Five New Stones in the Grimoire

Five stones went into the Grimoire this week, each with a full entry — how it forms, where it actually comes from, what it’s traditionally associated with, and how to care for it without quietly ruining it. Here’s what’s new, and the one thing from each that surprised me most.

Charoite comes from exactly one place on earth: a single massif in Siberia. That’s the entire world supply, one mountain. When it was first described in 1978, mineralogists outside Russia assumed the violet had been dyed in, because nothing else in the case looked like that naturally.

Lepidolite is the one I most want you to read the care note on. It’s a mica — around 2.5 on the Mohs scale, splitting into sheets like pages — and it should never get wet. I’ve also written the honest paragraph about its lithium, because that stone gets talked about in ways I’m not willing to repeat.

Bloodstone was called heliotrope long before it was called bloodstone. Pliny the Elder recorded the belief that dropping one in water would turn the sun’s reflection blood-red, which is my favorite wrong idea in the history of mineralogy.

Iolite changes color as you turn it — violet-blue from one angle, nearly clear from another, smoky gold from a third. You’ll see it sold as the Viking compass stone; I’ve explained in the entry why that story is a hypothesis rather than history.

Chevron amethyst isn’t its own mineral and I say so right at the top. It’s amethyst and white quartz banded into arrowheads — every chevron a record of the water changing while the crystal grew. It’s the stone that shows its work.

Four of the five turn up as chips and tumbles in the Witch’s Brew confetti, so if you’ve scooped a bag lately, you’ve probably already held one without knowing its name. Now you can look it up.

— with love & earthbound wonder, Kailer 🌙🍃