Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez  and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #30 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Jet crystal meanings, including:

Working with Jet Crystals during the Full & New Moons

Adopting the 'less is more' approach with Jet crystal energy

Jet's historical significance, including its connection to queer identities in the ancient world

 

Tune in now for a deeper look at Jet crystal meanings!

 

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.

 

Kyle Perez: Hello, and welcome to another crystal confab. Today, we're staying with another, not necessarily ‘gemstone-gemstone’, and I'm joined by Adam and Nicholas, and we're going to dive into Jet. How many of you love a bit of Jet action?

 

Nicholas Pearson: I've grown fond of it over the years.

 

Adam Barralet: Yeah. Me too. I think one of the really interesting things a lot of people find is just tactile-wise, how it feels so different to a crystal. And, you know, one of the problems I think all of us probably get is people sending pictures or trying to identify what this crystal is. And the great thing about when it comes to black crystals, Jet is so much lighter.

 

So if it's a really, really light crystal, then it's going to be really, really easy to go up that Jet type of thing. So that's one thing. But I, you know, I've had experiences and I'll share them later on about just the tactileness of Jet is really, really nice. But, I believe it's been used for a long, long time and has a really great history about it as well. And who better to tell us about the history than Nicholas?

 

Nicholas: Yeah. This is one of those rocks that I think we can trace approximately 30,000 years of human use of. Going back a really long time. In, you know, the earliest instances, people didn't necessarily make the strong geological distinction between Jet and related materials. Kennel coal and lignite and sometimes black shale were treated very similarly.

 

So we kinda have to have a little grace in interpreting the data. But it is a stone that is inherently in between, and I find that really magical. One of the most important sources for Jet in the ancient world was in Whitby and what is now modern day Whitby in Yorkshire. I have a bit of Whitby Jet here from the coast of England, and it is my favorite piece in my collection, of very few pieces of Jet. But I think it is really marvelous to imagine that particularly during the Roman occupation of Britain, this material was traded across thousands upon thousands of miles.

 

We find evidence of Whitby Jet carvings in faraway Switzerland and Germany, as well as in Rome proper. So this was a commodity that was traded for a very long time. In other parts of the world where Jet can be found, we find similarly ancient uses of it. But when this kind of Romano British center production was in full swing about thirty five hundred years ago, Jet seemed to acquire, if we read between the lines, a number of uses that are a little bit weird, a little queer, we might even say. And one of my favorite examples is, the remains of a a skeleton found in a a Roman period burial.

 

The skeleton is officially known as skeleton six five two, because we don't have names and dates and ages for all of these figures. And there are a lot of confusing data points about this. This person was interred with a lot of very lavish expensive funeral goods, including jewelry, but they were buried in the part of the cemetery that you would put people who were on the outskirts, the fringe, the beggars, the thieves. So we have a little bit of contradictory information there. When this area was being excavated for the first time, doing, osteological analysis,