The Seba library treats Amber in 5 passages, across 4 authors (including Abraham, Lyndy, Campbell, Joseph, Plato).
The alchemists saw amber, the golden, coagulated sap, as a potent image for the gold which issued from their growing metallic tree.
Abraham establishes amber as the central alchemical emblem of vegetable gold — the congealed sap of the philosophical tree — linking Crashaw and Milton’s poetic imagery to the opus alchymicum’s production of incorruptible gold.
, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998thesis
Necklaces of Baltic amber (the Bronze Age Amber Route was now in use, from the Baltic, overland through Central Europe, to the Adriatic). Gold objects from the Mediterranean. Egyptian faience beads.
Campbell situates amber within the Bronze Age Wessex culture as a prestige trade commodity circulating along the Amber Route, signifying aristocratic wealth and cross-cultural connectivity at the threshold of mythological and historical consciousness.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
amber jewelry (Baltic amber unknown in Crete). In men’s graves: breastplates and death masks of gold (mask showing visage with beard and mustache), swords, daggers, gold and
Campbell notes Baltic amber jewelry appearing in Mycenaean shaft graves while absent from Crete, marking amber as a distinctly Northern European prestige object that differentiated Mycenaean warrior-aristocracy from Minoan culture.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
Attraction of amber and loadstone, denied, 326
Cornford’s index to the Timaeus registers Plato’s explicit denial of attractive force in amber and lodestone, situating amber at the boundary of ancient natural philosophy where mechanical causation was contested.
, Plato’s cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
coins were made, and ‘amber’. However, ἤλεκτρον cannot mean ‘brilliant’, as amber is not brilliant, and the meaning and etymology of this word are unknown.
Beekes notes that the Greek ἤλεκτρον designates both an alloy used for coins and amber, but resists easy etymological derivation, leaving the word’s origins undetermined — a philological reminder of amber’s semantic opacity in antiquity.
, Etymological Dictionary of Greek, 2010aside