God sleeps in the minerals

I liked the title, and the pictures are nice too.

Not a theist myself, but I can certainly imagine a believer seeing god in all the wonders of nature.

"The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you."

Imagine associating $DEITY with war, slaughter, and destruction. I prefer the mineral $DEITY.

True, but among the minerals with cubic crystal structure it is not unusual for them to be found as crystals that are perfect regular or semiregular polyhedra, with a shape characteristic for the mineral, for instance octahedron (e.g. spinel, diamond), rhombic dodecahedron (e.g. garnet) or cube (e.g. pyrite).

I suppose that the crystals from the picture are of pyrite, which frequently looks like this.

In the antiquity, when what are now called diamonds (the Romans and the Greeks called them "Indian adamants", because they were first encountered by Europeans during the expedition in India of Alexander the Great; "adamant" meant something else in Europe) were very difficult to cut and polish, they were normally used as gems in their natural shape of regular octahedra.

Cutting diamonds from their natural octahedral shape into polyhedra with more facets, e.g. brilliant, was invented much later.

These types of huge perfect specimens always take my breath away when I am able to see them in person. To think that this kind of stuff just kinda exists buried in the earth...

I am a part of a local mineral club which hosts several "field trips" a year to various mineralogically interesting locations (most of which aren't accessible as an individual, like private land and special digs at active mining/quarrying sites on their days off). I have never found anything even remotely as beautiful as the specimens shown, but the small collection of mildly interesting things that I've smashed out of the earth with my own 2 hands is amazingly satisfying to me. You don't even have to be a super dedicated "rock nerd" to take part, I highly recommend looking for local mineral clubs to join if this even remotely interests you. It's really a ton of fun!