Money Talks, Ritual Walks The decline of primitive society gave rise to kingships, which introduced a new form for seeking immortality; immortality through the family. The King, followed by the common man, passed not only family immortality through the son but also included vast accumulations of physical mementos. And thus opened up to the average man the delights for the pursuit of ‘sweet lucre’; gold became the new immortality symbol. The son assures self-perpetuation by exceeding the father, i.e. by leaving behind a bigger mark. “Immortality comes to reside no longer in the invisible world of power, but in the very visible one, and death is overcome by accumulating of time-defying monuments. These accumulations of gold make possible the discovery of the immortal soul…Death is overcome on condition that the real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things; money is the man; the immortality of the estate or a corporation resides in the dead things which alone endure.” Money becomes the new “totemic”, the new revered symbolic possession. Money becomes the new ritual focus. • Ritual makes visible external signs of internal states—money provides a fixed external and recognizable sign • Ritual mediates experience—money mediates transactions • Ritual standardizes situations thereby providing a means for evaluation of worth—money provides a fixed standard for evaluating worth • Ritual and money provides a link between past and future • Money is an extreme and specialized type of ritual Money is difficult for modern wo/man to comprehend; just as water would be the last thing a fish would discover, so money is so unconsciously and naturally part of life that humans are unlikely to ever become conscious of its nature. “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…money is obscure to analysis because it is still a living myth, a religion.” Primitives used the teeth of dogs, bands of feathers, sea shells, etc. as money. Such things seem worthless to modern wo/man, the key to the whole thing is to recognize that we live in a different power spectrum. For us guns, motors, cars, etc., embody power. Teeth equaled biting and tearing power, feathers equaled freedom, etc. These forms were not merely ornamental they had real spirit-power value. What leads modern wo/man to assign value? Through a long evolution the powers of the gods came to be present in the metal ‘gold’. “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.” Currency seems to have its origin in the magic amulets that were imitations of the sun and moon. The first banks were temples controlled by the priests. Priests were the only ones allowed to coin money. The churches, with the priests, became the clearinghouse for money transactions. Money became the fee for intercessions with the dead in behalf of the living. In “the face on the silver dollar, we reexperience some of the quit confidence of the ancients who left the temples with their life-securing charms.”
