Gold of Dreams

For the third part of his trilogy on human culture, Ralph Dutli turns his attention to the »eternal« metal: gold.

Throughout the ages, gold has been coveted and worshipped as an indestructible, »eternal« metal. The gleam of gold is found in religion and in myths, in fairy tales, art and literature. It is a symbol of grandeur and greed, of power and magic.
When handling gold, human beings reache the height of their intellectual capacitoes and dreams – and the depths of their destructive passions.
From the bible and the pharaohs to the search for Eldorado, from the deities of India to digital gold currency, Ralph Dutli gathers gold dust for his cultural history from an astonishingly diverse range of sources. It was poets – from Horace to Rilke – who had profound thoughts on the nature of gold. Modern writers, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to the surrealists, placed themselves as successors of the alchemists. And left us a legacy: the precious gold of their poetry.
Ralph Dutli dedicates the third volume of his successful cultural histories to the most contradictory of metals. Starting olive tree, followed by the honey bee, he now turns to a mineral element. A trilogy of human culture, from centuries full of surprising episodes and stories.