The origin story
Design: Moya Gallery (Photo credit: Yantar Yoga)
When the world was new, slender pine trees slowly emerged from the abyss. Up and up! Like long fingers extending in the gesture of creation. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.” The pines listened. How did this first forest rustle? What was this first sound that broke eternity of silence? The scent of resin enveloped this young world. The first fish - their spines still only elemental - just discovered the possibility and joy of motion. To the right, to the left! Their swaying tails awakened the dark depths of water as small ripples traveled to its calm surface.
The night lasted long, maybe entire centuries. When the dawn came, the first ray of the sun was like an arrow that pierced the thick velvet of darkness. The ray ricocheted off a chitin back of a beetle, making it shine like a jewel. The beetle was laboriously climbing up the tower-like pine tree, oblivious to the fact that the most of creation lies beneath. Suddenly its journey stopped, tiny feet sinking into something warm and sticky. The beetle struggles, but resin doesn’t let go, enclosing the insect tightly in a golden tear-shaped mausoleum.
Day and night. Night and day. How many times have the astral spheres rotated since? Pine seedlings turned into giants that ultimately bowed under the weight of time and slid underneath the cool darkness of the waters. The sea spread over the continent. Day and night… I open my palm holding a piece of amber, as if slowly waking up from a long, long dream.
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The Greeks called amber elektron (ηλεκτρον), meaning something shining. In Latin it is called succinum meaning sap, resin. The old Slavic name jantar (also spelled, and pronounced, yantar) comes from Lithuanian gintaras. In Polish, more commonly used today bursztyn comes from German Bernstein - a stone that can be burned. In Hebrew, the word hashmal (חַשְׁמַל), contemporarily meaning electricity, also has the older metaphysical connotation of God’s power or the breath of the Spirit, first encountered in Ezekiel 1:4: “As I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north: a great cloud with brightness around it and fire flashing forth continually, and in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber (hashmal).”
Of course prior to the modern use of electricity humanity discovered that when amber is rubbed with cloth, the mysterious phenomenon manifests known today as static electricity. The pursuit of yoga has in it something of that Hebrew understanding of amber - looking for the light within, generating an electric flow that brings us closer to the divine.