Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez  and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #31 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Chiastolite crystal meanings, including:

Working with Chiastolite Crystals during Samhain & Beltane

Harnessing Higher Truth with Chiastolite

The history of cross-stones and the magic of the crossroads

Tune in now for a deeper look at Chiastolite meaning!

 

Podcast Episode Transcript:

Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren't sure how to use them? Join four crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for a casual chat about all things crystals.

 

Nicholas Pearson: Hello, and welcome back to Crystal Confab. It's Nicholas, and I'm joined by Adam and Kyle. Our crystal bestie, Ashley, is elsewhere in the universe today, and she'll be joining us again soon. And this week, we have, I think, another really underappreciated gemstone that we're gonna be confabbing about, and this is a stone that I think is probably pretty recognizable. Maybe fewer people can pronounce its name or spell it, and even fewer have worked with it.

 

And that stone is Chiastolite, which is a really fascinating stone that has been confused with some other stuff throughout history. No surprise there. And it's a variety of a mineral species called andalusite. I happen to know that Kyle's a big fan of andalusite more generally speaking. So what do you have to tell us about this mineral species?

 

Kyle Perez: Well, of course, I was introduced to andalusite doing my gemology degree. You have to cover pleochroic stones, and andalusite is like the poster child of pleochroism in minerals. As you can see, it has this kind of innocuous brown color, but when they are cut and faceted correctly and you see the light correctly through them, they show the traffic light system of colors, yellow, red, and green or like an amber color. And it is incredible that you can turn this stone one way to another and see these incredible colors shift and change. And I was drawn into it immediately, and I find it incredible to shift our perspective.

 

I think anything pleochroic has that ability to perspective shift, and it helps you to see practical ways of looking at things, energetic ways of looking at things, and kind of cerebral ways of looking at things. It really gives us the ability to look at things in many ways and from many angles and that's why I really love it and that's why I think it leads into and is incredible with Chiastolite or ‘Chiastolite’ as it is supposed to be pronounced.

 

Adam Barralet: I'd love to actually just bring that up. I've always said Chiastolite, but it's the correct Chiastolite, is it Nicholas?

 

Nicholas: Historically, yes. So it's taken from the Greek letter, which in English, we often say Kai, but would be kind of a really guttural sound closer to that in Greek. So is marked with an x or shaped like an x, which is how it gets its name.

 

Adam: I love that. And it is a really interesting stone, is it? Because normally when it's cut and this is how we find a cut the most, it's, you know, that beautiful brown stone, really interesting having that black cross throughout it.

 

Nicholas: Yeah. And that phenomenon has attracted quite a lot of attention over the years. So the earliest textual references, we have to things objects just called cross stones appear in the very late, fifteenth century, so toward the end of the 14 hundreds. And around this time frame, we might encounter an occasional illustration, and they're mostly just pebbles that are crisscrossed with veins of quartz or calcite in them, and they were known as cross stones or some version of that. There's like a million permutations of this name, lapis crucifer, from lapis meaning stone and prox brass, ferere, tecere, so literally cross bearing stone.

 

We have lapis cruciatis. We've got the crucis lapillo,