Why the story of metal is worthy of a Greek tragedy

I’ve spent the last few years researching and travelling for a book about rocks and metals. It’s driven by the notion that what we discovered in the ground beneath our feet has altered our species forever. At a time when we are – or should be – reappraising the way we have plundered natural resources, it seemed a rich seam to chase.  

Early on, I came across a paragraph in The Forge and the Crucible, Mircea Eliade’s classic study of metallurgy in traditional society. In it he proposes an astonishing idea – that “the imaginary world. . . came into being through the discovery of metals”. The production of metals, he suggests, was more than a functional process. It was revelation. And it stemmed from the impact of a single moment, the miracle in a furnace, when shining metals first trickle from dull rock.  

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Among people with animistic beliefs, the Earth was already a living thing – trees and stones were all part of the same organic sphere as humans. Metallurgy elaborated the idea and gave rise to the widespread conviction that in the soil was a womb-like space where substances gestated. Base metals like lead and iron were engaged in a series of alterations towards perfection, towards gold. That in itself encouraged the quest to discover and replicate those processes. Over time the techniques grew more intricate. For some the quest was borne of reverence, for others of greed. In Europe it became known by its Arabic name, al-kimiya,or alchemy. 

Alchemists always tended towards being figures of fun, but historians now recognise that they gave rise to the Scientific Revolution. In their idealism remains a view of nature that is more and more relevant for our own troubled age. They took a moment – the emergence of metal – and built from it a belief system, an entire discipline of applied enquiry, driven by awe and the conviction that the world around us is a place of marvels, a store of hidden powers waiting to be uncovered. 

Those powers were transformative. It all started with copper, continued with tin and iron, and went on through the periodic table. Rocks that were just rocks in one era became essential stuff for the next. The ground revealed itself a cache of magical substances, and metals were the real prize. Ploughshares and knives, money and nails, lunulae and torcs, axes and mattocks, hair clips, belt buckles, armour and goblets, ships’ hulls and aircraft fuselages, electric cables and semiconductors, nanochips, superconductive materials, lithium-ion batteries.

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Metals were buried alongside priests and queens in ancient tombs, and now orbit the planet as satellites, lie along the ocean beds as plaits of pulsing messages and in micro-quantities allow the phones in our pockets to work miracles. Metals have made us heroes, given us the wings of birds, the speed of the wind, the voices of gods. 

But all things have their price. Naysayers pointed to the dangers from the start. Nature kept its materials underground on purpose. Cut into the flesh of the planet and you wound it. Use its resources and suffer the consequences. In Metamorphoses, Book I, Ovid condemns the work of miners: 

They dug up riches, those incentives to vice, which the Earth had hidden and had removed to the Stygian shades. Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then war came forth.

Metals turned man against man. They promoted inequality, rewarded greed. They lethalised disagreement. They set up a compelling new set of priorities that offered immediate gain and long-term wealth. The rocks from mines and quarries elevated people, or some at least, created dynasties of emperors and kings, formed armies and filled state coffers.  

There’s a pattern to it all, a narrative arc worthy of Greek myth or tragedy. First comes wonder and benefit, then power over others, and finally over nature itself. Only later do the full consequences become apparent and the realisation that something else had come up from the ground when the ores were dug out, and that was hubris. 

In my experience, you never quite know where a book idea is going to lead – or whether it will just run into the sand. In this case, it’s been quite a journey. What began in the deep, collapsing tunnels of tin mines near my Cornish home, ended with panning for gold high in the mountains of Georgia. Between them came a trip through Europe, up the Rhine on a scrap-carrying barge, and a constant series of encounters with archaeologists, jewel smugglers, lithium prospectors and latter-day alchemists – and all of them treading a thin line between reward and catastrophe.  

As the months passed and the miles built up, I became aware of something else. If rocks aren’t actually alive in an organic sense, they are part of the super-connected elements of the Earth’s surface, key part of a cosmos that is now – after centuries of Cartesian separation – being understood again as an ecological whole. And somehow, these lifeless lumps of matter threw up stories of astonishing vitality.

Under a Metal Sky: A Journey through Minerals, Wonder and Greedby Philip Marsden is out on 13 February (Granta, £20). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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