"The basic characteristic of sublimation is the desexualization of sexual energy by its redirection toward new objects. But as we have seen, desexualization means disembodiment. New objects must substitute for the human body, and there is no sublimation without the projection of the human body into things; the dehumanization of man is his alienation of his own body. He thus acquires a soul (the higher spirituality of sublimation), but the soul is located in things. Money is 'the world's soul'. And gold is the proper symbol of sublimation, both as the death of the body and as the quest for a 'higher' life which is not that of the body. Spengler says:
Gold is not a colour; colours... are natural. But the metallic gleam, which is practically never found in natural conditions, is unearthly.... The gleaming gold takes away from the scene, the life and the body their substantial being... And thus the gold background possesses, in the iconography of the Western Church, an explicit dogmatic significance. It is an express assertion of the existence and activity of the divine spirit."
Norman O Brown Life Against Death - The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) p.281
