ENDNOTES “The Eldorado Spirit”: The Lure of the Man, Lake and Myth of El Dorado
As Spanish explorers arrived in Quito in the 1530s, they heard a story that would, over time, be carried back across the Atlantic: the story of a man whose skin was covered with gold dust, shining on a floating raft upon a lake. This story developed into a myth, telling of how El Dorado, an Indigenous prince, took part in a ceremony of his people while covered in gold dust and floated on a raft across a lake of buried treasure.1 The myth of El Dorado and his elusive home abundant with gold, a pinnacle of wealth, influenced European exploration of the Americas as explorers searched for mythic wealth. The myth of El Dorado first appeared in the sixteenth century, through a slow and gradual process as Europeans came to explore the Americas. While exploration urged “the quest for souls and the quest for gold,”2 knowledge of a gold-coated man began to spread in the mid-1500s. Word of an Indigenous ceremony involving the anointment of gold dust brought news of el indio dorado, “the Golden Indian,” which reached the eager ears of explorers across the Atlantic. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the quest to find El Dorado escalated, the myth evolved. As conquistadors explored the regions of South America, the image of a golden man was replaced by a golden lake, a place of ritual ceremony overwhelmed with treasure.3
Contemporary writers describe the legend through different lenses, adding Muisca Raft, Museo Del Oro, Bogota, photo by Reg Natarajan (2016), Wikime and omitting details over the years. The historian Pedro Simón based his own narrative on the expeditions he had witnessed, writing about a ceremony of the Muisca at Lake Guatavita in Colombia. Knowledge of the Muisca ceremony brought conquistadors to the region to no avail.4
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