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b"Remember, we welcome comments, questions and suggested topics at thewonderpodcastQs@gmail.com\\n\\xa0\\nS3E11 TRANSCRIPT:----more----\\nYucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca. And this week we're talking about crystals, herbs. Other magical treasures.\\nMark: Right. Yeah. These are things that are very important in the practices of many pagans. We have a different take on what that means from maybe the mainstream pagan view. So it will be talking about. But also about what we can do to create aesthetic objects and materials that help us to get into the right mind space, to do effective ritual work and and how we can best equip ourselves with all those kinds of things.\\xa0\\nYucca: Right. And also not just in the ritual space, but in our everyday mundane life and environments that we create.\\nMark: Sure because they work as talismans. And we did do a, an episode on talismans a long, long time ago. The, they, they, you can carry an object with you or wear a piece of jewelry or anoint yourself with a particular scent, any of those things. And if it has a strong association for you, it will remind you of that characteristic or quality.\\nAnd then you have that with you in your ordinary life. And that can be really great, really empowering and and supportive of success.\\xa0\\nYucca: Right.\\nMark: So for a minute, let's, let's just talk in the big picture about all of This What do we think about magic crystals?\\nYucca: This will probably not be a surprise to our long-term listeners, but my take and I'm guessing this is the as well Mark, is that they aren't inherently magical. They don't have super special powers. They're not supernatural. They're natural, just like everything else. Some of them are really. Some of them are beautiful.\\nTheir stories are amazing in terms of how they were made and the interaction between the biosphere and the geosphere and all of that is just incredible. But there's a lot of big claims about crystals that I don't buy.\\nMark: Yeah.\\nme neither. There, although we might aesthetically appreciate a quartz crystal more than we aesthetically appreciate A lump of granite, there's no special quality that makes the crystal any more special than the lump of granite. The lump of granite has an amazing story behind it, too.\\nYucca: Yeah.\\nMark: But that being said, and we're going to talk about the provenance of these things in a while, presuming that you have something that was, was brought to you in an ethical manner, there's nothing wrong with having beautiful stones on your, on your focus, your altar, or, you know, carrying it with you.\\xa0\\nYucca: of jewelry\\xa0\\nMark: jewelry One thing that I will tell you though, not to do, which is something that I saw a photo of on the internet that really terrified me. Someone had taken a whole, whole bunch of sacred stones and crystals and had hot glued them to the center of their steering wheel,\\xa0\\nYucca: oh, yes, don't do that.\\xa0\\nMark: where their airbag is,\\xa0\\nYucca: Yes. I've seen. People do that with their dashboards too, but the airbag is even a\\nMark: Yeah. I mean, that turns the thing into a Claymore mine. It's just, it's terrifying to think about the damage that that airbag would do if it deployed. So don't do that.\\xa0\\nYucca: Yeah to a lesser degree. That's why I, when I did have long hair, I haven't in years, but I never liked using like the chopsticks or the clippies or anything like that because I always thought, oh, what if I fall backwards? But an airbag that's a lot more intense.\\nMark: Yes. I have been on the receiving end of a face full of airbag. And I was really glad it was there, but it happens very, very fast and it hits you hard. So please don't put anything hard between you and it\\xa0\\nYucca: yeah. Yeah. So that's,\\xa0\\nMark: kind of a special case,\\xa0\\nYucca: let's say you have in common.\\xa0\\nMark: Yes.\\xa0\\nYucca: that the stones that you have are on the gyms that you have are not the mind in a way that is with slave labor and all of that. And that they're not,"