| Abstract: |
This paper brings to attention some hitherto unpublished ancient Indonesian icons and other objects of gold and silver in the collection of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, the Netherlands. Many items, including the important finds from Puger Wetan and Combre in Eastern Java, were acquired as early as the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The strong belief in the magical properties of gold and silver has undoubtedly enhanced the religious significance and ritual functions of such objects. Icons, ornaments and ceremonial utensils made in gold and silver, headed the list of the traditional dedicatory gifts of the Buddhists and Hindus, as offerings that would generate the highest degree of religious merits for the benefits of the living as well as the dead. Besides, images and various categories of symbols, made of these precious and potent materials, regularly functioned as sacral deposits, enshrined within stūpas and temples to create a mystical link between the man-made foundations and the divine cosmic order, to invoke auspiciousness and perpetuity, and to install in those edifices the presence of all the supernatural powers that protect the universe.
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