Just four weekends left to catch this golden show at the British Museum

One of the benefits of my new membership at the British Museum, I've just discovered, is fast track entry into major exhibits.  No pre-booking, no stopping by a desk to get tickets.  Just wave your card and you're in.  A speedy convenience that allowed me to pop into a show I'd been wanting to see after a doctor's appointment earlier this week.  Too late, practically, to go back to the office.  Just enough time to slip into "Beyond El Dorado:  Power and Gold in Ancient Columbia."


You, however, are likely to need to plan your culture into your weekends, so note that you have only four left before this dazzling display heads back to Bogata.

We all know the stories of the avaricious Spaniards plundering South America for its gold.  Frankly, it's a miracle there's any of it left.  That feeling will be magnified when you see the delicacy of the objects here.  Their wafer thin sheets and fine filagree work would get crushed in the standard jewellery box, much less in some panicked bid to hide them from conquest.

Most of the items on display here are ritual figures:  human, animal or a spooky hybrid of both.  Like the bat man who features on the exhibit posters (below); far more impressive to my eyes than the super hero!  The smallest are the size of your pinkie, the largest masks that might cover the human face.  But on the whole, you're going to be looking with rapt fascination at little details.  I was relieved there were few others in the show; you need to have your nose up against the display cases to really appreciate what you're seeing.

It's all a delight to just gawp at, not much different than window gazing at an exotic jewellery store.  But there's also an educational subtext here, and it's worth reading the displays to get it.  These were ritual objects, produced to further men's interaction with the gods.  The penultimate room of the exhibit does best at getting this across.

Many of the objects are trays and containers used to take ritual drugs, or representations of the animals the users felt they communed with when under the influence.  The exhibition designers have screened images of real jungle animals on a scrim hanging at the back of the dark room, and filled the twilight air with jungle and animal sounds.  The only real light comes from the illumination of the gold objects.  It's all marvellously creepy.  Easy to see both how these figures … with a little help from the coca leaf … could take people to a spirit world, and how the Spaniards could feel no guilt at melting any of them down.  They would have seen a perfectly good material being used for paganism and drug use.

The pre-colonisation Columbians, we learn, did not see gold as having any value beyond the spiritual.  The Spaniards, of course, saw cold, hard cash.  Turn the tables, and it would be like some alien descending on Europe with an insatiable taste for the stained glass in our churches, because for him it was money.  What a tragic train wreck of cultures.

We can only be thankful that these beautiful bits and pieces survived for our inspection.  You can check them out until 23 March.