March 17, 2025 • 53 mins
Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #24 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Red Garnet meaning, including:
Red Garnet for tuning into Mabon energies
Powerful & protective nurturing with Red Garnet
Red Garnet's connection to Goddess Brigid
The chemistry and energy of Red Garnet
Tune in now for a deeper look at Red Garnet meaning!
Podcast 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 crystal confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.
Kyle Perez: Hello, and welcome to another Crystal Confab. I'm Kyle, the Crystalline Mage, and I'm joined by Ashley Leavy, Nicholas Pearson, and Adam Barralet, my crystal besties as we confab about a different crystal every single week. Now this mineral in particular, I would argue we all have a very good relationship with. I think everyone loves a bit of this, and this is, of course, our red garnet. Red garnet has few different variations, and we're going to dive straight into Nicholas who's going to share a bit of the chemistry, a bit of the magic, and a bit of the energy that it entails.
Nicholas Pearson: So I wanna preface this by saying I'm as we've probably discussed in the past, I'm like an Uber Capricorn. I've got a big stellium there. I'm a January baby. Garnet is my birthstone. I'm also red-green colorblind.
I have never been excited about a red garnet in my life. And I'd heard that there were such things as green garnets and never laid my eyes on them. You know, I'd seen orangey reds and pinky reds, but it was mostly the dull, earthy, browny kind of reds that I just don't think my eyes perceive that color well. So I grew up not loving my birthstone, a story that sounds similar to others out there. And when I was a freshman at university and I started working for the Earth Science Museum, I found out that garnets could come in other colors, not just kind of, you know, green was an option and then variations on red, but they actually came in a a wide variety, and it dealt a lot with their chemistry and trace elements and things.
And I was really mystified to learn that unlike quartz, which comes in so many different colors but is fundamentally the same substance, garnets are a whole family. In fact, they're like two two series that share a common element, and it blew my mind. Furthermore, that particular year, this would be, like, early, maybe mid two thousands, the discovery of the Japanese rainbow andro garnets from Tenkawa Mine in Nara Prefecture was just blowing up all over the place. It was on the front of, like, Rockin' Gym and the neurological journal. And the museum I worked for, of course, got all these publications, and I saw this vivid multicolored thing.
And I was like, what is this? And my boss goes, oh, well, those are the Japanese rainbow garnets. You like rocks. Really, you've heard about these. They're everywhere.
I'm like, I know nothing. So I learned everything I could about garnet. It turns out at that point, the textbook said garnet came in every color of the rainbow except blue. Not long later, I found better, better data, more up to date information that said garnets could come in every color of the rainbow except blue garnets were usually microgarnets, and they were found in things like kimberlite pipes. And they were good indicators if you're looking at thin sections under polarizite that you might have diamonds nearby.
So you wanted to find them. They just weren't exciting to look at. And then sometime in the last decade, there was a find in Tanzania. I don't know how well this is gonna show up on camera, but blue garnets exist. They're kind of more blue violet than, like, a true blue.
But my white whale is out there in college.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:03):
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 crystal
confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.
Hello, and welcome to another crystal confab. I'm
Karl, the Crystal Lane Mage, and I'm joined
(00:24):
by Ashley Laby, Nicholas Pearson, and Adam Barreley,
my crystal besties as we confab
about a different crystal every single week. Now
this mineral in particular,
I would argue we all have a very
good relationship
with. I think everyone loves a bit of
this, and this is, of course, our red
garnet.
(00:44):
Red garnet has few different variations, and we're
going to dive straight into Nicholas who's going
to share a bit of the chemistry, a
bit of the magic, and a bit of
the energy that it entails.
So I wanna preface this by saying
I'm as as we've probably discussed in the
past, I'm like an Uber Capricorn. I've got
a big stellium there. I'm a January baby.
(01:05):
Garnet is my birthstone.
I'm also red green colorblind. I have never
been excited about a red garnet in my
life.
And I'd I'd heard that there were such
things as green garnets and never laid my
eyes on them. You know, I'd seen orangey
reds and pinky reds, but it was
mostly the dull, earthy, browny kind of reds
(01:26):
that I just don't my eyes don't perceive
that color well. So I grew up
not loving my birthstone,
a story that sounds similar to to others
out there.
And when I was a freshman at university
and I started working for the Earth Science
Museum,
I
found out that garnets could come in other
(01:48):
colors, not just kind of, you know, green
was an option and then variations on red,
but they actually
came in a a wide variety, and it
dealt a lot with their chemistry
and trace elements and things.
And and I was really mystified
to learn that
unlike quartz, which comes in so many different
(02:09):
colors but is fundamentally the same substance,
garnets are a whole family. In fact, they're
they're like two
two series that share a a common element,
and it blew my mind. Furthermore,
that particular year, this would be, like, early,
maybe mid two thousands,
(02:29):
the discovery of the Japanese rainbow andro garnets
from,
Tenkawa Mine in Nara Prefecture
was just
blowing up all over the place. It was
on the front of, like, Rockin' Gym and
the neurological journal.
And the museum I worked for, of course,
got all these publications, and I saw this
vivid multicolored thing. And I was like, what
(02:51):
is this? And my boss goes, oh, well,
those are the Japanese rainbow garnets.
You like rocks. Really, you've heard about these.
They're everywhere. I'm like, I know nothing.
So I learned everything I could about garnet.
It turns out at that point, the textbook
said garnet came in every color of the
rainbow except blue.
Not long later, I found better better data,
more up to date
(03:12):
information that said garnet could come in every
color of the rainbow except blue garnets were
usually microgarnets, and they were found in things
like kimberlite pipes. And they were good indicators
if you're looking at thin sections under polarizite
that you might have diamonds nearby. So you
wanted to find them. They just weren't exciting
to look at.
And then
sometime in the last decade, there was a
(03:33):
find in Tanzania.
I don't know how well this is gonna
show up on camera, but,
blue garnets exist.
They're kind of more blue violet than, like,
a true blue.
But my my white whale is out there
in college. I convinced myself when I changed
degrees to earth and environmental science, I was
gonna discover blue blue garnets and name them
(03:54):
after myself.
No. I failed. Someone else got there, thankfully,
because I I I was never gonna fund
that trip. But it has always gotten me
really
interested in how garnets work.
So,
garnets, because they are a family
of of two closely related series, there's quite
(04:15):
a bit of variation, not just in color,
but also in chemistry.
They belong to a category of silicate minerals
that we call mesosilicates,
which are island silicates. You've got, like, a
blob of silica surrounded by what feels like
a sea of metals.
And and because we don't get the hollow
framework or a complex sheet or
(04:35):
a ring like we find in so many
other silicates,
there's there's a lot of dense stuff packed
around that that silica. And so garnets, like
many mesosilicates,
are very, very heavy.
The way their their molecules come together,
they form in the isometric
or the cubic crystal system, which means that
they have the
(04:56):
the least bending of light. What what you
see is what you get. They it can
it can have a higher refractive index in
other ways. In fact, maybe I'll I'll mention
something fabulous about one of my favorite garnets.
But
the the real magic for me doesn't come
in examining their relationship with light because they're
not gonna do what
our our other crystal systems do. It's it's
(05:18):
looking at the complexity
of their makeup. So most of the red
garnets that we know belong to what's called
the pyralspite
series, which is just a funny word made
out of pyropia, almandine, and spessartine,
stuck together with -ite on the end because
that's how we do rocks,
as opposed to our ugrandite series, which is
the uvaroic, grossular, and androdyte. But, you know,
(05:40):
grossular form the bridge between the two. We
we can honorarily kinda stick them with both.
And our,
pyropia, almandine, and spacerteine group is where we're
gonna get most of the reds, but also
pinks and oranges and occasionally a few other
colors here or there, but, you know, it
tends toward the the reddish side of the
spectrum versus the yellow green side of the
(06:01):
spectrum.
And a lot of our garnets are formed
through one of two processes,
liquid magmatic, which means molten rock cools.
We see it in garnets. One of the
one of the reasons that we picked this
house to rent,
was the jumbo, and I mean jumbo garnet
that is in the granite countertop in our
(06:21):
kitchen. There is one
major garnet, and I saw it and said,
okay. I think I could live here. And,
you know, we find smaller bits of them
everywhere.
But the the other kind of category of
their their birth,
the ones that I think are a little
bit more geologically interesting, are those that are
made by metamorphic processes.
These are tertiary minerals. They're, you know, bent
(06:43):
and broken down. We often find them in
things like schist, which is what we've got
here, some almandine schist. So it's sparkly from
all of the mica, and then those
bright red garnets kinda get squished out of
it. And they appear to be grains
inside
that that host rock.
But when we start to examine
(07:06):
all of these things, like,
together, like telling the story of garnets,
most of the time with silicates, we get
these kind of expansive,
open minded, open
flowing,
we might say amplifying kind of energies, but
the denseness of garnet, thanks to it being
a mesosilicate with all those heavy metals in
there, lots of manganese and iron and sometimes
(07:27):
magnesium with our red garnets,
they're gonna confer a little more stability. They're
a little bit more anchoring. When we see
the presence
of stability. They're a little bit more anchoring.
When we see the presence of, like, iron
and manganese in particular,
those minerals tend to feel a little bit
more fiery and earthy at the same time.
That structure of that island, that silica,
(07:50):
is going to give us resistance to outside
forces. There's a there was a German lithotherapist
by the name of Michael Ginger.
When I was in college, I fell in
love with his work because he was a
geologist first and then went the crystal healing
route because he started to see trends and
started to map those trends out. And he
tells us that, nezo silicates, like garnets, grant
resistance to outside forces and encourage us to
(08:11):
structure our lives according to our ideal vision.
You know, think of it as like the
the defense you get by having your own
deserted island, and then you get to make
that your paradise. I think that's maybe a
good metaphor for how that might work.
I think of them as representing individuality. They
help us stay true to our beliefs. They
help us
really get a clear picture of what our
(08:33):
ideals can look like, and they also address
feelings of isolation. Any one little blob of
silica appears to be separate, but it's actually
not separated by an expanse of that sea
of metal ions, but
they bridge
those separate
islands of silica. So we can work with
mesosilicates to kind of get that that magic
(08:55):
coming in.
When we take a look at our red
garnets that are, you know, rich in
things like magnesium and aluminum or iron and
aluminum or some combination of the two,
with or without manganese,
we we see at once a kind of
earthy stabilizing influence as well as this really
centering kind of heart centered quality that they
(09:16):
bring.
Whether they're born of, you know, cooling molten
rock or by
regional metamorphism where we've got mountains
formed by the crashing together of crustal plates.
There is a kind of heat in in
the birth of them that also lends us
fire, creativity, and inspiration
to what garnet brings.
(09:37):
And so over the years, I've I've really
grown to appreciate them. I have a small
collection of here's a a natural garnet from
India. This one comes from, like, a biotype
matrix. It actually got little bits of mica
in there. So this is one of metamorphic
processes.
Some almending garnets in feldspar.
Some comes from out west here in The
States from California.
(09:59):
Of course, we've got, you know, things like
rosolar, which comes in so many colors and
and varieties.
We've got our our black androdites, which are,
colored by trace amounts of titanium and other
stuff.
But my other, like, truly, truly weird garnet,
like, you have to do a double take,
(10:19):
are these guys. They're sometimes referred to as
leuco garnets, and they are colorless.
This is near
pure
grossular garnet. So there's there's
just a tiny, tiny trace amount of manganese
in there,
which which makes it do something most garnets
won't do, and it will fluoresce under ultraviolet
light. Because there's so little manganese, it acts
(10:41):
as a fluorescent
activator too much, and it it quenches that.
It also gives us brighter colors. So,
I've I've over the years learned to appreciate
the kind of individuation
of every different species and varietal of garnet.
And,
you know, garnets sometimes surprise us. They they
come in colors we don't expect. Some garnets
(11:02):
will attract to strong enough magnets because of
their metallic ions that are present.
And then we also get beautiful displays of
light like our rainbow androdites or our demantoid,
another variety of androdites, so named for its
diamond like brilliance,
vivid green, so green. I can appreciate it.
And they outperform diamond.
So, yeah, I think garnets are really magical.
(11:23):
I warmed up to them over the years.
All it all it took was that photograph
on the cover of Rock and Gem or
the Mineralogical Journal, whichever it was twenty years
ago, and I've I've been a garnet fan
ever since.
So I wanna say I got one of
those actually, a few very tiny of those
Japanese rainbow garnets, and they are
(11:44):
phenomenal
stones to work with. There is something so
uplifting and so inspiring about them, and they
are quite hard to find now.
Still possible to find for sure, but they're
a little pricey.
And, you know, if you want one of
any decent size,
expect to pay, like, a small fortune because
they're they're highly collectible at this point.
(12:07):
But I was
sitting here kind of listening and and thinking
about what you were saying, Nicholas, and going
through all these different amazing
varietals of garnet that we have available to
us. And I wanna sort of pose a
question to the group.
Like, when you work with, say, red garnet,
do you are you specific and intentional
(12:29):
about what type of garnet you're working with?
Because so often, we're looking in our crystal
books. We're we're reading articles online, and and
someone will just say red garnet. Red garnet
for this or that or whatever. And same
thing sometimes, green garnet for this or that.
But we have so many different varieties.
Does it matter? If so, why? And if
(12:51):
you were gonna have a go to red
garnet, like, what would it be? Adam, do
you have thoughts on that?
I would say I I guess, when saying
with different types of red garnets, it's like
going, well, I wanna date, parties
kind of thing. But then they're all gonna
be kind of the same, but when you
get to know them, they're a little bit
more. I must admit, I'm in in the
(13:12):
garnet camp. You three all seem to have
drugged the the garnet Kool Aid, and I
haven't yet.
I think it's got some really powerful uses,
and I will talk about them especially,
for our time right here and now. But
if if I was going for a kind
of a fiery red crystal, I'd actually go
for a ruby nine times out of 10
over a garnet in that way. So I
probably haven't dived into getting to know each
(13:33):
of the red garnets differently.
What about you, Kyle?
I am a
for me, color's
very important in the way I see things,
and I generally stick to almandine
pyrope
as my red reds.
For me, spacetine goes into the orangey browns,
(13:54):
and it comes with a different more
creatively driven energy. I find the deeper reds,
the more burgundy reds
of almandine and Rhyolite, it tinges into purple
sometimes. This is a really cute little wire
wrapped one that I did myself that I
wear that's tiny and you can see it
when the sun goes through it, but it's
too hard on camera. It has
(14:15):
this depth of quality, of connection, of grounding
with the fire. I find the orangey brownie
ones bring fire on fire, maybe a little
bit of earth, but they seem to push
more on the fiery edge where these deep
burgundies,
you see them. This is one from the
hearts range,
real beautiful natural
faces.
(14:35):
This is a African, Tanzanian piece that has
really beautiful color. It's a rhyolite,
rhodolite.
My goodness. I'm confusing rhyolite and rodylite.
Let's just get that out of the way.
Sorry. Rhodylite
is rainforest jasper.
Rhodylite is a type of garnet.
Red garnets for me bring this depth.
(14:57):
I don't know. That's that's where I come
at it. That's where I come at it.
And I think as you go into the
blacks, they take you, like, right down into
the depths into infinite possibilities below our feet
and what exists outside of our range of
what we can see.
Awesome. Nicholas, what about you being the Capricorn
who didn't really connect with your January birthstone?
(15:18):
Have you grown to, like, form a solid
relationship with what any one particular
type of RedGarnet?
You know, the the challenge is that without,
like, really good testing, we just don't know.
So it is a safe bet to call
our our fairly assertive reds pyropia almandine. They're
somewhere on the spectrum between the two,
(15:41):
and that is that is usually as specific
as I will guess unless something has a
label or I I happen to know better.
So we'll say pyropia almondine,
and and we'll leave it at that.
And, Nicholas, people that maybe aren't so into
the the structure and the different varieties of
Ghana, when they go to a shop and
they buy a
(16:02):
pendant or a,
a tumbled stone, it just says red red
Ghana, is it probably that's what it's gonna
be?
It's probably gonna be somewhere on that spectrum.
So think of it as like a a
triangle,
pyropia, almandine, and spessartine.
And if we if we just plot out
those main points, they all have aluminum in
them, but they could have magnesium or iron
(16:24):
or, you know, other trace things in the
other spot. And it's just about how how
much magnesium or iron will give us the
difference between
pyropia and almandine respectively.
Rhodolite garnet is usually somewhere in the middle
between them.
And then when we look at, the spesertene,
it's got manganese and aluminum,
but you can also form a series that
(16:44):
is,
you know, between pyropi and spesertene or between
almandine and spesertene. So if you have a
an orangey brown one, it would be closer
to that manganese side versus to the iron
or magnesium end of the spectrum.
And that's why most of our crystal shops
just say,
garnet.
What about you, Ashley? You you posed the
(17:05):
question. Do you think it matters, or
do you have a
favorite? So I always run into the same
problem exactly like Nicholas mentioned where
we can't always know exactly. So I have
some things in my crystal toolkit that are
are just red garnet. Right?
But sometimes they come labeled, which is really
helpful, and you get to kind
of tap into those subtle differences.
(17:26):
But I wanna show one of this is
my new favorite garnet,
that I just got from the Tucson Gem
Show this year, and this is a rhodolite
garnet, like, was confirmed by the seller. It
doesn't look like too much here, but let
me just backlight it
so you can see if I can do
it. Look at the color.
(17:46):
It's like the most reddy red
red garnet ever if you are looking
watching on
video.
It it is something else. I mean, it
really is
just the most delicious
juicy red. It looks like a little gumdrop.
And
there is something about this that has that
(18:08):
very red violet sort of color to it,
that I really
resonate with. It feels somehow
really sort of soft and
really nurturing. Like, I love garnet because it's
it's one of those stones that kind of
just, like, envelops you really slowly.
It kind of brings me down and and
(18:29):
creates that sort of ocean of calm,
which you wouldn't
think of associating with the color red.
But in particular, that that rhodolite garnet
really feels like that's what it does for
me as opposed to maybe that pyropi almandine
sort of,
energy, like, especially the the pyropi garnet.
(18:51):
This is, like,
this is anchor. Get me in my body.
Get me grounded.
Also, get me a bit motivated. Like, I
feel a lot more
energizing quality from this. So it's really interesting
kind of exploring those, which is why I
was wondering if anyone else had, yeah, sort
of
thought about that a little bit. Like, what
(19:12):
what how does that express itself to us
when we're working with those different varietals?
Yeah. It's really interesting hearing how everyone's kind
of the different ways that they relate to
the energy. What about yourself, Kyle? What type
of energy do you find red garnets in
this umbrella term have for you?
For me, I love that they feel protective,
(19:32):
that they feel nurturing, and they feel
powerful
in both
making you feel powerful and helping you to
see that there is power out there. One
of my favorite examples that I found
in 2019
is a mala
made entirely out of garnet that I bought
in Bali,
with a couple of stones for the chakras
(19:53):
there. And I was drawn to it immediately,
like, in the daylight sun. It just looked
like black stones.
And I knew as soon as I picked
it up, I was like, it's not tourmaline.
Like, I know it's heavy, but it's not
tourmaline. There's a brightness to it. And I
saw that it was garnet, That was an
immediate, like,
yes. I need this. And what I have
done since is I will always wear it
when I do big work, when I do
(20:14):
workshops, when I do meditations, when I do
group work,
when I do,
places where I'm holding space for a lot
of people in a lot of time, I
am able to manage and work with my
energy. I'm able to protect myself. I'm able
to stay energized
throughout the day and
moderate
it and utilize it correctly. I find myself
(20:37):
really able to be
managed. I find myself not burning out, and
I know that I can keep
doing and delivering
along the way. I find myself finding
nice, rich red garnets to wear
often and regularly. And as I said, the
road light that I wrapped myself has that
same red color that Ashley showed when you
(20:59):
get the light behind it. That's why I
had to wrap it to where it's that
immediate feeling of, like, I've got you.
You're safe.
Now
why don't you express yourself a little bit?
Why don't you do something a little bit
exciting? Why don't you do something that motivates
you? Why don't you do something that lights
you up a little bit? You are safe
to do so. You are
(21:19):
ready to take that risk. You are ready
to take that next step. I find it
like
encouraging and supporting
like a really great friend that's not going
to let you like sleep and go come
on. Don't let this opportunity pass you by.
You're better than that. Like, don't let yourself
wallow in self pity. Let yourself be excited
(21:41):
about life. Yes. There is time for grief.
Yes. There is time for sadness,
but there's also time for action. There is
time for doing. There's time for
giving to yourself by giving. There is time
to receive
by giving like being out in the exchange
of the world. As Nicholas explained in the
chemistry, it really makes sense to me that
(22:01):
feeling of not being isolated anymore.
Actually knowing that you are yourself and unique
and weird on this spectrum of triangles or
whatever
and you are perfect
as that version and then there are others
that are different and you can connect to
them and be separated from them. Have your
own space. Take care of your inner child,
your inner needs, your emotions, your physical body.
(22:23):
Whatever it is, take care of that. But
also
don't hold yourself back from living and existing
and being a human that exists in the
plane that can hold up space. Don't feel
like you can't hold up space. I think
that's a really important lesson that comes from
Ghana is knowing that you can put yourself
out there. There is this beautiful ring that
(22:45):
I wear,
that is oh, just showing a little bit
of the red. This is a little vintage
ring I found on Portobello Road in London
and it I've with my loupe, I've found
it's made in the seventies.
And it just fits perfectly. It sits there.
And on my right hand, it's a reminder
that I'm
moderating what I'm putting out, but I'm putting
(23:05):
it out there. I'm not gonna stop putting
it out there. I'm not going to stop
hiding. I'm not going to
hide. I'm not going to stop myself from
showing myself. I'm not going to
listen to the words that come from negative
places out there because it is something that
we all face and it's something that I
have faced
every week of my life that I can
(23:26):
remember. And every week of my life that
I go live on my lives on Sunday,
on one of the three platforms, there'll be
someone that says
something I'm doing is the devil or the
demon's work or something to that effect because
I'm working with cards online. And it's I
love being able to go, well, guess what?
This is my house, block mute. Like, I
don't even have to engage with the people.
(23:47):
I don't even have to
connect. Like, this is not what I need
to do. You are not a part of
my life. If it's not for you, move
on. You don't have to say
nasty things.
Garnet allows you to be empowered,
to feel safe, and to know that you
don't have to take any ish from anyone
and from any direction. I think it's so,
(24:07):
so important to feel that empoweredness,
feel like you can, and feel like people
don't have the right to put you down.
People don't have the right to say that
you can't or you shouldn't just because they
don't think that they can. Like,
how rude. Excuse you. Mind your business. Like,
it's not your
business to tell me how to live my
life if I'm not hurting anyone, especially if
(24:29):
it's just from how I look, especially if
it's just from me holding up space or
holding space somewhere that maybe makes you feel
a bit uncomfortable.
I think it's an important lesson with Ghana
is knowing that you feeling comfortable
may
make others
uncomfortable.
You being in your light, you being like
(24:51):
that. And that's why we hold ourselves back.
It's like, I don't want the people to
look at me. I don't want to be
judged. I don't want to be questioned for
my actions. And it's like, they're gonna judge
you and question you for your actions anyway.
Do it. Right? Why don't you give them
something to talk about? Give them something to
look at. If they're focusing on you, they're
not focusing on themselves. And I think that,
like, brightness that Garner brings
(25:12):
will draw a little bit of attention and
I think that's okay. I think it's a
good thing. I think it means that you're
doing the right thing if you're having a
few eyes come to you because of what
you're doing. It shows that there are people
that are otherly focused,
but it gives you the right to focus
on you. I think it's so so important
in today's day and age. And as I
was writing my info on this, I was
(25:34):
like, there everything that I'm writing feels a
little bit selfish, but it's like, no.
It's self full. It's important that we take
care of our own needs.
It's important that we know our limits and
our boundaries. It's important that we give and
receive, and it's important that we hold space
for ourselves wherever we go.
(25:56):
I love that. I love that. And, you
know, just to say on the,
you know, to go off on a slight
tangent where you're getting the you're doing the
devil's work kind of thing. I've been trying
to find a,
an accurate number, and I've it's somewhere floating
around a million of how many actual gods
are honored around the world today.
And I saw an interesting post going, and
(26:17):
you're sure that your god's the right one?
Kind of quite quite interesting.
And and, you know, that's also including the
goddesses as well. So speaking of goddesses, I
believe you really find a really beautiful connection
between
Brigid and Red Garnet, Ashley.
I do. This is so it was this
connection that I felt between the goddess Bridget
(26:39):
and Red Garnet that really helped me
appreciate Garnet in a bigger way because
I will say there was this
long period before I really had connected with
Garnet and started working with it that
it was almost like I thought I knew
what Garnet was really about. I kind of
had this, like, assumption in my head. I
(27:01):
had this,
I guess, like, surface understanding, and I almost
looked at garnet as being this really, really
serious
stone.
And I was exploring, like, where did that
come from? Where did that understanding come from?
And it was because all these super serious
older women in my life always had, like,
garnet jewelry on. And I really think that's
(27:23):
where that, like, connotation came from. Like, oh,
no. That's for, like, older, serious women. That's
like a, you know, it's and that was
the vibe I always had from it. And
so I didn't really connect. I thought it
was just this, I don't know,
kind of old fashioned, like
I don't know. I I didn't I wasn't
feeling it.
But then I had this
(27:44):
amazing
experience
where I went to Ireland in 2019,
and I've talked about this before. I went
with my mom. We were doing, like, a
reconnection trip.
My mom is adopted. We have, like, family
history there.
We went to have this amazing mother daughter
trip together, and
(28:04):
we drove around
the country. It was a phenomenal experience
of, like, bonding and connection and healing and
nurturing, and it was great. And Garnet ended
up being this big part of it, Garnet
and Carnelian.
And so we were driving around to a
lot of different sacred sites. We visited a
(28:24):
number of holy wells especially,
and there was a particular
holy well associated with Brigid, not the main
one at Kildare,
strangely enough, but one out on the West
Coast.
And we stopped there,
and I had the most phenomenal
experience,
(28:45):
just sitting
at this sacred site,
listening to the birds,
feeling like the breeze on my skin, feeling
so
fully present
and immersed,
and found myself
with you know, I had brought a few
crystals with me just in a little
pouch, for travel. I had brought this garnet
(29:07):
for, like, grounding
and helping with my anxiety on the plane
and that sort of thing, and
and I found myself just, like,
twirling this little garnet in my hand, sitting
there feeling
this connection
with the land, with the birdsong,
with the water,
and holding this garnet. And and that is
(29:28):
where this
feeling of that really being
held, like Kyle just talked about, really being
held and supported,
really leaning into,
like, my purpose and my truth and
and what I am, like, put here to
do, not as a career, not as a
but, like, as a human being experiencing
(29:51):
life.
Right? Like,
it just had this deep impact and impression
on me. So
over the next, you know, quite a few
years after that, really connecting deeper with goddess
Brigid, who I had always felt this
call toward, this pull toward. And that was
one of the reasons, you know, specifically, I
(30:13):
wanted to stop at quite a few of
her holy sites
on this
road trip with my mom
and
digging deeper into goddess Brigid and understanding her
different aspects and that sort of thing. I
started to understand how the different crystals that
I was feeling drawn to at that time
where I was really opening up to her
(30:34):
energy
and her presence
sort of related to her different aspects.
So Garnet,
I sort of connect with her aspect
as the healer. And in a past episode,
when we were talking about Carnelian, I talked
about the connection to Brigid as hearth keeper.
But in Brigid's
(30:54):
aspect is healer,
Brigid was, like, known to have this amazing
knowledge of
herbs and herbal medicine. She was
one that could talk with and connect with
the bees. And if we think about the
importance of
of honey
for healing, right, honey is
(31:15):
so powerful. It has amazing antiseptic qualities. We
connect with it. Even still, when we, you
know, have a scratchy throat, a sore throat,
we'll have a cup of tea with honey.
And Brigid was like this keeper of the
bees, this
amazing goddess who could
communicate with the bees, speak with the bees.
(31:35):
And if we think about, you know, the
what the bees are really representative of is
community in so many ways. And so here
is
this amazing goddess who is,
able to
inspire
community action and orchestrate community action.
And so
it's through community often that we find healing
(31:57):
as well. So it's not just in the
plants and the land. It's not just in
the honey, but looking at the symbolism in
that, it's where we find
healing in community. And that for me is
so much of what garnet is because when
we are present
in our truth and what we're supposed to
be here doing as humans,
(32:18):
so much of it revolves around
connection
and collaboration,
and that is where I feel some of
garnet's
strongest
gifts
lie. Like, this this is where it's at.
So if you've been feeling that feeling of
being disconnected
and separate
and you wanna come back together as part
(32:39):
of that bigger whole, like Nicholas was talking
about with just the chemistry of garnet. Like,
this is a stone that can really help
you do that in big ways. And so
if you,
like me,
feel really connected with goddess Brigid or if
you don't and you'd like to explore that,
one of the best ways I feel like
we can work with Garnet to get close
(33:01):
to her
is to let Garnet be sort of a
muse,
to inspire you, to inspire
poetry,
song, dance,
music. Like, let those sparks of inspiration
fuel you and help you find your place
in community and the things that you can
do to make the world a better place.
(33:22):
So, actually, you're saying just by kind of
having garnered around near you and then creating
those opportunities for those kind of muse like
experiences, that's a good way to work with
this, Crystal?
Yeah. For me, it's almost like a tuning
in and a listening.
Like, I'm I'm so often taken back to
that exact moment of, you know, sitting at
(33:43):
the holy well and hearing the birdsong and
feeling so inspired by that, so connected.
And we don't have to have, you know,
made a pilgrimage to a sacred place to
do that. You can literally just sit where
you are in this moment.
Hold that garnet, wear it as jewelry,
and tune in and sort of listen. Just
(34:04):
listen to what's alive and what's present for
you, and you can start doing that by
just engaging your senses. So there's, you know,
just a really simple practice of holding that
garnet and thinking about
what you can see, what you can smell,
what you can hear,
what you feel, maybe what taste is in
your mouth, all of those things. But engage
(34:26):
those senses
to get you really present in your body
and then just sort of see what comes
up for you from there.
I love that. I love that. I must
admit, today, I've been sitting here in the
background kind of smiling like a teshire cat.
I hope everyone's kinda noticed that it you
know, one of the things I love about
crystal confab is that we all bring different
(34:46):
ideas, but there's really been an underlying theme
today of this kind of self fullness as
I think Kyle put it in. And Nicholas
is talking about being on that deserted island
and that type of thing as well. There's
a bit of method to our madness here
on this podcast. So, yes, we have to
choose different crystal each week, and you may
notice that I try and tie it into
something that's happening astrologically.
(35:07):
And the reason that Red Ghanet was selected
for this time is there's about three different
astrological
events that are actually happening where I think
Red Garland is absolutely perfect.
The one that ties in so beautifully with
what we've all been discussing today
is the retrograde of a major asteroid by
the name of Vesta,
another goddess.
(35:27):
She's known by the Greeks as Hestia.
Now to tell you a little bit about
this goddess, she was known as the goddess
of the heart and the home. So if
you think about it, she was the fireplace
that, you know, was honored in the past,
And we maybe don't honor our fires much
these days, but think in times gone by,
it was a source of warmth. It's where
you cooked your food. It was where the
(35:49):
family gathered.
It was a really key part of that.
But when you kind of look at her,
the honoring of this goddess that she had
these vestal virgins,
which were her priestesses. Now they when we
hear the word virgin these days, we think
that someone yet to experience sexual intercourse.
But virgins were
different. The definition was slightly different. These preceptors
(36:11):
were actually ones who decided
not to take a husband.
So not to go down the normal,
you know, heterosexual
route of, you know, we find a lover,
we get married, we have children, and we
build a home and that type of thing
as
well. In fact, these, these preceptors were often
in different fertility rights throughout the year, be,
you know,
(36:32):
be the portals of the goddess and would
make love,
to many different people in that type of
thing as well.
So what Vesta kind of represents is not
just that fireplace that we kind of think
and, you know, basic descriptions will be about
her, but it is about honoring that fire
within you.
And so
what happens, this asteroid that is in an
(36:54):
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,
when she goes retrograde,
which is happening in the, coming days,
you're going to find that your self integrity
or relying on yourself will be compromised.
And this is where Red Garner is the
perfect asset to have by you because people
will ask you to like, oh, do you
(37:15):
think you could just could you help me
out with that when you've already decided? No.
I'm having a night off or, you know,
a one more hour or, you know, those
little things where like, oh,
and for me, why I love Red Garner
is it has this real warrior energy,
not in an aggressive assertive way, although I
do find it quite fiery,
but more so in if you were a
(37:36):
warrior,
you need to make sure you're at your
best
so that you can give your best. Do
you mean if a warrior was going to
battle, they're trying to prepare themselves to be
in tip top shape? And that's exactly what
we've been talking about today. This is a
crystal to make sure that you are looking
after yourself. Again, as Kyle said, it's not
selfish.
It's being selfful
(37:57):
because you can give your best as a
partner, as a parent, as a colleague,
as a just a contributor to this world.
If you're in a bad shape,
you become a drain on society rather than
a contributor to society.
So really look at where your boundaries are
gonna be pushed in the next few weeks.
Are people trying to get you to do
things that are beyond what you actually want
(38:20):
to do. And then keep Red Garland nearby
you and either sit and ponder each night
and go, did I bend too much? Why
did I bend too much? Was it that
need to try and get other people's approval?
But as I often say, it doesn't matter
if you're Donald Trump or Lady Gaga or
Mother Teresa. You're gonna have people that love
you and people that hate you.
(38:40):
But only you get to decide how you
feel about yourself. Invest to retrograde is a
really great time for you to kind of
get those personal boundaries a little bit stronger
as well. So that's one thing that's happening
really soon. Now I'm gonna talk to my
Southern Hemisphere friends
because we also have a equinox happening.
(39:00):
Now it's going to be different. It's going
to spring equinox, which is known as Ostara
in the Northern Hemisphere.
This is a really great time for getting
back into action, planting seeds of desire.
But for us in the, Southern Hemisphere, and,
Kyle, I don't know if you've noticed it,
we've stopped our scorching hot 40 degree or
a hundred Fahrenheit days, and it's starting to
(39:21):
cool down slowly and you start to get
a bit of chill in the morning. We're
going into that autumnal weather.
Remember that humans are this only species on
this planet that ignores the cycles of the
sun, the moon and the seasons.
When the moon when the sun goes down
at night,
trees and plants will change the behavior and
(39:41):
so will animals. Humans, we flick on a
light and keep going. And, you know, that's
why we throw out our,
you know, our melatonin, our serotonin cycles,
our circadian cycles. That's why cortisol keeps us
up late into the night. All these different
things.
With the seasons as well, do you behave
differently in the summer and the winter?
(40:02):
With our climate control, a lot of the
time, we still do
a lot of the same stuff a lot
of the time.
Mabon or the autumn equinox is a really
great time to start slowing down, to get
into that more introspective time. And for me,
this is a really beautiful time.
We don't get it so much in the
Southern Hemisphere, but in the Northern Hemisphere, 1
thing I love is you have all the
(40:23):
autumn leaves.
The trees realizing that actually I no longer
need this except leaves. And for my survival
and introspection in these colder months, I need
to let go of excess.
So this is a really beautiful time to
focus on your base chakra.
And, of course, the base chakra is about
feeling grounded, feeling safe and secure.
(40:44):
And a lot of the time why we
feel overwhelmed is because we're trying to stretch
ourselves
in too many different directions. And this is
a great one for
for Mabon to kinda go, no. I need
to come back to what I need and
focus on that
and and build those boundaries around that as
well.
Now the final thing,
I'm I'm a little bit too late for
(41:05):
this one, but I'm also wearing mine now.
And it's a special type of gun that
we haven't talked about yet, which I'm gonna
throw back to everyone in a moment, the
blood moon.
So we talked about the blood moon last
week with bloodstone and the blood moon, by
the time you listen to this, has already
happened.
But I'm giving you one year's warning because
we have another blood moon in Virgo
in 2026
(41:26):
as well. And the crystal that I'd love
you to get is not just a red
garnet for that, but a star red garnet.
And I wanted to ask the gang, you
know, asterism
is this kind of effect you get on
certain crystals such as garnets,
rubies,
rose quartz, sapphires,
dioxides,
where when you shine the light on it,
(41:48):
you get either a four rate or six
rate star that kind of glides across it.
And I'd love to know from everyone,
what does that do to the energy of
that crystal
when when it's gotten and I think I've
seen a few people grab different crystals
off camera for a second.
What does that do to the energy? And
what's your feeling on star crystals? And, you
(42:09):
know, I'll I'll come back a little bit
and talk about star
garnets. Nicholas, I thought you'd grab yours first.
So in the case of our garnets, it's
usually,
either titania,
so something like rutile. Although it could also
be, you know, tiny little fibers of other
minerals that are in there. But, you know,
that titanium influence that we find in rutile
(42:30):
is
so connective.
It is strong. It forges
great boundaries and things as well, helps us
reach across distance while still protecting our light,
and I find it so
enlivening.
I have a star garnet sphere, which was
not labeled a star garnet sphere. It was
just in a basket of regular garnets.
(42:53):
And,
I never go crystal shopping
without a bright light. So, like, you know,
my mobile device, I have to look at
everything under a bright light to see what's
happening inside it. And, I mean, the moment
I turned the the torch on, it was
right there, this perfect
four rayed star. And I,
I went through every one of them categorically
(43:14):
to find the best, but it was the
first one. It's always the first one. And
I love that it brings
a greater sense of movement
to the otherwise somewhat kind of stabilizing or
anchoring quality that Garnet has.
And,
yeah, I think they're they're really, really sweet.
(43:35):
Kyla, so you grab one as well?
I have also had a very similar experience,
but with a pendant. I bought this really
beautiful garnet pendant, took it outside, the sun
hit it, and it went ping with a
four star. I was like, yes.
I'm so, so excited. Like, it brings life
this energy, this, like, richness the same way
(43:56):
that, like, golden rutile, star rose quartz,
star dioxide. I find anything with a like,
an asterism, a star in it just
brings this
party.
Yes, do,
amplify, can, like, depending on the situation,
it's like a yes for me.
(44:17):
I I I have started to doubt myself
this week as well. I was just doing
some Google searches for images as well, and
I wanted to
I've always been very certain and confident in
taught this, but I wanna double check with
everyone now. When it comes to you've got
star garnet, you've got star rubies. Now they
look very, very similar. They're both kind of
that red. There will be kind of variations.
(44:37):
But I both both Nicholas and Kyla mentioned,
it's a four rade star with Garnet, but
it will be a six rade star with
Ruby.
Please confirm that I am always correct.
Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is it's
quite when when I did a Google image
of star,
Garnet,
some of the images had a four rate
star and some had a six rate star.
(44:59):
So I do wonder sometimes whether in sales,
people are getting a little bit confused on
what they're selling
type of thing. But, yeah, that's obviously because
of the the layout of the the structure
of the crystal.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There there is a really
great exception, though, although it is rare.
Corundum can produce a 12 pointed star
(45:19):
if we have
the right spacing of the the rutile inside
them.
Just when I told
The fact that garnet is cubic,
cubic,
you know, four sides. Yeah.
Ruby, hexagonal, six sides.
Like, right there, it shows you that that's
the orientation that the curve the other minerals
(45:41):
within the mineral are going to form under
that structure. It's simple maths.
Yep. Yep. How about yourself, Ashley? Have you
worked much with Stargardens?
Yes. This is actually
I found a really beautiful one from this
amazing
ethical vendor a number of years back now.
But it's just a it's a massive
(46:01):
cabochon,
and so it just
perfectly displays that asterism. But I think in
general, when I when I think about
an asterism, I don't think of, like,
necessarily, like, star garnet versus star ruby versus
a starry rose quartz or something like that
compared to a regular one. I almost think
of the
the the asterism
as, like, this extra qualifier,
(46:23):
like, this extra type of energy. And for
me, kind of across the board, anything with
an asterism,
so good for focus,
and just an amazing
amplifier of whatever that crystal is already doing.
Like Kyle was saying, like, the yes can
do this. Like,
it's that
amplification
of whatever that stone is already doing, like,
(46:45):
taking it up times 10, but also really,
really good for enhancing focus on that aspect
of your life.
Yeah. I I find as well, asterism kind
of gives like the spiritual level of that
thing. So, you know, with rose quartz, rose
quartz is about that general love. The star
rose quartz kinda give that more kind of
soul love in that way.
(47:05):
I love blue star sapphires for that real
like, for me, that's one of the best,
stones you could use for soulmate work. If
you've got a soulmate,
you know, I think
star sapphire engagement rings would be probably
the best, would be my call. If someone's
like, if I could choose any stone, I'd
probably say star sapphires would be amazing for
(47:27):
that. With the rubies, it's that real fire
in us and garnets, when we come back
to that blood moon, it's that spiritual work
as well, Davide.
I really like that, and I I agree
with you on the star sapphire. It's such
a a beautiful stone.
But this is making me think of there
is this, lapidary worker who is
as famous as you can be for that
(47:49):
kind of thing, I guess, here in The
States,
but he did a lot of lapidary work
and a lot of mineral sourcing for Melody,
the author of the Love is in the
Earth series of books, and his name was
Bob Jackson.
And he would make these
chakra healing sets,
very, very few of them. It took him
a lot of time, but he would use
(48:10):
the metamorphosis
quartz from Brazil, which is, like,
trademark
name for quartz from Brazil with an asterism
in it.
Sort of almost
like a gyrasol according to Melody's literature, different
than a gyrasol, but looks very much like
a gyrasol, but then containing the asterism.
But he would actually
(48:31):
create doublets where he would put that astrated
quartz
on top
of different, like, what are considered usually more
like high vibrational stones. So you would have,
like,
a a beautiful ruby
with
this
asterated quartz on top, a
sugulite
(48:51):
with asterated quartz on top, and
a dioptase
with the asterated quartz on top. I mean,
very, very cool doublets where these are
bounded together. And then he would create, like,
these chakra stone sets out of them,
and I was lucky enough to have a
few of these throughout the years that I
(49:12):
was able to work with. But that's where
I really, really learned to appreciate that
asterism as, like, its own formation and what
else it kinda brought to the party.
So, if anyone just is out there, do
a quick image search and see if you
can find, like,
Bob Jackson
metamorphosis
quartz chakra sets and just look at them
(49:32):
because they're very, very cool.
That is awesome. I love that. I always
love in our conversations to kind of leave
our listeners and our viewers with kind of
practical things they can do with their red
gun. And, actually,
with with Bridget, you gave us a classic
example of that. I would say with this
kind of vestor retrograde and this kind of
integrity that we've all been talking about, I
(49:53):
think it's valuable to you know, we have
these little pockets in our jeans.
People often call them, I think, coin
pockets. What? Lead crystal pockets.
That's a really nice place to kind of
fit your red gun at the moment type
of thing. But I think it's also nice
to even place one where distractions
tend to come.
So if you place one with your phone,
(50:15):
if you find that's where it pulls you
away from who you are or if at
work, you won't get pulled away. Maybe you're
laying one on your desk and that type
of thing. Is that kind of energetic but
also visual reminder of honoring yourself as well?
But I'd love to ask the other gents
as well. You know, Kyle, do you have
a way that you could kind of suggest
people they've got their egg on it. What
do they do with it?
(50:36):
Whilst I was sitting, I wrote down a
couple of questions and I think sitting with
yourself, sitting with a piece of gun and
asking yourself these questions could be really, really
useful. The first one is, what is going
to be my best course of action that
takes care of my own needs as well
as everyone else involved?
Sit with that. How much can you do
for yourself as for everyone else? Find that
(50:58):
balance moving forward. And another one, do I
just need a hug or maybe a conversation
with a close friend? Like, sometimes it's just
that acknowledgement
that you need a bit of support
and sitting with that garment going actually okay
I'm gonna reach out to that friend because
I need a hug. I'm gonna give myself
that little bit of support. I think what
can you do? How can you use your
(51:19):
energy? And what support do you currently require?
I love that. Very very in line with
Investo Retrograde as well.
Love it. Nicholas, what about yourself?
You know, garnets feel so
corporeal, so kinesthetic to me. Like, I've I
wanna play with the physical bodies of them.
And so,
(51:40):
oftentimes, when I wanna, like, integrate crystal energy
into my lives, I I try to find
we'll we'll call them therapy windows rather than
just calling them energy centers. It's not necessarily
about a a map of the energy body,
but about how our bodies relate to space
and time and ourselves and our rocks.
And three zones that I really love integrating
(52:02):
garnet, but also lots of other crystals with
is just head, heart, and belly.
And there's something about bringing us into communion
with our physical bodies this way. The heft
of the garnet,
you know, kinda anchors the mind when we
hold it up to our brow or to
the top of the head. So we're not,
you know, spinning out in there. We're bringing
it to the heart, and it's got that
(52:23):
stabilizing centering influence like we see it's nezosilicate
structure do for us. Then the belly, usually
for me, that's a little lower than the
belly button, but, you know, somewhere in that
that abdominal region would be nice.
And it's it's about kind of
feeling at home
in your body
and
doing that with
(52:44):
a a stone that brings
us in touch with the material world that
allows us to have that kind of energetic
relationship, I think, is really useful, but it's
also just a fun exercise for any crystal
you wanna get to know.
I love that. I love that. One other
novel thing that I've heard, some people find
that putting a red garnet in your socks
will actually help or in your gloves will
(53:04):
help with circulation.
So if it gets colder in the, you
know, in in the Southern Hemisphere, maybe we
all need to put a little garnet in
our socks so that and see if that
works as well. Maybe let us know in
the comment if that's worked for you. But
we've given you enough to kinda Google today,
whether it be that that lapidrist or whether
it be asterisms.
Go out and search, and hopefully, you've also
(53:25):
found some new love for garnets as well.
We'll be back next week to discover
another great amazing crystal, another gift from Mother
Earth. Have a bit of a contact with
it. Thanks for joining us today. Until then,
take care and blessed be.
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 crystal
confab, a casual chat about all things crystals.
Hello, and welcome to another crystal confab. I'm
Karl, the Crystal Lane Mage, and I'm joined
(00:24):
by Ashley Laby, Nicholas Pearson, and Adam Barreley,
my crystal besties as we confab
about a different crystal every single week. Now
this mineral in particular,
I would argue we all have a very
good relationship
with. I think everyone loves a bit of
this, and this is, of course, our red
garnet.
(00:44):
Red garnet has few different variations, and we're
going to dive straight into Nicholas who's going
to share a bit of the chemistry, a
bit of the magic, and a bit of
the energy that it entails.
So I wanna preface this by saying
I'm as as we've probably discussed in the
past, I'm like an Uber Capricorn. I've got
a big stellium there. I'm a January baby.
(01:05):
Garnet is my birthstone.
I'm also red green colorblind. I have never
been excited about a red garnet in my
life.
And I'd I'd heard that there were such
things as green garnets and never laid my
eyes on them. You know, I'd seen orangey
reds and pinky reds, but it was
mostly the dull, earthy, browny kind of reds
(01:26):
that I just don't my eyes don't perceive
that color well. So I grew up
not loving my birthstone,
a story that sounds similar to to others
out there.
And when I was a freshman at university
and I started working for the Earth Science
Museum,
I
found out that garnets could come in other
(01:48):
colors, not just kind of, you know, green
was an option and then variations on red,
but they actually
came in a a wide variety, and it
dealt a lot with their chemistry
and trace elements and things.
And and I was really mystified
to learn that
unlike quartz, which comes in so many different
(02:09):
colors but is fundamentally the same substance,
garnets are a whole family. In fact, they're
they're like two
two series that share a a common element,
and it blew my mind. Furthermore,
that particular year, this would be, like, early,
maybe mid two thousands,
(02:29):
the discovery of the Japanese rainbow andro garnets
from,
Tenkawa Mine in Nara Prefecture
was just
blowing up all over the place. It was
on the front of, like, Rockin' Gym and
the neurological journal.
And the museum I worked for, of course,
got all these publications, and I saw this
vivid multicolored thing. And I was like, what
(02:51):
is this? And my boss goes, oh, well,
those are the Japanese rainbow garnets.
You like rocks. Really, you've heard about these.
They're everywhere. I'm like, I know nothing.
So I learned everything I could about garnet.
It turns out at that point, the textbook
said garnet came in every color of the
rainbow except blue.
Not long later, I found better better data,
more up to date
(03:12):
information that said garnet could come in every
color of the rainbow except blue garnets were
usually microgarnets, and they were found in things
like kimberlite pipes. And they were good indicators
if you're looking at thin sections under polarizite
that you might have diamonds nearby. So you
wanted to find them. They just weren't exciting
to look at.
And then
sometime in the last decade, there was a
(03:33):
find in Tanzania.
I don't know how well this is gonna
show up on camera, but,
blue garnets exist.
They're kind of more blue violet than, like,
a true blue.
But my my white whale is out there
in college. I convinced myself when I changed
degrees to earth and environmental science, I was
gonna discover blue blue garnets and name them
(03:54):
after myself.
No. I failed. Someone else got there, thankfully,
because I I I was never gonna fund
that trip. But it has always gotten me
really
interested in how garnets work.
So,
garnets, because they are a family
of of two closely related series, there's quite
(04:15):
a bit of variation, not just in color,
but also in chemistry.
They belong to a category of silicate minerals
that we call mesosilicates,
which are island silicates. You've got, like, a
blob of silica surrounded by what feels like
a sea of metals.
And and because we don't get the hollow
framework or a complex sheet or
(04:35):
a ring like we find in so many
other silicates,
there's there's a lot of dense stuff packed
around that that silica. And so garnets, like
many mesosilicates,
are very, very heavy.
The way their their molecules come together,
they form in the isometric
or the cubic crystal system, which means that
they have the
(04:56):
the least bending of light. What what you
see is what you get. They it can
it can have a higher refractive index in
other ways. In fact, maybe I'll I'll mention
something fabulous about one of my favorite garnets.
But
the the real magic for me doesn't come
in examining their relationship with light because they're
not gonna do what
our our other crystal systems do. It's it's
(05:18):
looking at the complexity
of their makeup. So most of the red
garnets that we know belong to what's called
the pyralspite
series, which is just a funny word made
out of pyropia, almandine, and spessartine,
stuck together with -ite on the end because
that's how we do rocks,
as opposed to our ugrandite series, which is
the uvaroic, grossular, and androdyte. But, you know,
(05:40):
grossular form the bridge between the two. We
we can honorarily kinda stick them with both.
And our,
pyropia, almandine, and spacerteine group is where we're
gonna get most of the reds, but also
pinks and oranges and occasionally a few other
colors here or there, but, you know, it
tends toward the the reddish side of the
spectrum versus the yellow green side of the
(06:01):
spectrum.
And a lot of our garnets are formed
through one of two processes,
liquid magmatic, which means molten rock cools.
We see it in garnets. One of the
one of the reasons that we picked this
house to rent,
was the jumbo, and I mean jumbo garnet
that is in the granite countertop in our
(06:21):
kitchen. There is one
major garnet, and I saw it and said,
okay. I think I could live here. And,
you know, we find smaller bits of them
everywhere.
But the the other kind of category of
their their birth,
the ones that I think are a little
bit more geologically interesting, are those that are
made by metamorphic processes.
These are tertiary minerals. They're, you know, bent
(06:43):
and broken down. We often find them in
things like schist, which is what we've got
here, some almandine schist. So it's sparkly from
all of the mica, and then those
bright red garnets kinda get squished out of
it. And they appear to be grains
inside
that that host rock.
But when we start to examine
(07:06):
all of these things, like,
together, like telling the story of garnets,
most of the time with silicates, we get
these kind of expansive,
open minded, open
flowing,
we might say amplifying kind of energies, but
the denseness of garnet, thanks to it being
a mesosilicate with all those heavy metals in
there, lots of manganese and iron and sometimes
(07:27):
magnesium with our red garnets,
they're gonna confer a little more stability. They're
a little bit more anchoring. When we see
the presence
of stability. They're a little bit more anchoring.
When we see the presence of, like, iron
and manganese in particular,
those minerals tend to feel a little bit
more fiery and earthy at the same time.
That structure of that island, that silica,
(07:50):
is going to give us resistance to outside
forces. There's a there was a German lithotherapist
by the name of Michael Ginger.
When I was in college, I fell in
love with his work because he was a
geologist first and then went the crystal healing
route because he started to see trends and
started to map those trends out. And he
tells us that, nezo silicates, like garnets, grant
resistance to outside forces and encourage us to
(08:11):
structure our lives according to our ideal vision.
You know, think of it as like the
the defense you get by having your own
deserted island, and then you get to make
that your paradise. I think that's maybe a
good metaphor for how that might work.
I think of them as representing individuality. They
help us stay true to our beliefs. They
help us
really get a clear picture of what our
(08:33):
ideals can look like, and they also address
feelings of isolation. Any one little blob of
silica appears to be separate, but it's actually
not separated by an expanse of that sea
of metal ions, but
they bridge
those separate
islands of silica. So we can work with
mesosilicates to kind of get that that magic
(08:55):
coming in.
When we take a look at our red
garnets that are, you know, rich in
things like magnesium and aluminum or iron and
aluminum or some combination of the two,
with or without manganese,
we we see at once a kind of
earthy stabilizing influence as well as this really
centering kind of heart centered quality that they
(09:16):
bring.
Whether they're born of, you know, cooling molten
rock or by
regional metamorphism where we've got mountains
formed by the crashing together of crustal plates.
There is a kind of heat in in
the birth of them that also lends us
fire, creativity, and inspiration
to what garnet brings.
(09:37):
And so over the years, I've I've really
grown to appreciate them. I have a small
collection of here's a a natural garnet from
India. This one comes from, like, a biotype
matrix. It actually got little bits of mica
in there. So this is one of metamorphic
processes.
Some almending garnets in feldspar.
Some comes from out west here in The
States from California.
(09:59):
Of course, we've got, you know, things like
rosolar, which comes in so many colors and
and varieties.
We've got our our black androdites, which are,
colored by trace amounts of titanium and other
stuff.
But my other, like, truly, truly weird garnet,
like, you have to do a double take,
(10:19):
are these guys. They're sometimes referred to as
leuco garnets, and they are colorless.
This is near
pure
grossular garnet. So there's there's
just a tiny, tiny trace amount of manganese
in there,
which which makes it do something most garnets
won't do, and it will fluoresce under ultraviolet
light. Because there's so little manganese, it acts
(10:41):
as a fluorescent
activator too much, and it it quenches that.
It also gives us brighter colors. So,
I've I've over the years learned to appreciate
the kind of individuation
of every different species and varietal of garnet.
And,
you know, garnets sometimes surprise us. They they
come in colors we don't expect. Some garnets
(11:02):
will attract to strong enough magnets because of
their metallic ions that are present.
And then we also get beautiful displays of
light like our rainbow androdites or our demantoid,
another variety of androdites, so named for its
diamond like brilliance,
vivid green, so green. I can appreciate it.
And they outperform diamond.
So, yeah, I think garnets are really magical.
(11:23):
I warmed up to them over the years.
All it all it took was that photograph
on the cover of Rock and Gem or
the Mineralogical Journal, whichever it was twenty years
ago, and I've I've been a garnet fan
ever since.
So I wanna say I got one of
those actually, a few very tiny of those
Japanese rainbow garnets, and they are
(11:44):
phenomenal
stones to work with. There is something so
uplifting and so inspiring about them, and they
are quite hard to find now.
Still possible to find for sure, but they're
a little pricey.
And, you know, if you want one of
any decent size,
expect to pay, like, a small fortune because
they're they're highly collectible at this point.
(12:07):
But I was
sitting here kind of listening and and thinking
about what you were saying, Nicholas, and going
through all these different amazing
varietals of garnet that we have available to
us. And I wanna sort of pose a
question to the group.
Like, when you work with, say, red garnet,
do you are you specific and intentional
(12:29):
about what type of garnet you're working with?
Because so often, we're looking in our crystal
books. We're we're reading articles online, and and
someone will just say red garnet. Red garnet
for this or that or whatever. And same
thing sometimes, green garnet for this or that.
But we have so many different varieties.
Does it matter? If so, why? And if
(12:51):
you were gonna have a go to red
garnet, like, what would it be? Adam, do
you have thoughts on that?
I would say I I guess, when saying
with different types of red garnets, it's like
going, well, I wanna date, parties
kind of thing. But then they're all gonna
be kind of the same, but when you
get to know them, they're a little bit
more. I must admit, I'm in in the
(13:12):
garnet camp. You three all seem to have
drugged the the garnet Kool Aid, and I
haven't yet.
I think it's got some really powerful uses,
and I will talk about them especially,
for our time right here and now. But
if if I was going for a kind
of a fiery red crystal, I'd actually go
for a ruby nine times out of 10
over a garnet in that way. So I
probably haven't dived into getting to know each
(13:33):
of the red garnets differently.
What about you, Kyle?
I am a
for me, color's
very important in the way I see things,
and I generally stick to almandine
pyrope
as my red reds.
For me, spacetine goes into the orangey browns,
(13:54):
and it comes with a different more
creatively driven energy. I find the deeper reds,
the more burgundy reds
of almandine and Rhyolite, it tinges into purple
sometimes. This is a really cute little wire
wrapped one that I did myself that I
wear that's tiny and you can see it
when the sun goes through it, but it's
too hard on camera. It has
(14:15):
this depth of quality, of connection, of grounding
with the fire. I find the orangey brownie
ones bring fire on fire, maybe a little
bit of earth, but they seem to push
more on the fiery edge where these deep
burgundies,
you see them. This is one from the
hearts range,
real beautiful natural
faces.
(14:35):
This is a African, Tanzanian piece that has
really beautiful color. It's a rhyolite,
rhodolite.
My goodness. I'm confusing rhyolite and rodylite.
Let's just get that out of the way.
Sorry. Rhodylite
is rainforest jasper.
Rhodylite is a type of garnet.
Red garnets for me bring this depth.
(14:57):
I don't know. That's that's where I come
at it. That's where I come at it.
And I think as you go into the
blacks, they take you, like, right down into
the depths into infinite possibilities below our feet
and what exists outside of our range of
what we can see.
Awesome. Nicholas, what about you being the Capricorn
who didn't really connect with your January birthstone?
(15:18):
Have you grown to, like, form a solid
relationship with what any one particular
type of RedGarnet?
You know, the the challenge is that without,
like, really good testing, we just don't know.
So it is a safe bet to call
our our fairly assertive reds pyropia almandine. They're
somewhere on the spectrum between the two,
(15:41):
and that is that is usually as specific
as I will guess unless something has a
label or I I happen to know better.
So we'll say pyropia almondine,
and and we'll leave it at that.
And, Nicholas, people that maybe aren't so into
the the structure and the different varieties of
Ghana, when they go to a shop and
they buy a
(16:02):
pendant or a,
a tumbled stone, it just says red red
Ghana, is it probably that's what it's gonna
be?
It's probably gonna be somewhere on that spectrum.
So think of it as like a a
triangle,
pyropia, almandine, and spessartine.
And if we if we just plot out
those main points, they all have aluminum in
them, but they could have magnesium or iron
(16:24):
or, you know, other trace things in the
other spot. And it's just about how how
much magnesium or iron will give us the
difference between
pyropia and almandine respectively.
Rhodolite garnet is usually somewhere in the middle
between them.
And then when we look at, the spesertene,
it's got manganese and aluminum,
but you can also form a series that
(16:44):
is,
you know, between pyropi and spesertene or between
almandine and spesertene. So if you have a
an orangey brown one, it would be closer
to that manganese side versus to the iron
or magnesium end of the spectrum.
And that's why most of our crystal shops
just say,
garnet.
What about you, Ashley? You you posed the
(17:05):
question. Do you think it matters, or
do you have a
favorite? So I always run into the same
problem exactly like Nicholas mentioned where
we can't always know exactly. So I have
some things in my crystal toolkit that are
are just red garnet. Right?
But sometimes they come labeled, which is really
helpful, and you get to kind
of tap into those subtle differences.
(17:26):
But I wanna show one of this is
my new favorite garnet,
that I just got from the Tucson Gem
Show this year, and this is a rhodolite
garnet, like, was confirmed by the seller. It
doesn't look like too much here, but let
me just backlight it
so you can see if I can do
it. Look at the color.
(17:46):
It's like the most reddy red
red garnet ever if you are looking
watching on
video.
It it is something else. I mean, it
really is
just the most delicious
juicy red. It looks like a little gumdrop.
And
there is something about this that has that
(18:08):
very red violet sort of color to it,
that I really
resonate with. It feels somehow
really sort of soft and
really nurturing. Like, I love garnet because it's
it's one of those stones that kind of
just, like, envelops you really slowly.
It kind of brings me down and and
(18:29):
creates that sort of ocean of calm,
which you wouldn't
think of associating with the color red.
But in particular, that that rhodolite garnet
really feels like that's what it does for
me as opposed to maybe that pyropi almandine
sort of,
energy, like, especially the the pyropi garnet.
(18:51):
This is, like,
this is anchor. Get me in my body.
Get me grounded.
Also, get me a bit motivated. Like, I
feel a lot more
energizing quality from this. So it's really interesting
kind of exploring those, which is why I
was wondering if anyone else had, yeah, sort
of
thought about that a little bit. Like, what
(19:12):
what how does that express itself to us
when we're working with those different varietals?
Yeah. It's really interesting hearing how everyone's kind
of the different ways that they relate to
the energy. What about yourself, Kyle? What type
of energy do you find red garnets in
this umbrella term have for you?
For me, I love that they feel protective,
(19:32):
that they feel nurturing, and they feel
powerful
in both
making you feel powerful and helping you to
see that there is power out there. One
of my favorite examples that I found
in 2019
is a mala
made entirely out of garnet that I bought
in Bali,
with a couple of stones for the chakras
(19:53):
there. And I was drawn to it immediately,
like, in the daylight sun. It just looked
like black stones.
And I knew as soon as I picked
it up, I was like, it's not tourmaline.
Like, I know it's heavy, but it's not
tourmaline. There's a brightness to it. And I
saw that it was garnet, That was an
immediate, like,
yes. I need this. And what I have
done since is I will always wear it
when I do big work, when I do
(20:14):
workshops, when I do meditations, when I do
group work,
when I do,
places where I'm holding space for a lot
of people in a lot of time, I
am able to manage and work with my
energy. I'm able to protect myself. I'm able
to stay energized
throughout the day and
moderate
it and utilize it correctly. I find myself
(20:37):
really able to be
managed. I find myself not burning out, and
I know that I can keep
doing and delivering
along the way. I find myself finding
nice, rich red garnets to wear
often and regularly. And as I said, the
road light that I wrapped myself has that
same red color that Ashley showed when you
(20:59):
get the light behind it. That's why I
had to wrap it to where it's that
immediate feeling of, like, I've got you.
You're safe.
Now
why don't you express yourself a little bit?
Why don't you do something a little bit
exciting? Why don't you do something that motivates
you? Why don't you do something that lights
you up a little bit? You are safe
to do so. You are
(21:19):
ready to take that risk. You are ready
to take that next step. I find it
like
encouraging and supporting
like a really great friend that's not going
to let you like sleep and go come
on. Don't let this opportunity pass you by.
You're better than that. Like, don't let yourself
wallow in self pity. Let yourself be excited
(21:41):
about life. Yes. There is time for grief.
Yes. There is time for sadness,
but there's also time for action. There is
time for doing. There's time for
giving to yourself by giving. There is time
to receive
by giving like being out in the exchange
of the world. As Nicholas explained in the
chemistry, it really makes sense to me that
(22:01):
feeling of not being isolated anymore.
Actually knowing that you are yourself and unique
and weird on this spectrum of triangles or
whatever
and you are perfect
as that version and then there are others
that are different and you can connect to
them and be separated from them. Have your
own space. Take care of your inner child,
your inner needs, your emotions, your physical body.
(22:23):
Whatever it is, take care of that. But
also
don't hold yourself back from living and existing
and being a human that exists in the
plane that can hold up space. Don't feel
like you can't hold up space. I think
that's a really important lesson that comes from
Ghana is knowing that you can put yourself
out there. There is this beautiful ring that
(22:45):
I wear,
that is oh, just showing a little bit
of the red. This is a little vintage
ring I found on Portobello Road in London
and it I've with my loupe, I've found
it's made in the seventies.
And it just fits perfectly. It sits there.
And on my right hand, it's a reminder
that I'm
moderating what I'm putting out, but I'm putting
(23:05):
it out there. I'm not gonna stop putting
it out there. I'm not going to stop
hiding. I'm not going to
hide. I'm not going to stop myself from
showing myself. I'm not going to
listen to the words that come from negative
places out there because it is something that
we all face and it's something that I
have faced
every week of my life that I can
(23:26):
remember. And every week of my life that
I go live on my lives on Sunday,
on one of the three platforms, there'll be
someone that says
something I'm doing is the devil or the
demon's work or something to that effect because
I'm working with cards online. And it's I
love being able to go, well, guess what?
This is my house, block mute. Like, I
don't even have to engage with the people.
(23:47):
I don't even have to
connect. Like, this is not what I need
to do. You are not a part of
my life. If it's not for you, move
on. You don't have to say
nasty things.
Garnet allows you to be empowered,
to feel safe, and to know that you
don't have to take any ish from anyone
and from any direction. I think it's so,
(24:07):
so important to feel that empoweredness,
feel like you can, and feel like people
don't have the right to put you down.
People don't have the right to say that
you can't or you shouldn't just because they
don't think that they can. Like,
how rude. Excuse you. Mind your business. Like,
it's not your
business to tell me how to live my
life if I'm not hurting anyone, especially if
(24:29):
it's just from how I look, especially if
it's just from me holding up space or
holding space somewhere that maybe makes you feel
a bit uncomfortable.
I think it's an important lesson with Ghana
is knowing that you feeling comfortable
may
make others
uncomfortable.
You being in your light, you being like
(24:51):
that. And that's why we hold ourselves back.
It's like, I don't want the people to
look at me. I don't want to be
judged. I don't want to be questioned for
my actions. And it's like, they're gonna judge
you and question you for your actions anyway.
Do it. Right? Why don't you give them
something to talk about? Give them something to
look at. If they're focusing on you, they're
not focusing on themselves. And I think that,
like, brightness that Garner brings
(25:12):
will draw a little bit of attention and
I think that's okay. I think it's a
good thing. I think it means that you're
doing the right thing if you're having a
few eyes come to you because of what
you're doing. It shows that there are people
that are otherly focused,
but it gives you the right to focus
on you. I think it's so so important
in today's day and age. And as I
was writing my info on this, I was
(25:34):
like, there everything that I'm writing feels a
little bit selfish, but it's like, no.
It's self full. It's important that we take
care of our own needs.
It's important that we know our limits and
our boundaries. It's important that we give and
receive, and it's important that we hold space
for ourselves wherever we go.
(25:56):
I love that. I love that. And, you
know, just to say on the,
you know, to go off on a slight
tangent where you're getting the you're doing the
devil's work kind of thing. I've been trying
to find a,
an accurate number, and I've it's somewhere floating
around a million of how many actual gods
are honored around the world today.
And I saw an interesting post going, and
(26:17):
you're sure that your god's the right one?
Kind of quite quite interesting.
And and, you know, that's also including the
goddesses as well. So speaking of goddesses, I
believe you really find a really beautiful connection
between
Brigid and Red Garnet, Ashley.
I do. This is so it was this
connection that I felt between the goddess Bridget
(26:39):
and Red Garnet that really helped me
appreciate Garnet in a bigger way because
I will say there was this
long period before I really had connected with
Garnet and started working with it that
it was almost like I thought I knew
what Garnet was really about. I kind of
had this, like, assumption in my head. I
(27:01):
had this,
I guess, like, surface understanding, and I almost
looked at garnet as being this really, really
serious
stone.
And I was exploring, like, where did that
come from? Where did that understanding come from?
And it was because all these super serious
older women in my life always had, like,
garnet jewelry on. And I really think that's
(27:23):
where that, like, connotation came from. Like, oh,
no. That's for, like, older, serious women. That's
like a, you know, it's and that was
the vibe I always had from it. And
so I didn't really connect. I thought it
was just this, I don't know,
kind of old fashioned, like
I don't know. I I didn't I wasn't
feeling it.
But then I had this
(27:44):
amazing
experience
where I went to Ireland in 2019,
and I've talked about this before. I went
with my mom. We were doing, like, a
reconnection trip.
My mom is adopted. We have, like, family
history there.
We went to have this amazing mother daughter
trip together, and
(28:04):
we drove around
the country. It was a phenomenal experience
of, like, bonding and connection and healing and
nurturing, and it was great. And Garnet ended
up being this big part of it, Garnet
and Carnelian.
And so we were driving around to a
lot of different sacred sites. We visited a
(28:24):
number of holy wells especially,
and there was a particular
holy well associated with Brigid, not the main
one at Kildare,
strangely enough, but one out on the West
Coast.
And we stopped there,
and I had the most phenomenal
experience,
(28:45):
just sitting
at this sacred site,
listening to the birds,
feeling like the breeze on my skin, feeling
so
fully present
and immersed,
and found myself
with you know, I had brought a few
crystals with me just in a little
pouch, for travel. I had brought this garnet
(29:07):
for, like, grounding
and helping with my anxiety on the plane
and that sort of thing, and
and I found myself just, like,
twirling this little garnet in my hand, sitting
there feeling
this connection
with the land, with the birdsong,
with the water,
and holding this garnet. And and that is
(29:28):
where this
feeling of that really being
held, like Kyle just talked about, really being
held and supported,
really leaning into,
like, my purpose and my truth and
and what I am, like, put here to
do, not as a career, not as a
but, like, as a human being experiencing
(29:51):
life.
Right? Like,
it just had this deep impact and impression
on me. So
over the next, you know, quite a few
years after that, really connecting deeper with goddess
Brigid, who I had always felt this
call toward, this pull toward. And that was
one of the reasons, you know, specifically, I
(30:13):
wanted to stop at quite a few of
her holy sites
on this
road trip with my mom
and
digging deeper into goddess Brigid and understanding her
different aspects and that sort of thing. I
started to understand how the different crystals that
I was feeling drawn to at that time
where I was really opening up to her
(30:34):
energy
and her presence
sort of related to her different aspects.
So Garnet,
I sort of connect with her aspect
as the healer. And in a past episode,
when we were talking about Carnelian, I talked
about the connection to Brigid as hearth keeper.
But in Brigid's
(30:54):
aspect is healer,
Brigid was, like, known to have this amazing
knowledge of
herbs and herbal medicine. She was
one that could talk with and connect with
the bees. And if we think about the
importance of
of honey
for healing, right, honey is
(31:15):
so powerful. It has amazing antiseptic qualities. We
connect with it. Even still, when we, you
know, have a scratchy throat, a sore throat,
we'll have a cup of tea with honey.
And Brigid was like this keeper of the
bees, this
amazing goddess who could
communicate with the bees, speak with the bees.
(31:35):
And if we think about, you know, the
what the bees are really representative of is
community in so many ways. And so here
is
this amazing goddess who is,
able to
inspire
community action and orchestrate community action.
And so
it's through community often that we find healing
(31:57):
as well. So it's not just in the
plants and the land. It's not just in
the honey, but looking at the symbolism in
that, it's where we find
healing in community. And that for me is
so much of what garnet is because when
we are present
in our truth and what we're supposed to
be here doing as humans,
(32:18):
so much of it revolves around
connection
and collaboration,
and that is where I feel some of
garnet's
strongest
gifts
lie. Like, this this is where it's at.
So if you've been feeling that feeling of
being disconnected
and separate
and you wanna come back together as part
(32:39):
of that bigger whole, like Nicholas was talking
about with just the chemistry of garnet. Like,
this is a stone that can really help
you do that in big ways. And so
if you,
like me,
feel really connected with goddess Brigid or if
you don't and you'd like to explore that,
one of the best ways I feel like
we can work with Garnet to get close
(33:01):
to her
is to let Garnet be sort of a
muse,
to inspire you, to inspire
poetry,
song, dance,
music. Like, let those sparks of inspiration
fuel you and help you find your place
in community and the things that you can
do to make the world a better place.
(33:22):
So, actually, you're saying just by kind of
having garnered around near you and then creating
those opportunities for those kind of muse like
experiences, that's a good way to work with
this, Crystal?
Yeah. For me, it's almost like a tuning
in and a listening.
Like, I'm I'm so often taken back to
that exact moment of, you know, sitting at
(33:43):
the holy well and hearing the birdsong and
feeling so inspired by that, so connected.
And we don't have to have, you know,
made a pilgrimage to a sacred place to
do that. You can literally just sit where
you are in this moment.
Hold that garnet, wear it as jewelry,
and tune in and sort of listen. Just
(34:04):
listen to what's alive and what's present for
you, and you can start doing that by
just engaging your senses. So there's, you know,
just a really simple practice of holding that
garnet and thinking about
what you can see, what you can smell,
what you can hear,
what you feel, maybe what taste is in
your mouth, all of those things. But engage
(34:26):
those senses
to get you really present in your body
and then just sort of see what comes
up for you from there.
I love that. I love that. I must
admit, today, I've been sitting here in the
background kind of smiling like a teshire cat.
I hope everyone's kinda noticed that it you
know, one of the things I love about
crystal confab is that we all bring different
(34:46):
ideas, but there's really been an underlying theme
today of this kind of self fullness as
I think Kyle put it in. And Nicholas
is talking about being on that deserted island
and that type of thing as well. There's
a bit of method to our madness here
on this podcast. So, yes, we have to
choose different crystal each week, and you may
notice that I try and tie it into
something that's happening astrologically.
(35:07):
And the reason that Red Ghanet was selected
for this time is there's about three different
astrological
events that are actually happening where I think
Red Garland is absolutely perfect.
The one that ties in so beautifully with
what we've all been discussing today
is the retrograde of a major asteroid by
the name of Vesta,
another goddess.
(35:27):
She's known by the Greeks as Hestia.
Now to tell you a little bit about
this goddess, she was known as the goddess
of the heart and the home. So if
you think about it, she was the fireplace
that, you know, was honored in the past,
And we maybe don't honor our fires much
these days, but think in times gone by,
it was a source of warmth. It's where
you cooked your food. It was where the
(35:49):
family gathered.
It was a really key part of that.
But when you kind of look at her,
the honoring of this goddess that she had
these vestal virgins,
which were her priestesses. Now they when we
hear the word virgin these days, we think
that someone yet to experience sexual intercourse.
But virgins were
different. The definition was slightly different. These preceptors
(36:11):
were actually ones who decided
not to take a husband.
So not to go down the normal,
you know, heterosexual
route of, you know, we find a lover,
we get married, we have children, and we
build a home and that type of thing
as
well. In fact, these, these preceptors were often
in different fertility rights throughout the year, be,
you know,
(36:32):
be the portals of the goddess and would
make love,
to many different people in that type of
thing as well.
So what Vesta kind of represents is not
just that fireplace that we kind of think
and, you know, basic descriptions will be about
her, but it is about honoring that fire
within you.
And so
what happens, this asteroid that is in an
(36:54):
asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter,
when she goes retrograde,
which is happening in the, coming days,
you're going to find that your self integrity
or relying on yourself will be compromised.
And this is where Red Garner is the
perfect asset to have by you because people
will ask you to like, oh, do you
(37:15):
think you could just could you help me
out with that when you've already decided? No.
I'm having a night off or, you know,
a one more hour or, you know, those
little things where like, oh,
and for me, why I love Red Garner
is it has this real warrior energy,
not in an aggressive assertive way, although I
do find it quite fiery,
but more so in if you were a
(37:36):
warrior,
you need to make sure you're at your
best
so that you can give your best. Do
you mean if a warrior was going to
battle, they're trying to prepare themselves to be
in tip top shape? And that's exactly what
we've been talking about today. This is a
crystal to make sure that you are looking
after yourself. Again, as Kyle said, it's not
selfish.
It's being selfful
(37:57):
because you can give your best as a
partner, as a parent, as a colleague,
as a just a contributor to this world.
If you're in a bad shape,
you become a drain on society rather than
a contributor to society.
So really look at where your boundaries are
gonna be pushed in the next few weeks.
Are people trying to get you to do
things that are beyond what you actually want
(38:20):
to do. And then keep Red Garland nearby
you and either sit and ponder each night
and go, did I bend too much? Why
did I bend too much? Was it that
need to try and get other people's approval?
But as I often say, it doesn't matter
if you're Donald Trump or Lady Gaga or
Mother Teresa. You're gonna have people that love
you and people that hate you.
(38:40):
But only you get to decide how you
feel about yourself. Invest to retrograde is a
really great time for you to kind of
get those personal boundaries a little bit stronger
as well. So that's one thing that's happening
really soon. Now I'm gonna talk to my
Southern Hemisphere friends
because we also have a equinox happening.
(39:00):
Now it's going to be different. It's going
to spring equinox, which is known as Ostara
in the Northern Hemisphere.
This is a really great time for getting
back into action, planting seeds of desire.
But for us in the, Southern Hemisphere, and,
Kyle, I don't know if you've noticed it,
we've stopped our scorching hot 40 degree or
a hundred Fahrenheit days, and it's starting to
(39:21):
cool down slowly and you start to get
a bit of chill in the morning. We're
going into that autumnal weather.
Remember that humans are this only species on
this planet that ignores the cycles of the
sun, the moon and the seasons.
When the moon when the sun goes down
at night,
trees and plants will change the behavior and
(39:41):
so will animals. Humans, we flick on a
light and keep going. And, you know, that's
why we throw out our,
you know, our melatonin, our serotonin cycles,
our circadian cycles. That's why cortisol keeps us
up late into the night. All these different
things.
With the seasons as well, do you behave
differently in the summer and the winter?
(40:02):
With our climate control, a lot of the
time, we still do
a lot of the same stuff a lot
of the time.
Mabon or the autumn equinox is a really
great time to start slowing down, to get
into that more introspective time. And for me,
this is a really beautiful time.
We don't get it so much in the
Southern Hemisphere, but in the Northern Hemisphere, 1
thing I love is you have all the
(40:23):
autumn leaves.
The trees realizing that actually I no longer
need this except leaves. And for my survival
and introspection in these colder months, I need
to let go of excess.
So this is a really beautiful time to
focus on your base chakra.
And, of course, the base chakra is about
feeling grounded, feeling safe and secure.
(40:44):
And a lot of the time why we
feel overwhelmed is because we're trying to stretch
ourselves
in too many different directions. And this is
a great one for
for Mabon to kinda go, no. I need
to come back to what I need and
focus on that
and and build those boundaries around that as
well.
Now the final thing,
I'm I'm a little bit too late for
(41:05):
this one, but I'm also wearing mine now.
And it's a special type of gun that
we haven't talked about yet, which I'm gonna
throw back to everyone in a moment, the
blood moon.
So we talked about the blood moon last
week with bloodstone and the blood moon, by
the time you listen to this, has already
happened.
But I'm giving you one year's warning because
we have another blood moon in Virgo
in 2026
(41:26):
as well. And the crystal that I'd love
you to get is not just a red
garnet for that, but a star red garnet.
And I wanted to ask the gang, you
know, asterism
is this kind of effect you get on
certain crystals such as garnets,
rubies,
rose quartz, sapphires,
dioxides,
where when you shine the light on it,
(41:48):
you get either a four rate or six
rate star that kind of glides across it.
And I'd love to know from everyone,
what does that do to the energy of
that crystal
when when it's gotten and I think I've
seen a few people grab different crystals
off camera for a second.
What does that do to the energy? And
what's your feeling on star crystals? And, you
(42:09):
know, I'll I'll come back a little bit
and talk about star
garnets. Nicholas, I thought you'd grab yours first.
So in the case of our garnets, it's
usually,
either titania,
so something like rutile. Although it could also
be, you know, tiny little fibers of other
minerals that are in there. But, you know,
that titanium influence that we find in rutile
(42:30):
is
so connective.
It is strong. It forges
great boundaries and things as well, helps us
reach across distance while still protecting our light,
and I find it so
enlivening.
I have a star garnet sphere, which was
not labeled a star garnet sphere. It was
just in a basket of regular garnets.
(42:53):
And,
I never go crystal shopping
without a bright light. So, like, you know,
my mobile device, I have to look at
everything under a bright light to see what's
happening inside it. And, I mean, the moment
I turned the the torch on, it was
right there, this perfect
four rayed star. And I,
I went through every one of them categorically
(43:14):
to find the best, but it was the
first one. It's always the first one. And
I love that it brings
a greater sense of movement
to the otherwise somewhat kind of stabilizing or
anchoring quality that Garnet has.
And,
yeah, I think they're they're really, really sweet.
(43:35):
Kyla, so you grab one as well?
I have also had a very similar experience,
but with a pendant. I bought this really
beautiful garnet pendant, took it outside, the sun
hit it, and it went ping with a
four star. I was like, yes.
I'm so, so excited. Like, it brings life
this energy, this, like, richness the same way
(43:56):
that, like, golden rutile, star rose quartz,
star dioxide. I find anything with a like,
an asterism, a star in it just
brings this
party.
Yes, do,
amplify, can, like, depending on the situation,
it's like a yes for me.
(44:17):
I I I have started to doubt myself
this week as well. I was just doing
some Google searches for images as well, and
I wanted to
I've always been very certain and confident in
taught this, but I wanna double check with
everyone now. When it comes to you've got
star garnet, you've got star rubies. Now they
look very, very similar. They're both kind of
that red. There will be kind of variations.
(44:37):
But I both both Nicholas and Kyla mentioned,
it's a four rade star with Garnet, but
it will be a six rade star with
Ruby.
Please confirm that I am always correct.
Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it is it's
quite when when I did a Google image
of star,
Garnet,
some of the images had a four rate
star and some had a six rate star.
(44:59):
So I do wonder sometimes whether in sales,
people are getting a little bit confused on
what they're selling
type of thing. But, yeah, that's obviously because
of the the layout of the the structure
of the crystal.
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. There there is a really
great exception, though, although it is rare.
Corundum can produce a 12 pointed star
(45:19):
if we have
the right spacing of the the rutile inside
them.
Just when I told
The fact that garnet is cubic,
cubic,
you know, four sides. Yeah.
Ruby, hexagonal, six sides.
Like, right there, it shows you that that's
the orientation that the curve the other minerals
(45:41):
within the mineral are going to form under
that structure. It's simple maths.
Yep. Yep. How about yourself, Ashley? Have you
worked much with Stargardens?
Yes. This is actually
I found a really beautiful one from this
amazing
ethical vendor a number of years back now.
But it's just a it's a massive
(46:01):
cabochon,
and so it just
perfectly displays that asterism. But I think in
general, when I when I think about
an asterism, I don't think of, like,
necessarily, like, star garnet versus star ruby versus
a starry rose quartz or something like that
compared to a regular one. I almost think
of the
the the asterism
as, like, this extra qualifier,
(46:23):
like, this extra type of energy. And for
me, kind of across the board, anything with
an asterism,
so good for focus,
and just an amazing
amplifier of whatever that crystal is already doing.
Like Kyle was saying, like, the yes can
do this. Like,
it's that
amplification
of whatever that stone is already doing, like,
(46:45):
taking it up times 10, but also really,
really good for enhancing focus on that aspect
of your life.
Yeah. I I find as well, asterism kind
of gives like the spiritual level of that
thing. So, you know, with rose quartz, rose
quartz is about that general love. The star
rose quartz kinda give that more kind of
soul love in that way.
(47:05):
I love blue star sapphires for that real
like, for me, that's one of the best,
stones you could use for soulmate work. If
you've got a soulmate,
you know, I think
star sapphire engagement rings would be probably
the best, would be my call. If someone's
like, if I could choose any stone, I'd
probably say star sapphires would be amazing for
(47:27):
that. With the rubies, it's that real fire
in us and garnets, when we come back
to that blood moon, it's that spiritual work
as well, Davide.
I really like that, and I I agree
with you on the star sapphire. It's such
a a beautiful stone.
But this is making me think of there
is this, lapidary worker who is
as famous as you can be for that
(47:49):
kind of thing, I guess, here in The
States,
but he did a lot of lapidary work
and a lot of mineral sourcing for Melody,
the author of the Love is in the
Earth series of books, and his name was
Bob Jackson.
And he would make these
chakra healing sets,
very, very few of them. It took him
a lot of time, but he would use
(48:10):
the metamorphosis
quartz from Brazil, which is, like,
trademark
name for quartz from Brazil with an asterism
in it.
Sort of almost
like a gyrasol according to Melody's literature, different
than a gyrasol, but looks very much like
a gyrasol, but then containing the asterism.
But he would actually
(48:31):
create doublets where he would put that astrated
quartz
on top
of different, like, what are considered usually more
like high vibrational stones. So you would have,
like,
a a beautiful ruby
with
this
asterated quartz on top, a
sugulite
(48:51):
with asterated quartz on top, and
a dioptase
with the asterated quartz on top. I mean,
very, very cool doublets where these are
bounded together. And then he would create, like,
these chakra stone sets out of them,
and I was lucky enough to have a
few of these throughout the years that I
(49:12):
was able to work with. But that's where
I really, really learned to appreciate that
asterism as, like, its own formation and what
else it kinda brought to the party.
So, if anyone just is out there, do
a quick image search and see if you
can find, like,
Bob Jackson
metamorphosis
quartz chakra sets and just look at them
(49:32):
because they're very, very cool.
That is awesome. I love that. I always
love in our conversations to kind of leave
our listeners and our viewers with kind of
practical things they can do with their red
gun. And, actually,
with with Bridget, you gave us a classic
example of that. I would say with this
kind of vestor retrograde and this kind of
integrity that we've all been talking about, I
(49:53):
think it's valuable to you know, we have
these little pockets in our jeans.
People often call them, I think, coin
pockets. What? Lead crystal pockets.
That's a really nice place to kind of
fit your red gun at the moment type
of thing. But I think it's also nice
to even place one where distractions
tend to come.
So if you place one with your phone,
(50:15):
if you find that's where it pulls you
away from who you are or if at
work, you won't get pulled away. Maybe you're
laying one on your desk and that type
of thing. Is that kind of energetic but
also visual reminder of honoring yourself as well?
But I'd love to ask the other gents
as well. You know, Kyle, do you have
a way that you could kind of suggest
people they've got their egg on it. What
do they do with it?
(50:36):
Whilst I was sitting, I wrote down a
couple of questions and I think sitting with
yourself, sitting with a piece of gun and
asking yourself these questions could be really, really
useful. The first one is, what is going
to be my best course of action that
takes care of my own needs as well
as everyone else involved?
Sit with that. How much can you do
for yourself as for everyone else? Find that
(50:58):
balance moving forward. And another one, do I
just need a hug or maybe a conversation
with a close friend? Like, sometimes it's just
that acknowledgement
that you need a bit of support
and sitting with that garment going actually okay
I'm gonna reach out to that friend because
I need a hug. I'm gonna give myself
that little bit of support. I think what
can you do? How can you use your
(51:19):
energy? And what support do you currently require?
I love that. Very very in line with
Investo Retrograde as well.
Love it. Nicholas, what about yourself?
You know, garnets feel so
corporeal, so kinesthetic to me. Like, I've I
wanna play with the physical bodies of them.
And so,
(51:40):
oftentimes, when I wanna, like, integrate crystal energy
into my lives, I I try to find
we'll we'll call them therapy windows rather than
just calling them energy centers. It's not necessarily
about a a map of the energy body,
but about how our bodies relate to space
and time and ourselves and our rocks.
And three zones that I really love integrating
(52:02):
garnet, but also lots of other crystals with
is just head, heart, and belly.
And there's something about bringing us into communion
with our physical bodies this way. The heft
of the garnet,
you know, kinda anchors the mind when we
hold it up to our brow or to
the top of the head. So we're not,
you know, spinning out in there. We're bringing
it to the heart, and it's got that
(52:23):
stabilizing centering influence like we see it's nezosilicate
structure do for us. Then the belly, usually
for me, that's a little lower than the
belly button, but, you know, somewhere in that
that abdominal region would be nice.
And it's it's about kind of
feeling at home
in your body
and
doing that with
(52:44):
a a stone that brings
us in touch with the material world that
allows us to have that kind of energetic
relationship, I think, is really useful, but it's
also just a fun exercise for any crystal
you wanna get to know.
I love that. I love that. One other
novel thing that I've heard, some people find
that putting a red garnet in your socks
will actually help or in your gloves will
(53:04):
help with circulation.
So if it gets colder in the, you
know, in in the Southern Hemisphere, maybe we
all need to put a little garnet in
our socks so that and see if that
works as well. Maybe let us know in
the comment if that's worked for you. But
we've given you enough to kinda Google today,
whether it be that that lapidrist or whether
it be asterisms.
Go out and search, and hopefully, you've also
(53:25):
found some new love for garnets as well.
We'll be back next week to discover
another great amazing crystal, another gift from Mother
Earth. Have a bit of a contact with
it. Thanks for joining us today. Until then,
take care and blessed be.
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.