Gold, Transferred

For centuries, alchemists struggled unsuccessfully to turn base materials into gold.  The key to alchemy was the secret stone, a gift from god, incomprehensible to the intellect. This “materia prima” or “opus” was an enigmatic substance that was given so many definitions that its very existence contradicted itself. However, some authors rose above the charlatans and swindlers who were “easily recognized by their endless recipes, their careless and uneducated composition, their studied mystification, their excruciating dullness, and their shameless insistence on the making of gold.” 1.

In folklore, gold is seen unambiguously to be a symbol of faeces. Furthermore, Freud suggested that “all the interests which the child has had in faeces is transferred in the adult on to another material which he learns in life to set above almost everything else – gold.” 2.  But according to several mythologies, gold is the excrement of hell. A similar idea was famously developed about paper money: the devil in Goethe’s Faust created a representative currency to temporarily rescue the royal treasury:

Paper redeemed without delay in gold
Confounds the doubter who had scoffed and taunted.
This men demand, to metals they are wonted.

Treasurer. Twixt us no slightest strife shall cause division;
I love to have as colleague the magician. 3.

Fiat money, gold certificates, reserves, managed money and other representative currencies are arcane formulas used by the alchemists at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other world banks, to transform base materials into glowing golden vessels. Their formulas concretize as cash containing complex aesthetic abstractions in the form of national symbols and arcane security measures such as watermarks, metallic foils, intaglio printing, holograms, threads, color fibers, rainbow printing, microprinting, latent images, blind embossing, and anti-scanning graphics such as EURion and Omron patterns. Paper money provides a tangible, authoritative talisman for abstract faith: a latter-day belief in the enigmatic “materia prima”.

“The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.” 4.

Aeron Bergman & Alejandra Salinas

Oslo 2010