“In this sense, money seems to have represented 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 increase, 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 exception? 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.” 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 bodyguards, 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 in the vicarious enjoyments of his heirs that his money continues to buy, or in the magnificence of the art works that he commissioned, 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.
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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. The only hint 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 observation 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.
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If the new dramatization of immortality was to be in the power and glitter of the visible rather than the invocation of the invisible, then that drama had to be transferred from the group to the new magic object, money. Money is the new “totemic” possession.
This equation of money and totemic spirits is not meant to be frivolous. With the decline of tribal society, rituals were also discredited. Yet man needed new rituals because they gave order and form to society and magically tied the whole world of experience together. And this is probably the fundamental reason that money entered the picture in the ancient world with such ineluctable force: it filled the vacuum left by ritual and itself became the new ritual focus. Mary Douglas makes just this equation of money and ritual in a very powerful way:
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.
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 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: 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.”
Ernest Becker, The Structure of Evil (Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology)
