How to Survive a Crystal Shop — The Shungite Medium, Chapter 12

The Stone and the Evidence · Chapter summary · from The Shungite Medium by Gary Fong

I spent an afternoon in a crystal shop. The owner wore stones head to toe and carried a worn paperback of crystal meanings, which she opened and read aloud when asked what a stone was for. I asked about shungite. She said she stocked it, sourced from Russia and cruelty-free, but had something better for 5G: an orgonite pyramid she poured herself, loaded with lead slivers, a copper coil and what she called shungite flakes, at hundreds of dollars. Shungite does not flake. Broken, it pulverizes into angular chips and then fine black powder. She also said she and her crew set a pyramid at the base of every 5G antenna in Kelowna each evening. That runs into the perimeter physics from Chapter Nine: a small object cannot shut off a transmitter rated at hundreds of watts.

While I was there a customer paid twenty dollars to have her stones touched with a tuning fork, a weekly retuning. I asked which fork. An A. I asked whether it was A at 438 or A at 440, and she shrugged.

A woman who saw my post said she had bought one of those pyramids and, trusting it, went onto her condo roof to watch a 5G antenna installation the suited crew had to leave before power-up. She stayed after they left. She got very sick.

I set down what orgonite is: epoxy resin with randomly embedded metal shavings, descended from Wilhelm Reich's 1930s accumulators. Reich was prosecuted by the FDA in the 1950s and died in prison in 1957. The tell I look for in a fake is a clear air bubble, which slow-grown quartz does not trap.

From the chapter

A=440 Hz is the modern international standard for the note A above middle C, pushed into universal adoption in the early twentieth century by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Philips recording company. The earlier A=438 Hz, used in classical European orchestras, is the harmonious one. Water-crystallization studies have documented distinctly different crystal patterns in samples exposed to A=438 Hz compared with samples exposed to A=440 Hz. The 438 samples form coherent, symmetrical structures; the 440 samples form disordered ones. The two frequencies are audibly distinct, physically distinct, never substituted in a real tuning context. The shrug told me what I needed to know about the substance behind the ritual. Crystals also do not lose their frequency. The vibrational frequency of a crystal is set by the geometry of its atomic lattice and the size of the stone. It is an intrinsic physical property. Crystals do not need to be "retuned," and a tuning fork tapped against them does not change anything measurable about them. The ritual is a performance. The customer was paying twenty dollars a week for a performance.

— Gary Fong, The Shungite Medium, Chapter 12

This is a summary of one chapter of The Shungite Medium: The Groundbreaking Exposé of History's Most Miraculous Stone by Gary Fong, LSH Publishing, first edition 2026, 259 pages. Three chapters are published here complete: What Is Shungite? · The Corporate Sticker · How to Tell Real Shungite from Fake. The reference apparatus is complete too: the studies, the glossary, the bibliography and the endnotes.