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From the Golden Age to El Dorado: (Metamorphosis of a Myth)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Fernando Ainsa
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The geographical Utopias that present a New World, from classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the exploration and conquest of American territories by Spain, give a two-fold vision of the myth of gold. On the one hand, the legendary lands in which were found the wealth and power generated by the coveted metal—El Dorado, El Paititi, the City of the Caesars—establish the direction of a venture toward the unknown, and a geography of the imaginary marked the ubiquitous sign of the mythical gold. But at the same time, America permitted the felicitous re-encounter in its territory of the Golden Age that had been lost in the Old World. The first steps of Western man toward the American adventure wavered contradictorily between these extremes, in that gold was at the same time “booty and marvel.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 34 , Issue 133 , March 1986 , pp. 20 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

References

1 Ernst Bloch, "Les utopies géographiques," Le Principe espérance, Vol. II, Paris, Gallimard, 1982.

2 Seneca, Medea, Tragedias, Vol. I, Biblioteca clásica Gredos, No. 26, 1979, p. 308. The quotations which follow are from this edition.

3 Quoted by Jesús Luque Moreno in the annotated edition of Medea.

4 Hesiod, Works and Days.

5 Ovid, Metamorphosis, I, verses 89-1159. Antonio Antelo in his essay on "El mito de la Edad de Oro en las letras hispanoamericanas del siglo XV", Thesaurus, No. 1, January-April, 1975, Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo, p. 94. He stresses the influence of Ovid's text on poets, humanists and historians of the Middle Ages and how the myth was transmitted to America.

6 Tibullus, Elegía III, in Antología de poesia latina, Bogotá, Instituto Caro y Cuervo, 1981, p. 89.

7 Quoted by Isaac J. Pardo in Fuegos bajo el agua: la invención de utopía, Caracas, Fundación La Casa de Bello, 1983, p. 20. Pardo recalls that in the Sumeriam epos of Gilgamesh there was also a sumptuous locus amoenus, the garden of the gods that was "surrounded by shrubs of precious stones. "

8 Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, XC. Seneca locates the Golden Age in Greece, fol lowing the opinion of Posidonius, that epoch in which "power was in the hands of the sages." Solon, who "established Athens in the equality of the law was one of the famous seven sages," the ideal model to which Pithagoras gave order and which would pass on to Sicily and Magna Grecia.

9 These three regions are somewhat more than purely geographical at the coming of Christianity. They are consecrated by religious allusions and mystical significa tions, among which are the Holy Trinity, the three sons of Noah from whom de scend the three human races—the descendents of Shem, Ham and Japheth—, the three Magi, the pontifical crown and even the cabalist significance of the number three.

10 Medea, op. cit. p. 306.

11 Elegia III, op. cit.

12 Authors studied by Antonio Antelo in the quoted article.

13 Medea, op. cit., p. 308, pp 367-370.

14 Ovid, op. cit.

15 Tibullus, op. cit., p. 89.

16 Virgil, Eclogue IV.

17 Dante Alighieri, Il Paradiso, Canto XV.

18 William Blake, Poemas proféticas y prosas, Barcelona, Barral Editores, 1971, p. 98

19 Quoted by E.M. Cioran in Histoire et utopie, Paris, Gallimard, 1977, p. 133.

20 Las Saturnales, I, quoted by Isaac J. Pardo in Fuegos bajo el agua: la invención de utopia, p.p 115-117.

21 Idem.

22 Ibidem.

23 Plato, Laws IV, 713e.

24 Plato, Politics, 272 a.

25 The Republic II, 368c-e, 369a.

26 Horace, Epode XVI.

27 Hesiod, op. cit. vv. 169-174.

28 Final words of Epode XVI.

29 José Enrique Rodó, Ariel, Montevideo, Edic. del Nuevo Mundo, 1967, p. 157.

30 Quoted by Rafael Pineda Yañez in La isla y Colón, Buenos Aires, Emecé, 1955, p. 17. He does not point out the apocryphal nature of the book attributed to Aristotle.

31 The story of the Ciudad del Sol, an extraordinary country that would be situat ed in the "great Ocean Sea toward the meridian" was compiled by Diodorus Siculus in his Biblioteca Historica, Liber Tercius, II, 55s, Oxford University Press, 1968.

32 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar Océano, Book II, Ch. 3 Madrid, 1851.

33 Roberto Godoy and Angel Olmo in Textos de Cronistas de Indias y poemas precolombinos, Madrid, Editora Nacional, 1979. A collection of some of the Nahuatl songs that Manuel Leon Portilla compiled.

34 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia de las cosas de la Nueva España, Mexico City, Editorial Porrúa, 1979, Book III, ch. 3.

35 "It seems to me that our islanders of Hispaniola living in the Golden Age, naked, without laws, without slandering judges, without books, live without care for the future, " adds Pedro Martir de Angleria. Decadas del Orbe Nova, José, Porrúa, Mexico City, 1965, Decade I, Book III, ch. 8, recalling the times in which mortals did not care about "give me and I won't give you." The American Indians did not have a "mine and yours."

36 Mariano Picón Salas, De la conquista a la Independencia, Mexico City, Fondo Cultura Económica, 1967, p 59.

37 Ernst Bloch, op. cit.