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Crystal healing treats every stone as its own kind of thing, named for its color and its claimed effect. Chemistry disagrees. Break the sacred gemstones down into the elements that make them, and most of them turn out to be close relatives.

Mostly Oxygen

Of the fifty three gemstones the atlas records a composition for, forty three, better than four in five, are built around oxygen. Quartz varieties such as amethyst, citrine and rose quartz are silicon and oxygen. Sapphire and ruby are the same aluminium oxide, colored by different trace metals. Garnet, peridot and topaz are oxygen compounds too. Nature had a narrow set of materials to work with, and the stones people singled out as sacred draw overwhelmingly from that one narrow set.

Where Diamond and Gold Part Ways

Two exceptions show how narrow that set really is. Diamond is composed of nothing but carbon, no oxygen at all, which is also part of what makes it harder than anything built around it. And the classical noble metals prized in myth and ritual, gold, silver, platinum, do not appear among these fifty three gemstones at all. The stones people carry as sacred and the metals people mint as sacred draw on almost opposite corners of the periodic table.

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• AmethystA quartz variety, silicon and oxygen like most of the list
• DiamondThe one exception, pure carbon and nothing else
• OxygenChalcogenThe element present in four sacred gemstones out of five
• GoldCoinage MetalsOne of the noble metals almost absent from the sacred stones