Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 62

rivers by seining it through lamb’s wool— the golden fleece. In our
own time, John Huston’s award-winning movie, The Treasure of
Sierra Madre, echoed this danger of greed and how gold corrupts
most o f us. In this tale of human nature and morality, the chief actor,
Humphrey Bogart, was at his finest as the crazed, paranoic miner.
Through the ages, gold always signified what humans held
dearest. For this reason, it is listed among the gifts of the Magi to
Jesus at the stable. Not surprising is the fact that gold is mentioned
some four hundred times in the Bible.
Gold, then, was a kingly gift and the gift of kings, because for
the most part, it was their prerogative and theirs alone. The common
man, because he was common, could not own this uncommon
treasure. Enough was never enough for those who possessed the
precious metal, as they themselves became possessed by it. Gold
was a constant mistress in the foreground o f the thought, passions
and desires of the lover. One must have it at all costs and dangers,
sometimes at the cost of life itself. Even ascetic medieval philoso
phers dreamed o f winning the power to transform all base metals
into gold through use of the “philosopher’s stone.”
O ur very language also betrays this admiration, passion, and
obsession for the metal. We speak of being given a “golden”
opportunity, meaning the chance of a lifetime. We refer to the
halcyon times past as “golden” days. Men have always prized
women with “golden” curls and women who sought to exploit all
they could from a man were called “gold” diggers.
Gold is the superlative to which all other precious things are
the comparative and thus the wealth of meaning in the name of an
opera by Puccini set in the burgeoning America, The Girl of the
Golden West. For it was in the West—the new world West of
America that brought such a harvest of the precious metal, the likes
of which the world heretofore had never seen. The scarcity of the
metal, rather than discourage a search for it, only increased m an’s

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