Crystal healing and protection

Crystal healing and protection is a recurring practice in Andy Warhol’s diary: crystals are meant to guard against harm, while related healing techniques offer ways to test and restore bodily energy. The practice never settles into certainty. A crystal fails to repel office roaches; a later crystal is said to have been invaded; and after several unsettling experiences, Warhol admits that crystals may not work, yet decides he must continue believing in them. Their significance lies in that unresolved bargain between protection sought and protection unproven.

Objects and Purposes

The diary distinguishes between two objects that can easily be conflated. In November, Warhol explains that the “share” is the healing object: a round crystal worn around the neck. A separate crystal is protective and preventative. This distinction gives the objects different jobs, even though both belong to the same system of energy and spiritual care. Warhol cannot say whether the protective crystal helped during the bookstore incident; what he can report is that he kept signing rather than panicking. The practical outcome is clear, but the object’s part in it remains uncertain.

The crystals also appear in mundane settings, where their claimed powers meet ordinary material problems. At the office, Tina Chow has obtained her crystal, but the crystal already in the kitchen still has not repelled the roaches. Vincent Fremont reports that they run around the stove clock beneath its glass. Warhol plans to take the crystal back to Dr. Bernsohn, treating the failure not as a reason to abandon the practice but as a problem to bring back to its practitioner. The kitchen infestation makes the test concrete: the crystal is expected to protect a real place from a persistent nuisance, and the nuisance remains.

Testing Energy and Seeking Healing

Dr. Li’s consultations involve physical procedures as well as spiritual interpretation. On one visit, she empties Warhol’s pockets and tests the phone numbers he carries for black magic. She places his hand on his chest to check for energy, then tests resistance by extending his arm. Among the objects examined are two keys, items from Japan given by John and Kimiko Powers, and the numbers themselves. The routine makes protection something that can be investigated through possessions and bodily responses, although the diary does not establish an independent measure by which the results could be verified.

Warhol also describes Dr. Li as distinct from Dr. Bernsohn. Their practices do not overlap: Li works in kinesiology, massages pressure points, and is a nutritionist, while Bernsohn is associated in the diary with crystals and spiritual matters. When Li checks Warhol after a frightening week, she pulls on his fingers and says he is perfectly aligned. She attributes the weakness of his crystal to an invasion and tells him it is low on energy and should be recharged in the sun. She also instructs him in a procedure involving the “share”: he must lie back rather than stand and throw his eyes back until he sees yellow. The advice links the wearable healing object to a bodily practice, while the crystal’s supposed depletion offers an explanation for why protection might fail.

The idea of invasion recurs across these consultations, but its source remains unsettled. Warhol first wonders whether his brother might invade the crystal, connecting that possibility to remarks he made in an interview about his nephew, who left the priesthood to marry a Mexican nun. He later thinks the intruder was instead the girl from the bookstore. The diary preserves the change of suspicion without resolving it. That shifting explanation matters: the crystal is not simply an inert safeguard but an object whose condition, vulnerability, and supposed contamination become part of Warhol’s effort to interpret unsettling events.

Protection Under Pressure

The most troubling test of protection is the bookstore assault, which Warhol later connects to the possibility that the crystal and share were infiltrated. The girl who was involved calls the office afterward and says she does not know why she did it; Warhol speculates that she may be having a nervous breakdown. His account makes the incident consequential in two directions: it leaves him questioning the crystal’s protective capacity, and it leaves the girl’s own response as an unresolved aftermath. He does not claim that the crystal caused, prevented, or explained the assault. Instead, he records the attempted spiritual explanation beside the fact that he kept signing and did not panic.

In November, Dr. Li’s account that both objects were infiltrated brings the distinction between healing and protection back into focus. The share is associated with healing; the separate crystal is supposed to prevent harm. Yet neither label gives Warhol a confident answer about what happened in the bookstore. His uncertainty is not a brief interruption in an otherwise secure belief. It is part of the practice itself: he consults one practitioner, reports her explanation to another, and continues to ask what the objects can and cannot do.

Doubt, Persistence, and Exchange

By late November, failures have accumulated into an explicit doubt. Warhol lists the moths that have damaged his rug, a beautiful old plastic ring he stepped on and crushed, and the assault at the book signing. These are different kinds of loss—damage to a home, the accidental destruction of a small possession, and bodily vulnerability—but he gathers them as evidence against the crystals’ promised protection. His conclusion remains divided: he is starting to think they do not work, but says he has to believe in something and will continue with them because things could always be worse. The crystals persist not as proven defenses but as objects of chosen reliance under conditions of uncertainty.

A December visit to Dr. Bernsohn introduces a further complication: the crystal system also involves money and negotiation. Bernsohn shows Warhol a crystal he says he bought for $1,000, that would usually cost $5,000, and that is worth millions to him because there is nothing else like it. Warhol offers the possibility of trading a print; Bernsohn instead asks for two portraits, one for his mother and one for himself, which Warhol calculates as $50,000 worth. Bernsohn presses for an answer by Friday, saying Dr. Reese would be “programmed out” if Warhol waited. Warhol decides not to call and says a boundary has to be drawn somewhere. In this final exchange, the sought-after object is no longer only a promise of healing or protection: it is also the center of a high-value proposed trade. Warhol’s refusal does not resolve his belief in crystals, but it shows that belief does not require accepting every demand made in their name.