The merchants' stones
Which stones for abundance and work?
This is lithotherapy's most commercial request, and the one with the biggest promises. It does have a real history, though: the prosperity stones are the ones that served as money, as a store of value or as a badge of rank.
Where the association comes from
First from appearance: pyrite looks so much like gold that it is called fool's gold, and prospectors ruined themselves on it. Citrine and aventurine are gold and green, the colours of wealth and banknotes. But there is firmer ground. Nephrite jade was, in China, more than a precious stone: a marker of status, a ritual object and an inherited asset for more than five thousand years, and the character that names it enters into the words for value and virtue. Jade represented real wealth, not symbolic wealth. Emerald played a comparable role in Colombia and in Mughal India. So the association with abundance comes, in part, from the plain fact that these stones were expensive.
The stones tradition offers
What tradition suggests doing
Place it in the workplace, or in a drawer with the accounts, sometimes near a shop's till. Feng shui, which has its own logic and its own rules, readily places stones in a sector of the house called prosperity. That practice is cultural and old; it involves no mechanism, and any serious shopkeeper will tell you that what fills a till is work.
What a stone does not do
This is the field with the strongest and emptiest promises. No stone has ever brought money in, and shops that imply otherwise are selling a hope, not a mineral. If an offer promises you a financial return through a stone, a ritual or an «activation», it is a scam, and the price asked is generally the only transfer of money that will take place.
The correspondences presented here belong to tradition and cultural heritage. They are in no way medical advice and never replace a consultation.
Frequently asked questions
Is pyrite gold?
No: it is an iron sulphide. But it often contains invisible traces of gold, and some gold deposits are mined precisely in pyrite. Fool's gold is not always so foolish.
Why is jade so expensive in China?
Because it was never an ornamental stone among others there, but an object of rank and ritual since the neolithic. The white «mutton fat» jade of Xinjiang reaches prices no diamond approaches per gram.
Can a stone attract money?
No. That is the only honest answer, and it is worth writing here: everything sold to you on this ground rests on belief, and the more precise the promise, the more it should alarm you.