Clear quartz
Clear quartz, or rock crystal, is colourless quartz. Pliny the Elder believed it was a kind of ice, which is how it got its Greek name; John Dee used a crystal ball to call angels, and modern crystal healing credits it with an energy no test has found.
Meaning
Clear quartz is the stone the ancient world simply called crystal. Pliny the Elder, in book 37 of his Natural History, says it got its Greek name from the certainty that it was a kind of ice, found only where winter snow freezes hardest, and he notes its six-sided form. George Frederick Kunz, writing in 1913, describes the crystal ball of John Dee and the crystal-gazers. Modern crystal healing treats crystals as sources of a healing energy, a belief that experiments by a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, found no support for.
Origin and history
Pliny’s two chapters on crystal (book 37, chapters 9 and 10) mix observation and wonder. Crystal could form only from rain and pure snow, he thought, so it could not bear heat and was used only for cold drinks. Physicians told him that a crystal ball set in the sun made the best cautery for the human body. Crystal was also a luxury: Nero, hearing that all was lost, smashed two crystal cups so that no one would drink from them again.
The idea of crystal as ice lasted into the Christian centuries. Kunz quotes St Jerome repeating Pliny without naming him: “While a stone to the touch, it seems like water to the eye.” In church symbolism, Kunz adds, the clear stone stood for the pure faith of those within the Church.
Crystal balls and John Dee
Kunz describes how gazing long at a crystal ball, or at an opal, moonstone or sapphire, can leave a person half hypnotised, a state believed to give insight into the future. John Dee, who was favoured by Elizabeth I, first tried his crystal ball at Mortlake on 22 December 1581, Kunz writes, beginning with an invocation to the angel of the stone. The sphere of Dee’s now in the British Museum is smoky quartz, not clear. Dee also used a black mirror of Obsidian.
The crystal skull that wasn’t Aztec
Kunz’s 1913 book illustrates the British Museum’s rock-crystal skull as “an exceptionally fine specimen of Aztec work”. He had a part in its story. The Smithsonian anthropologist Jane MacLaren Walsh records that the museum bought the skull in 1898 from Tiffany & Co., which had bought it from the French dealer Eugène Boban; Kunz, Tiffany’s vice president, was the middleman both times. Walsh reports that a scanning electron microscope study of the skull suggests it was carved within a decade of 1881, the year it was first offered for sale.
Does clear quartz do anything?
Modern crystal healing says that each crystal has healing properties carried by a “subtle energy”. The psychologist Chris French tested what people feel when they hold one. In studies presented in Rome in 1999 and to the British Psychological Society in 2001, his volunteers relaxed for five minutes holding either a real quartz crystal or a glass copy. Whether the crystal was real made no difference to what they reported; the sensations, French concluded, came from suggestion.
Read next
- Next in Crystal and gemstone loreCitrineCitrine is yellow to orange quartz. Before modern gemology it was confused with topaz, so it has little lore of its own, and most citrine on sale today is amethyst that has been heated.
- The same shape in Andean and Inca symbolsNazca linesGiant drawings scraped into the desert of southern Peru between about 500 BC and AD 500: straight lines and trapezoids several kilometres long, and outlines of animals and plants. UNESCO lists them as the Lines and Geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa.
See also
Obsidian, Rose quartz, Amethyst, Carnelian, Onyx, Bloodstone.
Sources
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book 37, chapter 9, Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, book 37, chapter 9 (The nature of crystal)
- Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, book 37, chapter 10, Translated by John Bostock and H. T. Riley, 1855, Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, book 37, chapter 10 (Luxury displayed in the use of crystal)
- The Curious Lore of Precious Stones, by George Frederick Kunz, 1913, J. B. Lippincott (Project Gutenberg edition), ch. 2 (Rock-crystal); ch. 6 (crystal-gazing, Dr. Dee); British Museum skull caption
- The Skull of Doom: Acquisition History, Jane MacLaren Walsh (Smithsonian Institution), Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America), 2010, Acquisition history
- The Skull of Doom, Jane MacLaren Walsh (Smithsonian Institution), 27 May 2010, Archaeology (Archaeological Institute of America), Under the microscope
- Romance in the stones? The power of crystals vs the power of suggestion, Chris French, 21 April 2021, The Skeptic (UK), Account of the 1999 and 2001 studies
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from lines or triangles.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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