Incorruptible gold: from the Roman bulla to the Orphic tablets

Gold does not oxidise, does not tarnish and is not attacked by most acids. For ancient civilisations this resistance to time was a sign of divine nature: the metal that does not die could protect what is fragile and accompany those passing into the afterlife. Associated with the Sun in almost every tradition, gold was used for amulets, seals and funerary masks, and its symbolic history is inseparable from that of power and the sacred.

The flesh of the gods

In ancient Egypt the flesh of the gods was said to be made of gold, and the metal was linked to the sun god Ra. For this reason the masks and coffins of rulers made lavish use of it: the funerary mask of Tutankhamun, found in the tomb discovered by Howard Carter in 1922 and now in Cairo, is the most famous example. Covering the king's face with gold meant turning him into an imperishable being, like the gods.

Pindar opens the first Olympian ode by declaring that gold shines like blazing fire in the night. The line sums up a perception shared by many ancient peoples: gold as material light, a fragment of the sun in the human world, worthy of being offered to the gods and of accompanying kings into the tomb. In the same ode the poet sets it beside the sun, the star that nothing else surpasses in brightness.

The bulla of Roman boys

In Rome freeborn boys wore around their necks the bulla, a small round capsule containing substances believed to be protective. For the sons of the wealthiest families it was made of gold, for others of leather. The custom, which ancient sources such as Macrobius trace back to the Etruscans, lasted until the day the young man assumed the toga of manhood; then the bulla was laid aside and dedicated to the Lares, the guardians of the household.

Pliny the Elder, in the thirty-third book of the Natural History, devoted to metals, discusses gold and its history at length, severely criticising the greed it arouses in human beings. He also reports some beliefs about its use as an amulet, presenting them as current opinions rather than established truths. His moral judgement on gold, a metal that corrupts those who covet it, thus sits alongside a patient record of popular beliefs.

The gold tablets of the initiates

Among the most evocative testimonies are the inscribed gold tablets found in graves in southern Italy, Greece and Crete, dating mostly from the fifth to the third century BC. The one from Hipponion, today's Vibo Valentia, and those from Thurii give the dead directions for finding their way in the afterlife: avoid one spring, drink from another, declare oneself a child of Earth and starry Heaven. Scholars connect them with mystery cults of Orphic or Bacchic type.

The choice of metal was not accidental. A word entrusted to gold remained legible for ever, as if the promise of salvation shared the incorruptibility of its medium. The tablets, folded and laid beside the body or on the chest, were at once a religious document and a talisman for the final journey. Some were kept in small cases hung around the neck, just like the amulets of the living.

From Egypt to Magna Graecia, protective gold was not simply a sign of wealth. It was the material chosen for what had to last beyond human time: the king's face, the citizen's childhood, the journey of the soul. Medieval alchemists would later make gold the symbol of the perfection to be attained, but the ancient civilisations had already read in it an image of immortality.