that the stone does anything. There is no scientific evidence that crystals produce effects beyond placebo; a double-blind study by Christopher French and colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London, presented to the British Psychological Society in 2001, found that participants reported the same sensations from fake stones as from real ones. That finding is printed here because this book would rather tell you something less satisfying and true. What it can give you is who believed what, where, and in which century, with the source named — and what the object in your hand is actually made of. If you are unwell, see a clinician. Do not delay or stop any medical treatment because of anything you read here.
BEFORE YOU PUT A STONE IN WATER YOU INTEND TO DRINK. This book takes no position on whether gem water does anything. It takes a very clear position on what is in the glass. If a mineral contains arsenic, lead, copper or antimony as a principal element — realgar, orpiment, galena, crocoite, malachite, azurite, stibnite among others — then some of that element can pass into water in contact with it, and none of those metals has a safe intake. Cinnabar is named separately and on purpose: it is mercury sulfide, the mercury in it is not soluble and does not leach, and the reason it still does not go in a glass is the softness rule at the end of this notice, not the metals rule you have just read. If a mineral is a soluble sulfate or a soluble salt — selenite, satin spar and any other gypsum, halite, and the anhydrite sold as angelite — then part of the stone dissolves into the water, and in the case of anhydrite the stone also swells and breaks itself apart. If a mineral is soft, it sheds particles, and cinnabar at Mohs 2 to 2.5 is soft. None of these are beliefs; they are chemistry, and they apply whether or not the practice works. If you make gem water, use the indirect method: the stone in an outer vessel, the water in a sealed inner one, never in contact. Never grind a mineral into anything you intend to swallow. There is a published precedent for what happens when a tradition ingests minerals: Saper and colleagues, writing in JAMA in 2008, tested 193 Ayurvedic products bought over the internet and found detectable lead, mercury or arsenic in 20.7 per cent of them. If you have been drinking water that stood in contact with any of the stones named above, that is a conversation to have with a clinician, and this book is not one.
A NOTE ON HANDLING, BEFORE YOU BUY. Nothing in this book is dangerous sitting on a shelf, and it is not written to make you afraid of your own collection. The hazards in this hobby live in three verbs — grind, heat, swallow — and in a fourth, store closed, which applies only to the radioactive minerals. Never cut, sand, grind or polish any mineral dry: all mineral dust is bad to inhale, quartz included. Wash your hands after handling raw sulfides. Do not heat cinnabar, and if you are pregnant or may be, do not handle it at all. Keep realgar and orpiment dark, dry and dust-tight, because light converts them into a powder that is arsenic trioxide, and keep torbernite and autunite out of any lived-in room. This is safety information, not medical advice. If you believe you have been exposed to a heavy metal, that is a conversation with a clinician and not with a book.

The Keeping of Stones

Who Believed What About Each Stone, Where, and in Which Century — With the Source Named

  • 230 pages, 16 chapters, in four movements
  • Appendix A · Check Me — every source by author, work and date, public-domain ones marked
  • Appendix B · What I Could Not Verify — the claims this book refused to make, printed
  • Appendix C · Your Own Shelf — every action the book asks of you, on one page, ordered by damage, plus the stone index and the index of people and texts
  • Instant PDF. Phone, tablet, computer, or printed. Yours to keep.

$27

One PDF, 230 pages, delivered by email.

Get the book — $27

Secure checkout by Stripe. Instant download. 60-day Check Me Guarantee.

The Check Me Guarantee — 60 days

This book’s whole argument is that you should not have to take anyone’s word for anything, including mine. So the guarantee is the same shape.

Every source in it is named at the back, with its author, its work and its date, and the public-domain ones are marked so that checking them costs you nothing. Go and check one. Check ten. If a source does not say what this book says it says, or if after sixty days the book has not changed a single thing about how you keep your stones or what you say about them, email mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com from the address you used at checkout and you get every penny back. No form, no questions, no explaining yourself.

And you keep the files. Asking someone to return a PDF would be theatre, and you would still have read it.

Questions people ask before they buy

1 · Is this another A–Z list of what each crystal means?

No, and it would not be worth your $27 if it were. That product exists and it is given away free — one site hands out more than three hundred stones as a downloadable file. This book answers the other question, the one that comes second and never gets an answer: not what does it mean, but who said so, where, and in which century. Every belief in it carries a name and a date, and the source is printed so you can go and read it yourself.

2 · Is this book going to tell me that what I believe is a lie?

No. It takes no position on whether crystals work, it says so in the open in Chapter 1, in a section called What this book does not contain, and does not claim, and it holds that line for 230 pages.

Here is the honest version of why, so you know exactly what you are buying. Chapter 1 also reports one finding, once, in a section called One study, said once: a double-blind study presented to the British Psychological Society in 2001, in which eighty people meditated holding either real quartz or a fake, and both groups reported the same sensations at the same rate. That paragraph is not there to tell you that you have been fooled — the sensations in that experiment were real, in both groups. It is there because a book that hides the thing that costs it something is not a book you should trust with the other 230 pages. What that study speaks to is the mechanism, and mechanism is not this book’s subject. If somebody demonstrated tomorrow that quartz acts on a nervous system, not one date, source or number in here would change.

What you get instead is the ground that can actually be held: who believed it, where, when, and what the object in your hand is made of. Four things that are checkable, three of which the person laughing at you does not know, and none of which asks you to concede anything about your own experience.

3 · I saw a video that said the opposite of something in this book. Who is wrong?

Usually nobody, and this is worth saying plainly, because it is the most common reason a reader arrives here.

Most of this field’s advice has been copied forward for decades without a citation attached, so a creator working carefully today inherits a text with no way to check it — the same problem the readers of the standard books keep writing about in their reviews. When the good ones spot a gap, they say so: the biggest video in this niche about dangerous stones carries a pinned note from its own creator, explaining that he was talking about mining, cutting and grinding raw material, and that a finished, properly polished stone used as intended is a different context. That is exactly right, and it is exactly the distinction chapter 12 is built on.

This book’s contribution is narrower than being right: it prints where each claim came from, so you can settle it yourself instead of choosing which voice to trust. Where two sources genuinely disagree, it says so and names both. Where it could not find a source at all, that claim is in Appendix B, under the things it refused to print.

4 · Do you sell stones, or take a commission on any of them?

No. No shop, no affiliate links, no commission, and no trademarked variety invented for this book. It is worth asking, because the only writing that exists on what is fake and what is unsafe to handle is published by the shops that sell the stones. A minerals dealer telling you which minerals to avoid is doing you a favour with one hand and setting your shopping list with the other. This book has nothing to sell you but itself.

5 · Will it help me identify a stone when I don’t know what it is?

No, and it should be said clearly rather than fudged in the small print. This book will not teach you to name an unknown mineral by hardness, streak or crystal habit; it does not go outdoors, and there are no localities in it. In this book the stone has already been bought and is already in your house. What it does answer is the narrower question you probably wanted anyway: is this what they told me it was, and what was done to it before it reached me — dyed, heated, reconstituted, stabilised, resin, glass, or a ceramic magnet sold under a mineral’s name.

6 · I already own The Crystal Bible. Is this the same book again?

No, and the difference is structural rather than a matter of quality. Judy Hall’s book was built to answer which stone — two hundred entries, a page or less each, no room to argue any of them. Her publisher puts it past a million copies and sixteen languages, and a great many people needed exactly that. This one is built to answer says who, which takes essays rather than entries: sixteen chapters, four movements, and fifty-four pages of back matter naming where every claim came from. Two of the reviews quoted at the top of this page were written by her readers, asking for a footnote. This is the footnote.

7 · I have been doing this for thirty years. Is there anything in here I don’t already know?

Probably more than you would guess, because almost none of it has been in a crystal book before. That the oldest surviving European text on stones, from around 315 BC, is sober to the point of dryness and nearly free of magic. That Pliny recorded the amethyst belief in order to call it false, and the field has quoted him with the denunciation removed for two thousand years. That your birthstone comes from a jewelers’ convention in 1912, revised three times since. That the rainbow the chakra table hangs on was fixed in 1977. That several of the most-loved stones in your collection were first described between 1770 and 1868, which puts a firm ceiling on how ancient their traditions can be. And the whole material half — the hardness, the solubility, what salt does inside a porous stone, what is safe on a wrist and unsafe on a sanding disc — which no book written for this reader has ever carried.

8 · What do I actually get, and what if it is not for me?

A single PDF, 230 pages, delivered by email within a minute or two of payment, and a link that does not expire. It reads on a phone, a tablet or a computer, and it prints. There is no subscription, nothing recurring, and nothing else to buy — no volume two waiting behind a paywall. If you add The Keeping Cards at checkout, that is a second PDF in the same email. And if it does not do what this page says it does, the Check Me Guarantee runs for sixty days: one email to mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com and you get every penny back, keeping the files.

Somebody is going to ask you again

It will be at a table, with other people there, and it will not be a question. You know the vocabulary by now — how much money did you spend on all these rocks, when are you going to learn — and you know the three things you can say back, and that none of them was built for that particular moment.

This book does not hand you a better belief. It hands you the other half of the subject: that Theophrastus was sorting stones by how they behaved in fire around 315 BC; that Pliny wrote the amethyst story down in AD 77 in order to call it false; that in classical China the jade was never supposed to do anything to the wearer at all; that your birthstone was settled at a trade convention in August 1912; and that the rainbow on the chart was fixed in two publications of 1977.

None of that requires you to claim that any stone does anything. All of it is checkable, and almost nobody in the room has read a line of it. That is the asymmetry, and it is the only one you need.

The other half protects the stones. The amethyst comes off the windowsill tonight, the gypsum comes out of the water for good, and you find out in four seconds whether the hematite on your wrist is hematite.

The Keeping of Stones — 230 pages, 16 chapters, three appendices. $27.

Get the book — $27

Instant PDF. 60-day Check Me Guarantee. We do not sell stones.

Free: What the Water Actually Does

Five stones on your shelf that the standard cleansing advice ruins, and how to tell tonight whether you own them

Cover of the free twelve-page sheet, What the Water Actually Does

One practice, run end to end, over stones you already own — no purchase, nothing to identify, nothing you have to go and buy. Twelve pages.

Four methods circulate for cleansing and charging — water, salt, sun and moonlight — and this sheet takes the first one, because it is the one recommended first and most often and the one that takes the most out of the object. It takes no position on what cleansing and charging are or are not doing; a mineral cannot answer that. What it can settle is narrower and useful tonight: what water does to five particular stones, chosen for how likely they are to be in your house rather than for how alarming they sound.

So: the white piece with the silky shine, which is genuinely soluble, at how many grams per litre, and the temperature argument this hobby has the wrong way round. The pale blue one sold as angelite, which is not dissolving but swelling, and goes on forcing itself apart after the surface is dry — the stone most often recommended for a water charge, and the one that answers water worst. The pale blue cluster, where the damage arrives by handling rather than by chemistry. The green one with the banding, which gives copper up to whatever it stands in. And the brassy cubes, plus the gold flecks in your lapis, which keep reacting once they are damp and take the inside of the storage box with them.

Every one of the five carries a block called How you know you have one — color, shine, shape, and the form it is usually sold in — so you can walk your own shelf tonight without a loupe, a test kit or a name for anything. It closes with two jobs that take about ten minutes between them: make the tray of what never goes to the tap, and open the closed boxes, which is the one job that protects stones other than the one in your hand.

And it is one method and five stones on purpose. Salt and its three mechanisms, what actually fades in sunlight and the figure this book refuses to invent, moonlight, and the full table of every method against every stone are Chapter 11 of the book — What the Water Actually Does, which is where the sheet borrowed its title. The sheet tells you what not to do tonight. It does not tell you where a single thing you believe about those five stones came from.

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History, culture and mineralogy. Not medical advice and not a claim that crystals do anything. Full disclaimer inside.