This work is a study of the twelve small gold lamellae from Crete, nine of them engraved with texts, that were tokens for entrance into a golden afterlife: the deceased who were buried or cremated with them believed that they had earned 'Paradise'. The lamellae are here placed within the context of a small corpus of similar texts, and they are published in an edition with extensive commentary on their topography, lettering and engraving, dialect and orthography, meter, chronology, material, shape, and usage. The texts on the lamellae reveal a hieros logos whose poetics and ritual(s) are not much different from Homeric rhapsodizing and prophetic discourses. Cretan contexts, both literary and archaeological, are also brought to bear on these incised objects and on the burial custom involved. Finally, this work also adduces parallels to the texts on the lamellae from the Byzantine period and modern Greece in order to illuminate the everlasting and persistent human quest for 'earning Paradise'.