The ancients believed that it contained a fragment of creative divine fire, and that the sun was made out of it. It’s no wonder that they used it to craft protective amulets, for this life and the next. Paweł Janiszewski writes about the ancient fascination with crystal.

Expert literature explains that those vases adorning cabinet shelves aren’t crystal at all, but lead glass, which, in what is fortunately a bygone era, was used to make such little monstrosities. Real crystal – that is, the mineral commonly known as mountain crystal – is a colourless quartz. Next come the complicated chemical diagrams and scholarly geological explanations that can put off practically anyone. Studying it all makes you yearn for the days when chemistry, still firmly within the clutches of alchemy, labelled stones as the Green Lion, the Red Dragon, the White Swan or the Snow Maiden. They might be rather vague descriptions, but they certainly fire up the imagination.

Yet if we study the writings of ancient authors, we find out that crystal was already something exceptional at the dawn of civilization, existing in physical reality, but simultaneously with a metaphysical dimension.

Divine fire

The Greek noun krystallos means ‘ice’ in its primary sense, but is also used figuratively to describe a state of numbness or stiffness. For the ancients, crystal stone was thus water that had frozen forever. But it wasn’t a dull natural process. ‘Freezing’ is actually the wrong word; a kind of metaphor. Rather, crystal was ‘petrified’ water: a liquid that had transformed into the opposite physical state and become a stone, solidified in a form that was contrary to its nature.