Why Are Rocks and Minerals Called Crystals?

What Are Crystals?

In recent years, the word 'crystals' has become a blanket term for rocks, minerals, and other materials associated with alternative therapies such as crystal healing.

In geology, the word has a more precise meaning. A crystal is a solid whose atoms are arranged in an orderly, repeating pattern. A terminated quartz crystal is perhaps the form most people visualise when they hear the word, although crystals occur in many different shapes and sizes.

Crystals in the scientific sense are extremely common. Ice is crystalline water, ordinary sugar consists of crystals of sucrose, and much of the world's sand consists of grains of crystalline quartz.

The word 'crystal' is also used by Swarovski for what is essentially manufactured glass. Lead crystal is also a type of glass usually made with lead oxide. Neither is crystalline in the geological sense.

In the metaphysical and crystal-healing market, the meaning has broadened much further. Rocks, minerals, gemstones, geodes, carvings such as spheres and towers, and even manmade materials such as goldstone and opalite are routinely grouped together under the general heading of 'crystals'.

So how did one word come to describe such a wide range of completely different materials?

The Spread of the Word Crystals

The modern use of 'crystals' is closely associated with the New Age movement, which grew rapidly during the 1970s and 80s.

New Age spirituality brought together a wide variety of beliefs and practices. Meditation, astrology, alternative medicine, reincarnation, Eastern philosophies, channeling, and other forms of spiritual exploration were often combined rather than treated as separate traditions.

By 1987, Time magazine was reporting on the growing American fascination with what it called 'crystal consciousness', describing the belief that quartz, citrine, tourmaline, amethyst and other stones possessed paranormal healing and restorative powers.

Another Time report from the same year noted that the number of New Age bookshops in the United States had doubled in five years and that advertisements for 'healing yourself with crystals' appeared regularly in New Age magazines.

The phenomenon was sufficiently widespread for The New Yorker to describe crystals as the 'hot cosmic commodity of the moment', noting that rock shops once frequented by young geology enthusiasts were now attracting psychics, healers and other followers of New Age beliefs.

The Los Angeles Times reported people running their hands over crystals to find those they believed had the 'right vibrations'.

By this point, the association between crystals, alternative healing and New Age spirituality was clearly well established.

Melody - Love Is in the Earth

A number of books helped organise and popularise the beliefs surrounding crystals. Katrina Raphaell's Crystal Enlightenment, published in 1985, was an early influential guide. It discussed crystals and gemstones as tools for healing, meditation, spiritual development and what it described as 'crystal energies'.

Then came Melody, whose Love Is in the Earth became one of the most extensive reference works on the metaphysical properties attributed to rocks and minerals.

Her work went far beyond a small guide to popular stones. An expanded version of Love Is in the Earth: A Kaleidoscope of Crystals, published in 1995, was 726 pages long. Remarkably, it didn't contain a single photograph of the stones.

In 2007, The Crystal and Mineral Encyclopedia, also by Melody, was 965 pages. It covered more than 1,400 minerals and featured more than 1,400 photographs.

What makes Melody particularly interesting is the way her books combine genuine mineralogical information with metaphysical claims. Later publications include chemical information alongside astrological associations and even 'numerical vibrations' assigned to more than 1,300 crystals and minerals.

Melody is repeatedly presented as a scientist with degrees in mathematics. However, despite the enormous influence of her books, I have not been able to find any independent information about her academic background. She published under the single name Melody, and biographies repeat that she held a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Arts in mathematics, but they don't identify the universities she attended, when she graduated or any scientific or mathematical work she subsequently carried out.

That's unusual for such an influential and successful author, particularly one whose scientific background is repeatedly cited as part of her authority.

That doesn't mean her qualifications were not genuine, but I have found no way of independently verifying them from the information currently available. More importantly, even if accepted at face value, qualifications in mathematics would not establish expertise in mineralogy, physics or medicine. Nevertheless, describing the author as a scientist may have made claims about crystal energies and 'numerical vibrations' sound considerably more authoritative.

Melody didn't invent the idea that crystals possess particular vibrations. That belief is considerably older.

Crystal Energy Fields and Vibrations

One of the most interesting discoveries is that the language now associated with crystal healing can be traced back well before the New Age movement.

William Thomas and Kate Pavitt's The Book of Talismans, Amulets and Zodiacal Gems, first published in 1914, discussed what the authors believed to be the psychic and magnetic influence of gemstones. Their explanations included the idea that gems could transmit forces and 'vibrations'.

They described an experiment with lapis lazuli in which a person supposedly detected vibrations coming from within the stone.

That language sounds remarkably familiar because variations of the same idea continue to appear in crystal-healing literature more than a century later.

Another important figure was American psychic Edgar Cayce. In readings during the first half of the twentieth century, Cayce attributed particular vibrations to gemstones. One reading described the vibrations of pearl as healing and creative, while another claimed that ruby and diamond could influence the vibrations of the human body.

Later, these older occult ideas were mixed with the language of modern science. That is where claims about atomic vibration, frequency, energy and piezoelectricity enter the story. These are genuine scientific concepts that are often used to support metaphysical claims that the science doesn't support.

The confusion is easy to understand. Search online for terms such as 'crystal vibrations', and you'll find genuine scientific articles explaining that crystals vibrate. The problem is that scientists are referring to the movement of atoms within a crystal lattice, not to a healing frequency that can engage with an energy field.

For a casual reader, especially someone who already believes crystals have metaphysical properties, a highly technical scientific article could seem to confirm what they already believe without requiring them to understand the physics. The statement that science has proven there are vibrations within crystals is true, but the meaning of 'vibration' has changed completely by the time it reaches crystal-healing literature.

The Success of Judy Hall's Crystal Bible

The next important book was Judy Hall's The Crystal Bible, published in 2003.

Unlike the enormous reference works produced by Melody, Hall's book was compact, highly illustrated and easy to use. Readers could look up a stone and immediately find information about its appearance, as well as its purported spiritual, emotional and physical properties.

According to its publisher, the original Crystal Bible sold more than one million copies worldwide, and Judy Hall's work has been translated into sixteen languages.

The original book covered more than 150 crystals. It was followed by The Crystal Bible 2 in 2009 and The Crystal Bible 3 in 2013.

By the time The Crystal Bible appeared, the use of 'crystals' as a general term was already firmly established. The book did not create the terminology, but its extraordinary reach helped to expose the language and beliefs of crystal healing to a much larger audience.