Stunning exhibition of El Dorado reveals savage truth behind lost city legend

For centuries it was the myth that transfixed fortune-hunters: El Dorado, the dazzling city made of gold, hidden in deepest South America. Countless European bounty seekers lost their lives in search of this legendary place.

Others believed that El Dorado was not a city at all, but a man painted with powdered gold who had dived into Lake Guatavita, near the modern Colombian capital of Bogota, and whose priceless body lay waiting to be discovered.

Neither the city nor the man was ever found. But as a new exhibition at the British Museum, opening today, shows, European explorers did find an ancient civilisation seemingly obsessed with gold and other precious metals, mined in the Andes, reports the Daily Mail.
 

Gold was used to make models of the alligators and jaguars to be found in the South American jungles.

The ancient Colombians revered the animals and thought that if they donned their skins, they could assume their athletic powers. 

The jaguar was particularly prized for its strength and ferocity, and its skins were worn by the society’s leaders.

One star exhibit in this show is a flask in the shape of a jaguar made from hammered gold sheets — with a platinum ring strung through its nose. Platinum was as prized as gold in ancient Colombia.

In order to make the transition from the human world to the animal one, these pre-Hispanic civilisations also devised golden costumes.

"Birds, bats, felines, amphibians, snakes and alligators were just some of the powerful disguises adopted," says Elisenda Vila Llonch, the curator of the show.

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Representations of these animals were frequently made in elaborate gold pieces.

"Gold objects, including nose, lip and ear ornaments, diadems [ornamental headbands], pectorals [decorations worn on the chest] and pendants enabled a person’s physical transformation, together with paint, animal pelts and feathers."

They used gold, too, to contain their favourite narcotic stimulants from plants including tobacco, cocaine and the yopo — a tree that produces leaves and beans with hallucinogenic effects.

On show at the British Museum is a huge, egg-shaped shell of gold alloy, 21.4cm long and 10.5cm wide.

This priceless artefact was made purely for the purpose of holding coca leaves. Another exhibit shows a man sitting down in a state of blissful leisure, chewing on a wad of the same leaves.

The pre-Hispanic civilisations became extremely adept at drug-taking. In order for the stimulants to be absorbed better, they were combined with a chalky powder made from lime and smashed seashells.

Delicately carved golden dippers — like pipettes — were used to carry the intoxicating powder from elaborate drug pouches to the mouth. At other times they used gold snuff trays — like ornate mini-shovels — piled high with dried or crushed yopo seeds, which they then swallowed or sniffed.

By taking these intoxicating substances, the men of this ancient civilisation believed that their spirits might leave their bodies — just as they did through the wearing of animal skins.
 

A priest told one of the first Spanish colonials that, under the influence of yopo beans, he had ‘flown’ a vast distance to and from the distant village of Santa Marta in a single night. So the idea of the drug trip is certainly nothing new.

But the world of El Dorado was far from being a zonked-out, peace-and-love civilisation. 

Many of the gold objects in the British Museum exhibition are devoted to warfare, including spear-throwers — sheaths in which a spear was placed before it was hurled, to give it greater reach.