From Quartz To Hagstones: Science Meets Spellcraft - Nicholas Pearson

Imagine picking up a beach pebble and realizing it’s not “just a rock,” but a potential ally with history, voice, and agency. That’s the journey we take with author and crystal expert Nicholas Pearson, who brings together geology, folklore, and practical magic to transform how we see stones—from glittering quartz and moonstone to the humble salt on our table. We move beyond buzzwords and trends into clear definitions and meaningful practice: what makes a crystal a mineral, when a rock is more than the sum of its parts, and why understanding structure actually deepens the mystery.

Nicholas shares a refreshing reframing of “precious,” rooted in medieval lapidaries where a stone’s value came from its virtue—its ability to influence protection, healing, or weather—rather than scarcity. That animistic thread runs through tales reaching back to hominid-era quartz offerings and into modern craft you can try today. We unpack the witching stone concept with a standout tour of the hagstone: how erosive forces and even mollusks pierce stone, why hag and hedge share a boundary-born origin, and how a simple hole becomes a literal lens for threshold work, dream protection, and divination.

What makes this conversation so useful is its accessibility. You don’t need to be a witch, pagan, or druid to participate. Nicholas offers archetypal roles instead of prescriptions, so any tradition can adapt the work. We also explore georegional magic—finding power in local stones like flint, chalk, granite, and fossils—supporting ethical practice while deepening a relationship with place. If you’ve ever felt awe at moonstone’s glow, this talk helps you keep that wonder while learning the science that holds it. If you’ve ever doubted that a garden pebble could be magical, you’ll leave with tools to prove yourself wrong.

Ready to blend science with spellcraft and build a practice grounded in both? Listen, subscribe, and share with someone who loves rocks as much as you do. If this episode sparked ideas, leave a review and tell us which stone is calling your name.

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Guest Introduction
• 3:45 Nicholas’s Path: Music And Museums
• 8:15 Crystal, Mineral, Rock: Clear Definitions
• 17:20 Kambaba “Jasper” And Rock Formation
• 20:30 Animism And The Agency Of Stones
• 25:55 What Makes A Witching Stone
• 30:05 Lore To Craft: The Hagstone Deep Dive
• 39:20 Inclusive Magic Beyond Any One Path
• 44:15 Why This Book And Why Now

Transcript

GDC: 0:01

Welcome to Belief Being and Beyond with your host, Granddaughter Crow. Hi everybody, Granddaughter Crow here with yet another episode of Belief Being and Beyond. And I have such a wonderful guest for you guys today because you know what led me to a lot of awakening my own spirituality and curiosity, and even as a child, I walk around the playground, I walk around the park, I could just walk on a beach or the mountains or even down the street, and I find stones, I find crystals, I find minerals. I don't know. I don't know what I'm looking for, but it made me so curious. And so then I began to understand more about stones. And they, to me, as a shaman, that is the stone nation. They are the most ancient nation on the face of this earth before animals, etc. That's how I perceive them. But without further ado, you guys, I have Nicholas Pearson here with me to talk about his newest release, released in October, The Witching Stones. Yeah, we're gonna go there. So a little bit more about Nicholas. So Nicholas Pearson, if you didn't know, you'll start going. Wait, I think I do have one of Nicholas's books on my bookshelf. Go check it out because he's been writing books and immersed in all spec uh all aspects of Mineral, the Mineral Kingdom for 30 years. Oh my goodness. And he's written books, not just this one, but I think this is like his tenth book. I'm sure he's writing more. And also he has the Crystal Basics, which is another one that I'm just like, oh, everybody has that book. Yeah, Nicholas Pearson wrote it. So he is one of the leading voices in crystal healing today, and he offers a unique blend of science and spirituality alongside a grounded practical approach to working with crystals. He's been on the metaphysical circuit, and I can't believe I haven't run into him. But I think that we orbit each other, and I'm just so excited to have him on the show. So please, without any further ado, Granddaughter Crow, let's welcome Nicholas Pearson.

Nicholas Pearson: 2:36

Well, thank you so much for the lovely introduction, and thanks for having me on the program.

GDC: 2:40

Oh, absolutely. You know, it's really kind of funny because I kind of think like I know people that you know, you might know people that I know, and it's just kind of like we've been a little bit one degree apart in separation. And finally, I found you through your Instagram post and all of my lovely people. Shout out to Joelle on Instagram as well as Jenny C. Bell. You guys know her. I have her on the show all the time. Jenny's like, what? You don't know Nicholas? And I'm like, well, uh, you know, is this a stone rite of passage to know Nicholas? I love it. But Nicholas, I I mean, this one, this is a beautiful book. I mean, it literally, people, you can't really, really see it, but you can hold it. And it's absolutely amazing. Before we get into your book, um, I want to know a little bit more about who is Nicholas Pearson? And in doing my research, I'm like, oh, Nicholas likes music. Oh, Nicholas lives in Florida. Oh, you know, Nicholas has studied science. And and I'm just like, whoa. And then I love the fact that you bring the science into the spirituality. But tell us a little bit about who you are. What is a day like in the day of Nicholas Pearson?

Nicholas Pearson: 4:02

Well, thank you. I I I often say that I wear a lot of hats. So depending on the day of the week, a day in the life of Nicholas looks pretty darn different. Um, currently I hold a handful of very different kinds of um, not just identities, but like ways of relating to the world. So, yes, I'm a musician. I'm mostly a hobbyist. That being said, I've I've got a couple of paid gigs for the first time in decades, which is really cool. I spent a long time away from music, and now I've really kind of let it fill my heart in ways that it hadn't in quite a while. I've got the energy and the space for it in ways that I didn't before. Um, I do historically informed horn performance um in addition to you know playing in community ensembles. I play like the modern, the ancestors of the modern French horn, um, because why I do anything the easy way, I'm I'm so immersed in the history and the development of anything that I do that you know that kind of carries in. Uh, I also work in the science field. I work in collections management, doing curatorial work, um, database entry, essentially building the first functional database for a collection that isn't uh, I mean, has been in in this institution for nearly 70 years, but is is the better part of like 85, 90 years old altogether. Um, some 35,000 specimens are my current estimate for what I'll be doing there. So I I work with earth science collections. I work with things like um uh identification and triage and like uh what we would call development and conservation and restoration repair uh of mineral specimens, uh, working on things like provenance and locality, because some previous iterations of our databases were we'll say miss sorted because they're more spreadsheet than database. And so that that led to some kind of functional problems with them. So uh that's that's what I'll be doing all day tomorrow. And and I really love it because I get to work with things that we don't usually see in the kind of metaphysical scene, uh, but you know, primarily a significant portion of any day is taken up by my true life's work, uh, which is the stuff that I write about, the stuff that I practice. So that's of course informed by the science. It's informed by uh so many other things that I do, but my love of folklore and history and language and mythology and spirituality, all of that kind of comes together, whether I'm writing about crystals or about flower essences or about the practice of Reiki, all of these are things that are near and dear to my heart. And I have this very, we'll say, interdisciplinary connection to all of them.

GDC: 6:40

Oh, wow. Wow. You know, it's almost, you know, I'll just be honest with you, it's almost intimidating talking to you about crystals because I'm like, am I using the right terminology? Like, so educate us a little bit with your scientific background. Like, I love stones, I love crystals, I have a lot of them, I work with a lot of them. I even have taught, you know, beginner 101 stones and crystals up the chakra system with the colors, you know, and all of their meanings. But I sometimes get tripped up. Like, can you use the word stone and crystal interchangeably? Or where does the mineral come in? Could you give us just Mr. Science? Could you tell us how to do this correctly?

Nicholas Pearson: 7:29

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, before we get into definitions, I want to just preface it by saying the International Mineralogical Association's Committee of New Names, nomenclature, and what whatever else the fancy committee is called is not gonna knock on your door and say, actually, this is not a mineral, this is a mineraloid. Noah's gonna come on by and say, hey, um, this texture, those are foliations and not striations. Nobody's gonna do that. I mean, some jerk on the internet might, but who cares about them anyway? Um uh so ultimately, like in a colloquial sense, I think it is safe to interchange a lot of these terms. That being said, they do they do hold some specific meanings. So let's start with like the most specific to the least specific. We're gonna start with the word crystal. Um, a crystal is usually a solid substance. There are semicrystals and quasi-crystals and liquid crystals and stuff we won't get into. There's not enough time or energy for that. But usually we think of a crystal as a solid substance that has a regular composition, so it's the same ingredients throughout, and a recurring symmetrical structure. Now that structure happens in three dimensions, and given enough time and energy and space, that's the other important part, um, as well as raw materials, it will create a crystal will show us geometric planes that meet at regular angles or intervals. So, you know, here I've got a piece of quartz. It's got a fun little phantom in there, but quartz is a great example of a crystal. Um, so crystals exist in our body, they're in our food, they're in plants and animals and out in space and deep in the earth. Um, we can talk about a specific kind of crystal, which is a mineral. So if we take that regular composition and recurring symmetrical structure, uh we can add a couple more criteria to it, and then we get a mineral. So, in addition to being crystalline, a mineral must also be naturally occurring. Mother nature made it, and it's created by inorganic processes. There's a very slight amount of wiggle room there, but again, that's a deeper conversation than we've got space for. So quartz is a mineral, calcite is a mineral, hematite is a mineral. Um, what defines a mineral is that it has its own unique identity, a specific chemical composition, a specific crystal structure. You can even take something like calcite and aragonite that have the same chemical formula, calcium carbonate, CA, C, O3, but because we arrange those things in a slightly different shaped molecule, they they have different physical chemical structural properties and we categorize them as two different minerals. On the other hand, we can take things like amethyst, citrine, rose quartz, smoky quartz, carnelian, agate, tiger's eye, and chemically they're one mineral, quartz, because they're just the same thing. Now they're impure, they've got other stuff going on, but they're all functionally one mineral species in in lots of different varieties. So we've got crystals are known for their structure and composition. If that is made by non-living processes by Mother Nature, then they're also minerals. And then that takes us to the word rock. So a rock is defined as an aggregate of one or more minerals. So instead of thinking this is one single crystal that I'm holding, we can see the crystal faces. You pick up a piece of granite and you look at it and you go, oh, there's a little cross section of a quartz crystal. Here's a little sparkly bit with some mica in there, um, this kind of creamy background, all of that is going to be feldspar. You might find garnets, you might find lots of other things embedded in that granite, but granite is a mixture of things. And because it is a mixture, it has variable composition and variable texture and you know all sorts of other stuff. So um they're less specific, less rigid, shall we say, in terms of their makeup than uh a mineral would be. And we also get this two other words worth mentioning. Uh, one is stone, the other is gem. A stone, I love how delightfully vague the word stone is. Uh, we might define the word stone as a hard fragment of the earth's crust of geologic origin. So the word stone frequently connotes something that is shaped or altered by human activity. It doesn't have to, but it often does. Think of standing stone, stone tools, gem stone, um, building stones, and so on and so forth. And then the word gem could be any of those things, plus maybe a few more that don't neatly fit into those categories that we use expressly for ornamental purposes. If you wear it in jewelry, it's a gem. Um, we've got things that are gem materials that are not actually stones either, things like amber and jet and opal, which is not really a mineral because it lacks the the crystal integrity of a mineral, and so on and so forth. So um we do have some we'll say some gray area around these definitions, but again, nobody's nobody's gonna, you know, knock on the door and say, hey, according to Mr. Pearson, this definition isn't correct. Um that's it it's nice to know, and and here's why it's nice to know. From from the perspective where the science and the energy meet, the thing about a mineral, therefore a crystal, um, is its specificity, its purity, its predictability. Quartz is always quartz. Sure, we can have it in this color or that color, but the difference between them is pretty negligible in the grand scheme of things. And so there's something reassuringly regular about its energy. It's a single voice that we might listen to, a single instrument playing a melody. But with a rock, because it's lots of things intermingled, it's a choir of voices. Now you could have a piece of sandstone that's like 97% pure quartz. Maybe that's like having uh uh, I don't know, a trombone choir. Um, and you know, the 3% are just we've got some bass trombones in there for a little bit to it. Um, but then you know, compare that to something like uh porphyritic granite or you know uh spherolytic metariolite or you know, other things that have more complicated names, which kind of imply more complicated mineralogy, there's lots more diverse stuff in there. So, you know, maybe we've got a mixture of things that's more like a full symphony orchestra, you know, lots of different parts and pieces adding to the energy that we experience. So um that's that's where it's helpful to know the difference. But if that's where your geology knowledge ends, that's okay. Just being able to go, that's a rock versus that's a mineral, that that's a pretty big win in my book.

GDC: 14:11

Oh my goodness. That like I've known a lot of things, but that just kind of helped me to organize my thoughts a little bit. At one moment, I did hold up this one, and I don't know what you would call this. I know that you can't, you can only see it on the screen.

Nicholas Pearson: 14:31

Yeah, so this is frequently called Kumbaba jasper or kumbaba stone on the market. It's not a true jasper. This is what we would call actually, this is an example of spherulytic metariolite. So it began rock as an extrusive igneous rock with um a composition with lots of uh we call them thyalic minerals, things rich in silica and aluminum and oxides. Um, it's the same, same kind of ratios of things that make granite as well as diorite and uh and and and other kinds of things. But um, when it cools very quickly, there's not space for big crystals to form. And every now and then they kind of nucleate in these kind of little blobs that are almost like spheres when cut in cross-section. Um, and then when that's further exposed to maybe heat in the terms of contact metamorphism or if it's squished together by regional metamorphism caused by tectonic activity, um, those component minerals are going to kind of rearrange themselves a little bit differently through a process called minmatization and through metamorphosis as well. And then we end up with something like that kambaba stone, which began life as one thing and has slightly undergone some revision as more energy got added to the equation over time.

GDC: 15:41

I love that. You know, I love that you do this beautiful thing, and that is the science and spirituality. And um, let's start moving over to your book, The Witching Stones People. This, I mean, this we just gave you a little bit of a taste that, like, if you are a witch, you pick up this book. If you're a scientist, pick up this book. If you're a witch scientist, this book is for you. You know, what I a couple of things I just wanted to mention is that I really enjoyed the way that you did the correlation between the earth and a stone or a crystal or mineral and music. That just made so much sense to me. And I also like when you, you know, talk about well, these are these are part of us too. Like we have minerals inside of us. I never thought about that. I never really kind of considered that Mother Earth is also, you know, the the minerals and the stones and all of that is within me. So now I have another magical correlation to make. Before okay, so witching stones. What is a witching stone? I know it's a very general question, but it sounds so cool, and I need some. It's October, people. Go get your witching stones and the book to back it up. What is a witching stone, Nicholas?

Nicholas Pearson: 17:16

I mean, the the really short answer to this question is a witching stone is any stone that you find magic in. So, you know, maybe that's the humble piece of flinch that you dug out of your backyard or piece of chalk that you found by the seashore. Maybe it's a pebble from the stream with a hole in it. Maybe it's that shaker full of salt on your table because salt is a mineral resource as well. It can be a beautiful gemstone, a rare and precious thing like a ruby or an emerald. It can also be a semi-precious stone, uh a quartz, an agate, a moonstone. But ultimately, the witching stones that I selected for this book, there are 13-ish. Maybe we'll unpack that-ish part later, but they're 13 chapters each devoted to category, so to speak. Yes. Um, and and these 13 chapters I chose because of the kind of magic that is so palpable and tangible. In many cases, we're talking about extraordinary lengths of time over which humans, and not even just like Homo sapiens humans, but like hominids generally have worked with some of these stones. Something like flint goes long before Homo sapiens walked the earth. Quartz as well. We've got evidence of the human quartz relationship or the hominid quartz relationship that goes back to like maybe Homo habilis, Homo erectus, where people would go out of their way to collect quartz. They were interred with people for seemingly ritual purposes. We can't reconstruct those rituals. We can hypothesize all we want, but we just don't know because they didn't write it down. Um, and and it's just incredible to me that we have literally since the dawn of time, as cliche as that sounds, we have made magic with stone.

GDC: 18:59

Yeah.

Nicholas Pearson: 19:00

Stone is the foundation of our lives in every way imaginable.

unknown: 19:04

Yes.

Nicholas Pearson: 19:04

And if we can find magic in stone, if we can find magic in the earth, then we can find it anywhere.

GDC: 19:13

And it really, there's a flavor in reading through your book. Um, one, I love the chapters, and you always set up with the stone, the lore, and the craft, and I'll get into that in a second. But there is an animistic with the way that you approach stones and crystals and minerals, you talk about them and taking care of them, and they have a personality and characteristics. What do how do you perceive the stone nation is what I call it?

Nicholas Pearson: 19:50

Yeah, this is a great question. So that that kind of animistic perspective, I think, is really near and dear to my heart. And it's something that before I had the language to describe it, I was an animist. I I was a small person who grew up in a not very religious household. My dad was raised very Catholic, and as a result, I wasn't raised anything. Right. Um, other families did church. We did a trip to um the library or or, you know, something along those lines. And I just gravitated toward a reverence for the intelligence of nature. And I didn't know that had a special label. I didn't know that it was something different to most people either. I just kind of took it for granted that, well, everybody can talk to rocks and flowers and birds, right?

GDC: 20:42

It was natural, natural, yeah. Right.

Nicholas Pearson: 20:45

So, you know, given that that's such a a cornerstone of my orientation to the world, um, it's not really a surprise that I kind of maintain those conventions today. I have more sophisticated metaphors and language around it, but it's still the same fundamental thing. And if you look at a majority of humans who've lived over the entire course of history and prehistory, most humans who've ever walked the earth could be labeled as animists. They might not have used that term themselves because it's a very like 19th, 20th century invention kind of term, but but most people who've ever existed had an animistic worldview. And and it's only relatively recently in the span of human history that we've decided to change that. So that that speaks volumes to me. The one of the unifying aspects of the work that I did that became the Witching Stones, uh, a good portion of my research was spent pouring through pre-modern texts. So we're we're looking at things like medieval grimoires and uh a category of texts we call lapidaries, which like an herbiary or a bestiary, which were books about plants and animals respectively. This is about the lore, the natural history, the properties of stones. And um, in like from the earliest period, special designations are given to stones that have a kind of quality or essence or magic about them. And it's in the medieval period that this really gets categorized very distinctly. And it's it's wrapped up in terms we still use today, but we don't use them in the same way. And it's the difference between a precious stone and a non-precious stone. Today, that's completely a commercial designation. We have precious, we have semi-precious, and we have non-precious. And it's mostly it's mostly engineered to get us to buy expensive things. A certain amount of that is like a reflection in the relative scarcity of things, but it it's mostly perceived scarcity. Um, there are some semi-precious stones that are far less abundant than sapphires and diamonds, and and yet they don't get the precious designation. Right. Um But historically, a stone was considered precious when it met only one criterion. And that criterion is in Latin is what we call a virtus or virtutes in the plural, and it means a virtue. Before couching this in terms of energy, we thought about agency. And virtues are an expression of a stone's agency, and any stone could be precious as long as we perceived a virtue within it, uh, a means by which it could influence reality or our connection to reality. Did it offer healing or protection? Did it protect from storms? Did it bring rain? Did it, you know, remove bad vibes? Did it do any of these other things? So it didn't matter how beautiful or rare or valuable something was to be precious. It only had to exert some kind of agency in the world around it. And when we start to look at the mineral sphere through that lens that is informed by animism, all of a sudden, every stone is precious because every stone can become an ally we can collaborate with. I don't want to think of them in terms of tools, but they are they are agents of change that we work with rather than use and put to use. And and through that collaboration, through that relationship, they help shape our world. They help us weave our magic and manifest uh hopefully a world more aligned with what we are aiming for. And so every stone is precious, and therefore every stone is magical, and any stone has the potential to be a witching stone.

GDC: 24:45

I love that. And so, you know, it's interesting because, you know, we kind of started this conversation with, you know, more of the science end, and now through animism and understanding all of this, we're starting to see a little bit more of the spiritual witchy side. And so I think this is a good segue that you know, you have these 13 chapters. I mean, this is an amazing book. It's it's not just one that you can just, I mean, you can pick it up and read right through it. That's absolutely fine. But it's also kind of like choosing, like, oh, I have a moonstone. I'm gonna read the chapter on moonstone. Ooh, I have I want salt. I I want to, you know, so you can move through this book. At least that's what I've found, and I think that's how you have it set up. But in each of these uh 13 chapters, you bring us from the science into the spirituality. So you start by talking about the stone and the characteristics, then you move into the lore, and then you move into the craft. Could you kind of give us a little bit of an example of that flow?

Nicholas Pearson: 25:58

Yeah, for sure. Um, so it's it's Halloween, it's spooky season. I'm gonna pick uh a really, a really uh kind of emblematic stone for for this time of year, I think, and that's the hagstone. So that's any stone that is naturally perforated, you know, like this big old cobblestone I'm I'm holding up here to the camera. Um we know them as hagstones and witch stones and eye stones and by a million other names around the world. Um so for example, in the chapter on hagstones, we open with what is a hagstone? And among all the stones in the book, this is the only one whose makeup doesn't matter. It's materiality matters in a different sense. It is about process versus substance. It has to be naturally pierced, and then it is transformed into a hagstone. So it breaks down how can they form? What erosive forces are involved? Some are actually fossils, some are, believe it or not, whittled away by mollusks called the angel wing or the pitdock. They're a kind of naturally bioluminescent uh aquatic creature that are, you know, common in certain kinds of environments. You find them in the Pacific Northwest, you find them off the coast of England, probably other places as well. Uh, and once we understand what a thing is, what makes a stone, in this case the hagstone, what sets it apart from other stones, then we can also kind of take a step back and explore its connection to humankind. Take a look at, you know, a really brief overview of its use in history. There are practical uses for all of these 13-ish stones there. So, like from a practical perspective, they could be used for ornamentation. They could be used as weights for fishing nets or spindle whirls or any number of other uses where you might want to dangle a rock from.

unknown: 27:44

Yeah.

Nicholas Pearson: 27:45

But then there's also the symbolic use, and that kind of builds the bridge into the second part of every chapter, which is the lore, where we explore folklore, mythology, well, maybe every now and then a little bit of oral tradition that I've I've received in my life, kind of cleverly wrapped up in stuff to not, you know, dissolve the mystery too much around it. And I try to stick to the point, which is to make it magical, but to also orient it in a wider scheme of how we've perceived these things. So, with you know, the hagstone, they're frequently known to protect against nightmares. So, where does that come from? Where does this idea of the hag come from? We in the modern world, English-speaking world, we hear the word hag, and we might have a not so kindly image of an an older woman. Um uh given that this is Halloween season, we're probably gonna picture, you know, the hook-nosed witch with the conical hat and you know the wart.

GDC: 28:44

Don't forget the wart on the nose or the chin with the hair. Yeah.

Nicholas Pearson: 28:48

But but really, that that word comes from some other root. And by exploring that, we also understand something about the hag stone, who's named after it. The hag, uh ultimately that that word shares a common origin with the word for hedge, uh, which is a boundary, the periphery around which the settled versus the unsettled world existed. And the reason Hag became associated with the witch is first and foremost, hag was a term like the word mare, night mare, night hag is what that meant, was uh kind of mythical spirit beast that sat on your chest and suffocated you, which is why we explained away night terrors before we understood any of the psychology and and neuroscience of that. Um so this kind of malevolent being comes from beyond the hedge, but the witch gets that association because what do we do as witches? We cross thresholds between the ordinary and the non ordinary. We go beyond what is safe and predictable into what is maybe not safe and maybe not predictable. And that's where the real magic happens. And we as witches become the intermediaries between one world and the next. And the magic of the hagstone is that both sides are pierced by this hole. We can literally look through it and see beyond that threshold that otherwise stone is not transparent in this case. Um, so by understanding the lore, it also sets us up to understand the magic we can weave from it. So there's lots more lore about Hagstone in the book, but the final section is like, what do I do? All of this is cool. I understand the science, I get how they form, special, but what are practical things that I can do? So they're gonna be meditations and spells and rituals and charms and maybe things that look more like prayers, all kind of woven together, like um more than 50. I don't remember exactly how many we came to all together, but it was it was more than 50 among all the chapters. So you'll find peppered throughout things for healing, for protection, for divination, recipes for incense and oils, um, weather magic and um things for inspiration and finding direction in life. It's it's all in there.

GDC: 30:57

Yeah, that's just so rich. And there's a whole bunch in this book. You know, another thing that I noted when I was reading, I was like, oh, you are actually giving us, you know, like this whole rich world and introducing us on a deeper scientific and lore and spiritual level to, you know, the the witching stones and and stones. And yet you also offer this and say, I'm not telling you like you need to be a pagan, you need to be a witch, you need to be a shaman, you need to be a druid. You can utilize the this magic with respect and with any path that you want. Can you, did I get that right? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Nicholas Pearson: 31:45

You hit the nail on the head there. And it was really important to me that I one make it as accessible as possible, um, in in terms of like, you know, the readability and it it's very easy. Sometimes I slip into speaking another language that I call geologies. Um, and like even from my day job, writing interpretive text for a new exhibit that I'm curating, my boss will send me edits. She's like, all of this was great. Our middle schoolers who come for a field trip aren't gonna understand half of these words, so I made some changes. I'm like, that's fine, that's what you're here for. That's your job. My job is to tell the story. You're the director, you decide what matters to our, you know, that audience. Um uh and it's it's kind of a similar thing with this book. It's it's great to know the separate parts, but if we get too rigid about it, we can get kind of locked into only one way of doing it. And so I wanted the book to be very accessible for anyone's path. If you are, you know, a seasoned crystal healer who's just looking for a different different approach to crystals. There are things in here that immediately translate to your practice. So much of what we know about like the healing properties of crystals today are rooted in this kind of folkloric tradition, which is as old as books. Literally, the first known book to ever be stamped in clay is a book about the virtues of stones.

GDC: 33:09

What?

Nicholas Pearson: 33:10

Yes, uh, you know, Mesopotamian, Babylonian, somewhere in that era, um, a book called Um Abnushikinshu, the The Stone Whose Appearance Is, and then it's just a list of stones whose appearance is, who come from blank, who are worth this much, who have these properties. So um brilliant. That's brilliant. So, you know, there's that aspect of it. But also, like, let's say we are already in the kind of occult sphere, the witchcraft sphere, uh kind of shamanic sphere. Rather than giving you a cast of characters, these are specific spirits, deities, ancestors you should invoke. That's pretty much missing. Maybe one or two examples I provide that that might name something a little bit more concrete. I try to stick with more archetypal roles as opposed to specific names, because then you can personalize this. You can say, oh, well, you know, this idea of the light bringer is really important in my tradition. And my tradition, that's Hecate Phosphoros, um, who is seen as the soul of the world and the torchbearer. And that's that's phenomenal. I want you to have that. If you're uh uh, you know, a different kind of polytheist or different kind of witch, then you might have a different flavor that fits in that role. And please make this your own. I I didn't want anyone to feel excluded. Um and it was important that even though we've got the word witch in the title there, you can be anyone and still find magic in the earth. You can be anyone of any spiritual practice or prowess and still let the magic the stones have in them enrich your life.

GDC: 34:45

Oh my goodness. I absolutely love it. So, no matter what path you're on, how you understand the divine as it reveals itself to you, how your magic comes forth, it doesn't matter where you are on the face of this earth, you can pick up The Witching Stones by Nicholas Pearson and learn more about your guides, your stones. Yeah, I called them guides, people, because I do practice a lot of shamanism, and this is you're speaking to me of what I call a nation. This is the stone nation, and I'm just this is amazing. So you know, you write a lot of books on crystals. I know you laugh because you do, and you're working on more. I know this. I know this because I saw your website, which is illuminouspearl.com. Go check out all of the things that Nicholas, all the books, and as well as classes and events and things like that. Um, but before we go into more of what you offer, I guess what led you to write this book in particular? It's not just an educational, hey guys, we're in biology class and I'm gonna teach you about stones, or hey guys, you know, it's not just a normal stone or or crystal book. It's a very unique book. Can you talk to us a little bit about like what led you to this and um yeah, enlighten us, Nicholas?

Nicholas Pearson: 36:19

Yeah, so there's kind of a few threads woven into this. Um first and foremost, my relationship to my practice has changed. And I kind of hope that's true for everybody who does something for a long time. I hope we grow and we change and we develop. And and I needed to express how my relationship to the land, like the land with a capital L, wasn't necessarily rooted only in these rare and exotic things that come from faraway places. Um, I love emeralds and rubies. I appreciate a nice diamond. I don't own a nice diamond, but I appreciate that they exist. Um, I love a great piece of quartz, but you're not gonna find it here in Florida. And so a lot of my time and energy over the last several years as I think a lot about the trade of minerals, the mining and extraction of mineral resources, of which the Crystal Healing market, although a multi-billion dollar industry, is still the tiniest fraction compared to things we use for infrastructure and information technology and so many other things. Um I I've really wanted to give the humble minerals that are in our backyards their own due. I've wanted to unwrap the magic in the easy stuff as well as the hard stuff. You look at a piece of moonstone, it doesn't really matter who you are, that is magical. When you look at that adularescence, that shimmer that it's got, you're like, oh my gosh, even if you understand the science of it, it doesn't make it any less magical. But I challenge you to do the same thing with a piece of flint, a few grains of salt, um, you know, a fossil that's maybe not so well preserved, and try to find the same magic there. Sometimes it's harder until you can look at things through the right lens. And I've spent so much time kind of romanticizing these stones and really building a practice that is rooted in georegionalism in the rocks that are around me when I travel, getting to know the rocks where I am, as well as not just the ones here in my home. But I wanted to write a book that included a really big emphasis on some of these humble stones. And when we find their magic, the rest is super easy. Another really important part of this, kind of we'll say in tandem with this, was this magical trip that I took in 2003 with um my best friend. We created this wonderful retreat in southwestern England. Um and we worked with so many stones of the landscape. And a lot of those stones ended up in this book. We also worked with some stones not from that landscape that kind of fit into the mythological landscape. Um, so some there there's there's a lot of inspiration that was shared. Things that didn't fit into one container, there was overflow, and they had to have a home. Um, but you know, another part was just I was kind of stuck. Uh I'd been working on a project for five years. Um well, I I would have been working by the time it came out, five years start to finish. I'm I my my average book that I write takes less than a year to write. I have a couple that have taken like a year and a half. Um, but this one was just an unconscionable amount of time. I I once wrote a manuscript in 27 days. I'm not gonna pretend it was a good draft, but it was a draft. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so I was just kind of sick of looking at this project. I I needed a breath of fresh air. And one of the things that I came to in this time period was plant magic. I I've loved plants. I wrote a book about fluorescences, and I knew that I wasn't quite done with them. And one of the resources that I fell in love with while writing that book is um a book called The Witching Herbs by Harold Roth. And it is delightful. It's similar to the way mine is set up. It's got you know different aspects for for every stone. His has like the horticulture of the different plants, as well as their human plant history. It's got some folklore and myth, and then it's got the operative magic, in this case, usually in the form of recipes and things you can do uh of that nature. And so um, I have to give credit where credit is due that you know Harold's book was such a delight for me that finally I was working on other stuff that that wasn't the manuscript I was supposed to be finishing. And and the idea came to me, I could do something like this for rocks. It would, I would make it my own. It it ended up being a lot bigger, uh, which was a conversation we had with the publisher. Um, but it it just kind of emerged from this space. And then when I powered through that really overdue project, uh, which came out earlier this year, it's called Crystals for Psychic Self-Defense. I'm super proud of this book. I love it. It also has some overflow from that trip to the UK. Um, it's got you know things that that are really special to me. A lot of humblestones like um granite and slate and chalk and flint are going to be in there as well in a very different kind of context. But but then this became my treat when I when I finished everything, then I got to sit down. Uh, and I I wrote this book very quickly um because it was just so much fun to do. Oh, your books.

GDC: 41:36

Yeah. I absolutely love that because I too am an author and I do understand that some books just flow out of you, and some are a labor of love that takes so much longer to write. And so I get it. And this this is dessert, people. This is dessert. I absolutely love that. It's the treat. Um, you know, I really enjoy that. I know it's it's gonna so come sound like I'm telling a dad joke, but I really enjoy how grounded this book is. You can hit it from the landscape of science. And even if you're not a scientist, people just listening to what Nicholas said, I started going, oh wait, so when I, you know, say blessings to the Stone Nation, I'm actually talking about myself too. I'm talking about my table salt, I'm talking about my home, the structure, my patio, all of these things. And you kind of opened up this thought in my head, because usually just as a magical practitioner, I'm like, oh yeah, stones, let's go to the stone shop, let's get one for love, let's get one for protection, let's get one for healing, and you can get all, but you actually are like, oh, well, that's just a little bit. What we've got is that the world is actually built out of stones and science. And I mean, you kind of expanded my mind. So basically, in hearing the science, it can open up your mind to different even metaphysical properties that you can correlate with your own practice, even if it's like, oh, that stone comes from close to the sea, like the hag stones or things like that. And then you can go, oh yeah, well, I have uh, you know, I'm a cancer, I'm a Pisces, I'm a Scorpio, I love water. Maybe that I can align with that because of those attributes. And I mean, it's endless. It's endless, people. Is there anything? Okay, so I was checking out your website, theluminouspearl.com. And it does allude, I mean, it has all your beautiful books and a little bit about you and everything and what you're doing. Um, do you have any like upcoming classes or events or a newsletter? Like, what can we find in order to follow you closely and and your Instagram handle? Because that's how I found you.

Nicholas Pearson: 44:14

Thank you. So I I try to be consistent. So I'm the Luminous Pearl in most places. So slap an at in the front of it, and that's Instagram and most other social media. Uh, the LuminousParl.com is my website. Um, one day I'll write that book, and it's actually a reference to a different kind of mythological gem story for another day, I suppose. But uh I do have a newsletter that I usually send out twice a month, sometimes more, but often less. Uh, and that'll give you a rundown of my upcoming events and other cool things, little updates about publishing and life in general sometimes and other fun things. Uh, I've got a full calendar on my website as well. I host a monthly online Reiki share, which is open to all people, all practices, all levels of experience, including none at all. Um, so we we find common ground in that space. Um, I have uh a couple of online and in-person events coming up. By the time this airs, I will have uh a class on crystal and fossil folklore and magic uh in December. Uh and more events will get announced as as kind of time moves forward, um, talking about you know things on the horizon. I'll have a new book out in the spring, and I'm writing the book after that. So um there's gonna be a lot happening, and I'll make sure that I I get all of that up on the website as as time moves forward.

GDC: 45:39

Well, you have been an absolute gem, luminous pearl, etc. I just really enjoyed talking with you today, and I feel like I um need to write an essay on everything you just said because it was I you schooled me, you schooled me, and I love it. I love learning. Nicholas, thank you so much for being on the show. Is there any last words that you want to say to the listening audience?

Nicholas Pearson: 46:09

I just want to give my gratitude. Thank you for having me, and thank you for everyone who's tuning in. Um, go out and find some magic in the earth, whether it is a precious gemstone or that little pebble you found in the garden, go go make magic.

GDC: 46:23

Oh, so go so go make magic, people. Thank you, thank you, thank you to all of the listeners. Like, subscribe, share, do all of the bells and whistles. You know, if if you're like listening to this and you're like, oh my goodness, my uncle blah blah blah loves he's a rock hand, and and I've been trying to talk to him about this stuff. Maybe this is a good place where you guys can start having those conversations. Send him this, he can hit you from a scientist point of view, you can hit him from a witchy point of view, and then you guys can talk about the witching stones. I really appreciate you. I love you guys, love you, love you, love you, and we'll see you on the flippity flip.