[Angry_Chimp]

“Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sign for what would be confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates experience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evaluate them. Money makes a link between the present and the future, so does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme and specialized type of ritual.”
~Mary Douglas

Some heavy hitters explaining why money is the ritual of your life.
BTW
If you haven't been paying attention one of our shamans has warned us our rituals are about to make a drastic change:

"What I point out is that we're in a turning phase and that the extraordinary improvements that have occurred in the world economy in the last 15 years are transitory, and they're about to change"…So, I think this whole process will begin to reverse."
Shaman Greenspan
http://tinyurl.com/2v699m



John Maynard Keynes: "The magical properties, with which the Egyptian priestcraft anciently imbued the yellow metal, it has never altogether lost. ... Gold (was) originally stationed in heaven with his consort silver, as sun and moon."

A. M. Hocart: "Gold ... evidently partook of the nature of the sun since it could be substituted for it in ritual."

"This ... suggests a common origin for the gold coin, the crown, and the halo, all three being merely representations of the sun's disc."

"The earliest Egyptian currency consisted of gold rings."

G. Elliot Smith: "The Egyptians ... created the artificial value of the metal (gold)."

"When the kings of Egypt accepted the belief that the prolongation of their existence after death (and the consequent attainment of the immortality to make gods of them) depended upon making adequate material preparation for effecting their purpose, expeditions were sent to collect gold.

"It was used with the almost incredible lavishness made known to us in the case of Tutankhamen's tomb, to make certain the dead king's attainment of divinity.

"The pictures in the tomb of Tutankhamen's vizier Huy had already made us aware that vast quantities of gold were being obtained from the Sudan.

"When it became a matter of national policy thus to obtain gold, the mere demand for the metal further enhanced its value that its use in making amulets had created.

"Hence even in very early times the search for gold extended beyond the frontiers of Egypt."

To be immortal meant to be as the sun, a god. And gold was the sun expressed on Earth, the god. Surround yourself by the god and you had a piggyback ride into eternity. But if gold and silver were the gods, it follows that the banks were the temples.

Norman O. Brown: "It has been long known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or priest-kings. But these economic institutions have been interpreted as in themselves secular-rational, though originally sponsored by sacred auspices. The crucial point is (B.) Laum's argument that the institutions are in themselves sacred.

"Laum derives the very idea of equivalence (equal value) from ritual tariffs of atonement, the very idea of a symbol of value from rituals of symbolic substitution, and the very idea of price from ritual distribution of the sacred food.

"In other words, the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable from symbolism; and symbolism is not, as Simmel thought, the mark of rationality but the mark of the sacred.

"If we recognize the essentially sacred character of archaic money, we shall be in a position to recognize the essentially sacred character of certain specific features of modern money -- certainly the gold standard, and almost certainly also the rate of interest.

"As far as gold and silver are concerned it is obvious to the eye of common sense that their salient characteristic is their absolute uselessness for all practical purposes. John Locke put his finger on the essential point with his formula of 'mankind having consented to put an imaginary value upon gold and silver.'

"Measured by rational utility and real human needs, there is absolutely no difference between the gold and silver of modern economy and the shells or dogs' teeth of archaic economy."

"Keynes ... recognizes that the special attraction of gold and silver is due not to any of the rationalistic considerations generally offered in explanations but to the symbolic identification with sun and moon, and to the sacred significance of sun and moon in the new astrological theology invented by earliest civilizations.

"(F. M.) Heichelheim, the authority on ancient economics, concurs on the essentially magical-religious nature of the value placed on gold and silver in the ancient Near East.

"Laum states that the value ratio of gold to silver remained stable throughout classical antiquity and into the Middle Ages and even modern times at 1:13 1/2. It is obvious that such a stability in the ratio cannot be explained in terms of rational supply and demand. The explanation, says Laum, lies in the astrological ratio of the cycles of their divine counterparts, the sun and the moon.

"The history of money from this point of view has yet to be written. Greek money, which contributed to modern money the institution of coinage, was recognized by Simmel to be essentially sacred and to have originated not in the market but in the temple.

"Laum has amplified and established the thesis. But Simmel and Laum are confused by the illusion that modern money is secular, and hence they confuse the past by describing as 'secularization' a process which is rather only a metamorphosis of the sacred.

"Even Keynes perhaps shares this illusion, although he sees the real secularization of money as still lying in the future.

"The historian must doubt the possibility of having capitalism without gold fetishism in some form or other. At any rate, the historian must conclude that the ideal type of the modern economy retains, at its very heart, the structure of the archaic sacred."

Ernest Becker: "With the decline of the primitive world, and with the rise of kingship men came to imitate kings in order to get power. ... And so the pursuit of money was also opened up to the average man; gold became the new immortality symbol."

"Let us see how the ritual fascination of money began in the ancient world, and how it took over as an immortality focus in itself. One of the fascinating chapters in history is the evolution of money -- all the more so since it has yet to be written, as (Norman O.) Brown says. One of the reasons it isn't written is that the origin of money is shrouded in prehistory; another is that its development must have varied, must not have followed a single, universal line. Still a third reason touches closer to home; modern man seems to have trouble understanding money; it is too close to him, too much a part of his life. ... But beyond all this, ... the reason money is so elusive to our understanding is that it is still sacred, still a magical object on which we rely for our entrance into immortality.

"Put another way, money is obscure to analysis because it is still a living myth, a religion. Oscar Wilde observed that 'religions die when one points out their truth. Science is the history of dead religions.' From this point of view, the religion of money has resisted the revelation of its truth; it has not given itself over to science because it has not wanted to die."

"Hocart ... suggests a common origin for his the gold coin, the crown, and the halo, since all these represent the sun's disc. ... The great economist Keynes agreed that the special attraction of gold and silver as primary monetary values was due to their symbolic identification with the sun and the moon, which occupied a primary sacred place in the early 'cosmic government' cosmologies."

"Currency, then, seems to have had its origin in magic amulets and magic imitations of the sun which were worn or stored because they contained the protecting spirit powers. If gold had any 'utility,' as Hocart says, it was a supernatural utility."

"If gold was sacred, we can now understand -- with Simmel and Hocart -- how it was that the first banks were temples and the first ones to issue money were the priests. With the ascendancy of priestcraft it became the priests themselves who monopolized the official traffic in sacred charms and in the exchange of favors for gold. The first mints were set up in the temples of the gods, whence our word 'money' -- from the mint in the temple of Juno Moneta, Juno the admonisher, on the Capitoline Hill in Rome. Forgery was sacrilege because the coins embodied the powers of the gods and only the priests could handle such powers; we get the same feeling about counterfeiters today, that they are practising an unspeakable usurpation of hallowed powers.

"The temples, then, were clearinghouses for money transactions, just like banks today.

"It was surely not lost on the priests -- the first leisure class -- that the tiniest quantity of sacred gold-power could bring in huge amounts of food and other stuffs. Priests may have talents for dealing with the supernatural, but they have very human appetite (and often lots of it); and if they have the leisure to ply their trade, it is because since earliest times they have convinced their fellows that it is important to assure that leisure by bringing part of the fruit of the sweat of their brow to the priests. And so the food producers must have brought food to the temples in exchange for prayers and sacrifices being performed on their behalf. Also, it must have worked the other way too: gold was a fee paid to the priests for his intercessions with the invisible powers. ... Whence the tradition of the earliest coins being imprinted with the images of gods, then divine kings, down to presidents in our time. All visitors to the most holy temples could bring back with them gold encapsulations of sacred power that would keep them safe throughout the year."

The sun god of Egypt held out the salary of immortality. For the faithful who not only believed that you can get something for nothing in this universe, but also happened to have handy a few of his earthly golden tokens, he delivered a bonus right here on earth. The bonus was even better than the salary because you could enjoy it immediately. That something for nothing was compound interest on loans. The pyramid says it all.

James Henry Breasted: "The pyramid was ... the chief symbol of the sun god."

Norman O. Brown: "The ambition of civilized man is revealed in the pyramid."

"In the pyramid rose both the hope of immortality and the fruit of compound interest.

"As Heichelheim showed, the Iron Age, at the end of which we live, democratized the achievement of the Bronze Age (cities, metals, money, writing) and opened up the pursuit of kings (money and immortality) to the average citizen. But the inevitable irony redresses the balance in favor of death."

John Maynard Keynes: "Perhaps it is not an accident that the race which did most to bring the promise of immortality into the heart and essence of our religions has also done most for the principle of compound interest."

The actual word for principal, that is, capital, as opposed to interest, comes from Babylonia.