Today’s Enlightening Entertainment will be presented in Spanish, with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

Greetings brilliant viewers. Today, we invite you to join us on a visit to an extraordinary museum. The Banco de la República Gold Museum in Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, is one of the largest and most distinguished museums of pre-Hispanic metallurgy in the world.

Visited by more than 500,000 people per year, it has served as a bridge of history, collecting since 1939 masterpieces of gold, pottery, shell, wood, and textile produced by the Colombian pre-Hispanic natives. This unique collection of 33,000 finely crafted metal pieces helps us to understand the way of life and spiritual beliefs of Colombia’s indigenous people. Mr. Eduardo Londoño is the museum’s head of outreach and our knowledgeable guide.

The interesting thing is that the indigenous Americans 16,000, 20,000 years ago came to this continent, and when they came to America they did not bring the knowledge discovered much later in Europe. The discoveries were totally independent of what had been done in China, India or in the Middle East. So the natives with their experience with this gold metal found in the sand of the rivers, they started to appreciate it and learned how to work it, how to purify it, until it turned into these beautiful objects that we can see in the museum today.

What tools did they use? Most important of all, was the strength of their lungs, because for melting inside these ceramic containers, several people gathered together with canes, blowing until the metal was heated to 1,053 degrees, the gold fusion temperature, and in this way were able to purify it, take away impurities and work it, either with a hammer, or by smelting until make these objects we see in the museum’s showcases.

American metallurgy was not oriented towards producing sharp tools for farming, etc. as it was so in other regions of the world. Rather, it was used to produce personal ornaments and symbols, full of shamanistic meaning.

Gold had a sacred meaning. The main idea was that this metal, which for our societies represents value and trade, for them it represented the vital energy force that comes out from nature, which is transmitted by the cosmos, represented in the Father Sun. So the natives who loved life, represented it with the sun. They saw in gold metal the same brightness, the same color, and therefore they were attracted to work with these materials.

In Colombia, reverence for the sun even extended to the natives’ plant-based food culture.

The main food of all American cultures, but in particular for those who lived here in Colombia and in the ancient territory of Bogotá, was corn. They ate potatoes, other tubers, beans, pumpkins, but corn was the food that was the basis of their diet. It’s a very interesting aspect that corn has the same gold color. And in their cosmology, corn was also associated with gold and with the power of the sun, such that nature through the sun gave the pre-Hispanic natives the corn.

Colombia is a land of diverse cultures of forests, mountains, and coasts. The Gold Museum represents many of them through their beautiful crafts. They include the Nariño High Plains culture, the Tumaco on the Pacific Coast, Calima, Tolima, San Agustín and Tierradentro of Upper Magdalena, Quimbaya and Cauca, Zenú from the Caribbean Plains, the Tairona culture, Urabá and Chocó, and the Muisca of the Eastern Range.

In all, there are 62 languages other than Spanish that are spoken in Colombia! The Muiscas, who lived in the ancient Bogotá area, were known as traders. Trading helped to maintain harmonious relations between tribes.

The Muiscas created emeralds from the mines located also in this range, but strangely they did not have gold mines. So in order to obtain the metal to make their gold work, they got it by trade. They made agreements and peace was kept permanently in the region, that was one of the most important activities of the natives and the chieftains at that time.

According to indigenous mythology, the sun god is the creator of all things, infusing them with light and vitality. Gold as a sacred metal receives energy from sunlight. In turn, the chief of the tribe wore gold upon as a symbol of inheriting this power.

The symbols of this chief were these ornaments that we see in the Gold Musseum, the ornaments for the chest, the nose, ears, the crown. Besides the metal ornaments, these objects told the community that the chief had the power of the sun to bring the community together and organize the collective work.

Both in pre-Hispanic art and in present-day Colombian indigenous culture, a shaman or person of high status would be seated on a bench, a symbol of power. A shaman would meditate on the bench to contact the Divine.

The shaman is a religious specialist of the community. He sits on the small wooden benches that we see in the museum. All the communities have them and it signifies the mental work; to be in contact with the higher worlds and the lower worlds.

The natives and shamans do meditation and they have different techniques, but one is to use repetitive sounds of the maraca, which is a sacred instrument, or from the fern leaves, shaking them, in order to be separated from this life that we have today, or from this cover that we have, and be able to get in touch with Mother Nature.

We’ll find out more about the cosmology in indigenous Colombian culture and the symbolism of gold when we continue our visit to the fascinating Banco de la República Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Enlightening Entertainment. We now continue our visit to the unique exhibitions of the Banco de la República Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia.

For the natives the cosmos is composed of two major forces, that is the masculine and the feminine. They are the masculine sphere symbolized by the sun, meaning what is hot, is brilliant, is the light, and the feminine sphere, that is water, the land, is what allows procreation. Then, between these energies, the world we live in is formed. Gold metal is associated with masculinity and copper with femininity. And copper, which represents the woman, was used in the alloy that we call tumbaga.

This alloy of gold and copper allowed, on one hand, to reduce the melting temperature in order to work the metal more easily, and on the other hand, it gave colors. So we will find red objects, which probably were seen as feminine objects. Golden objects were seen as masculine strength. But they also had a whole range of pinks that leads us to think about the balance of the world, which was a concern of the natives.

The precious artworks of the Gold Museum clearly show how much in tune the natives were with nature. Some of the art pieces are of mystical beings with combined human traits and animal features such as wings or tails.

As humans were a part of the greater cosmos, much attention was devoted to organizing the world in its complexity of relations, such as through rituals. Of course, gold was an important element. During the ceremony of El Dorado, the chief would be covered in shimmering gold dust as he threw gold and other sacred elements into the lake as an offering.

The Muiscas chiefs and priests here in the vicinity of Bogotá, they knew a beautiful lake that looks like an amphitheater. It’s a round lake with the mountains surrounding it. And in this special place so magical, they performed the ceremony of El Dorado. It was held each year to celebrate the pact of the calendar renewal or every time a chief took office, because that chief had to make an agreement not only with the society, but also with Mother Nature.

The Spanish say that they never saw this ceremony, but they described it. We have in the Gold Museum the privilege of seeing it with this raft that was made by a native who saw the ceremony. We can interpret this ceremony from the natives’ cosmological world, which is still alive today in our country, and it is the Father Sun uniting with Mother Earth during this unique ceremony of El Dorado. It was very sacred and probably it was the symbol for life to be able to continue for another cycle in this lifetime.

Today, the golden legacy of Colombia offers ancient wisdom for the modern times. It’s the treasure of a country that is represented in the metal gold. The gold has no important economic value, but each culture contributes their part. And the natives are talking about the contact with nature, in a world that has forgotten these issues. The natives still live in the forests, still live in the mountains or on the coasts, and they are in direct contact with nature that they have learned to respect. They know that attempts against a forest is a bad thing that will be returned against their own community.

So we must receive that message from the natives and keep the balance of the world. What they represented as masculine and feminine forces means that we can’t harm the cosmos in which we live, because we were created in the same day that nature was, and we are not the owners of nature, we are a part of nature. We have to be one with it.

At the Banco de la República Gold Museum, the more we look into these ancestors’ exquisite creations, the more we can reflect on ourselves. A museum is a place that brings you closer to strange and beautiful materials from the past, and makes us think seriously about the destiny we want to give to our life or our society. And I think that is the subject we should consider when visiting this Colombian museum of diversity, this museum of cosmological knowledge from the ancient natives of Colombia. Welcome to the museum.

We thank Mr. Eduardo Londoño and the Banco de la República Gold Museum of Bogotá, Colombia for graciously opening your treasure collection to all. May the splendor of the spiritual indigenous people of Colombia continue to be shared with the world.

For more information about the Banco de la República Gold Museum in Bogotá, Colombia, please visit

Golden-hearted viewers, thank you for your company on Enlightening Entertainment. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News, on Supreme Master Television. Wishing you and your loved ones abundant peace and harmony.