The Lithotheque

A lithotheque is a reference collection of stone. Archaeologists keep real ones — drawers of catalogued rock from known sources, held so that an unidentified flake from a dig can be laid next to a known sample and named. The point of such a collection is comparison. You bring it a thing and it tells you what the thing is.

That is what this is, and it is organised on the same principle as the Herbarium: around the material, never around what somebody wants from it. There is no way here to look up a stone by intention, property, chakra or birth month. That absence is deliberate and it is the whole design. A catalogue arranged by what a stone is for has already agreed that it is for something.

Two questions, asked of everything

What is it, actually? Every entry is checked against the master list of the International Mineralogical Association's Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification — the body that decides what counts as a mineral species. The result is more interesting than expected: a large share of the names the crystal trade sells are not mineral species at all. Amethyst and citrine are colour varieties of quartz. Labradorite is a composition in the middle of a feldspar series whose intermediate names the IMA discarded in 1988. Nephrite is a rock. Moldavite is glass. Jade is a trade name covering two unrelated minerals. Opalite is manufactured.

None of that is a gotcha. It is simply what the material is, and no one selling it tends to mention it.

When was the meaning invented? Each entry records the earliest period its metaphysical association can be traced to, from a fixed list — classical, medieval, Theosophical, New Age, internet era. This is a date, not a verdict, and it varies enormously. Amethyst against drunkenness is genuinely Greek and the Greek is still visible in the word: amethystos, "not intoxicated". A great deal of the rest of the modern system arrives in a small number of books published between about 1972 and 1991. Moldavite's fame is traceable to a surge on social media in 2021.

Recording the date does the work that arguing never does. An association first written down in 1985 may still mean something to the person holding the stone. It is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the card in the box says.

Two things worth being blunt about

Some of these are genuinely poisonous. Cinnabar is mercury sulfide. Realgar and orpiment are arsenic. Galena is lead. Autunite and torbernite are radioactive, and both are sold online to collectors. Instructions for "crystal elixirs" — leave the stone in water overnight, drink the water — circulate widely and almost never mention any of this. Every entry here carries a toxicity rating for that reason. Do not put a stone in water you intend to drink, and do not put one in your mouth.

The supply chain is not clean. Most stones sold for wellbeing are mined, frequently as by-products of industrial extraction or by small-scale operations with little oversight. Investigations into mica in Madagascar and India have documented child labour; comparable concerns attach to cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and to jade in Myanmar. Where something specific is known about how a material reaches the market, the entry says so.

The wider argument about whether any of this does anything is not repeated on every page. It is made once, properly, in crystals and crystal healing. These pages describe the stone.

Why so much of this is marked untested, and why people persist anyway

Read straight through, both collections can look bleak: a great many entries say the trials are mixed, or absent, or negative. It is worth saying plainly why that is not the whole picture.

Some of it is that nobody has looked — "untested" is not a finding, and for most of the world's plants no one has ever run a trial. Some of it is that the thing being tested is genuinely hard to test: a herbal preparation is not a defined molecule, and two samples of the same species can differ by an order of magnitude in what is actually in them.

And some of it is that people are reporting something real that is not coming from the material. Expectation, ritual, attention and the act of taking your own difficulty seriously produce measurable effects with identifiable mechanisms — this is the placebo effect properly understood, and it is neither imaginary nor an insult to anyone experiencing it. What it is, precisely, is covered in the placebo effect and the meaning response, which is worth reading before drawing conclusions from anything here.

The one thing it does not license is inferring what a substance does from how somebody felt after taking it. That is what the evidence column is for, and it is why these records keep the two apart.