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Hawkes, Jacquetta – A Land – Gold
Identifier
021714
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Jacquetta Hawkes – A Land
I am puzzled by this ancient bond between men and gold, a bond far more powerful and tyrannical now than it was four thousand years ago. It is not that I am incapable of understanding the economics of the gold standard-though even there the fact that a nation will give vast quantities of food and goods for lumps of metal to be at once hidden underground would seem to belong to a fairy-tale world. It is one of the extravagant fantasies that are accepted without surprise by the most prosaic.
The power of this metal cannot depend upon its rarity alone.
There has always been a fascination in this bright stuff that shines like the sun; it is as though it came from the ground so laden with symbolism that men, always troubled by intimations of mystery, seized upon it and exalted it until its name is one of the most evocative words in every language. It stands for the pure heart and for the root of evil, it veins our life and our literature as it veins mountains; a perpetual proof of the power inherent in the differentiated, the fully individual.