Terms
This site is operated by Mysteries Group LLC. It sells one thing: files you download and read. There is no shop, no shipment, no membership, no consultation and no stone changes hands here — we do not sell stones and never have. Buying a file means you accept what is on this page.
What you are buying
The Keeping of Stones is a 230-page PDF of sixteen chapters and three appendices. The Keeping Cards is a 70-page printable PDF: forty cards, one printable page each, plus the Color Index, the Collection Register and fifteen pages of sources. What the Water Actually Does is a free 12-page PDF. That is the whole catalogue.
- These are digital downloads. Nothing is printed, bound or posted to you, and no physical object of any kind ships.
- They are books, not a service. There is no course, no membership area, no login, no community, no coaching and no personal consultation attached to a purchase, and none is implied by anything on this site.
- They are not a professional opinion about your particular stone. We do not identify, authenticate, grade, appraise or value anything, and we do not answer what is this piece by email.
- You need a device that opens a PDF. There is no other technical requirement, and there is no digital rights management on the files.
Delivery
Payment is taken by Stripe. As soon as it clears, your browser lands on a delivery page that starts the download, and the same links go by email to the address you gave at checkout. Keep that email: it is how you get the files again on another device.
If nothing arrives within a few minutes, look in the promotions tab and the spam folder first. If it still is not there, write to mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com from any address and say roughly when you paid; the files go out by hand, usually the same day. A failed delivery is our problem to fix, not yours to prove.
Refunds — The Check Me Guarantee
Sixty days, and the guarantee has the same shape as the book. The whole argument of these pages is that you should not have to take anyone's word for anything, our own included: every source is named at the back with its author, its work and its date, and the public-domain ones are marked so that checking one costs you nothing.
So go and check one. Check ten. If a source does not say what the book says it says, or if by the sixtieth day the book has not changed a single thing about how you keep your stones or about what you can say about them, you get every penny back. Email mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com from the address you used at checkout, within sixty days of the purchase. No form, no questions and no explaining yourself.
Refunds go back to the card or account that paid, through Stripe, normally within a few business days of us processing them. You keep the files. Asking somebody to return a PDF would be theatre, and you would still have read it. This applies to both paid products, together or separately. The free sheet costs nothing and therefore has nothing to refund.
Prices, currency and tax
Prices are in US dollars and are shown before you pay. Stripe processes the payment and collects any sales tax or VAT it is required to collect for your location; that amount, if there is one, appears at checkout. We never see or store your card number. Prices can change for future buyers; a change never affects a purchase already made.
What you may do with the files
The purchase gives you a personal, non-transferable licence to use the files for yourself, for as long as you like:
- Read them on every device you own, and keep your own backups.
- Print them on paper for your own use. The cards are designed for exactly that, and the Collection Register is meant to be photocopied as many times as you need.
- Quote a passage, with the title credited, the way you would quote any book.
What the licence does not cover: reselling, giving away or sharing the files or your download links; uploading them anywhere public or to a file-sharing service; reproducing substantial parts of the text or the card layouts in another product, free or paid; or feeding them into a service that redistributes their content. The text, the layout and the covers stay the copyright of Mysteries Group LLC, 2026. Sources quoted inside the books belong to their own authors and publishers and are cited as such.
Editions and updates
The books carry a visible revision date, because a book that cites its sources has to be honest about when it was checked. If a correction or a new edition of a title you bought goes out during the twelve months after your purchase, it goes to the address you bought with, at no charge. After that there is no promise either way. Nothing here obliges us to keep any title on sale.
What these books are not, and what they do not contain
Said plainly, because the scope is the product:
- No medical, psychological or therapeutic advice, and no claim that any stone affects any illness, symptom, mood or condition. The full notice is below.
- No ruling on whether crystals work. These books take no position on that. They report who believed what, where, in which century, and with which source — and, separately, what the object is made of.
- No mineral identification. Nothing here will tell you what an unnamed stone is. There is no determinative key, and nothing asks you to scratch, weigh or test a piece to discover its identity. The Color Index in the cards finds a card by a name you were already given; it is a tab on a file, not a test.
- No valuations, no appraisals, no resale prices and no investment view on any stone, any collection or any market.
- No collecting sites and no field procedures. These books are about stones that are already in your house.
- No authorship credential. No laboratory, no gemological certification, no personal collecting experience and no audience are claimed anywhere. The authority is the citation, and the citation is printed so that you can go past us to the source.
Historical and cultural material is reported as history. Mineralogical figures — hardness, solubility, cleavage, temperature — are drawn from the published references named in each book and are given as general information about a species, not as a measurement of your particular piece.
The disclaimer, in full
This is the notice printed in the front of all three files, and it is word for word the wording the free sheet and the cards carry. The book’s own front page is a shade shorter: what this longer version states up front — that there is no evidence crystals act beyond placebo — the book reports once inside, in Chapter 1.
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.
Handling, and the three verbs
The notice that opens the toxicity chapter, in short form. The chapter itself is more specific than this page — it names respirable crystalline silica, its IARC Group 1 classification and silicosis — and the chapter is the one to read before you do anything to a stone that sitting on a shelf does not do to it. This is safety information about objects, and it is not medical advice.
Most of the stones in this chapter are not dangerous sitting on a shelf, and this book is not going to tell you to be afraid of your own collection. The danger in almost every case lives in three verbs — grind, heat, swallow — and in a fourth, store closed, which applies only to the radioactive minerals. A polished, sealed piece worn on the wrist is not the same object as the same mineral turned to dust on a dry sanding disc, and any source that treats them as one thing is not protecting you, it is only frightening you. What follows gives, for each stone, the route of exposure that is actually the problem. Wash your hands after handling raw sulfides. Never cut, sand, grind or polish any mineral dry — all mineral dust is bad to inhale, including quartz. Do not heat cinnabar. Keep realgar and orpiment dark, dry and dust-tight, because light converts them into a powder that is arsenic trioxide. Do not keep radioactive minerals such as torbernite or autunite in a bedroom, a closed cabinet or any lived-in room, because the hazard is radon accumulating in an enclosed space. If you are pregnant or may be, do not handle cinnabar at all: mercury crosses the placenta and the developing brain is the tissue most at risk. 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.
Water you intend to drink
The most serious safety notice in these books, reproduced here as Chapter 13 prints it, because the practice it describes is a live one. Cinnabar is kept off the leaching list on purpose and enters by the softness rule instead: mercury sulfide is among the least soluble compounds known and does not leach, which is a finding with a source behind it (Paquette and Helz, 1995) and not a softening of the warning — the stone stays out of the glass either way.
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.
How these books were made, and what they are not selling
This book has nothing to sell you but itself. There are no affiliate links in it, no shop behind it, no commission on any stone 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 you can recognise it, never so that you buy a particular alternative from a particular seller. 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.
Sources, cultures and what we would not print
Where this book describes what a culture believed, it names the text, the author or the excavation, and the date. Where a belief is attributed to a living tradition without a source I could locate, this book says so rather than repeating it. Several claims commonly made about Native American, Persian and Inuit beliefs about stones fall into that category and are listed at the back under What I Could Not Verify.
If you think something in these pages is wrong, or that a source has been read badly, write and say so. Corrections that hold up go into the next revision, and the revision date on the file changes with them.
Liability
The files are sold as they are. We stand behind the sourcing — that is what the guarantee above is for — but no book can promise a result, and nothing here is a warranty that any particular stone, seller, label or piece of care advice will turn out as described. You decide what to do with your own property.
To the fullest extent the law allows, Mysteries Group LLC is not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from the use of these files, and any liability we do have is limited to what you paid for them. Nothing in these terms limits liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited — and nothing in them takes away a statutory consumer right you have where you live.
Children
This site is not directed at children under 13, and nothing here is written for a child to act on. Some of the minerals described are genuinely unsafe to grind, heat, swallow or store in a closed room; if there are children in the house, the handling notice above is the part to read first.
Changes, law and contact
If these terms change, the date at the top changes with them, and the version in force is the one published when you bought. These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and of the state in which Mysteries Group LLC is organised, without affecting mandatory consumer protections in your own country or state.
Mysteries Group LLC · mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com. One person reads that address and answers it. See also our Privacy page.