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In the dream, I am being shown the amber robe of the Sun. Even untenanted, spread out on the ground, it is an awesome sight.

The golden omofor is covered—feathered, enscaled—with huge, smooth pieces of amber: pieces as large as my palm, the largest the size of my outstretched hand. I hadn't realized that natural amber occurred in such large pieces. The effect of so many together overwhelms me.

I stand unmoving in awestruck wonder. On the body of its wearer, radiant with Sunlight, the lordly robe, so masterfully wrought, would blind the eye.

I bow to the ground and kiss the largest of the amber disks, the one covering the wearer's heart.

I won a set of brown beads in a raffle. They were simple and pleasing, warm to the touch. To my surprise, they turned out to be amber, understood by the ancients as both a kind of solidified sunlight and as the tears of a goddess.

I've never much been one for religious jewelry, but that doesn't mean I haven't generally got a god or two tucked somewhere or other about my person. You could call them “pocket gods.”

The Norse called them hlutir and carried them in pouches. (Hlutr is the same as English lot, as in “drawing lots,” which gives one something of an idea of their cultural importance.) The witch-wife Heiðr once told Ingimund the Old, while he still lived in Norway, that he would settle in an undiscovered land west over sea, and that the sign of the truth of her seeing would be this: that the little silver hlutr of Frey that he always carried in his pouch would be lost, but that he would find it again buried in the ground when he dug to raise the pillars of his house in the new land. And so indeed it came to be when, years later, he settled in Iceland.

Which pocket-gods I carry depends on the season and the vagaries of my own thought and mood. Shown above are two that are frequently with me, both worked in Baltic amber: a Sun-disc and a Thunder-ax. Sun and Thunder are two of my best-loved gods, and I like to bear their main (power) with me as I go through my day.

Some friends of mine own a Baltic imports store: best amber this side of the Mississippi. I was looking at a case of hand-carved wooden items, including some beautiful wooden spoons.

A woman came over and began looking at the spoons. “This one is labeled 'sacred spoon,' but it looks just like the rest of them,” she said. “What makes this one sacred and not the others?”

A reasonable question, certainly. As it happened, I knew the answer, because the owner of the store had told me about it a few days before. “It's sacred because it was carved out of wood from a tree that was struck by lightning,” I told her. In fact, the tree in question had been the oldest and most sacred oak in a grove sacred to Thunder; the oak, of course, is Thunder's tree. Oak struck by lightning in a grove sacred to Thunder: heap big juju.

They say that when the Moon, Mother of Witches, gave birth to the tribe of Witches, she looked into the water to see what the life of her first-born people would be. And there she saw sorrow, black sorrow; and there she saw joy, golden joy.

Then she wept a mother's tears for her first-born people, for what may be and what must be. From her left eye fell tears of black sorrow; they fell to the ground and were jet. From her right eye fell tears of golden joy; they fell to the sea and were amber.

So the great ones among us wear necklaces of amber and jet to this day; and whoever carries upon him the black tears or the golden will always draw her eye to him, for from her eye they came.