Every stone in here was somebody's magic item at some point. People carried them for protection, for luck, to stay sober, to find north. Some of that was superstition. Some of it was physics they didn't have a word for yet. Each entry lists what was claimed, who claimed it, and whether it actually holds up.
Open the catalogueNo rock has ever changed a blood test. If someone tells you a crystal cured something, they're selling you something that doesn't exist. I'm not going to do that.
But people have carried these things for ten thousand years, on every continent, mostly without ever talking to each other, and it's not because everyone was stupid. Something you keep in your pocket and reach for when you're nervous does do something. That effect has a name, it's been measured over and over, and it's one of the most reliable findings in medicine. It's just not coming from the rock.
The placebo is real. Knowing it's a placebo doesn't fully turn it off, either. That's the weird part, and it's more interesting than pretending.
So here's how this works. I won't tell you what tourmaline does for your sleep. I will tell you that Dutch stone cutters in 1703 called it the ash-puller, because a warm crystal drags ash out of a pipe, and that they were right, because tourmaline is pyroelectric. I'll tell you the Greeks carved wine cups out of amethyst to stay sober, and that it never worked once, because it's silicon dioxide and it doesn't care what you're drinking.
Both of those are worth knowing. One's a real property and one's a nice mistake people kept making anyway. What you do with that is up to you.
Every entry keeps the measured facts and the attributed powers in separate boxes, and says where the stone came from. Most are bought in. A few times a year I sell a batch I dug myself, and those get marked.
The old claim turned out to be true. You can test it.
People believed it, sometimes for thousands of years. There's no mechanism.
Argued over, mistranslated, or a mix-up that stuck.
Raw stone, left the way it came out of the ground, with silver built around it.
Most crystal jewelry starts by cutting the stone down until it fits a setting somebody already made. I'm doing it the other way. The stone stays how it is and the silver gets made to fit it.
Claw, cage, bezel or wire, depending on the piece. Nothing gets cut, polished off or drilled. If a point's chipped or a face is cloudy, that stays. The idea is something you can wear that's still obviously a rock.
The first designs are based on the 1980s crystal device books, the ones with build plans for wands, headbands and pendants in copper and silver. The theory behind them is that a conductive metal amplifies whatever the stone is doing. That's a claim, so it gets a tag like everything else here.
The tradition also says some stones belong on your body and some belong in a room. Mostly that's lore. Sometimes it's tracking something real, and selenite is the best example I know. The rule for selenite is don't wear it, keep it in the room, and it never needs cleansing. The first two have a reason nobody wrote down. It's gypsum, hardness 2, you can scratch it with a fingernail and it dissolves in water. Wear it and you'll wreck it. The third rule has no history behind it at all.
Two out of three, for a rule that got handed down with no explanation. Every wearable entry will say whether it's for wearing or placing, with the same tags as everything else.
The van is how any of this happens.
I fix RVs for a living. Diesel diagnostics, 12 volt systems, the appliances that quit in the middle of nowhere. That job taught me the one thing this shop runs on, which is find out what's actually true before you tell anybody anything.
That's why the catalogue looks the way it does. I got tired of buying stones online and not being able to find out where they came from, whether the color was real, or if anyone had ever checked the claims on the listing. So I started looking the stories up and writing down what I could actually verify.
Most of what's here is bought in, from dealers and shows, traced back as far as the paper trail goes, and the entry says so. A few times a year I take the Sprinter out to a site that isn't on anybody's list and dig. Those come back as a small batch, get marked as field collected, and go fast because there are never many. Everything, dug or bought, gets cleaned, trimmed and wrapped by hand in Los Angeles on a bench I built to fold down and travel.
Ask me where something came from and you'll get a straight answer. Most of the time the answer is I bought it in, and that's on the label.
When something worth cataloguing comes in, the list sees it before anyone else, with the locality, the measurements, and whatever people used to think it did. Small batches, no schedule. If there's nothing to say I won't send anything.
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Every entry has the measured facts, the attributed powers with a tag on each one, where the stone came from, and whatever the label has to say about treatment. Photos are being shot to one standard and added as they get done.
The old claim turned out to be true. You can test it.
People believed it, sometimes for thousands of years. There's no mechanism.
Argued over, mistranslated, or a mix-up that stuck.