Escape from Evil part 4

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varied, must not have followed a single, universal line. Still a third 
reason touches closer to home: modem man seems to have trouble 
understanding money; it is too close to him, too much a part of 
his life. As someone once remarked, the last thing a fish would 
discover is water, since it is so unconsciously and naturally a part 
of its life. But beyond all this, as Brown has so well understood, 
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. Or, 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. 

How else explain that we do not yet have a sacred history of 
money, despite the massive collection of anthropological and his- 
torical monographs, the observations by Plato and Aristotle them- 
selves, those by Augustine on money fetishism, the writings of 
Simmel and later German and French scholars, the fascinating 
thoughts of Spengler, the trenchant essays of A. M. Hocart, the 
insights of Marx, and now, finally, of modem psychoanalysis? This 
is where Brown’s synthetic talents come into the problem: he 
leaned on this long tradition, including Freud’s theory of anality, 
and raked over it all with a penetration and doggedness that re- 
minded one of Das Kapital. Brown showed that despite all the 
expert hemmings and hawings, money was what it was — sacred 
power — and not another thing. There is no purpose in repeating 
here Brown’s running argument with key authorities; let me just 
sum up the high points, partly from my own point of view. 

We get many key insights into the early history of money, even 
though it is shrouded in obscurity. For one thing, anthropologists 
have long known that money existed on primitive levels of social 
life; and when we took Anthropology 1A, we were amused at the 
“perversity” of primitives. Imagine such bizarre things as dogs’ 
teeth, sea shells, bands of feathers, and mats being used as money! 
These things not only seem to us worthless, they may even be 
repugnant to our sense of what is “proper” to carry around and to 
value. The key to the whole thing is, of course, that we live in a 


Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology 77 

different power world than did the primitives. For us, motors, guns, 
electric circuits embody power, for the primitives, power resided 
in the qualities of living things and in the organs that embodied 
those qualities: teeth equaled biting and tearing power, with their 
uncanny smoothness and white luster and their terrible destructive- 
ness to living beings; feathers equaled the freedom and miracu- 
lousness of flight; and so on. 8 These forms of primitive money, 
then, did not have mere ornamental value or practical exchange 
value as we understand it; they had real spirit-power value. And 
when it comes to the evolution of our own money we must look 
to the same source, to its origin in magic amulets or tokens, as 
Brown — basing himself on Laum — understood. 

The noted historian G. Eliot Smith put together ap interesting 
speculation on the origin of gold as a thing of great value in an- 
cient Egypt. What leads man to assign great value to something? 
That it gives life, enables man to triumph over weakness and 
death by borrowing some of the powers of the gods. Eliot Smith 
put together the following development: There was a cowrie shell 
in the Red Sea which came to be prized as a token of life-giving 
powers, as an amulet to ward off the danger of death and to pro- 
long the existence of the souls of those already dead. It was an 
immortality symbol, then, that came to be identified with the god- 
dess Hathor, the divine cow, the Great Mother. Eliot Smith says: 

The people of Egypt began to make models of these and other magical 
shells in clay, stone and any other material that came to hand. These 
were believed to have the magic of the real shells. ... In the course 
[of time they] discovered that they could make durable and attractive 
models by using the soft plastic metal which was lying around unused 
and unappreciated in the Nubian desert. . . . The lightness and beauty 
of the untarnishable yellow metal made an instant appeal. The gold 
models soon became more popular than the original shells, and the 
reputation for life-giving was then in large measure transferred from the 
mere form of the amulet to the metal itself. 9 

In other words, the powers of the god came to be present in the 
metal. 

In India, as Hocart so clearly showed, gold was straightforwardly 
identified with the fire god Agni. Gold could be substituted for 


ESCAPE FROM EVIL 


78 

the sun in the sacred ritual. Hocart quotes this telling passage from 
the S atapatha Brahamana: 

For this gold plate is the same as truth. Yonder sun is the same as 
truth. It is made of gold: for gold is light, and he (the sun) is light; 
gold is immortality, and he is immortality; it is round, for he is round. . . . 
Indeed, this gold plate is the sun. 10 

Hocart, in his masterful little essay, "Money,” suggests a common 
origin for the gold coin, the crown, and the halo, since all three 
represent the sun’s disc. (We liked to imagine that we knew coins 
were round because they could fit more comfortably in our pock- 
ets. ) 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” cosmolo- 
gies. Even more fascinating is the fact that the value ratio of gold 
and silver has remained stable from classical antiquity through the 
Middle Ages and even into modem times as 1:1312. Brown agrees 
with Laum that such a stability cannot be explained in logical terms 
of rational supply and demand: the explanation must lie in the 
astrological ratio of the cycles of the divine counterparts of these 
metals — the sun and moon. 11 We have forgotten how tenacious 
astrological magic has been in history, even in the face of its vitality 
still today. Man has always sought to discover the special magical 
properties in nature and to bring them to bear in his life. The 
ancients sought these special qualities in qualities of living things, 
in natural miraculous objects like the sun, and in the ratios they 
could tease out of nature. Until very modem times, to take one 
example, musical instruments were built in magical astrological 
proportions so as to make the most divinely harmonious sounds; 
and I personally know one inspired guitar maker who uses the 
ancient “Greek foot” as a basic measure. 

Currency, then, seems to have had its origin in magic amulets 
and magic imitations of the sun, which were worn or stored be- 
cause they contained the protecting spirit powers. If gold had any 
"utility,” as Hocart says, it was a supernatural utility: “a little of 
it was given away in exchange for quantities of stuff because a few 


Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology 79 

ounces of divinity were worth pounds of gross matter.” 12 And so 
we see how it was that money came to buy many other things: if 
it was magic, people would give anything to have it. As Geza 
R6heim put it in a very happy formulation, “originally people do 
not desire money because you can buy things for it, but you can 
buy things for money because people desire it. is 

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 practicing 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 be- 
half. Also, it must have worked the other way too: gold was a fee 
paid to the priest for his intercessions with the invisible powers. 
As Hocart pointed out, in India the gold fee was the proper one 
to pay to a god, whose essence was gold. 14 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. 
As we finger, in our pocket, the face on the silver dollar, we re- 


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experience some of the quiet confidence of the ancients who left 
the temples with their life-securing charms. Today clerics similarly 
finger the souvenir medallions of their visit to holy Rome, and over 
the years they wear away the face of the Pope on these medallions. 
The Pope’s power is present in the effigy just like the god’s was 
in the coin. 

We know that the priests were part of the immortality ideology 
of what has aptly been called “cosmic government” and “the astro- 
biological unification of divine kingship.” We have already de- 
scribed the hierarchy: the king got his powers from the heavens 
and radiated them in his own person to the people with the help 
of the priests, to the benefit of the patriarchal families. We might 
say that money coinage fit beautifully into this scheme, because 
now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without 
even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immor- 
tality in the marketplace. Nor is this just a manner of speaking, 
for this traffic was a most serious new business that arose. Admit- 
tedly, when we reconstruct the phenomenological history of money 
it is impossible for us moderns to “get into the mind and behind 
the eyes” of the ancient negotiators. But a new man emerged in 
the ancient world, a man who based the value of his life — and so 
of his immortality — on a new cosmology centered on coins. We 
can’t very well grasp what the painting visible even today at the 
entrance of a house in the ruins of Pompeii meant to the owner of 
the house or to the passerby whom it was obviously supposed to 
impress. But a picture of a man proudly weighing his penis in a 
scale of gold coins must convey a feeling that the powers of nature 
as exemplified in the reproductive life force have their equivalency 
in gold, even perhaps that fatherhood is given by gold as well as 
the penis — and generally that the causa sui project is well in hand. 
And the two chests of coins just inside the entrance, adjacent to 
the sleeping rooms of the adult occupants, surely convey the new 
way of life based on the feeling in the painting. Money became 
the distilled value of all existence, as Spengler seems to have under- 
stood so well: 

When . . . Corinth was destroyed, the melting-down of the statues for 
coinage and the auctioning of the inhabitants at the slave-mart were, 


Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology 81 

for Classical minds, one and the same operation — the transformation of 
corporeal objects into money. 15 

Or, we might say, into a single immortality symbol, a ready way of 
relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and 
events of one’s world. In this sense, money seems to have repre- 
sented a cosmological unification of visible and invisible powers — 
powers of the gods, of kings, of heroic victors in war — and the 
distillation of the booty of war. And at the center of this cosmology 
stood the person himself with the visible counters of his own in- 
crease, the divine testimonial to his own immortal worth, distilling 
and spanning both worlds. 

It is along lines such as these that we have to understand the 
meaning of money, from its very inception in prehistory and from 
its explosive development with the invention of coinage in the 
ancient world. Money is sacred as all cultural things are sacred. As 
Rank taught us and as Brown so powerfully reaffirmed, “Custom 
is . . . essentially sacred” — and why should money be any excep- 
tion? 16 The thing that connects money with the domain of the 
sacred is its power. We have long known that money gives power 
over men, freedom from family and social obligations, from friends, 
bosses, and underlings; it abolishes one’s likeness to others; it 
creates comfortable distance between persons, easily satisfies their 
claims on each other without compromising them in any direct 
and personal way; on top of this it gives literally limitless ability 
to satisfy appetites of almost any material kind. Power is not an 
economic category, and neither is it simply a social category: “All 
power is essentially sacred power.” 17 This is perfect. All power is 
in essence power to deny mortality. Either that or it is not real 
power at all, not ultimate power, not the power that mankind is 
really obsessed with. Power means power to increase oneself, to 
change one’s natural situation from one of smallness, helplessness, 
finitude, to one of bigness, control, durability, importance. In its 
power to manipulate physical and social reality money in some 
ways secures one against contingency and accident; it buys body- 
guards, bullet-proof glass, and better medical care. Most of all, it 
can be accumulated and passed on, and so radiates its powers even 
after one’s death, giving one a semblance of immortality as he lives 


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in the vicarious enjoyments of his heirs that his money continues 
to buy, or in the magnificence of the art works that he commis- 
sioned, or in the statues of himself and the majesty of his own 
mausoleum. In short, money is the human mode par excellence 
of coolly denying animal boundness, the determinism of nature. 

And here Brown takes issue with orthodox Freudian theory and 
makes a real improvement on it, makes it amenable to our under- 
standing in one of its most inverted and esoteric areas. We have 
always been put off when psychoanalysts equated money with 
feces — it seemed so crass and unreal. We cannot imagine pure 
pleasure in playing with feces; even to children feces are ambiva- 
lent and to some degree distasteful. If as tiny infants they play 
with feces, it is at a time when feces can have no precise meaning 
to them; if later on they play with feces, this is already a different 
kind of play, a play of mastery of anxiety, a dealing with a very 
ambivalent area of experience. Also, it has always seemed simplistic 
to say that money equals feces, because money has been so super- 
charged with the yearning of ambition and hope; it could not be 
merely infantile smearing, not simple self-indulgence. In fact, as 
Brown has so well argued, money does not equal feces at all, does 
not represent them at all: rather, it represents the denial of feces, 
of physicalness, of animality, of decay and death. 


To rise above the body is to equate the body with excrement. In the 
last analysis, the peculiar human fascination with excrement is the 
peculiar human fascination with death . 18 


Money is associated with the anal region because it represents par 
excellence the abstract cultural mode of linking man with tran- 
scendent powers. As Marx so unfailingly understood, it is the 
perfect “fetish” for an ape-like animal who bemuses himself with 
striking icons. Money sums up the causa sui project all in itself: 
how man, with the tremendous ingenuity of his mind and the 
materials of his earth, can contrive the dazzling glitter, the magical 
ratios, the purchase of other men and their labors, to link his 
destiny with the stars and live down his animal body . 18 The only 


Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology 83 

hiint we get of the cultural repression seeping through is that even 
dedicated financiers wash their hands after handling money. The 
victory over death is a fantasy that cannot be fully believed in; 
money doesn’t entirely banish feces, and so the threat of germs and 
vulnerability in the very process of securing immortality. If we say 
that “money is God,” this seems like a simple and cynical obser- 
vation on the corruptibility of men. But if we say that “money 
negotiates immortality and therefore is God,” this is a scientific 
formula that is limpidly objective to any serious student of man. 

Nor do we have to dig back into prehistory and conjecture on 
what money meant to the ancient Greeks or Pompeiians. We see 
the: change from tribal modes of achieving power to money modes 
riglbit before our eyes: the drama of early Athenian society is re- 
peal ted in any area where detribalization is taking place. Tempels’s 
continent on the modem Bantu eloquently sums up the new man 
whc< emerged in history and continues to emerge: 


Recently I have heard Bantu of the old school say, with reference to 
our modem product, the Europeanized evolues “These are men of 
lupeto (money).” They have explained to me that these Europeanized 
youitiig men of ours know nothing but money, that it is the only thing 
possessing any value for them. They . . . give up their Bantu philosophy 
... for a philosophy of money. Money is their one and only ideal, their 
end and the supreme ultimate norm regulating their actions. . . . Every- 
thing . . . has been destroyed by this new value, this modern universal 
rule of conduct: lupeto, money. 20 


Hew to understand this obsessive, fanatical shift that occurs in one 
generation, right under the eyes of the elders, except to see it as a 
hunger for self-perpetuation, a hunger driven by the discredit into 
which the traditional immortality ideology has fallen? The rapid 
and utter disintegration of tribal society has always been, histori- 
cally, the result of the discredit of old sources of immortalizing 
powers and the belief that the new ways of life brought by the 
foreigners contain the genuine, the stronger powers. The old group 
no longer gives life, and so the young chuck the social obligations 


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in iavor of real, new power over men and things. Missionary ac- 
tivity has gone hand in hand with superior weapons and medicines 
because the priests have always known that they have to prove 
that their god represents superior powers. Think; if a race of men 
with advanced learning, health, and weapons were to land on our 
planet and tell us about the god who sustains them in Alpha 
Centauri, a new religion would sweep over large numbers of peo- 
ple overnight and discredit most of our institutions. 

Thus money has been the single red line connecting the various 
failed historical ideologies of immortality — from lupeto men called 
by a hundred other tribal names, through Pompeii, through the 
buying of indulgences in the Middle Ages, through Calvin and 
modern commercialism. Underneath the different historical forms of 
immortality striving has pulsated the lifeblood of money. In this 
sense, the social-structural forms of immortality striving that suc- 
ceeded each other up to modem times have been a kind of mask 
or fa