Amber
Also Succinum, Baltic amber
Transparent to cloudy honey-yellow through orange to deep red-brown, often with insects, bark or bubbles caught inside; rare green and blue forms exist.
- Crystal system
- Amorphous
- Hardness
- 2-2.5 Mohs
- Handling
- Amber is not a mineral. It is fossil resin, and it is fragile. At 2 to 2.5 it scratches on almost anything, including a fingernail. Alcohol, acetone, perfume, hairspray and household solvents dissolve or cloud the surface, and heat softens and chars it. Wipe with a damp cloth, never soak it, never put it in an ultrasonic bath, and put it on after scent rather than before.
- In water
- No
What it is held to be for
Amber is not stone. It is the resin of pine forests that stood tens of millions of years ago, hardened and washed out of the Baltic. Pliny knew this and said so, against the poets who called it the tears of Phaethon's sisters. It has been worn as a protective amulet longer than almost any other material, and Pliny reports it hung on infants for that reason.
Pliny, Natural History XXXVII (succinum); Ovid, Metamorphoses II
Correspondences
These are the tradition's ascriptions, not properties of the mineral.
- Planet
- Sun, Venus
- Element
- Fire
- Signs
- Leo, Aquarius
- Chinese phase
- Earth
- Year animal
- Tiger, Dog
- Centre
- Solar plexus Manipura
- Sephirah
- Tiphereth
How it is used
Worn against the skin, warm and light: a necklace, a bead on a cord, a piece held closed in the fist. Kept for long sitting with grief, and for children, which is its oldest recorded use.
Today
Warm a piece of amber in your closed hand until it is blood temperature. Say the name of somebody you have lost. Put it in your pocket.
A longer working
In the evening, with the lamp low, rub the amber briskly on wool until it will lift a scrap of torn paper. That is the old proof that the stone is awake; the Greeks named electricity after it. Then hold it in both hands and say what you are carrying, in whatever words come. Wear it for the next three days without taking it off. On the fourth morning wash your hands, set it aside, and go on.
Works with
- Herb
- Bay laurel
- Incense
- Benzoin