The Gold of Troy

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

• Essence: Archaeological Mythopoeia of Kingship in Time’s Spiral

The so-called “Gold of Troy”—a cache of diadems, necklaces, earrings, and ceremonial vessels unearthed by Heinrich Schliemann—is not only material wealth but mythic time made visible. Through Henri Bergson’s lens, this treasure is less a discovery and more a creative projection of memory into matter, a condensation of millennia of heroic imagination into precious metal.

Bergson insists that duration (la durée) is the true reality—time as lived and continuous becoming. Schliemann’s act of “finding Troy” was an imaginative fusion of Homeric myth and archaeological practice, whereby memory—collective, poetic, and cultural—shaped the very perception of the soil. Thus, the gold is not merely ancient—it is mythologized presence, vibrating with the rhythm of stories retold across centuries.

Each diadem, each fibula, shimmers with what Bergson might call intuition’s echo: an ancestral impulse to eternalize power through adornment. But these are not static emblems—they are mobile centers of memory, mediating between the ideal kings of Homer and the anonymous artisans who lived and worked long before his verses were spoken. The gold, like duration, is a flow disguised as form.

Furthermore, the treasure’s controversial removal, display, and political entanglement echo Bergson’s notion that negation and affirmation are inseparable: by “unearthing” Troy, Schliemann also created a Troy, affirming one cultural narrative while negating others. The gold becomes a temporal knot—simultaneously origin and projection.

In this light, the treasure is not merely a remnant of ancient kingship, but a mythopoeic function of human creativity itself. It reveals how memory—when conjoined with desire, myth, and belief—can transform soil into destiny, gold into sovereignty, and ruins into sacred continuity. This is gold not as matter, but as becoming—as a luminous seam between what was, what is believed, and what will be reimagined again.