Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez  and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #30 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Jet crystal meanings, including:

Working with Jet Crystals during the Full & New Moons
Adopting the 'less is more' approach with Jet crystal energy
Jet's historical significance, including its connection to queer identities in the ancient world


 
Tune in now for a deeper look at Jet crystal meanings!


 
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 a casual chat about all things crystals.

 

Kyle Perez: Hello, and welcome to another crystal confab. Today, we're staying with another, not necessarily ‘gemstone-gemstone’, and I'm joined by Adam and Nicholas, and we're going to dive into Jet. How many of you love a bit of Jet action?

 

Nicholas Pearson: I've grown fond of it over the years.

 

Adam Barralet: Yeah. Me too. I think one of the really interesting things a lot of people find is just tactile-wise, how it feels so different to a crystal. And, you know, one of the problems I think all of us probably get is people sending pictures or trying to identify what this crystal is. And the great thing about when it comes to black crystals, Jet is so much lighter.

 

So if it's a really, really light crystal, then it's going to be really, really easy to go up that Jet type of thing. So that's one thing. But I, you know, I've had experiences and I'll share them later on about just the tactileness of Jet is really, really nice. But, I believe it's been used for a long, long time and has a really great history about it as well. And who better to tell us about the history than Nicholas?

 

Nicholas: Yeah. This is one of those rocks that I think we can trace approximately 30,000 years of human use of. Going back a really long time. In, you know, the earliest instances, people didn't necessarily make the strong geological distinction between Jet and related materials. Kennel coal and lignite and sometimes black shale were treated very similarly.

 

So we kinda have to have a little grace in interpreting the data. But it is a stone that is inherently in between, and I find that really magical. One of the most important sources for Jet in the ancient world was in Whitby and what is now modern day Whitby in Yorkshire. I have a bit of Whitby Jet here from the coast of England, and it is my favorite piece in my collection, of very few pieces of Jet. But I think it is really marvelous to imagine that particularly during the Roman occupation of Britain, this material was traded across thousands upon thousands of miles.

 

We find evidence of Whitby Jet carvings in faraway Switzerland and Germany, as well as in Rome proper. So this was a commodity that was traded for a very long time. In other parts of the world where Jet can be found, we find similarly ancient uses of it. But when this kind of Romano British center production was in full swing about thirty five hundred years ago, Jet seemed to acquire, if we read between the lines, a number of uses that are a little bit weird, a little queer, we might even say. And one of my favorite examples is, the remains of a a skeleton found in a a Roman period burial.

 

The skeleton is officially known as skeleton six five two, because we don't have names and dates and ages for all of these figures. And there are a lot of confusing data points about this. This person was interred with a lot of very lavish expensive funeral goods, including jewelry, but they were buried in the part of the cemetery that you would put people who were on the outskirts, the fringe, the beggars, the thieves. So we have a little bit of contradictory information there. When this area was being excavated for the first time, doing, osteological analysis, looking at the the bones of the remains, researchers came to the conclusion that this person could be identified as and it's a problematic term, but we'll say to use use the terminology they did, anatomically male by by their bone structure.

 

But all of the trappings are of what a female identified body would be buried with, including, most importantly, a multi strand necklace consisting of more than 600 rather beads of Jet said to be scattered among the rib cage because, you know, the thread had broken like a swarm of ants. And so we have to do a little bit of reconstruction about what this might have meant. And, there's probably a very strong influence from a cult of a particular goddess who came from the Far East, and she was symbolized by a great black stone. Her name is often anglicized, Cybelle or Cybelle or Cybele. I'm not really sure what the original pronunciation was or worship would have originated in the Anatolian Peninsula where there's a material very similar to Jet found.

 

Looking at some gemological analysis, there's actually debate over what we should classify it. That's somebody else's problem. We're gonna consider it to be socially akin to Jet and treat them very similarly. And, worship was one that we find very similar mythic cycles in other parts of the world. We have a kind of eternal goddess who is the mother of the earth.

 

She has a dying and resurrected lover. We've seen this motif with Adonis and Aphrodite. We see it with Irushtar, Ishtar and her consort. We see it with Isis and Osiris. So it's a, we'll say a mythic motif or theme that recurs in many parts of the world.

 

But one thing special about Kibele's worship was that she had a unique class of, we'll say, priestly people. And I'm using those words in particular because by modern day terms, we would consider Munich. They were the third gender. They underwent a process to to become third gender, if you catch my drift, and occupied a kind of liminal space, an in between space that was neither male nor female. And the kind of resurrecting power of the goddess was said to work through them and to grant them great gifts in the next life, but they were the shamans and the priestesses of this cult.

 

They entered ecstatic trance. They were ferocious when they needed to be, tender and loving when they could be. They didn't necessarily operate by all the rules of society. To engage in the worship of the goddess this way was a really transgressive act. And the fact that her worship was also marked by a very curious stone, something that we find in geological environments, but it floats in seawater.

 

Something hard and enduring, but also flammable, something ancient and of the earth, but still organic, means that Jet has, we'll say, received quite a lot of unusual imagery over the years. And, we can associate Jet with this in between space. It is a stone and not a stone. It is a fossil, but it is not a mineral. Unlike petrified wood, it hasn't undergone the process of permineralization where something like silica or another mineral comes in and replaces the organic tissue.

 

In fact, it is the organic remains of an ancient class of trees called auricaria that were probably swept out to sea, or to bodies of water, we'll say, by a great and cataclysmic event or series of events. And the two rough categories of Jet that are out there, hard Jet and soft Jet, which actually has a lot more to do with their oil content than their brittleness because they have the same hardness range on the Mohs scale. But one one would have gone in seawater and the other into freshwater, immediately be buried by sediment and compressed by the sands of time. And that hypoxic environment prevented decay and putrefaction. It prevented microorganisms from breaking it down like other organic materials tend to.

 

And so living in this in between zones in the earth, in the water, but not really either, it becomes this other thing. And so Jet for me has been a stone of embracing the otherness, the queerness, the liminal spaces of life. I think of it as a stone that I turn to when I need to feel surrounded by my queer ancestors and the people who have been the trailblazers for me to live the life that I live as openly as I live it. It is protective. It is a stone that helps us face our fears and maybe examine where they come from.

 

And at the same time, it's a stone of incredible mystery. You know, we have expressions like black as Jet because the color of the stone is so iconically dark, unknowable, impenetrable. It is not transparent in thin sections like obsidian and some onyx and even some tourmalines would be. It is opaque, and there is something about the opacity that it represents of the unknown that when we surrender to, we can come out really empowered and transformed. And so when I need a little extra queer magic in my life, Jet is one of my go to stones.

 

Adam: Nicholas, black stones are often seen as being good for protection. Would you say that maybe Jet might be a good one for queer people who feel that they need extra protection?

 

Nicholas: Yeah. I do. And, you know, the reason for this, I think, is manyfold. Jet has been associated with another stone we'll eventually talk about, amber, because they're found in similar environments. They both float in seawater.

 

They're both flammable. So they kinda share a little bit of one another's functions in different historic periods, and both are considered very protective. We can find references in medieval and earlier and later texts, but, describing how either of these stones were placed on coal and allowed to smoke because they're organic materials that smoke will drive out demons and spirits. And I think of that as something symbolic. Like, sure, you can burn Jet.

 

I actually have a Jet incense recipe coming up in the witching stones, which will be out in the fall. But,