Earth, Plant & Stone

This section covers the belief that matter and place carry meaning — that a stone can hold a quality, a plant can be chosen by its appearance, a hill can be a threshold, and a room can be arranged rightly or wrongly.

It is the most commercially active territory on the site, and the one where the difference between a tradition and a product is hardest to see. It is also where the most physical harm happens. Plants are pharmacologically active, which is exactly why they have been used as medicine for as long as there have been people — and exactly why some of them will damage your kidneys or interact with your prescriptions. Nothing here is instruction, and every page that touches health says so.

The material divides into three rough strands, and they have very different evidential positions.

Practices that encode real observation in metaphysical vocabulary. Some feng shui principles produce buildings that are pleasant to be in. Forest bathing turns out to describe something measurable about time spent among trees. The explanation offered may be wrong while the practice is not.

Practices that are much younger than they claim. Modern crystal healing is largely a twentieth-century construction rather than an ancient inheritance, and the Western form of feng shui differs substantially from the Chinese one. Where a lineage has been invented or rearranged, this section says so — not to debunk it, but because a practice presenting itself as five thousand years old is making a claim that can be checked.

Practices belonging to living peoples. Smudging, sacred sites and ceremonial plant use are not free-floating techniques. They are described here at a public level, from sources within those traditions, with no instruction.

The Lithotheque

Alongside the articles, this section holds the Lithotheque — 150 records of stone and metal, from quartz to the seven metals of alchemy.

Each one gives the chemistry, the crystal system, the hardness, how it forms, whether it is safe to handle and where it comes from. Two things are checked rather than asserted. What it actually is is verified against the master list of the International Mineralogical Association, and the results are worth seeing: a large share of the names the crystal trade sells are not mineral species at all. And when the meaning attached to it was invented is recorded as a date, from classical antiquity to a social media surge in 2021.

It is organised around the material and never around the intention: you can look up a stone, and there is deliberately no way to browse by property, chakra or birth month. Browse the 150 →

Medicinal plant use used to sit in this section and now has its own: Herb & Remedy covers the four major traditions, the evidence, and the toxicology, because it had outgrown a shelf here and because it is the material most likely to hurt someone.

Start anywhere. If you are going to read one page before doing anything, make it crystals — not because it is the most dangerous thing here, but because it is the clearest example of how a lineage gets invented.