Crystal Healing Archetypes
It’s a sign of the times that many people think crystal healing is blatantly ridiculous. Some (actually quite funny) comedy sketches I have seen are especially good at this ridicule. Let’s look at a famous instance of "scientific” derision and how it turned out... with the benefit of hindsight.
In an effort to begin to organise the elements into what we now know as the periodic table, in 1864 the British scientist John Newlands put forward his "law of octave". Every eighth element seemed to have similar properties and he proposed a similarity with music, where the eighth note is an octave above the first. He was openly mocked, leaving scientific research and reputed to have never recovered from the contemptuous laughter.
The genius of Dmitri Mendeleev was to incorporate Newlands idea to become the father of the periodic table. Interestingly, this beautiful arrangement of the elements was revealed to him in a dream. Just how does that fit into the scientific method? Aren't dreams as whimsical as crystals to the hard-nosed realists? Thankfully for chemistry, Mendeleev was a little more open-minded.
"For the true knowledge of music is nothing other than this: to know the order of all separate things and how the Divine Reason has distributed them: for this ordering of all separate things into one, achieved by skilful reason, makes the sweetest and truest harmony with the Divine Song." Hermes Trismegistus
Shape has Properties
The best known examples are in relation to the pyramids. Egyptologists have found well-preserved grain in tombs thousands of years old. Grain stored in modern silos usually keeps no longer than four years. Several experiments have confirmed that the shape and orientation of pyramids can preserve organic matter.
If you take the chemicals that give a rose its fragrance, but arrange them in a different geometric shape, you will not smell the sweetness of a rose. If you take different chemical substances and arrange them in the same molecular shape as those found in rose oil, you will smell the sweetness of rose. A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but not by any other molecular geometry. Form has properties. The only difference between the softness of carbon (left) in graphite and the hardness of carbon in diamonds (right) is the shape the identical carbon molecules are arranged in. The matter is identical, only the energetic bonds differ.
If something as subtle as fragrance results from the properties of form, then how can something that is defined by its form - a crystal, not have properties related to it? Quartz has a hexagonal form at every level. From the most powerful microscopes showing geometrised light waves at the level of the inconceivably minute (the picture on the left below is a single silicon atom), to the molecular level (below right) and the beautiful shapes we all see, quartz is hexagonal. It embodies the archetype of what the ancient Greeks called the Hexad, "sixness”.
"These refraction photos are the closest visualization that science can give with respect to the nature of atomic substance, which appears to be patterns of geometrized light-energy." Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry - Philosophy and Practice.
"All the pictures which science now draws of nature and which alone seem capable of with observational fact are mathematical pictures … From the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.” Sir James H. Jeans (1877-1946, English physicist, astronomer and writer)
Number is within all things. Attributed to Pythagoras.
In numerology 6 is considered the number of material perfection.
The Greek mathematical philosophers called six the Perfection of Parts since six is the only number that is both the sum and the product of the same three numbers. (1+2+3=6, 1x2x3=6) Those numbers that six can be divided by (1,2, and 3), are the only set of numbers where each number divides the sum of the other two. Six is the only number other than ten that can be formed by the multiplication of two different factors other than 1. (6=2x3, 10 =2x5). When 6 manifests in nature or industry as the hexagon, it is always perfectly efficient.
"There being, then, three figures which of themselves can fill up space around a point, viz...the triangle, square and the hexagon, the bees have wisely selected for their structure that which contains the most angles, suspecting indeed that it could hold more honey than the other two." Pappus (300A.D., Greek mathematician in Alexandria, Egypt)
In M. S. Schneiders’s work on the mathematical archetypes in nature, art and science, "A Beginners Guide to Constructing the Universe”, the archetype of "sixness” is defined as a perfect structure, function and order.
The circle is considered most perfectly segmented and measured at 360 degrees - 6 as perfect structure.
The optimum number of spokes (i.e. fastest) on racing bicycles was found to be 36 (6x6). Bees found a pot with 6 sides held the most honey with the minimum effort and materials. Industry also uses hexagonal storage systems for the same reason - 6 as a perfect function.
Time is dissected into multiples of 6 - 1 minute = 60 seconds, 60 minutes 1 hour, 24 hours 1 day – 6 as perfect order.
Much of the electronics industry is based on the qualities of the close-packed silicon atoms of quartz arranged in hexagons. The piezoelectric nature of quartz means pressure yields electricity and electric currents yield regular mechanical pulses, hence, the quartz watch. This indicates that even in the most modern sense, the quality of 6, the Greek Hexad, is associated with perfect order and timekeeping.
When the hexagon viewed from this perspective of archetype, Plato’s plane of ideas, is it so difficult to imagine it could also apply to human health and self-development?
Quartz crystal has a precisely defined natural frequency at which it oscillates, like a tuning fork. Crystal healing means this natural frequency helps to restructure, harmonise our electro-magnetic and physical bodies, restoring order to dysfunctional metabolisms.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Albert Einstein
We may not understand all the implications of the Hexad, but we can get a feel for the number, shape and archetype. Write the number 6, draw hexagons, draw circles and arrange them in patterns of 6, count angles and look for 6 in nature - we are surrounded by information about the archetype, essential nature, of 6 if we look. When we have a feel for the "quality", not merely the quantity of 6, we will be learning to see crystals in harmony with the cosmic design, and better understand their and our place in it.
"You begin to see, as never before, the wonderfully patterned beauty of Creation. You see true artistry, far above any human contrivance. This indeed is the very source of art. By contact with it, your aesthetic senses are heightened and set upon the firm basis of truth. Beyond the obvious pleasure of contemplating the works of nature - the Many - is the delight that comes through the philosophical study of geometry, of moving towards the presence of the One." - John Michelle, Sacred Geometer.