Yes, in the sense that a brick does, and that is not what anyone is asking. The other version of the question, the one people mean, was once put as a physics problem and answered at length. That attempt is the most useful way into this.
The book runs to 652 pages. Its title is a list: magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemism, in their relations to vital force. Karl von Reichenbach wrote it. John Ashburner translated it for Hippolyte Bailliere, who published it in London in 1851.
The second treatise is headed “Crystals: the relation of these and of the magnet to human organs. The poles of crystals. Light and force of these.”
Force. Poles. A relation to human organs. You could print that heading on a shelf card tomorrow and it would not look out of place.
The version of the question that came with an index
Reichenbach was not writing scripture. He was writing what he took to be a physical proposal, and he gave it the apparatus of one: a translator, a London publisher, an index, and six hundred pages of reported observation. Crystallization sits on that title page between light and chemism, in the same list, being related to the same thing as the rest of them.
He also did the thing a physical proposal has to do, which is name what it is talking about. The sixth treatise is headed “Matter in general: the heavenly bodies; regions of the earth. The new force, embracing the whole universe. Nomenclature. The word Od.”
Od. That is what he called it.
I find that heading strangely moving, and also clarifying. Here is somebody who thought a stone and a magnet and a human body were connected by a single thing, who took the trouble to name the thing, and who set the naming out as a chapter. That is what the physics version of this question looks like when somebody commits to it. Not vague at all. There is a word in it.
That is not what happens when the question comes up now, and the two are not the same argument.
What the practice means by it
Ask someone behind a counter what a stone’s energy is like and listen to the shape of the answer. It will be about the stone’s job. This one is for steadying yourself. That one is for the room you work in, and it is heavy enough that you will know it the moment you pick it up.
None of that is a description of a force. It is a description of a relationship between a person and an object they have given a reason to. Crystal practice has a specific vocabulary for that relationship, and “energy” is the word it reaches for. A stone that has been given a job and kept where you will see it is, at the very least, something you keep seeing.
What that is not is a claim about your body. Whether a stone has any measurable effect on a person is a real question with a real answer, and the evidence for it is set out in what we say about crystal healing. What follows here is about the word.
The argument therefore gets stuck in a predictable place. One person hears a claim about the physical world, because the vocabulary was built to make one. The other means something much smaller and much more ordinary, and was not thinking about physics at all. Then it runs for a while and neither of them moves.
Ask how old the sentence is
The small thing that changed how I read a shelf card costs nothing.
When a sentence about a stone reaches you, ask when it was written. You are not trying to catch anybody out. Ask because the answer tells you which of the two things the sentence is doing. A claim written in the 1850s about crystals and human organs was reaching for physics, and it came with a coined noun and a chapter of justification. A claim made in a shop this morning about a stone being good for a difficult week is doing something else entirely, and it is not weaker for that. It is a different sentence.
The dating works forwards too. A practice with a documented history behind it, a placement people have used for a long time and can tell you the reasoning for, is a different thing from a phrase that turned up in product copy and spread because it sounded technical. Vibration and frequency, which in crystal writing stand in for the quality a stone is associated with, are the two worth testing that way. If a word in a sentence could be removed without changing what the sentence is telling you to do, it was probably there for the sound.
None of this asks you to stop keeping stones. I keep plenty. It asks you to know which claim you are agreeing with, which is a fair thing to want when you are handing over money.
There is a version of all this that stays interesting for years, and it is not the argument. It is what crystallization turned out to be once people had the tools to look: what these things are made of and why they take the shapes they take. That is set out stone by stone in the Crystalance Mineral Library.
The answer, then, is that the question has two versions and they need separating before either can be answered. In the physics version, a crystal has energy in exactly the way a brick does. In the crystal-practice version, energy is a word for what an object does when you have given it a job. Ask which one you are being sold, and the rest gets much easier to think about.
Sources
- Reichenbach, Karl von, Physico-physiological researches on the dynamics of magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemism, in their relations to vital force, translated by John Ashburner, London: Hippolyte Bailliere, 1851, 652 pages, for the title, for the second treatise heading on crystals and human organs, and for the sixth treatise heading naming the word Od: archive.org
