It is not just rock and metal that is attributed to Satan. Old Nick has found that an additional element from the Earth’s crust is associated with His powers because He often encounters followers who employ crystals in their magic. This practice is alien to Him, not because His preferred element is of course brimstone, but because He abhors stupidity so vehemently that He declared it the cardinal Satanic sin.
The Devil always has immediate access to science because men and women of science have been steadily condemned to Hell by all human religions through all time. He therefore knows better than to believe that crystals have magical properties although He appreciates their aesthetic qualities. Satan has already debunked Anton LaVey’s notion of magic as outdated speculations in the early days of psychology, but geology is another matter and deserves mention.
Crystals can look impressive; the oft-found translucency can seem to contradict their otherwise rock-like features, and their often fractal structure and vivid colors distinguish them from other types of rock. One can forgive a primitive mind for believing crystals might have a coupling with divine powers and thus possess an intrinsic magical capacity: it looks special and beautiful and must consequently have special and desirable qualities that one can utilize.
Satan’s followers reject the existence of gods, devils, and similar mythical creatures and would never claim that the crystals serve as spiritual conduits. Suppose some Satanist believes that there is power to be harnessed via crystals. In that case, this Satanist needs another explanation—and preferably a better one than claiming that crystals have extraordinary capabilities contradicting science simply because they look pretty.
Such Satanists instead look for science, which Satan thinks is generally the best place to look. They learn about a somewhat strange feature that turned early 1900s occultists into rock collectors overnight and had every hippie looking for good vibes in the 1960s: they invariably learn that crystals can vibrate, which makes them a key component in radio equipment. (And what do radios do? They transmit information over long distances, through solid material, invisible to the eye, almost like magic. A layman may have heard about “radio waves” or even electromagnetic fields but without scientific training they, too, remain abstract phenomena.)
To someone whose knowledge of crystal-based radios is limited to operating volume knobs and tuning in on the desired radio station, the actual role of the crystal is unclear, except it somehow causes the radio to work through “vibration,” whatever that means when something is a piece of rock.
The Devil represents undefiled wisdom and fortunately has access to physicists and electrical engineers who can assist Him. According to these damned souls, crystal vibration combines a physical property of certain crystal structures with a human invention and requires some specific, additional components that Satan has yet to spot on any “crystal magic” altar.
You see, a crystal consists of molecules that are all arranged in a specific lattice structure. Some crystal structures exhibit a physical property is known as piezoelectricity which was discovered in the late 1800s. It means that when the crystal is squeezed, the crystal molecules get slightly rotated as the lattice skews. This causes their positively-charged atoms and their negatively-charged atoms to be oriented so that one end of the crystal has a different charge than the opposite end. In other words, the mechanical pressure causes a slight voltage difference across the crystal. You know this effect from the lighters that you “click” to produce a spark when a crystal is struck with a small hammer.
Quartz is the preferred piezoelectric material because it is both inexpensive, insensitive to moisture, and energy-efficient compared with other piezoelectric crystals.
When the pressure is released, the voltage across the crystal returns to zero. How fast this happens depends on the crystal’s size and thickness, quite like a spring (which also does not bounce back into its resting position immediately).
Piezoelectricity also works the other way: by applying a voltage across the crystal, it becomes deformed because the electric field slightly rotates the molecules in the lattice, skewing the lattice. When the voltage is removed, the crystal snaps back into shape and, because of the piezoelectric property, “returns” the voltage, as it were.
This brings us to the aforementioned human invention. When a voltage difference (i.e., electricity) is applied to the opposite ends of the crystal, it deforms. When the voltage is removed, one knows by the size of the crystal how long time it takes before it “returns” the voltage. On receipt of the return voltage, one immediately repeats the electric stimulation of the crystal, which again deforms and responds after the same amount of time as before. Do this indefinitely, and you have created a method to obtain a very accurate clock tick. Such an accurate clock tick is needed for the signal carrier wave frequency in radios, provides the time in quartz watches, as well as ensures deterministic activation of the many hardware units inside of microprocessors. The invention was made in 1917 and is known as a crystal oscillator.
What this all means is that the crystal does not just sit there and vibrate on its own, nor does it have a vibration property that you can somehow tap into. In fact, it behaves like any other solid matter in terms of vibration but is piezoelectric. This makes it an electrically powered clock source, no more and no less. All the necessary properties are well understood by science. It simply deforms when stimulated then moves back into shape. The crystal does not vibrate unless the designer of an electrical circuit continuously stimulates it on each return to its resting state. That is, to vibrate the crystal, one must provide an electrical circuit that provides the crystal with the actual movement energy.
Before anyone objects that brain waves are an electromagnetic field and could thus serve to stimulate the crystal, Satan regrets to say that His scientists claim that both the frequency of the brain waves and their field strength are far too low to exert any influence on a piezoelectric crystal no matter how intently the would-be magician concentrates and gazes at it. One of them, presumably an engineer, suggested that the magician would have better luck gluing the crystal to a loudspeaker and merely play the desired frequency so the crystal would be shaken accordingly.
Would-be sorcerers with little understanding generally make blithering fools of themselves in the eyes of those who know. Astrologists never studied astrophysics. Self-declared wise women who claim to know the secrets of plant-based healing never studied biology or medicine. Parapsychologists never studied psychology. All such individuals manage is to repeat words or expressions from various scientific fields and assign a personal interpretation to them that has no correspondence to the original meaning. They have interpretation, not understanding. They deceive themselves when they believe it is the latter.
Our crystal magicians have heard the short-hand notion of crystal vibration as a source in a piece of (relatively) advanced technology. They adopt the term but the inner workings of the technology are sheer magic to them, and the “vibration” is an equally magic term. If these amateur rock collectors can muster such fascination with a misunderstanding of a particular crystal property, Satan cannot wait to hear what immense forces they might attribute to far more esoteric components such as the field-effect transistor or nonvolatile memory. To those who know about crystal oscillators, however, it is evident that crystal magicians, with their concept of “vibrations,” are dumb as rocks.