A few years ago, a friend of mine posted an article on social media, titling his post \u201cMurder, murder, murder, heal, heal, heal.\u201d The article, \u201cDo You Know Where Your Healing Crystals Come From?,\u201d by environmental journalist Emily Atkin, exposed an industry with an entirely unregulated flow of crystals. Atkin names the stakes in one sarcastic line: \u201cGiven that crystals can be used to \u2018make a promise to mama earth,\u2019 it would seem important to know how they were extracted from mama earth.\u201d Most crystal sellers do not disclose where or under what conditions mining occurs, either because they do not know or because the answer conflicts with the message. As a vendor she spoke with says, \u201c\u2018Sourcing is a very murky topic within the healing crystal community, for a variety of reasons\u2019\u2026 Part of it stems from \u2018the deep, psychological construct of the mining industry, where everything is a little bit hidden.\u2019\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Emily Atkin, \u201cDo You Know Where Your Healing Crystals Come From?\u201d The New Republic<\/em> (website), 11 May 2018, accessible online.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Atkin reveals that most healing crystals are by-products, ripped from the seams of massive gold, copper, and cobalt mines, and publicly traded companies are not required to disclose profits from by-products. There is little regulatory governance for crystals, such as that provided by the Kimberley Process for conflict diamonds. To make matters murkier, sellers don\u2019t buy directly from mines. They buy, almost exclusively, from the annual Tucson Gem, Mineral & Fossil Showcase in Arizona. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Stones change hands many times\u200a\u2014\u200afrom miner to cutter, tumbler, shipper, and multiple vendors\u200a\u2014\u200abefore arriving in Tucson with an erased ledger. The little source material that is known, thanks to the work of a few investigative journalists, is invariably brutal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n As for the consumer, a very different type of information is made available. Healing properties and cryptological meanings have long been ascribed to the possession of crystals. According to an early book on the subject, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones <\/em>(1913) by George Frederick Kunz, agate was believed to cure insomnia and ensure pleasant dreams, rubies were said to boil water and protect fruit trees from tempests, amethysts prevented intoxication, serpentine stones protected peasants from the bites of venomous creatures, and emeralds foretold the future.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - George Frederick Kunz, The Curious Lore of Precious Stones<\/em> (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1913).<\/span> Kunz was an American mineralogist who helped to establish the modern field of gemology. He worked for the U.S. Geological Survey, was vice president of Tiffany & Co. at twenty-three years of age and advocated for the carat to be instated as an international unit of measurement for precious stones. Curiously, his book is dedicated to John Pierpont Morgan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is not insignificant that gemology, industrial mining, and the modern banking system were all developed in the same period, nor that all three converge in one figure: J. P. Morgan. Morgan was an American financier who, during the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century, drove the creation of several multinational corporations, including General Electric and U.S. Steel, which became the world\u2019s first billion-dollar company. Morgan exercised immense power over market forces and policies, essentially laying the foundation for the American capitalist economy. Working with Kunz, he funded several of the first gem collections in public museums in New York and Paris. Both men have gems named after them: kunzite and morganite. It would seem, then, that the classification, fetishization, and lore surrounding crystals are inseparable from some of the most dominant figures and operations of modern capitalist empire. Walter Benjamin wrote, \u201cThe class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Walter Benjamin, \u201cTheses on the Philosophy of History,\u201d Illuminations<\/em>, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 254.<\/span> The refined and spiritual world of healing crystals is indeed wrought through a violent and exploitative relationship with labour and land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n J. P. Morgan\u2019s bloated biography continues to reach even into the present. In 1917, he financed the company Anglo American in Johannesburg, South Africa, the centre of the early diamond-mining industry. This company now owns De Beers, the multinational mining conglomerate that currently operates three diamond mines in Canada: Snap Lake and Gahcho Ku\u00e9, both near Yellowknife; and Victor, a recently closed diamond mine in northern Ontario, ninety kilometres upstream from the Attawapiskat First Nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In early 2020, the paired anxieties of the pandemic and the bitter American presidential election caused a significant uptick in the sale of crystals and other ritual goods associated with metaphysical healing in the United States.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Hannah Elliott, \u201cThe Market for Crystals Is Outshining Diamonds in the Covid Era,\u201d Bloomberg<\/em> (website), 28 May 2020, accessible online.<\/span> Indeed, metaphysical healing practices seem to surge in the aftermath of disasters and prolonged political failures. Crystals today are marketed to address specifically contemporary anxieties and ailments. For instance, Charms Of Light, an online crystal merchant, markets Clear Quartz as the \u201cmaster healer\u201d that \u201cdraws off negative energy of all kinds, neutralising background radiation, including electromagnetic smog or petrochemical emanations.\u201d8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - See \u201cClear Quartz Healing Properties,\u201d Charms Of Light<\/em> (website), accessible online.<\/span> Goethe claimed that superstition only seizes false means to satisfy genuine needs, and there is no doubt that people feel an urgency to heal.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - Cited in Marina Warner, \u201cThe Writing of Stones: Roger Caillois\u2019s Imaginary Logic,\u201d Cabinet<\/em> 29 (Spring 2008).<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n New Age practices locate spiritual authority within the self. The curator and writer Hera Chan comments, \u201cNew Age assigns fate a relatively fixed position. Individual power and the channeling of positivity can manifest your desire in the material world but larger shifts such as those by the government are seen as naturalized and part of life\u2019s larger course.\u201d10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - Hera Chan, \u201cChanneling Energy, for Freedom Fighters!\u201d Real Review<\/em> 10 (Autumn 2020): 66\u200a\u2014\u200a69.<\/span> As a practice and culture, crystal healing is based on individual well-being, on assuaging the anxiety that society produces, but it ultimately reinforces alienation and a lack of collective power because it fails to account for structural oppression and its material causes and effects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n New Red Order\u2019s exhibition The Last of the Lemurians<\/em>, offers a critique of New Age practices as a form of \u201cwhite indigeneity.\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - \u201cArtist Talk: New Red Order\u201d (video), with Jackson Polys and Kite of New Red Order, Centre CLARK, 2021, accessible online.<\/span> New Red Order\u200a\u2014\u200ain this iteration consisting of the artists Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, Kite, and Jackson Polys\u200a\u2014\u200adescribes itself as a \u201cpublic secret society\u201d that looks critically at the \u201cauthenticity imperative\u201d and fetishization of Indigeneity within the framework of an appropriative, colonial society. The Last of the Lemurians<\/em>, hosted by Centre CLARK in Montr\u00e9al as part of MOMENTA in 2021, takes Lemuria as its subject. Lemuria is a hypothesized supercontinent proposed in the nineteenth century by zoologists, believed to have sunk beneath the Indian Ocean. Helena Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, promoted the myth of Lemuria as the origin place of human beings and called its inhabitants Lemurians.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Last of the Lemurians <\/em>looks at the power that is forged within speculative histories and chimeric myths. New Red Order\u2019s works step inside the speculative imaginary to expose the clouded fantasies and settler guilt that make up the colonial imagination. The titular video work focuses on two geological formations that recur in Lemurian mythology: Mount Shasta in Northern California, and Kauai in Hawaii. The video makes symbolic use of two materials that connect the twinned locations: lava and crystal. In the exhibition space, crystal is materially mobilized as an entity that symbolizes purity and as a metaphor for the hardening (crystallization) of historical narratives that, when subject to immense pressure, can be liquified and made malleable again. What agitates New Red Order in this video installation is that the myth of Lemuria has been employed to create a lineage through which white settlers could claim Indigeneity without having experience of the violence inflicted on Indigenous people by colonial powers. Mythical lost races and lands such as Lemuria and Atlantis contain within them colonial anxiety and capitalist alienation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Theosophy was a direct precursor to New Age beliefs and practices. There is a New New Age resurgence of interest in Lemuria, which a search for #lemuria on TikTok, as Kite from New Red Order has done as part of her research, will unveil. Young, mostly white women unbox crystals, identify one another as Lemurian through guided meditations, and speak and chant in it\u2019s supposed ancestral language. Yet, the ambiguous connection to ancestry and land does not bear out in the historical, material reality. The opaque and mystified provenance in both cases\u200a\u2014\u200aLemuria and healing crystals\u200a\u2014\u200asignals a guilty conscience that Clear Quartz alone will not be able to heal. <\/p>\n\n\n\n A previous iteration of this text, titled \u201cIn the Rough,\u201d was published as part of the exhibition <\/em>Of Several Depths at The Plumb in Toronto in 2021.<\/em><\/p>\n\n
![\"NewRedOrder_Clark\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Whiteway_NewRedOrder_Clark_20_C-scaled.jpg\")
<\/strong>The Last of the Lemurians,<\/em> installation view,
Centre Clark, Montr\u00e9al, 2021.
Photo : Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"NewRedOrder_Clark\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Whiteway_NewRedOrder_Clark_03_C-scaled.jpg\")
The Last of the Lemurians <\/em>(detail),<\/em>
installation view, Centre Clark, Montr\u00e9al, 2021.
Photo : Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"NewRedOrder\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Whiteway_NewRedOrder_Still_07_lr.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"NewRedOrder\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Whiteway_NewRedOrder_Still_09_C.jpg\")
The Last of the Lemurians, <\/em>video stills,
Centre Clark, Montr\u00e9al, 2021.
Photos : courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"NewRedOrder\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Whiteway_NewRedOrder_Still_02_lr.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n