Chrysography

Abstract

The practice of chrysography, writing with gold on paper, emerged among scribes of the Abrahamaic faiths around the same time that metal coinage was invented, and ended in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries AD with the introduction of paper currencies that were exchangeable for gold (Shell 1982:186). Chrysography posed a particular theological problem, for it ran the risk of commensurating the 'monetary value of the written letter' with the spiritual value of the Word of God. The 'medium of linguistic exchange' written words were penned in the 'substance of monetary exchange' (ibid. 192). Clerics feared that the golden representation of the Word of God had the potential, for the foolish at any rate, to approach the aura of the Divine. Chrysography presented a species of the age-old problem of the limits of 'likeness and adequation' (Shell 1982:194)a problem that preoccupied thinkers in the Western tradition from the Greeks to Enlightenment philosophers arguing over the tossing of coins and the figuring of calculus, the mathematics of probability, asymptotic relations and limits. These were problems posed by the attempt to separate the 'moral arithmetic of belief' from the 'econometrics of marginal evaluation', or epistemological probability from statistical probability (ibid., see also Maurer 2002). What happens to an imitation, an original, and the relation between the two when the imitation reaches the epistemological and mathematical limit of likeness; when, as a copy, it becomes both believable and empirically accurate? Gold letters suggested, to the point of possible confusion and equation, both monetary value and spiritual value. The practice of writing in gold faded just when insubstantial paper gained value from an imagined relation to gold backing it. Here, the problem shifted onto the money-form itself. Was paper as signifier adequate to its signified referent, the sublime object of true value? Fiat currencies that emerged in the nineteenth century pushed the problem further, as they were backed by nothing but credit, faith, and the insubstantiality of state promises (see, for example, Hart 2001; Gregory 1997). And counterfeit money brings it to a head, for a really good counterfeit is efficacious only so