Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez  and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #32 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Emerald meaning, including:

Manifesting abundance with Emerald
Emerald as a travel companion
Using Emerald for radical self-love


Tune in now for a deeper look at Emerald meaning!


 
Podcast Episode 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.

 

Adam Barralet: Welcome to this week's episode of crystal confab. We are so excited to be talking about this crystal today, and I think Nicholas is extremely excited. We've talked about stones of nobility in the last few weeks. We've talked about sapphires. We've talked about ruby.

 

And so, of course, we must, otherwise, Nicholas would probably threaten to leave the show, talk about emerald. And that's exactly what we're talking about today. Joining me are Kyle and Nicholas, and we are talking about one of the things I really love about Emerald is that it's part of a family called the Beryl family. And I just think of a bunch of old women sitting around knitting called the Beryl's and that type of thing. But people may not realize that some of our other much loved crystals such as acmarin, heliodor, and morganite, they're all part of the beryl file family.

 

Aren't they, Kyle?

 

Kyle Perez: Absolutely. The beryl family is all beryllium silicates, and they are beautiful in their perfect formation. They are all hexagonal, and your pure colorless beryl is called goshenite, originally found in Goshen, The United States. I don't know exactly where it is. I've forgotten.

 

Nicholas should be able to let me not know. I know it was named after where it was found. This is an etched Brazilian piece, really interesting, and totally colorless. You'd think it was quartz. Then you have Heliodor, yellow, named for the sun god.

 

I love Heliodor and aquamarine because they're both colored by iron, and it is one ion of iron difference that changes the color from blue to yellow, which is really cool. And I can actually show you in this aquamarine that goes into heliodor from Namibia. I love to call it aquadore. You can call it whatever you want. Then we have red beryl.

 

Red Beryl comes from the Wawa Mountains, which I just love to say, which is too much fun. Definitely the rarest and most expensive of your Beryls. It will cost you several tens of thousand dollars a carat cut. And then a really rare interesting one, black Beryl. Weird, included, kind of interesting.

 

There is also a Maxixe beryl, which is a really dark, dark blue beryl that you find in Brazil that actually changes color when it comes out of the Earth. And then there's even orange Beryl and green Beryl that you find out there as well, and it's just an amazing family. And they're strong gems. Remember, Beryls are eight on the hardness, so they're good sturdy gems that actually last well in jewelry. So look for all of the colors of the rainbow, please.

 

Adam: And do you find, Kyle, the, the Beryls are good as a family for something in particular?

 

Kyle: I literally have all of my Beryls in one grid together. They all live together in one grid, and they all access all of the elements, and they connect to fae, and they connect to light and joy and all of this really uplifted energy. I actually have a crystal skull carved, two in morganite, three in emerald, two in aquamarine, and two in heliodor as well. I have a full collection of skulls carved in this energy, and I really love that element where you get water, you get fire, you get earth, you get air, you get it all coming in together, and it really is empowering. And I think it's a great follow on from, you know, last week talking about everything coming together.

 

Maybe pop your Beryls in.

 

Adam: Yeah. I love that idea. And it's funny you talk about the elemental beings. I find the Beryls to be probably the best family group for bringing in elemental energy. I love either Heliodor or Goshenite for the Fae realms.

 

I love Acrebrine. It's said to be one of the favorite stones of the Merfolk. I think, big fight is really great or Red Beryl is really great for dragon energy. It's got real power in it. And then, of course, emerald is really great for gnome energy, and that will kind of come unpacked as we talk about this.

 

But I think me and Kyle are just torturing Nicholas off camera at the moment because he's just like, let me talk about Emerald, and we're just having a dialogue here. Nicholas, tell us all about why you love Emerald and why it's we. I asked Nicholas if you had a ranking top, but it's in your top family. Is that right?

 

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. Yeah. I'm, you know, I'm sure all of us being in the public sphere working with crystals, we get asked on a pretty regular basis, what is your favorite crystal? What's your top five? And I have favorites for different reasons at different times.

 

My favorite thing to collect, hands down, is quartz because you'll never get bored. It's what started my collection. My favorite thing to work with therapeutically for me in my journey has been a rhodonite. My favorite thing just for the sheer beauty of it is petersite, but the stone whose mythology and magic just floors me every time I get a chance to, like, have that intimate connection to it and its story is emerald. And what a magical and subversive stone it has been throughout history.

 

So I'm gonna give us, like, the short version of the the history to today, because I really wanna, like, jump into this, like, deeper symbolism that that I've experienced with emerald. We get emerald in English from French, which is, you know, derived from Latin, which comes from Greek, which ultimately comes from even older roots. But in Greek, it just meant greenstone. So our ancient emeralds, much like our ancient sapphires and our ancient rubies, were just things that color. And what we find in emerald is a lot of history that connects it to the natural world because green things grow from the Earth.

 

Emeralds are green and found in the Earth. They're extraordinarily rare, true. Emeralds are formed with tiny little bits of trace chromium in them. There's some debate. Some gemological institutions will honorarily allow Beryl colored by vanadium to be called Beryl or to be called emerald.

 

Others absolutely will not. So I'm in the ‘will not’ camp. But, the magic of emeralds is in part linked to the fact that they don't form like most other Beryls. A lot of our gem quality Beryls, we're gonna find in igneous environments. We're gonna find them in pegmatites, which are thought of granite, but with much larger components because it cooled so much more slowly and gave time for these crystals to form into very high quality gems.

 

And a lot of our really good gem materials in general come from pegmatites, but not emeralds. They form in metamorphic environments. We're gonna find them largely in schist, occasionally in some other metamorphic rocks. Very rarely, there's a well known Chinese deposit that is formed in a primary and igneous rock. But what is happening is the beryllium essential to the make of beryl, it's a beryllium aluminum cyclosilicate, and the chromium that gives it that rich green color almost never occurs together.

 

So what we need is for literally the making of mountains, the folding of landscapes in half, the doubling of them over, the squeezing and stretching. And then the icing on the cake is a little bit of extra hydrothermal activity going on. And in those little pockets in the in between, we can bring together these other ingredients, the beryllium and the chromium with the very common, silicon and oxygen and aluminum and and and any other trace elements might be in there to give us emeralds. But because of that kind of tortuous and arduous history, geologically speaking, they're usually not very big, and they're usually not very transparent. They're often riddled with flaws of all different kinds.

 

We usually find them in, as Kyle showed, schist kind of rock, which is a really high grade metamorphism. So I've got some Brazilian emeralds here in the matrix. This is a gift from my dear friend, Takeda. And, you know, when we're really lucky, we'll find big emeralds or we'll find transparent emeralds. Sometimes we find them both at the same time.

 

My largest is this one here from Ethiopia, and it's got this beautiful biotite, you know, relic of the schist that came out of here. And this is unusually large for an emerald. It's not unusually high quality. I could afford only one of those modifiers, and it was not quality, so I went for quantity over quality for once. But emeralds in history have been used, like true emeralds, have been used since the Neolithic era in Northern Africa, and they were fashioned into at least one headdress or crown that has been found.

 

There's some rough dark emeralds in it. There's also bone and natural resin holding the whole thing together. We see inventory records from Babylon that record the sale of emeralds around six thousand years ago. We can't be sure they're the same species, but they were a precious green stone. We've got large scale mining of emeralds that takes place for the very first time in Egypt in the mines at Wari Sekait, which under the kind of Roman Hellenistic occupation period was named was renamed Mons Muragnus or Mount Emerald because of how rich the emeralds were there.

 

And this was around 1,500 BCE, so like 3,500 ago. We find stones there that were buried with the dead and worn as jewelry by the living. Inscribed stones were used as talismans. These were deeply spiritual,