silicates
Charoite
(K,Sr,Ba,Mn)15-16(Ca,Na)32[Si70(O,OH)180](OH,F)4·nH2O
- Crystal system
- monoclinic
- Hardness
- 5–6 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- vitreous
- Colour
- Lilac to deep violet, swirled and fibrous
- Where it forms
- In a single locality, where a syenite intrusion metamorphosed limestone under unusual chemical conditions.
- Chiefly from
- Murun massif, Sakha Republic, Russia
Why it is that colour
Manganese. The swirling fibrous texture is characteristic and essentially unmistakable.
Safety
Safe to handle.
Where it comes from
A single deposit in remote Siberia, near the Chara river. Extraction is limited and the material is genuinely finite; the Russian authorities have restricted output at various points.
Historical use
None. It is a mineral that entered the world in 1978.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
What is attributed to it, and since when
Described in 1978. It has no history of any kind before then, and everything attributed to it dates from the 1980s and later.
Described, not endorsed. Dating a claim is not the same as assessing it — but an association that first appears in a book published in 1985 is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the label says. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the stone doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Worth knowing
Charoite is the cleanest possible test of whether stone meanings are discovered or assigned, because it has a birth certificate. It was described scientifically in 1978, from one deposit in Siberia, and before that date no human tradition anywhere had any relationship with it.
It now carries a full complement of metaphysical properties, presented in the same register as those attached to lapis lazuli, which has been traded for six thousand years. The properties arrived within roughly a decade of the mineral becoming purchasable.
That is not an argument that they mean nothing to the people who hold them. It is an argument about where they came from.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.