Crystal Consciousness and Pyramid
Power
If the cross is the classic symbol of Christianity, the crystal is the quintessential talisman of the New Age.
The crystal-conscious hang the rocks of ages around their necks and suspend them from their ceilings; they wear them on their fingers and in body pouches; they place them on their coffee tables and window ledges and around their pets' necks; they stash them in their pockets, purses, and briefcases; drop them in their toilet tanks and bathtubs; affix them to their carburetors and bedposts; and use them for meditating and relaxing, focusing energy, and finding soul mates.
Some true believers even drink powdered rock crystals in an energizing elixir dubbed the "gem and tonic." And they want you to know that crystals can cure toothaches, allergies, face wrinkles, and toenail fungi.
All that, the proponents say, is possible because crystals molecularly can develop shapes in harmony with the internal structure of the human body, thereby helping us amplify and balance our energies.
New Agers — and a lot of other people, too — are fond of quartz crystals. They come in sizes minuscule to mammoth (up to a ton or more) and they can be as clear as water (preferred by many), milky or smoky, or dazzling shades of rose, blue, and violet. Gemstone favorites also sell well these days at psychic fairs, trendy boutiques, and New Age bookstores. The sought-after baubles include amethysts,
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rubies, emeralds, sapphires, topaz, onyx, jade, lapis lazuli, tourmaline, and moldavite, a translucent, green meteorite gem — and, of course, diamonds. Some New Agers even have an obsession with obsidian.
You don't need a crystal ball to see that all this demand has pushed up the price of gemstone jewelry and crystals like . . . well, like magic. (We'll take a closer look at this commercial angle in chapter 15.)
Crystals and their alleged mystic properties were known and taught about in Hindu scriptures thousands of years ago, said Swami Sivasiva Palani, editor of Hinduism Today.1 Precious minerals played an important role in the pagan religious practices of biblical times as well, and figured prominently in the pagan rites of astrology.
Though a waggish critic proclaimed the New Age fascination with crystals "an epidemic of lost marbles," the undeniable beauty and alleged special powers of the hexagonal shapes of silicone dioxide have glittered in the eyes of the stars as well as lesser lights.
A veritable cache of crystals was on parade at the 1987 Academy Awards — not surprising, given their popularity among celebrities.
Actress Jill Ireland wears a crystal necklace and ring and keeps crystal clusters on the tables and in the gardens of her Malibu and Los Angeles homes. She first meditated with pieces of quartz following her mastectomy when her doctor recommended the therapy to reduce stress.
"I'm not saying crystals cure cancer, but when you have the disease, your peace of mind is damaged as well, and that's where they work for me," she told Los Angeles Times writer Carol McGraw.2
Singer Tina Turner reportedly holds a crystal for a few moments when she's on tour and enters a strange hotel room. The properties of the crystal seem to calm her and purge the loneliness.
Shirley MacLaine wears quartz pendants, and her solid-gold triangular pendant is registered "No. 7" by the firm that will sell you one just like it for $250.3 Bandleader Herb Alpert loves his 750-pound slab of quartz which he bought at a Manhattan fossil and mineral shop. And Alan Talansky, owner of a Manhattan investment company, explained the
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therapeutic comfort he feels radiating from the 600-pound quartz that sits on a lighted pedestal in a corner of his office: "When I'm in a big hassle, I turn and look at this thing that has been around for millions of years, and it makes the problems seem less."4
It's true that quartz has been around a long time; it is, in fact, the most common mineral on the planet, comprising about 12% of the Earth's crust. Yet rock power has dug its own substratum within the New Age movement.
The inventory of titles on crystal consciousness at the Bodhi Tree in West Hollywood, one of Southern California's best-known metaphysical bookstores, doubled to forty in just six months between 1986 and 1987. The Whole Life Expo shows, which in years past had only a handful of crystal dealers, now limit the number because of overcrowding.
Joan's Crystals in Venice, California (where you get a free crystal just for dropping by), sells "gourmet crystals at fast-food prices." Not far away is the home of Abraham's Atlantia Quartz Crystal Temple Bell Bowls, which come in five sizes and a variety of tones and are produced from pure quartz-crystal sand. The bowls give off good vibes and ring well at the cash register ($150 up, mallets not included). "Fill a room, fill a canyon, fill a universe" with the dulcet tones, sounds an advertising flyer.
In late 1987 Abraham was also creating "crystal wizard's hats which theoretically raise your consciousness and intelligence with cone energy. It's the same principle as the dunce cap," he said, "a tool to make you smarter."5
Abraham is no dummy; he's also been tapping into knowledge about "sacred geometry" from a pyramidologist-mystic. Together, they make quartz pyramids with superpowerful paranormal properties. The angle is the age-old belief that the pyramid form emits magnetic energy that can be harnessed to control events.
Ramtha, you may remember, first came to channeler J.Z. Knight through pyramid power. Knight tells one version of the story (it differs somewhat from other accounts she has given in media interviews) on a videotape distributed to her followers. She began placing small pyramids of different colors and sizes throughout her home, she says, and was amazed when a pyramid was able to create a "petrified
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cockroach." Then one day in 1978 she decided to hold a polka-dotted pyramid to her brain. The results were immediate. An entity appeared in her kitchen, saying, "I am Ramtha, the enlightened one. I have come to help you over the ditch. I have come to teach you to be a light unto the world."6
But Ramtha's not the only pyramid scheme.
"Pop-together" open-frame portable pyramids kits can be purchased for under $100 from Universal Mind, complete with a compass for proper alignment with magnetic north. According to assorted pyramid promos, the objects are acclaimed for such things as sharpening razor blades, stimulating exceptional plant growth, purifying water and killing bacteria, preserving and dehydrating foods, mellowing inexpensive wines, lowering electric bills, heightening awareness, raising vibrational levels, and amplifying thought, meditation, and astral projections. (And, I suppose, we should add petrifying cockroaches.)
What about these claims? As usual, the answer is cloudy rather than crystal clear.
Scientists know that tapping or squeezing a crystal produces a minute electrical charge called the piezoelectric effect. The compression forces the negative and positive ions together, creating the tiny current which flows in one direction; when the pressure is released, the ions return to their original position, giving off a charge flowing in the opposite direction. This ability has been harnesses by industry, particularly in the field of electronics.
From the simple quartz crystal "cat's whisker" radios that some of us remember assembling when we were children, to crystal-controlled frequencies, computers, watches, lasers, and the amplification of phonograph recordings, the crystal's vibrational constant is highly valuable.
So, wrote Jake Page in OMNI magazine, "it does not seem too great a leap of imagination to believe that a crystal could respond piezoelectrically to the electric field of a human being, augmenting such signals or somehow restoring a distorted (diseased) field to harmony and balance."7
Except for one thing: The crystal's current only flows during "deformation or recovery," says Page; constant pressure produces no continuous current. And any current produced is minutely weak, with almost no amperage.
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It seems unlikely that anything more exciting, electrically speaking, could come from a crystal than one could get from a tiny squeeze-type flashlight cell. But even if a perceptible current were generated, how could that influence health, happiness, or the future?
When New Agers say that crystals correctly synchronized, or "programmed," to the body vibrations of their owners can enable them to tap into past lives and future events, earth scientists sputter.
Anthony R. Kampf, curator of minerals and gems at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, says: "With people assigning metaphysical properties to certain minerals, it's shades of the Dark Ages, when there was a certain amount of mysticism associated with minerals . . . I can see a lot of people out there who have become quite enamored with certain minerals to which they are assigning these properties, which in scientific terms, the minerals don't have."8
"It's as close to poppycock as you can get," added Samuel Adams, a director of the Geological Society of America and the head of the Department of Geology and Geological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines.9
But crystal devotees leave no stone unturned.
Quartz miner Jimmy Coleman first beamed his light on a gigantic "super crystal" in 1972 as he dug into a cavern sixty-five feet deep in his mine in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas. An ancient earthquake had dislodged and exposed what he considered to be the rarest crystal in the world. Standing thirty-nine inches high and weighing seven hundred pounds, the quartz beauty was perfectly formed and milky white. Sensing a mysterious destiny, Coleman wrested the single-pointed "Earthkeeper" (so called because it is purported to possess a remarkable protective power and knowledge) to the surface and stored it.
Then, in July 1987, Almitra Zion, a "scout" for the Saiva Siddhanta Church, a Hindu group based on the island of Kauai, trekked to Arkansas in search of a crystal she said she had seen in a vision. She found it at Coleman's mine — although he had never told anyone about finding the behemoth crystal, according to a monk at the Hindu monastery near Kauai's famed Fern Grotto. The scout persuaded Coleman to sell the rare crystal, and on Harmonic Convergence Day
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(August 16, 1987) it was installed in Kauai's San Marga temple.
Light focused from a laser beam was "sanctifying" the crystal, the orange-robed monk told me during a visit in May 1988. The Earthkeeper, which the faithful believe is a "planetary knowledge storage device," was to be enshrined as the main icon of the San Marga sanctuary, overlooking lush meditation gardens above the Wailua River. The stone will be "adored as the . . . naturally formed mark of God Siva," the monk said.10
"The worshiper receives the vibration field of this crystal and attunes to it," he continued as the pungent aroma of incense wafted through the temple. "It is God pervading and being all souls, all universes in the rarefied psychic vibration it constantly radiates. It is God unmanifest in its . . . image of the undefinable Absolute. It is the type of awesome beholding that dilates the eyes' pupils while the mind stills into its known superconscious depths seeking to fathom what it sees."
New Age practitioners also consider smaller slivers of mineral Earth to have equally awesome and wondrous properties.
Brett Bravo, a pleasant lady who speaks in soothing tones and instructs her clients to place crystal jewelry on specified acupuncture meridians of their bodies for healing, claims stones heal through "the tuning fork effect." Crystals and people both have electromagnetic fields around them determined by their vibratory rates, says the Solana Beach, California, parapsychologist.
"The crystal or gemstone is the first tuning fork and transmits its vibration to the human being as the receiving tuning fork that begins to vibrate at the same frequency as the crystal. This is the healing / harmonizing effect!"11
If this is really so, why not use manufactured tuning forks?
Retired IBM scientist Marcel Vogel, who has studied crystals as well as less exotic subjects like fiberoptics, looks to mysticism for the answer. He has set up a million-dollar lab in San Jose to find out whether cut crystals can accomplish such feats as easing arthritic pain or purifying water. He believes a "divine" force like electromagnetism operates — but in a different plane — and crystals can help align that energy. He
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also thinks patterns of this force are stored in bones, and that vibrations from crystals can replace a bad pattern.12
However, since scientific inquiry, as we now know it, cannot measure spiritual or divine energies, any objective proof for crystal healing or pyramid power is elusive.
Materials Engineer Lawrence Jerome, of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, concluded that "the energies and powers they claim to use and capture in crystals have nothing to do with the everyday electromagnetic, chemical, or other energies we ordinary humans are familiar with."13
Popping a crystal in your pocket may make you feel lucky — like rubbing a rabbit's foot. Your anxieties might even melt away if you clutch the crystal's smooth, angular surface and think positively.
But if very much is wrong with you, better call the doctor.
Chapter 13 || Table of Contents
1. Sivasiva Palani, "Let's Sue the New Age (editorial)," Hinduism Today 9, no. 6 (September 1987): 2.
2. Carol McGraw, "Seekers of Self Now Herald the New Age," Los Angeles Times, 17 February 1987, pt. 1, 3.
3. Advertisement in India Journal 8, no. 1 (February 1988): 2.
4. Martha Smilgis, "Rock Power for Health and Wealth," TIME, 19 January 1987, 66.
5. Lyssa Royal, "The Ultimate Crystal," Conscious Connection (October--November 1987): 23.
6. Cited in Wike Associates (Roanoke, Va.), National & International Religion Report, 23 January 1987.
7. Jack Page, "Supreme Quartz," OMNI (October 1987): 96.
8. Quoted in Beth Ann Krier, "Crystal Craze and Rock Mania," Los Angeles Times, 5 December 1987, pt. 5, 1.
9. Quoted in Shawn Hubler, "Crazy over Crystals: Quartz Rocks of Yore Revived as Talisman for '80s," The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, 18 January 1987.
10. From personal conversation and literature at the Church of San Marga, Kauai, Hawaii, 14 May 1988.
11. Handout at Celebration of Innovation Workshop, San Francisco, 7 November 1987.
12. Page, "Supreme Quartz," 96.
13. Quoted in ibid., 100.
