Amber
DESCRIPTION:
Fossilized tree resin, usually clear yellow to orange in color, and sometimes with animal or plant inclusions
COMPOSITION:
Carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen (C10 H16 O)
METAPHYSICAL PROPERTIES:
Thought to possess life energy. Good for healing, and for connecting to past lives.
You might have learned about amber from Mr. DNA. The 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park included a pseudoscientific interlude in which the characters take an informational tram ride through the soon-to-be-opened theme park and a cartoon double helix explains how they were able to bring dinosaurs back to life. “One hundred million years ago, there were mosquitos, just like today” he explains, bouncing around the screen, “and just like today, they fed on the blood of animals, even dinosaurs.”
But then, occasionally, a blood-bellied mosquito would land on a resin-covered tree and get stuck, coated, hardened, and buried, and millions of years later would still have that belly full of dinosaur DNA.
A day before Jurassic Park was released, scientists extracted fragmentary strands of DNA from a weevil that had died while being engulfed in tree resin 130 million years before. It was believed to be the oldest DNA ever found, and it set off a race of research with the promise of rebuilding ancient animals—possibly even dinosaurs—dangling at the finish line. There was just one problem. The DNA was highly susceptible to contamination, absorbing other DNA from mold spores and bacteria and the scientists themselves. No one could replicate the weevil. Then, in 2012, scientists discovered that DNA has a half-life of 521 years, meaning it would cease to be readable after about 1.5 million years. And even without all that pesky science, the dinosaur DNA from Jurassic Park would have rapidly broken down during the mosquito’s digestion, making it pretty impossible to have survived even a couple of hours, much less eons. There was no way Jurassic Park could be real. But what a tempting story, that all the secrets to our past are sitting somewhere perfectly preserved.
Amber doesn’t quite feel like a gem. It’s too light, like it’s made of plastic. It feels odd that something so insubstantial was allowed to survive; surely it should have crumbled by now. It’s made of tree resin, which is different from sap. While sap is like the blood of the tree, carrying nutrients up from the soil and through the branches, resin exists only to protect the tree from outside invaders. When a branch breaks or a bug tries to claw its way in, the resin seals and sterilizes the injury and prevents further damage. Amber’s metaphysical properties are some of the most literal given what the resin is physically capable of. Everyone from the ancient Romans to the creators of Chinese medicine expanded on the idea that amber has the power to heal. “Worn upon the neck…it is a cure for fevers and other diseases, and, triturated with honey and oil of roses, it is good for maladies of the ears,” wrote Pliny the Elder. “Beaten up with Attic honey, it is good for dimness of sight; and the powder of it, either taken by itself or with gum mastich in water, is remedial for diseases of the stomach.” It could also keep one safe from harm, both in life and in the afterlife; ancient Roman graves have been found with bodies adorned in amber to protect the soul on its journey.
But amber also has the property of preservation, which leads some to believe it can heal not just your body but your soul, and the souls of everyone who has come before you. It connects you to “ancient memories of your wisdom, truth, and purpose” and can mend past traumas that you didn’t even know you were carrying with you. More than other gems, amber is recognized for its connection to life. The tree it came from has most likely gone extinct, but the appeal is that some part of its life, a moment of the day that resin was formed, is still perfectly preserved inside. When it warms it releases a scent, an experience of something long ago captured. Amber’s magic says we can see the past just as it is, perhaps live in it for a moment. It is a physical manifestation of hindsight, holding the promise that if we could just go back, the moment would be there, clear as day, and we could fix things, change things, or just remember why. It is so easy to get trapped in that sticky promise.
Death is supposed to give life meaning. Life, as the more fleeting of the two, is really the state of not being dead. Life might be marked by decay and movement toward death, but it is still movement. And life without decay, or an eternity of stasis, is just another version of death, as we’ve learned from every tale of everlasting life, from Tuck Everlasting to The Good Place. This is to say amber is just like us: fluid and moveable one day, and then rigor mortis hard the next. It’s pretty obvious that amber should represent life and death. Its warm, golden hue evokes the sun and its life-giving shine, as well as the knowledge that one day we won’t feel it on our skin. A bee or mite trapped inside hardened amber was once alive but is now suspended in a state of life-like death, transformed into something hauntingly beautiful. Something ends when amber forms it’s a reminder that death will always come no matter the quality of one’s life.
American schools are fond of referring to ancient Egyptians as “death obsessed” in middle school curricula, as if that were an insult, but they seem no more so than any other culture with a robust ideology around the afterlife. The premise of any afterlife is that life, in some form, will continue after death. Some traditions are more abstract about this than others. In Hinduism, the soul is reincarnated as many times as is necessary for it to understand its completeness, after which it joins the cosmos. In Mormonism, there are three realms in which a person may reside for eternity, depending on their religious beliefs on earth, with all of their baptized family. Outside of organized faith, there are ghosts that linger on earth, stuck in the houses where they were wronged, replaying the same moment, needing to make peace with the past before they can move “on,” wherever that is.
In Ancient Egypt, amber was considered the tears of the eye of Ra, the sun god, who represented life, growth, and creation. Amber and pine resin have been found embedded under the skin of mummies, supposedly to protect them on their journey to the afterlife, but also because pine resin is antibacterial and helped prevent decay, ensuring the body wouldn’t fall apart before the soul’s journey was through. In this mythology, after an arduous schlep through the underworld, the weighing of the soul, and rebirth, souls would be reunited with their bodies and together enter the Field of Reeds, where the Nile was always flowing and the crops always came in. For all the journeying and interaction with gods, the ultimate reward was the nicest possible version of the most boring parts of existence: farming, eating, spending time with loved ones, all while wearing the best clothes your family could afford to put in your coffin. An eternal replication of what you did on earth, a forever of good harvests and good health.
Not all afterlife myths are so literal, but most promise a preservation of something you already know or can easily imagine. Heaven is freedom from earthly pain and frustration while hell is an abundance of it. Eternity is your family reunited, all the things you wanted but never got now available for the taking, the ability to talk to all the famous people you thought were cool, the peace of being able to farm and harvest without worrying that there will be enough, because there is always enough. This, of course, depends on how good you are in life, whether you follow the rules and arrive at your judgment with a sinless heart and a light soul. But the reward for getting it right is largely the same—your life, better, continued.
Even when considering an afterlife outside of religious traditions, we have a hard time envisioning anything but an augmented earthly bureaucracy. In the 1988 film Beetlejuice, the dead are given a handbook that reads like “stereo instructions,” and hell is the DMV. In the 1991 high-concept rom-com Defending Your Life, the Egyptian soul-weighing morphs into a courtroom drama where the recently deceased are given a lawyer and must prove to a panel of judges that they have lived their lives without fear. Everyone is decked out in comfy robes and shuttled around office parks and hotels during their downtime. You can eat as much spaghetti as you want and not get fat. You can replay the highlights of your life on TV. There are meetings and appointments and schedules to keep to. Everything is carpeted.
In the sitcom The Good Place the audience is convinced, at least for the first season, that heaven looks like a cute suburban neighborhood, where everyone eats frozen yogurt and fondue with monogamous soul mates and sometimes you can fly. There are houses and restaurants and parties and interpersonal dynamics to navigate, and people still go jogging for some reason. The reveal is that [SPOILER ALERT] what we thought was heaven is actually “the bad place,” something you could easily have figured out if you thought about the continued presence of cul-de-sacs in eternity. Life in the neighborhood is in fact a form of torture that forces people to continue to operate in polite society, down to the pressure to be in love with their so-called soul mates. The main characters go in search of the real Good Place, or at least a “medium place” where they won’t be flayed and burned. But even when they get close to the Good Place, it seems like nowhere anyone would choose. Sure, it smells like cookies and everyone is guilelessly enthusiastic, but they’re also all wearing polar fleece.
The visions of the afterlife presented in these stories probably aren’t what any of their creators believe really happens after we die; but an abstract, interdimensional landscape free from anything resembling human interaction or emotion doesn’t make for compelling, plot-driven entertainment. But so many of our thoughts of life after death are wrapped up in not just our anxieties about dying, but also our anxieties about life. Death becomes freedom, but not too much. A soul joining an all-knowing ball of light is too weird for daily contemplation. But the best version of these afterlives (not the jogging) is a comforting wish. A nice house with all your childhood pets, or reliving your wedding day, or finding yourself preserved in the happiest moments of your life—if you have to die, that doesn’t sound too bad.
It’s only when I’m really happy that I feel like dying. When life feels fully saturated and the only possible place to go from here is down and muted and dimmer. I don’t really want to die, but when I’m fizzing and filled with gratitude for the privilege of life, I’m overcome with the melancholy wish that things could always be like this. I’ll be lying on the couch after a deliriously happy day when I remember it will be bad again, someday, and I say I feel so good I want to kill myself. This is not a thing people say! The first time I admitted it was on the phone at two a.m., and the person on the other end immediately threatened to call the police. It probably should have occurred to me how I sounded, but the thought felt so natural that I assumed everyone else felt the same way. I assured my friend that it’s not really true, that’d I’d never do that, life is grand. But for me, cresting on the wheel of fortune doesn’t inspire acceptance that what goes down must come up again, that just as it will be bad again, it will be good. Instead, I feel my buoyancy disappearing.
Really, I just want it to snap off. An afterlife that resembles life on earth, with work and needs and people to answer to, sounds exhausting, and an eternity filled with my highest moment would only dilute that moment. Instead, I want it all to freeze, a beautiful time had by all petrified so fast no one notices, no one even has the time to mourn a lost future. Everything preserved at the best moment, not the worst.
But so many crystals are women’s pain, hardened and celebrated. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Clymene, daughter of the ocean personified, bore the sun god Phoebus (also known as Apollo or Helios) seven daughters and one son, Phaethon. Phaethon is mocked for being unable to prove his parentage and begs Clymene to tell him the truth. She assures him Phoebus is indeed his father and that he should travel to his Palace of the Sun and see for himself. There, Phoebus tells Phaethon his mother has spoken the truth and promises to give his son anything he wants. So Phaethon asks to drive his father’s sun chariot for a day. His father warns him of the fire-breathing horses, the terrible heights, the rushing and turning sky. “No doubt, since you ask for a certain sign to give you confidence in being born of my blood, I give you that sure sign by fearing for you, and show myself a father by fatherly anxiety.” But Phaethon can’t be persuaded to choose anything else.
Phaethon was so small that the horses thought the chariot was empty. They dove toward the earth, scorching the land, destroying cities, evaporating seas. Earth herself was choking, and she commanded Jupiter, “Look around you on either side: both the poles are steaming! If the fire should melt them, your own palace will fall! Atlas himself is suffering, and can barely hold up the white-hot sky on his shoulders! If the sea and the land and the kingdom of the heavens are destroyed, we are lost in ancient chaos! Save whatever is left from the flames, and think of our common interest!” Jupiter was forced to strike down Phaethon with a lightning bolt before he could do further damage. It is a myth of hubris and anxiety, of a son wanting his father’s acknowledgment and approval so badly he cannot see he already has them. Often, the myth about the grief that comes after is ignored.
After Phaethon is killed, his mother wanders the earth looking for her son’s bones, and his sisters cry. They cry so much that when the eldest tries to throw herself to the ground she finds her ankles have stiffened. They cry so much that one’s hair turns to leaves, another’s legs become wood, and Clymene tries to save them by tearing the bark from their skin. “ ‘Stop, mother, please’ cries out whichever one she hurts, ‘Please stop: It is my body in the tree you are tearing. Now, farewell.’ and the bark closed over her with her last words,” wrote Ovid. “Their tears still flow, and hardened by the sun, fall as amber from the virgin branches, to be taken by the bright river and sent onwards to adorn Roman brides.” Everyone else in the story gets to move on. Phoebus still carries the sun across the sky, Clymene returns to the oceans, the world moves. But the sisters are reduced to hardened tears, forever captured in a state of grief.
There are more myths. In a Lithuanian legend, the goddess Jurate lived in an amber castle under the sea. She fell in love with the mortal fisherman Kastytis, and after they are both punished for their affair, Jurate cries, and her tears mix with shards of her castle and wash up on the shore. (Jurate lives in the Baltic Sea, the site of the world’s largest amber deposit.) In Othello, as he is about to kill himself over his grief, Othello refers to himself as a man “whose subdued eyes,/Albeit unused to the melting mood,/Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees/Their medicinable gum.” Amber is not just proof of life, but proof of trauma, and whether directly tied to death or not, the idea is that tears are curative. A tree’s resin only appears when it is hurt, and in our love of humanizing the inhuman, we probably saw in a tree the cathartic release of a good cry. The hope is that by letting it out and putting it somewhere else, we will heal. The crystal shop House of Intuition’s website describes amber as “a gentle healer, cleanser, and transmuter of negative energy of all kinds on all levels” and says it’s good for healing and depression. If amber is the pain of a long-gone tree frozen in time, then maybe it can represent the same for anyone who uses it. Cry into the amber, let it fossilize, and move on.
Not all resin can become fossilized amber. It needs the right conditions. Most of the time, the resin washes away after it’s secreted, never getting a chance to harden. Only certain forms of resin are resistant to sun, rain, bacteria, and fungi, and even then it needs to find itself buried in wet clay or sand to fossilize without too much oxygen. There is little reason why some resin is preserved, taking along whatever particles are trapped within, and some resin dissolves in the rain. As much as humans have ascribed meaning to amber—these pieces are here because it was Jurate’s castle, these are the tears of a mourning woman—like most things in nature it’s a total crapshoot.
If amber can heal our traumas by connecting us to the past, it’s with a magic that says dwelling on those moments isn’t just a masturbatory exercise. It helps us recognize our past traumas, perhaps generational traumas, that sit like stones in our stomachs. By looking at them from every angle we’re supposed to see what they’re doing to us, whether their presence is a balm or a festering wound, and protect ourselves from a psychic attack if it’s the latter. Amber says that by taking time to obsess over trauma or memory or death, we can move on and perhaps even learn something. But Phaethon’s sisters probably did not want to become amber-sobbing trees, no matter how gracefully Ovid wrote them to accept their deaths. If it had to happen, and if it were up to them, they might have chosen a different day to become trapped in. Maybe a nice afternoon while their brother was still alive. Maybe some future day that they never got to see. But they can’t control it; they’re trapped on a loop, doomed to relive the same moment forever.
Often we have no choice over what stays with us and what gets washed away. Moments like death, marriage, and birth are intentionally memorialized through ceremony. But we also live through horrible traumas and unspeakable joys, and those too are transcribed on a part of our soul that doesn’t forget, does not fade with time—a repository of moments we wish to live in forever, and moments we’d sooner cast to the bottom of the sea. Amber reminds us we are supposed to choose what we carry forward, but it’s also a warning not to get too bogged down. Death is coming no matter what, but there will be time enough to relive all those moments again and again and again.
The preservation properties of amber also mean we don’t have to throw the past away, at least not yet. We can keep looking at it, keep analyzing it, and turn to it when we need to escape the here and now. Sometimes it feels so good to live in the past, and now it’s easier than ever. My Facebook reminds me of things that happened three, five, or twelve years ago without my prompting. My Gmail is an archive of flirtations from college. With the help of the internet, I can be the teen complaining about her friends not getting along like they used to. I can be the twenty-one-year-old caught between two dramatic loves, writing impassioned letters back and forth, remembering when life was chaotic and unpredictable and I didn’t know where I’d end up. I can be someone with a fuller face, flatter abs, stronger arms (but admittedly with a worse haircut). I read and relive that part of my life in excruciating detail, every kiss and text that was ever documented like it is happening in this moment. We’re meant to look at these moments preserved in metaphorical amber briefly in order to make sense of the present, but what if you stayed?
I’ve set guards against the temptation to become too enamored with my past life. I’ve deleted select emails and done my best to focus on the present, where these loves are married or absent or have just moved on, where my body is what it is. I pull myself out before the warm orange sap takes me whole.
I think often of Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, the creatures who exist at all times simultaneously, who can focus on inhabiting and observing as many frozen moments as they’d like without the emotional burden of the unknown. They are powerless to prevent anything from happening, so they throw their big green hand up and say “so it goes,” living in the moment, or at least a moment, whichever one they feel like. When they meet Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, he is like any other human—afraid of what comes next, traumatized by what has happened to him, and convinced that there was another outcome possible if he could just figure out where it all went wrong. The Tralfamadorians laugh, and eventually Pilgrim adopts their fatalistic view of the world. After all, he has been “unstuck” from time, doomed (or blessed) to visit past and future moments of his life, though without control over where and when he goes. When Pilgrim says “so it goes” to the humans around him, he means to reassure them there is nothing we can do except to enjoy the moment we’re in, even if horror surrounds us in all dimensions.
The preservation properties of amber mean we don’t have to throw the past away, at least not yet. We can keep looking at it, keep analyzing it, and turn to it when we need to escape the here and now.
But I’m sure, when he returned from the Tralfamadorian zoo, his friends and family found him an unrelatable asshole, creepily content with death and tragedy, so understanding of the big picture that he forgets about the small ones that make a life. At its best, amber might make us time travelers to our own lives, but at its worst we become either stuck or unstuck, so myopically focused on one moment or so disconnected from the passage of time that we can no longer sense its flow.
It’s easy to make an afterlife of life. You can relive a moment, beautiful or painful, so convincingly that you forget anything else has happened since. You could mimic what you’ve already done to the point that you become a ghost, haunting the same spots and performing the same rituals over and over again instead of moving on. The past is that dead mosquito preserved in amber, too full and comfortable to know it was being carried on a gummy river to its death—but at least it’s a known quantity. At least we don’t have to contend with the discomfort of surprises. Or so we think…
In Jurassic Park, the scientists thought they knew what they were doing. The dinosaur DNA was incomplete, so they fused it with modern frog DNA under the assumption that they could bring back dinosaurs and control them. Obviously, that didn’t work. The frog DNA allowed the dinosaurs to spontaneously change their reproductive organs, they started laying eggs, and life found a way. The scientists didn’t know all of what had happened, so they couldn’t know what would happen. Because no matter how many mosquitos were trapped in amber, they couldn’t fully know the past. Not the details, not the things that would make the presence of dinosaurs in a human society so truly awesome.
Ever since DNA was discovered, we have spoken in metaphor of things inherent to us as “encoded in our DNA.” There are things we can’t change and things we are predisposed to, inevitabilities that would be foolish and unproductive to fight. Things that have happened. We have relied on the thought that it has all been written, and that’s all there is to read. But there are some moments available to us and some that aren’t, and some that were but will never be with us in full, colorful detail no matter how often we turn to amber for help. When I want the world to go away, I have to remind myself that I have been pleasantly surprised. If the world had stopped when I asked it to, or if I decided one perfectly preserved moment was the only good one there would ever be, I would have missed so much. Sometimes it feels easier to be trapped, but I don’t want to forget about the sun on my face.
