Mysticism, Time

Cheating Females: The Production of Inequality, by Illusions of Equality

I’ve been deceiv’d. The Publick Safety
Requires he should be more confin’d; and none,
No not the Princess self, permitted to
Confer with him. I’ll quit you to the King.
Vile and ingrate! too late thou shalt repent
The base Injustice thou hast done my Love:
Yes, thou shalt know, spite of thy past Distress,
And all those Ills which thou so long hast mourn’d;
Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.

The Mourning Bride

Barent Coenders van Helpen, L'Escalier des Sages, Cologne, 1693

Barent Coenders van Helpen, L’Escalier des Sages, Cologne, 1693. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Promises, promises.

False promises. Broken promises.

In marital relations, there is no greater sting, no act more likely to turn love to hatred, than the act of infidelity. The breach of trust. The breaking of a sacred bond. It is the ultimate betrayal.

Imagine for a moment the most hurtful of such betrayals. An adulterous affair, resulting in the birth of an illegitimate child.

Mylius version of 'Donum Dei' Series_MD03_edit_CONCEPTIO-PREGNATIO

J.D. Mylius, Rosary of the Philosophers (Rosarium philosophorum sive pretiosissimum donum Dei), 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

In medieval Latin, the word infidēlitas means unfaithful, disloyal, and treacherous. It implies a willful intent.

From ancient times, men have used overt sexual symbolism to communicate and record economic actions. Even when divorced from their origins in husbandry, we still use these sexual metaphors in our economic language. In accounting and finance in particular, many words are puns – they carry a double meaning.

Growth. Cycle. Period. Maturity. Seed. Deposit. Yield. Labour. Bond. And that’s only a handful.

Maier_Atalanta Fugiens_AF35

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

In New York, happiest among the financial alpha males is the big swinging dick. The term entered the lingua franca via Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker.[1]

It should come as no surprise then, that men have long used covert sexual symbolism to secretly communicate – and propagate – the art of economic deception, manipulation, and domination:[2][3][4]

Just like their oriental colleagues, the occidental alchemists expressed themselves in a twilight language. All the words, signs, and symbols, which were formulated to describe the experiments in their obscure “laboratories”, possessed multiple meanings and were only comprehensible to the “initiated”.[5]

Maier, Atalanta Fugiens_AF21

Square the Circle – Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

“Make of the man and the woman a Circle,
of that a Quadrangle, of this a Triangle,
of the same a Circle, and you will have
the Stone of the Philosophers.”

So cryptic, so long disguised and so deeply embedded is it, that even men such as former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King (The End of Alchemy) appear not to have understood the core conjugal metaphor:

[A]lchemy lies at the heart of the financial system; moreover, banking was, like alchemy, a medieval idea, but one we have not as yet discarded.

As Lord King remarks, the alchemy is “the belief that money kept in banks can be taken out whenever depositors ask for it”. This is a confidence trick in two senses: it works if, and only if, confidence is strong; and it is fraudulent. Financial institutions make promises that, in likely states of the world, they cannot keep.[6]

Banking – and money – is all about the making of promises.

Mutual promises.

A mutual exchange of promises.

Banking, and money, is all about the alchemical marriage of two opposite principals (principles) – a lender (male, active), and a borrower (female, passive) – who agree to a mutual, binding exchange of promises.

The primal act of banking, is the forming of a “bond” – a union of opposites – between a creditor (Sola ☉, Mars ♂), and a debtor (Luna ☽, Venus ♀).

Lots of them.

Arnold of Villanova from Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, Franckfurt, 1617_A280

Arnold of Villanova (c.1240-1311), from Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, 1617. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Roger Bacon from Albertus Magnus from Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, Franckfurt, 1617

Roger Bacon (c. 1220-1292), from Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, 1617. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Albertus Magnus from Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, Franckfurt 1617.jpg

Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280), from Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, 1617. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The purpose of this bond – this union of opposites – is not to love each other, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. There is a higher purpose.

Reproduction.

The reproduction and growth of money.

The true purpose of this union of opposites, is the creation and multiplication of money … for the lender.

Engraving 14 from J.D. Mylius Philosophia reformata, Frankfurt, 1622

J.D. Mylius, Philosophia Reformata, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

In banking, the production and reproduction of money is achieved not by alchemy, or magic.

It is achieved by lying, and cheating.

Cheating females is the base principle that lies, by design, at the heart of the money system.

Cheating females, is what makes our world go round. It is the driving force behind a critical factor in all monopoly-monied economies: the “circulation”, the “flow”, or the “velocity of money”.

Cheating lies at the heart of the “creative destruction” phenomenon in capitalism, and the so-called “boom and bust” economic cycle.

Cheating females is also the cause of a phenomenon seen repeatedly, through all of recorded human history: the long term relationship between lending at “interest” (usury), and rising inequality.

Engraving 28 from J.D. Mylius Philosophia reformata, Frankfurt, 1622

J.D. Mylius, Philosophia Reformata, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The art of monetary cheating – along with its base sexual metaphor of male (lender) principle cheating the female (borrower) principle – can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Babylon, through the trade and migration routes, and the boastful claims to historicity, of a unique guild of artisanal merchants.[7]

Bab. K. 713

The same secret principle – a gross perversion of the hieros gamos (“Sacred Marriage”)[8] fertility rite – is found in the accounting records, in the scholarly, literary, and technical texts, and in the magico-religious artifacts of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, the Roman Empire, Arabia, and the Far East.

The crowns of red and white combine into one

“The Crowns of Red and White combine into One.” – S.A. Weor, Treatise of Sexual Alchemy (1953)

It is found in the Babylonian Talmud and Jewish Cabala, in the code words and symbolism of Eastern and Western alchemy, and in the upaya (“method”, “trick”) of the Tantric Buddhist Kalachakra (“Time Tantra”) secret high initiation rites of medieval India.[9]

yuganaddha

(Source: Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism)

Last of all, the same secret principle of monetary cheating is found in el modo vinegia, the medieval “Venetian method” of bookkeeping by double entry, still used as the foundation of banking and finance to this day.

“And the bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.”[10]

Johann Bernard Hildebrandt, De lapide philosophico, Halle, 1618

Johann Bernard Hildebrandt, De lapide philosophico, Halle, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Cheating females – the Royal Art of “philosophers” – is all about producing inequality, by illusions of equality.

Since ancient times, the illusion of equality has been represented by the alchemical symbol of the androgyne (Mercury-Hermes ☿). It does not, as most believe, represent the union of male and female principles – two equal opposites – in a gender-neutralising, transcendent harmony.

The androgyne actually represents a mixture of male-female reproductive forces – the mixed “seed” of the man and woman – that is “possessed by a man”.[11]

Basil Valentine_Azoth series_VA07

J.D. Mylius version of Basil Valentine ‘Azoth’ series, Philosophia Reformata, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

In the alchemy of banking, the illusion of equality is represented by a bookkeepers’ symbol (“$”, “€”, “£”, “¥) called “money of account”. It does not, as most believe, represent the union of Assets and Liabilities  – two equal opposites – in a “supply-demand” harmonising equilibrium.

“Money of account” actually represents a mixture of lender (male) and borrower (female) “deposits” – Assets (left side) and Liabilities (right side) … that is possessed by a Lender:

Engraving from JA Siebmacher, Das guldene Vleiss, Nurnberg 1737

Note hands AND feet: Left = Assets (real wealth), Right = Liabilities (double-entry *book* debt) | J.A. Siebmacher, Das guldene Vleiss (“The Golden Fleece”), Nurnberg, 1737. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

DEB-Ortes-Hedonistic-Balance-Sheet

[T]he role of money [of account] as supplementer of value is concealed behind an apparent but deceptive power to guarantee equivalence. Moreover, the power of money enables the construction of previously unprecedented levels of wealth, and the possibility of new power relations for those with money and those without it.[12]

Frontispiece from Adolph Christoph Benz, Philosophisce Schau-Buhne, Nurnberg 1706

Adolph Christoph Benz, Philosophisce Schau-Buhne, 1706. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

How does the male (lender) principle cheat the female (borrower) principle?

By faking it.

The male cheats the female, by faking his – her – “deposits”.

The lender does not give the promised “seed” to the borrower.

He does the opposite.

Using a secret method, he actually steals hers.

Hans Karl von Ecker, Freymäurerische Versammlungsreden der Gold- und Rosenkreutzer des alten Systems, Amsterdam, 1779

“I show her/it to you, now follow her/it.” | Hans Karl von Ecker, Freymäurerische Versammlungsreden der Gold- und Rosenkreutzer des alten Systems, Amsterdam, 1779. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Following in the footsteps of Hermes “the Sage, the Babylonian”[13] – god of merchants, orators (eloquent liars), tricksters, imposters, hegemons and thieves – the lender actually “sucks money out of purses as the magnet attracts iron”:[14]

In the traditional Buddhist conception an embryo arises from the admixture of the male seed and the female seed. This red-white mixture is referred to by the texts as sukra. Since the fluids of man and woman produces new life [..] if the yogi succeeds in permanently uniting within himself both elixirs (the semen virile and the semen feminile), then eternal life lies in store for him. He becomes a “born of himself”, having overcome the curse of rebirth and replaced it with the esoteric vision of immortality. With the red-white mixture he attains the “medicine of long life”, a “perfected body”. Sukra is the “life juice” par excellence, the liquid essence of the entire world of appearances. It is equated with amrta, the “drink of immortality” or the “divine nectar”.[15]

J.D. Mylius Donum Dei series_2

J.D. Mylius, Anatomia Auri, 1628. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

In the four highest secret initiation rituals of Tantric Buddhism, this “skillful” trick (upaya) is called the Vajroli method. It is considered “a veritable touchstone of the highest yogic skill”.

In the act of yuganaddha (fusion) with a “wisdom consort” (mudra) – lots of them – the tantric master sucks out the seed of the woman with his ‘cock’ :[16]

Maier_Atalanta Fugiens_AF30

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

“After he has streamed forth,” Mircea Eliade quotes a text as saying, “he draws in and says: through my force, through my seed I take your seed — and she is without seed”. The man thus steals the seed of the woman under the impression that he can through this become a powerful androgynous being, and leaves her without her own life energy.

Some of the “initiated” even succeed in drawing up the semen feminile without ejaculating any sperm so as to then produce the yearned-for sukra mixture in their own body. The mastery of this method requires painful and lengthy exercises, such as the introduction of small rods of lead and “short lengths of solder” into the urethra.[17]

JD Mylius_Rosarium series_MR16

J.D. Mylius, Rosarium Philosophorum (“Rosary of the Philosophers”) series, Philosophia Reformata, Frankfurt, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Now what happens if the yogi has not mastered the method of drawing back? .. [T]he adept may catch the sukra from out of the vagina in a vessel and then drink it. It is not rare for the drinking bowl to be made from a human skull. The Candamaharosana Tantra recommends sucking the mixture up with a tube (pipe) through the nose. If one sips the sukra out of his mudra’s genitals with his mouth, then the process is described as being “from mouth to mouth”. Without exaggeration one can refer to this drinking of the “white-red bodhicitta” as the great tantric Eucharist, in which semen and blood are sacredly consumed in place of bread and wine. Through this oriental “Last Supper” the power and the strength of the women are passed over to the man.[18]

Abraham Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werck, 'Flamel', Erfurt, 1735_EL07

Abraham Eleazar, Uraltes chymisches Werck, ‘Flamel’, 1735. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The frontispiece from Nicolas de Locques’ Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle (1665) perfectly illustrates the essence of the alchemical act. As the two “flames” (desire, lust) of Mercury-Hermes and Aphrodite-Venus “bond” – with the Sun ☼ (male) in the dominant position over the Moon ☾ (female), and her eyes blissfully wedded to the point of their “fusion” – the thieving trickster god steals her “waters” from right under her nose.

He uses her symbol (ancient Greek kteis, a pun meaning scallop shell and vagina) – held in his right hand (symbol of phallic power) – to perform the theft.

Frontispiece from Nicolas de Locques' Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle, Paris 1665

Mercury-Hermes stealing the “waters” (menses) of Aphrodite-Venus | Nicolas de Locques, Les Rudiments de la Philosophie Naturelle, Paris, 1665. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

This calculating thievery is celebrated by the Tantric Babhaha (“Free Lover”) in poetic verse:

In the sacred citadel of the vulva of
a superlative, skillful partner,
do the praxis of mixing white seed
with her ocean of red seed.
Then absorb, raise, and spread the nectar—
A stream of ecstasy such as you’ve never known.[19]

Kalachakra3

The deity Kalachakra and his consort, Kali Vishvamata. (Study carefully – click to enlarge)

The gesture of dominance with which the tantric master seals his consort during the sexual act is called the Vajrahumkara mudra: he crosses both hands behind the back of his partner, with the vajra [phallus] held in his right hand, and the gantha [vagina] in the left. The symbolic content of this gesture can only be the following: the yogi as androgyne is lord over both sexual energies, the masculine (symbolized by the vajra) and the feminine (symbolized by the gantha). In encircling (“sealing”) his wisdom consort with the androgyne gesture, he wishes to express that she is a part of his self, or rather, that he has absorbed her as his maha mudra (“inner woman”).[20]

In the alchemical doctrine of both East and West, the entire wealth of the cosmos is created out of the interaction of male and female genders – two equal opposites. By stealing the seed of the woman and uniting it with his seed within the temple of his own mystic and physical bodies, the tantric adept believes that he has at his disposal the secret birth-force of the female – a power that he both lacks and desires:

Maier_Atalanta Fugiens_AF34

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The tantric master uses a human woman [karma mudra], or at least an inana mudra [“spirit woman”] to create his androgynous body. He destroys her autonomous existence, steals her gynergy, integrates this in the form of an “inner woman” [maha mudra] and thus becomes a powerful double-gendered super-being.

“He absorbs the Mother of the Universe into himself”.[21]

Maier, Atalanta Fugiens series_AF01

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

In the alchemical doctrine of bankers, the entire wealth of the economy is created out of the interaction of two opposite genders – Savers and Borrowers. By uniting their “deposits” within the temple of his own mystic and physical body – a monopoly banking △ system – the banking adept has at his disposal the secret birth-force of material wealth.

He now possesses legal ownership claims, on real world assets – the “collateral” he demands as “security” against failure to repay “his” “loans” – land, industrial “capital”, intellectual “property”, and the spent time and gynergy of human “labour”.

Maier, Atalanta Fugiens

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

By cheating females – lots of them – the alchemist can become the “Grand Sorcerer” (Maha Siddha):

The goal of tantric androgyny is the concentration of absolute power in the tantric master, which in his view constitutes the unrestricted control over both cosmic primal forces, the god and the goddess. [..] Supernatural power gives the tantric master control over the whole universe. He can dissolve it and reestablish it. It grants him control over space and time in all of their forms of expression. As “time god” (Kalachakra) he becomes “lord of history”.[22]

Frontispiece from Johann de Monte-Snyders, Metamorphosis planetarum, Amsterdam 1663

Johann de Monte-Snyders, Metamorphosis planetarum, Amsterdam 1663. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

This cheating process is precisely what happens in our ‘modern’, neo-medieval banking and money system. Or, to be more precise, their neo-Babylonian banking and money system. It is built on precisely the same Old Babylonian occult (Latin occultus: hidden, secret) sex magic principles.

The Unity (or Union) of Opposites.

And the Law of Inversion (or Reversal).

Eyes Wide Shut

“Eyes Wide Shut” Artist Print (AP), J.S. Rossbach

In both East and West, the cheating method for sex magic – claimed to result in the spiritual and physical transformation of the (male) adept into an immortal Time Lord – at the expense of the female – is the same as the method for supposedly transforming base metals into pure gold:

Hermes Trismegistus from Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, Franckfurt, 1617

Hermes Trismegistus (“Hermes the Thrice Greatest”), from Michael Maier, Symbola aurea mensae, 1617. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

[P]recisely because most extreme estrangement from enlightenment is inherent to the “daughters of Mara”, because they are considered the greatest obstacle for a man and barricade the realm of freedom, according to the tantric “law of inversion” they are for any adept the most important touchstone on the initiation path. He who understands how to gain mastery over women also understands how to control all of creation, as it is represented by him. On account of this paradox, sexual union enjoys absolute priority in Vajrayana. All other ritual acts, no matter how bizarre they may appear, are derived from this sexual magic origin.

The Tibetan lama, Dragpa Jetsen [..] distinguishes three aspects of the royal art: the “Alchemy of life: he can make his life last as long as the sun and moon[; the] Alchemy of body: he can make his body eternally be but sixteen years old[; and the] Alchemy of enjoyments: he can turn iron and copper into gold”. These three experiments, then, primarily concern two goals: firstly the attainment of immortality, and secondly the production of gold, that is, material wealth.[23]

Maier_Atalanta Fugiens_AF18

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

It should not surprise us to discover then, that the method long used by the male “time god” to steal the female’s gynergy, is precisely the same method long used by the male (lender) to cheat the female (borrower) in banking and trade.

Faking “deposits”.

As long ago as the dawn of the second millennium BC, the oldest written law code of human civilisation targeted this covert form of thievery:

Some evidence of the knowledge and previous existence of such practice of issuance of false receipts as against supposed valuables on deposit for safe-keeping clearly exists in the Law No. 7 of the great Hammurabi [1792 BC to 1750 BC] which same law was undoubtedly intended as a preventative to this sickness in society, which, even at that day, may very well have been the cancer that destroyed much that has been before. [..] The severity of the penalty and the placing of the law so high in the code leaves little doubt that it was directed against an evil that was by no means new…

“If a man buys silver or gold or slave, or slave girl, or ox or sheep or ass or anything else whatsoever from a [free] man’s son or a free man’s slave or has received them for safe custody without witness or contract, that man is a thief: he shall be put to death.”

The requisite of witnesses and contract attesting to the true facts of valuables on deposit, would to some extent obviate the danger of the goldsmiths, silversmiths or traders, involved in a transaction, creating receipts for valuables that did not exist, in safe custody or otherwise.[24]

Milkau_Oberer_Teil_der_Stele_mit_dem_Text_von_Hammurapis_Gesetzescode_369-2

Figures at top of stele “fingernail” above Hammurabi’s Code of Laws, Old Babylonian Period, c. 1792 – 1750 BC. (Milkau Oberer Teil der Stele mit dem Text von Hammurapis Gesetzescode 369-2)

The death penalty must have motivated the cheating “time gods” to alter their method. As we will see, some six hundred years after King Hammurabi, the alchemists of Babylon were secreting a recipe to create the appearance of silver – their international trade (and thus, the accepted royal) standard, against which all other commodities were measured. The method, and especially the ingredients of this secret recipe, has far-reaching, explosive – and truly enlightening – explanatory powers.

Around two thousand years later, the cheating time lords were still practicing their secret method in and around what remained of the fallen and fragmented Roman Empire:

I summon today
All these powers between me and those evils,
Against every cruel and merciless power
that may oppose my body and soul,
Against incantations of false prophets,
Against black laws of pagandom,
Against false laws of heretics,
Against craft of idolatry,
Against spells of witches and smiths and wizards,
Against every knowledge that corrupts man’s body and soul…

Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, c. 433 AD

[This prayer also known as The Cry of the Deer (i.e., the “hart”)]

Saint-Patrick

Palladius Patricius (St. Patrick) chases the ‘snakes’ out of Hibernia (Ireland).

In 620 AD the Roman emperor Diocletian issued a decree ordering to destroy all alchemical manuscripts for he was afraid of devaluation of the currency by false silver and/or gold made by alchemists.[25]

Almost a thousand years after that, at the dusk of the medieval era and the dawn of ‘modern’ commercial banking, they were still at it:

Francesco de’ Medici, a prince of the Medici, eldest son and heir to Cosimo I, should have been born with the golden apple of fortune clutched firmly in his hands. What went wrong? Why did he end his life loathed and feared by the people of Florence, amid whispers he had been poisoned by his own brother? [..] [I]n in letters and documents of the day Francesco is universally described as .. obsessed with alchemy.[26]

Francesco de Medici_Jan_van_der_Straet_-_An_Alchemist's_Laboratory_-_WGA21869

Joannes Stradanus (Jan van der Straet) – Francesco I de’ Medici in The Alchemist’s Laboratory, 1570.

Thurneisser or Thurneysser, as well as five other spellings, was born in Basel in 1530. His father was a goldsmith. Arrested for selling gilt lead as gold, Thurneisser fled Basel [..] He wrote on chemistry, alchemy, meteorology, pharmacology and medicine, making it up as he went along. History sees him now as a flamboyant charlatan.[27]

Leonhard Thurneisser, Alchemy Book on the Waters, 1612_TH10

Leonard Thurneisser, Archidoxa, 1575. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Today, we “females” no longer use silver or gold as common money. Nor do we use cuneiform or paper I Owe You’s – written records of a Promise to Pay – receipts issued by ‘smiths for our gold and silver “deposited” with them for safe-keeping.

Instead, almost all of the “money” that we use today, is really just an electronic bookkeeping record of a male promise to pay us the government’s legal tender – cash notes and coins – “on demand”.

We pay the male rent – renamed as “account keeping fees”, “charges”, and “interest” – to have electronic “access” to his “payments system”; meaning, a system allowing us to send a request for a change in his bookkeeping records.

We believe, or unthinkingly assume, that the male – a privileged monopoly “agent” of the Sovereign – actually has a “supply” that is equal to his promises to pay out the Sovereign’s real money, stored securely in his safe.

He does not actually discharge his “promise” – a binding, legal obligation – to pay us real, physical Sovereign money, unless we “demand” it.

But he would really, really prefer that we didn’t:

In case you thought banks lend money – they take deposits and lend money – you’re wrong. Legally, they do not take deposits, they borrow from the public. The expressions in banking are designed to mislead what’s really happening…

Kalachakra_crop

What is a bank account? It is not a deposit. What is it? It is a record of the bank’s debt to the public; it is a record of the bank’s debt to the new borrower, and they’ll show you the record of how much money they owe you. That’s it. They don’t pay up.[28]

So what happens when we “spend” the “money” in the “account” that we are renting access to?

The male “time god” simply changes hisstory in his books.

He now records that his debt to one female is less, and his debt to another female – or, the debt owed by his fellow cheating time lord in another temple of their cabal – is more.

He calls that a “payment” or “transfer”. Even though no one has actually been paid out any real money.

He and his fellow cheating time lords have simply shuffled their stories of their undischarged promises – their Sacred Marital obligations – to give the cat the cream.

Conjurer_Bosch

“The Conjurer,” painted by Hieronymus Bosch (between 1496 – 1520). The painting accurately displays a performer doing the cups and balls routine, which has been practiced since Egyptian times. The shell game does have some origins in this old trick. The real trick of this painting is the pickpocket who is working for the conjurer. The pickpocket is robbing the spectator who is bent over. (Source: Wikipedia)

In ‘modern’ banking, the counterfeiting of “deposits” is done using the “Venetian method” of bookkeeping by double entry. For all its fabled pretences to mathematical precision, “balance”, and objective impartiality, the art of bookkeeping – the keeping of “accounts” – is really nothing more than story-telling.

With “positive” and “negative” numbers added.

(Did you see what I did then? Loθok again.)

Most importantly, “money” by double entry is always a story of two opposite perspectives told from only one perspective.

The bookkeeper’s.

Andreas Orthelius' commentary on Sendivogius' Novum Lumen Chymicum (

Andreas Orthelius’ commentary on Sendivogius’ Novum Lumen Chymicum (“New Chemical Light”), 1624. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

So his double story-telling has lots of opportunity for “skillful” tricks of word-play.

Puns.

Words with double, or even multiple meanings:

Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs were originally based on punning systems. Punning has been credited as the fundamental concept behind alphabets, writing, and even human civilization.[29]

In the world’s first empirical test to discover what banks really do when they “issue” a “loan” of “money”, Professor Richard Werner has proven that the trick of the ‘modern’ cheating time lord is … a pun.

He just names the record of his undischarged debt – his promise – as her “deposit”.[30]

Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica Physica Atque Technica Historia, 1617-1621

Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi Maioris scilicet et Minoris Metaphysica Physica Atque Technica Historia, 1617-1621. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The Sacred Word “deposit” … is a pun.

From the perspective of the female renter of access to “money”, it appears to be her money – the money that he promised to give her. It appears to “perform” just like the real thing.

Eyes Wide Shut_her POV_1

But from the perspective of the cheating time lord, it is just a record – a reflection, a re-presentation – of his unpaid debt. His false promise. The source of his power, to “draw blood” from “easy meat” … from, in his own words, a “Babylonian whore”.[31]

Eyes Wide Shut_his POV

At all times, all of these “deposits” (and a few drops of real money) are stored within the temple of his mystic and physical body – the monopoly banking debt-“money of account” △ system.

Eyes Wide Shut_Pyramid System

The male never discharges his debt – his promise – unless she demands to have it in her “purse”.

If and when she does, he might not be able to do it:

Banks promise to return money today, when most is tied up until tomorrow or the day after. They rely on the trust of customers collectively not to call their bluff. When that trust is lost, creditors run, promises cannot be met and the banking system collapses.[32]

There is nothing the cheating time lord fears more, than having lots of “females” – karma mudras – collectively exercising their Sacred Right and demanding to have the money – the real money – that he promised to pay:

[I]n India the flowing of the male seed into “the fiery maw of the female sexual organ” is still today regarded as a sacrificium and therefore feared as an element of death.[33]

[E]jaculation is equated simply with death. [..] “The fear of losing body fluids leads not only to retention, but to attempts to steal the partner’s fluid (and the fear that the partner [karma mudra] will try the same trick) — yet another form of competition”.[34]

The drawing up of sperm by a woman is viewed by a tantric yogi as a mortally dangerous theft and a fundamental crime.[35]

Mylius, Rosarium philosophorum (Rosary of the Philosophers) series, Philosophia Reformata, Frankfurt, 1622_MR12

J.D. Mylius, Rosarium philosophorum (Rosary of the Philosophers) series, Philosophia Reformata, Frankfurt, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

For the lying cheating banker, this means that the Royal Art is a delicate balancing act. If the females ever wake up to his “confidence trick”, and collectively demand the real Sovereign money, then he is royally f****d.

He is always living on the edge, of economic life and death:

For a Buddhist Tantric the retention of the male seed is the sine qua non of the highest spiritual enlightenment. [..] As soon as a person begins to experience sexual desire, it starts to flow out, drop by drop [..] The destination of the sperm’s journey within the body is the tip of the penis. Here, through extreme meditative concentration, the adept collects the lust [..] “Through this, the act obtains a cosmological dimension. … It becomes the means of attaining enlightenment (bodhi)”. “Delight resides in the tip of the vajra [penis]”…[36]

Michael Maier, Viatorium, Oppenheim, 1618

Michael Maier, Viatorium, Oppenheim, 1618 © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

JD Mylius_Rosarium series_MR16

J.D. Mylius, Rosarium Philosophorum (“Rosary of the Philosophers”) series, Philosophia Reformata, Frankfurt, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The Sanskrit term for alchemy is Rasa-vada. Rasa means ‘liquid’ or ‘quicksilver’. Quicksilver was considered the most important chemical substance which was made use of in the “mystic” experiments, both in Europe and in Asia. The liquid metal was employed in the transformation of materials both in the east and the west, in particular with the intention of producing gold. In the Occident it bore the name of the Roman god, Mercury. The Kalachakra Tantra also mentions quicksilver at several points. The frequency with which it is mentioned is a result of its being symbolically equated with the male seed (bodhicitta); it was, in a manner of speaking, the natural-substance form of the semen virile.

It is a characteristic of quicksilver that it can “swallow” other substances, that is, chemically bind with them. This quality allowed the liquid metal to become a powerful symbol for the tantric yogi, who as an androgyne succeeds in absorbing — i.e., “swallowing” — the gynergy of his wisdom consort.[37]

Engraving from Baro Urbigerus, Besondere chymische Schrifften, 1705_A129

Baro Urbigerus, Besondere chymische Schrifften, 1705. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The alchemist plays a dangerous game. In order to transform himself into the Master of the Universe – having “absolute power” and “unrestricted control over both cosmic primal forces, the god and the goddess” – he must “conquer” all the “females”.

To do this, he must continually “grow” the size of his undischarged promises to pay out real Sovereign money (cash notes and coins).

In bankers’ words, he must “expand his balance sheet” … until all the “females” are firmly, irredeemably in his debt.

This is nothing less than an alchemical, misogynist metaphor for growing an enormously “big swinging dick”.

Given that borrowers’ debts are recorded as the bankers’ Assets, to expand his balance sheet means that – from his perspective – he is growing an enormously “big black swinging dick”.

We “females” see a growing debt as our being “in the red”.

The “time god” sees that same debt, for him, as being “in the black”.

As we will see, according to the Law of Inversion the alchemist believes that he should begin with the worst substances, in order to “transform” them into the best. Indeed, the very first step in an alchemical experiment is “located within a context of sacrifice, death and the color black”, and is called nigredo – “blackening”. So the bankers’ cynical creed is not only malevolently misogynist; paradoxically, it is also rapaciously racist … against black people.

Professor Werner’s world-first empirical study has shown that every time a lying cheating “time god” makes a new false promise to pay – every time he “issues” a new “loan” of fake “money of account”, and does not discharge any real money – this is precisely what happens.

His balance sheet – his metaphorical ‘cock’ – grows bigger:

For firms without a bank licence, the disbursement of the loan is from funds elsewhere within the firm. Thus there is an equal reduction in balance of another account from which the lent funds came from. Therefore, the balance sheet shrinks again. There is no overall change in the total size of the balance sheet.

However the story is quite different for the bank. Surprisingly, we find that unlike the other firms whose balance sheets shrank back in Step 2, the bank’s accounts seem in standstill, unchanged from Step 1. The total balance sheet remains lengthened. No balance is drawn down to make a payment to the borrower.[38]

Screen Shot 2016-04-09 at 5.24.57 PM

“For banks only the balance sheet remains unchanged in its EXPANDED position .. In other words: banks do not discharge their liability.”

 

From Vajrayana comes the striking saying that “A yogi whose member is always hard is one who always retains his semen”.[39]

 

USA

ChinaOffshore centres

These lying cheating time lords have long told a romantic story of their past, and present. This fairy tale “account” says that theirs is only a neutral, benevolent, guiding hand – the Invisible Hand – in the reproductive affairs of others. Just like a high priest, officiating at the Sacred Wedding of two opposites. His divine intermediation and blessing on their union is necessary to ensure that the gentle rains of prosperity, security and happiness will fall on both of them … or so hisstory goes.

Sixth Key of Basil Valentine, 1599, in Michael Maier, Tripus Aureus (Golden Tripod), Frankfurt, 1618

Sixth Key of Basil Valentine (1599), in Michael Maier, Tripus Aureus (Golden Tripod), 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Over many centuries, these invisible-handed banking high priests – along with their most-favoured choir boys in the economic theory profession – have conjured up lots of abstract word-pairs to describe this “productive” union of two opposites.

Savers and Borrowers. Patient and Impatient. Investors and Entrepreneurs. Sellers and Buyers. Producers and Consumers. Exporters and Importers. External and Internal. Public and Private. And that’s just a handful.

These abstract word-pairs serve the purpose of creating a false appearance – an illusion – of equality in the union of two opposites, with the banking high priest merely “serving” the community as the trusted, Fatherly intermediary.

J.D. Mylius, Philosophia reformata, 1622

J.D. Mylius, Philosophia Reformata, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The reality is rather different.

As with most effective deceptions, there is some truth in this tale. One part of time lord operations once was – and still is, in a manner of speaking – acting as an intermediary between so-called “Savers” and “Borrowers”: receiving “deposits” for “safe-keeping” (legally, borrowing) from one, and “lending” to the other.

But even here, the appearance of equality between these two abstract opposites, is just an illusion. A clever trick of word-play.

The banking high priest is practicing “Time manipulation” – or more accurately, date-of-birth shuffling – with all the “accounts” of his promises to pay real money.

He is able to “create” and multiply real wealth for himself, using the “flows” between all the opposites.

Engraving from Benedictus Figulus, Thesaurinella olympica, Hamburg, 1682

Benedictus Figulus, Thesaurinella olympica, 1682. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

The banking high priest calls this date-of-birth hustling procedure “maturity transformation” – of “term” “deposits”.

With one hand, he borrows from “depositors” for a short period of time.

With the other hand, he lends to “borrowers” – who are instantly “transformed” into “depositors” too – for a long period of time:

By doing this, banks transform [their] debts with very short maturities (deposits) into credits with very long maturities (loans), and collect the difference in the [usury] rates as profit.[40]

There is no “magic” in any of this. The cheating time lord is simply abusing his privileged, monopoly position. Because he controls the bookkeeping records of large “stocks” of his promises, and constantly re-writes hisstory of his promises – that is, his story of the “flows” of his promises between his customers’ “accounts”, and, between those and the “accounts” written by his fellow “time gods” at other temples – he is able to gain real wealth for himself by cheating all the “depositors”.

He will only get caught if too many “account holders” (renters) start to smell a rat, and decide, at the same time, to demand the real deal – legal tender cash notes and coins – that the cheating time lord has promised to pay.

Maier_Atalanta Fugiens_AF22

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

However, this is only one small part of banking “alchemy” thievery.

The hidden truth is that the banking high priest is not just a lying, cheating, fake “intermediary” officiating at the Sacred Marriage of Savers and Borrowers.

He is the infamous Mercury–Hermes (☿), the “purse”-sucking androgyne himself.

Mylius series_MY07

J.D. Mylius, Philosophia Reformata, 1622. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Hiding behind economic babel (“confusion”) – and that owing much to the Paradox of Opposite Perspectives in double entry – the cheating time lord does not just shuffle promises to pay; he also creates new promises to pay.

False promises. Misleading promises. Deceptive promises.

“Fraudulent” promises – his promises – that he calls “credit” but is actually debt.

His debt.

He actually owes all of “our” debt … to us!

As Professor Werner has proven, that is how all “money of account” appears – and disappears – in the first place.

 

“The dragon slays itself, weds itself, impregnates itself.”[41]

DONUM-DEI-Samuelis-Baruch_ des Juden Rabbi_in_Abraham Eleazar_Uraltes chymisches Werck, Erfurt, 1735

Samuelis Baruch, des Juden Rabbi, Astrologi und Philosophi, gebohren aus dem Stamm Abrahams, Isaacs, Jacobs und Judä, welcher erlernet das grosse Geheimniss des grossen Meisters Tubalkains aus dessen Tabell, gefunden von Abrahamo Eliazare, dem Juden. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

“The serpent devouring its own tail represents alternately
.. tempter and Redeemer.”[42]

 

Why do we “females” do this?

Why have we allowed these lying cheating “time gods” incarnate to keep returning to steal our gynergy, for over 5000 years?

Woodcut by Jost Amman from Jacob Rueff, De conceptu et generatione hominis, Frankfurt, 1587_amcl_emb34

Woodcut by Jost Amman from Jacob Rueff, De conceptu et generatione hominis, Frankfurt, 1587. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Temptation.

An offer.

A “trade”.

A devil’s pact.

A promise, of Yesh for Ayin.

Something for Nothing.

In a word – usury.

The cheating time lord sucks in the female’s “interest”, using a honey-sweet promise to pay her “interest”.

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblemata Nova De Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens, Emblemata Nova De Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Yesh for Ayin.

But only on the condition that she walks down the aisle, ties the knot … and lets him have her “deposit”.

Preferably, for a “locked in” “period”.

The longer the “term” until “maturity”, the more “interest” he promises to pay her.

She can only “redeem” her “deposit” – and the promised “yield” – when her “deposit” in his mystic temple has gone “full term”.

Maier, Atalanta Fugiens_AF13

Michael Maier, Atalanta Fugiens: Emblemata Nova de Secretis Naturae Chymica, 1618. © Adam McLean 1997-2017 (alchemywebsite.com). Used with permission.

Thanks to the magic “$”, “€”, “£”, “¥”, and especially the %signs that he flashes in our eyes, we “females” are blinded to the reality.

His fake system is an inversion – a reversal – of “Mother” nature.

His system of promises is all about cheating, stealing, manipulating, dominating, and destroying the “autonomous existence” of the fundamental feminine principle – our mother nature.

 

Almost 2,500 years ago, Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out that money is sterile. It does not naturally breed more money, the way that cows breed more cows. He explained that “Money exists not by nature but by law”:

The most hated sort [of wealth getting] and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange but not to increase at interest. And this term interest (tokos), which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of all modes of getting wealth, this is the most unnatural.  (1258b, POLITICS)

For over 1000 years in the “Dark” and Middle Ages – when there was no separation of two “opposites”, the Church and the State – there was an official ban on the practice of usury.

Honoured sometimes as much in the breach as in the observance. There’s a long story of willfully-blind eyes there, all in itself.

But prohibition, nonetheless.

The defenders of usury prohibition were – are – precisely right.

Far more right, than any are given credit for.

The lying cheating system of false promises and fake “deposits”, of usury by double entry – the Royal Art of “the philosophers” – is contra naturam:

[Watch to the end. The devil’s in all the little details.]

 

*****************

END OF PART I

*****************

POSTSCRIPT

I hope that you have found Part 1 of this essay to be informative. Despite its length, it is only a barely adequate quick summary of the voluminous, multi-disciplinary literature touching the subject matter.  To do the themes justice may well require a multi-volume book series. Publisher inquiries welcome.

My thanks to Professor Steve Keen and Professor Richard Werner for inspiration, support and economic reading suggestions, and kind assistance with accessing academic journals; to Dr. Omar Zaid for reading suggestions and support; to Adam McLean (alchemywebsite.com) for kindly granting permission to use his coloured alchemical images; to my family for love, patience and support; and to Anna Novikova for love, inspiration, support … and more reading suggestions! Finally, I would like to borrow a leaf out of the book of one wiser than I, in giving thanks for any good to be found here to the original source of all true wisdom (Jeremiah 33:3).

The interpretations and opinions expressed here are entirely mine – ergo, the aforementioned persons are not to be held in any way responsible for them, or for any errors or omissions.

 

Heav’n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn’d,
Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn’d.

 

In writing this essay, I earnestly hope to provoke in womenfolk the Fury of the Woman scorn’d.

I say this to all but especially to the menfolk reading: There is no way – in my opinion – that the Babylonian “Money Power” can ever be defeated, unless the tremendous power of the “scorn’d Woman” – and her fiercely-protective Mother nature – is invoked by all of us, and turned against her violator:

 

“Tell the housewife at her kitchen table about this stuff. She is smart. She understands. But if you keep it a secret, naturally she’s not going to be able to act, and we can’t transform something until we understand it.”

– Ann Pettifor, Money for Nothing

 

In Part 2 we will consider a perfect example of the righteous anger of the Woman scorn’d, from Old Babylonian mythology.

 

“Now whether the yogis can actually and permanently maintain control over the women through their ‘tricks’ (upaya) is another question. This is solely dependent upon their magical abilities, over which we do not wish to pass judgement here. The texts do repeatedly warn of the great danger of their experiments. There is the ever-present possibility that the ‘daughters of Mara’ see through the tricky system and plunge the lamas into hell.”

 

Robert H. Bork (The Antitrust Paradox) wrote that “One of the uses of history is to free us of a falsely imagined past. The less we know of how ideas actually took root and grew, the more apt we are to accept them unquestioningly, as inevitable features of the world in which we move.”

In Part 2, we will travel back to ancient Mesopotamia, and trace forward from the earliest recorded, pre-writing origins of the two fundamental principles that lie at the heart of the Babylonian “money of account” usury system.

We will learn more – and more repulsive – details about alchemical sex magic “experiments” and rituals. We will also consider the Old Babylonian magico-religious objects and incantations (“spells”), and learn the real significance of the winged lions guarding the city of Venice, and the City of London financial district.

We will also discover the “explosive” and enlightening ingredients in the Old Babylonian secret alchemical recipe for making fake silver counterfeits of the royal standard ingots.

Thank you for reading, and sharing.

**********

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. (…) Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. (…) It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating.”

– George Orwell, 1984

**********

FOOTNOTES

[1] Daniel Gross, The End of the BSDSlate, Sept 25, 2008 — “(Relevant quote: ‘If he could make millions of dollars come out of those phones, he became that most revered of all species: a Big Swinging Dick.’)”

[2] Miroslav Novák, Heritage of Alchemical Cryptography (2013), Il Chimico Italiano 24: 17-24 — “Medieval European alchemists used a disorganized way of coded expressing together with a very complicated system of diverse graphical symbols... The symbols, besides their shorthand role, also serve as a specific cryptographic system, for very often the alchemists tried to conceal the results from the Christian church, avaricious noblemen and possible competitors. [..] The cryptography (or cryptology; from Greek κρυπτός, “hidden, secret”; and γράφειν, “writing”, or λογία, “study”, respectively) is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties (called adversaries) (Wikipedia). And these adversaries were the main reason, why alchemists coded their written products.

[3] Samuel Scarborough, The Imagery of Alchemical Art as a Method of Communication, Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition No. 9, Vol. 1, Autumnal Equinox (2005) — “[T]he metalworkers, especially the gold and silver smiths, who in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance formed guilds to protect their secrets and craft worked with a kind of alchemy that was later to become metallurgy.”

“Alchemists, like modern day scientists, would share their findings and works with one another [..] So, how could alchemists from various countries and parts of Europe communicate in a safe manner without giving away their secrets? The answers came as allegory and allegorical imagery, which hid, from the uninitiated what was being discussed and shared amongst them.”

“This form of discussion or conveying information and ideas in allegorical images would later go on to influence several bodies of dramatic initiating orders or lodges. Among these would be the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, particularly the fringe Masonic bodies, and even the magickal orders of the nineteenth century. This idea that images convey a message and power is powerfully illustrated in a line from the Neophyte Initiation Ceremony: ‘…for by Names and Images are all Powers awakened and re-awakened.'”

[4] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p.77 — “In order to keep hidden from the public all the offensive things which are implicated by the required breaches of taboo, some tantra texts make use of a so-called ‘twilight language’ (samdhya-bhasa). This has the function of veiling references to taboo substances, private bodily parts, and illegal deeds in poetic words, so that they cannot be recognized by the uninitiated. For example, one says ‘lotus’ and means ‘vagina’, or employs the term ‘enlightenment consciousness’ (bodhicitta) for sperm, or the word ‘sun’ (surya) for menstrual blood. Such a list of synonyms can be extended indefinitely.”

[5] ibid., p. 102; — “Just as in some tantra texts, ‘secret’ practices were represented by ‘harmless’ images in the European treatises; this was especially true of the topic of erotic love and sexuality.”

“Both the tantric and the alchemic writings are [..] maps of the erotic imagination and anyone with a little speech psychology can recognize the pervasive sexual system of reference hidden in a hermetical text from the 16th century. At that time people did not have the slightest qualms about describing chemical processes as erotic events and erotic scenarios as chemical fusions. They behaved in exactly the same manner in the West as in the East.”

[6] Martin Wolf, Will there be another huge financial crisis?, Irish Times, June 1 2016

[7] I have chosen not to specify here the artisanal guild in question, in view of intention to publish a book encompassing the subject.

[8] Hieros gamos, Encyclopædia Britannica — (Greek: “sacred marriage”), sexual relations of fertility deities in myths and rituals, characteristic of societies based on cereal agriculture, especially in the Middle East. At least once a year, divine persons (e.g., humans representing the deities) engage in sexual intercourse, which guarantees the fertility of the land, the prosperity of the community, and the continuation of the cosmos.

Some scholars have applied the term hieros gamos to all myths of a divine pair (e.g., heaven–earth) whose sexual intercourse is creative. The term, however, should probably be restricted only to those agricultural cultures that ritually reenact the marriage and that relate the marriage to agriculture, as in Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Canaan, Israel (the Song of Solomon has been suggested to be a hierogamitic text), Greece, and India.

[9] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; pp. 40, 585 — “..if we translate upaya (as it is clearly intended) as ‘cunning means’ or even ‘trick’ or ‘ruse’ (Wilber, 1987, p. 310).”

upaya – “‘skill in means’ – array of expedient devices employed by bodhisattvas to enlighten beings trapped in suffering existence.”

“To summarize, upaya stands for the masculine principle, the phallus, motion, activity, the god, enlightenment, and so forth; prajna represents the feminine principle, the vagina, calm, passivity, the goddess, the cosmic law. All women naturally count as prajna, all men as upaya.” (p.39)

[10] Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars; The Lawful Path (1996), citing William Cooper, Behold A Pale Horse (1991), Light Technology Publishing

[11] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; p. 47, 65, 93; — “Modern Western authors with views compatible to those of Buddhism [..] tend toward the opinion that the tantric androgyne harmonizes both sexual roles equally within itself, so that the androgynous pattern is valid for both men and women. But this is not the case. Even at an etymological level, androgyny (from Ancient Greek anér ‘man’ and gyné ‘woman’) cannot be applied to both sexes. The term denotes [..] the male-feminine forces possessed by a man, whilst for a woman the respective phenomenon would have to be termed ‘gynandry’ (female-masculine forces possessed by a woman).”

“The tantric yogi unites with her not just in the sexual act, but above all through consuming her holy gynergy, the magical force of maya. Sometimes, as we shall see, he therefore drinks his partner’s menstrual blood. Only when the feminine blood also pulses in his own veins will he be complete, an androgyne, a lord of both sexes.”

“In the usual yab–yum representation of the Dhyani Buddhas, the male Buddha figure always crosses both of his arms behind the back of his wisdom consort, forming what is known as the Vajrahumkara gesture. At the same time he holds a vajra (the supreme symbol of masculinity) in his right hand, and a gantha (the supreme symbol of femininity) in his left. The symbolic possession of both ritual objects identifies him as the lord of both sexes. He is the androgyne and the prajna is a part of his self.”

[12] Mahmoud Ezzamel and Keith Hoskin, Retheorizing Accounting, Writing and Money with Evidence from Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, Critical Perspectives on Accounting (2002) 13, 333–367; — “The distinctive development that we see introduced by the invention of money of account is a principle of value reciprocity. Money of account constructs value by denominating it as something other than, and separate from, either the commodity or its accounting; instead value becomes something which passes reciprocally between the two, supposedly guaranteeing that each is equalised in value terms. In so doing, the role of money as supplementer of value is concealed behind an apparent but deceptive power to guarantee equivalence. Moreover, the power of money enables the construction of previously unprecedented levels of wealth, and the possibility of new power relations for those with money and those without it.”

“[M]oney plays a double game. First, it appears as the benign supplement, embodying the new possibility that value exists in a separate denominable form and simply making space for itself as numeraire to act as the measure of that value. But secondly, money is also the dangerous supplement. Beneath the apparent surface where equivalence reigns and money is just a transparent medium, the play of difference is at work: from the production of little remainders and marginal inequalities, through the generation of interest and profit, to money’s own re-writing into new and more complex instruments.”

[13] Vladimír Karpenko, Alchemy as donum dei, HYLE – International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1998), No. 1, pp. 63-80; — “In the Tenth Discourse of his treatise Al-Fihrist,[12] An-Nadim (A.D. 987) writes, after the introductory basmallah, about the origin of alchemy [§ 1]: ‘The adepts of the Art of Alchemy, … assert that the science of the Art was first discussed by Hermes, the Sage, the Babylonian …’.”

[14] Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus (1995), pp. 36-38; — “Panurge is not only connected to the tradition of Hermetic magic: he also has something of the humanist Hermes, the savant of his time. This does not prevent him from being at the same time a sort of alchemist, for he claims to possess the Philosophers’ Stone: ‘I have a philosophical stone which sucks money out of purses as the magnet attracts iron.’ And in his speech in praise of debtors, he speaks of the ‘joy of the alchemists when, after long labors, great care and expense, they see the metals transmuted in their furnaces.'”

[15] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; pp. 121-122 “Even if many tantric texts speak only of bodhicitta, the male seed, at heart it is a matter of the absorption of both fluids, the male and the female, in short — of sukra. Admittedly the mixing of the sexual fluids does seem incompatible with the prohibition against ejaculation, but through the so-called Vajroli method the damaging consequences of the emission of semen can be reversed..”

“The bodhicitta is also called bindu, which means ‘point’, ‘nil’, ‘zero’, or ‘drop’.” (p. 135)

[16] ibid., p. 124 “The initiation path of the Kalachakra Tantra [..] now leads us on to the four highest initiations, or rather to the twelfth to fifteenth initiation stages. [..] The reader will soon see that we are dealing with an extended copy of the four ‘higher initiations’ (8–11). They thus also bear the same names: (12) the vase initiation; (13) the secret initiation; (14) the wisdom initiation; and (15) the word initiation. The difference primarily consists in the fact that rather than just one mudra, ten wisdom consorts now participate in the ritual. All ten must be offered to the master by the pupil (Naropa, 1994, p. 193). There are different rules for monks and laity in this regard. It is required of a layman that the mudras be members of his own family — his mother, his sister, his daughter, his sister-in-law, and so on (Naropa, 1994, p. 192). This makes it de facto impossible for him to receive the Kalachakra solemnity. Although the same commandment applies to a monk, it is interpreted symbolically in his case. Hence, he has to deliver to his guru numerous girls from the lower castes, who then adopt the names and roles of the various female relatives during the ritual. Among other things the elements are assigned to them: the ‘mother’ is earth, the ‘sister’ water, the ‘daughter’ fire, the ‘sister’s daughter’ is the wind, and so on (Grünwedel, Kalacakra III, p. 125). After the pupil has handed the women over to his master, he is given back one of them as a symbolic ‘spouse’ for the impending rites (Naropa, 1994, p. 193).”

[17] ibid., p. 122-123 Here can be seen very clearly how much of a calculating and technical meaning the term upaya (method) has in the tantras.”

“Equivalent quotations from many other Western interpreters of Tantrism can be found: ‘In … Tantrism … woman is means, an alien object, without possibility of mutuality or real communication’ (quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7). The woman ‘is to be used as a ritual object and then cast aside’ (also quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7). Or, at another point: the yogis had ‘sex without sensuality … There is no relationship of intimacy with an individual — the woman … involved is an object, a representation of power … women are merely spiritual batteries‘ (quoted by Shaw, 1994, n. 128, pp. 254–255). The woman functions as a ‘salvation tool’, as an ‘aid on the path to enlightenment’. The goal of Vajrayana is even ‘to destroy the female’ (quoted by Shaw, 1994, p. 7).”  (p. 47)

[18] ibid., p. 122; citing Eliade, 1985, p. 257, Shaw, 1994, p. 157, and White, 1996, p.200

[19] ibid., p. 122, citing Shaw, 1994, p. 158.

[20] ibid.,p. 98

[21] ibid., p. 60, 62 —  “[A]lthough her autonomous feminine existence has been dissolved, her feminine essence (gynergy) has not been lost. Via an act of sexual magic the yogi has appropriated this and with it achieved the power of an androgyne. He destroys, so to speak, the exterior feminine in order to internalize it and produce an ‘inner woman’ as a part of himself. ‘He absorbs the Mother of the Universe into himself’, as it is described in the Kalachakra Tantra (Grünwedel, Kalac[h]akra IV, p. 32).”

“In general, the maha mudra is said to reside in the region of the navel. There she dances and acts as an oracle as the Greek goddess Metis once did in the belly of Zeus. [..] The male tantric master now has the power to assume the female form of the goddess (who is of course an aspect of his own mystical body), that is, he can appear in the figure of a woman. Indeed, he even has the magical ability to divide himself into two gendered beings, a female and a male deity. He is further able to multiply himself into several maha mudras.”

[22] ibid., p. 48  “In place of the human ego is the superego of a god with far-reaching powers. This superhuman subject knows no bounds when it proclaims in the Hevajra Tantra, ‘I am the revealer, I am the revealed doctrine and I am the disciple endowed with good qualities. I am the goal, I am the master of the world and I am the world as well as the worldly things” (Farrow and Menon, 1992, p. 167).'”

[23] ibid., pp. 77; 102-103 “[F]or the ‘true’ adept (whether Tantric or European alchemist) it was not just a matter of the actual yellow metal, but also the so-called ‘spiritual gold’. In the West this was understood to mean the ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ or the ‘hermetical elixir’, which transformed the experimenter into a superman. Alchemy and Tantrism thus have the same spiritual goal. In order to achieve this, numerous processes of conversion were needed in the laboratory of the adept, which did not just take the form of chemical processes, but which the alchemist also experienced as successive transmutations of his personality, that is, his psyche was dissolved and then put together again a number of times in the course of the experimentation. Solve et coagula (dissolve and bind) is for this reason the first and most well-known maxim of the hermetical art.”

[24] David Astle, The Babylonian Woe (1975), pp. 15-16, citing G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, Ancient Codes and Laws of the Near East (Clarendon Press, Oxford); and Professor W.F. Albright, The Amarna Letters from Palestine (Cambridge University Press)

[25] Miroslav Novák, Heritage of Alchemical Cryptography (2013), Il Chimico Italiano 24: 17-24

[26] Elizabeth Loupas, Alchemy and a ducal mistress: One prince’s deadly obsessions (2014).

[27] Bibliotheca Chemica, p. 453; D.S.B.; cited by Abe Books, Item Description: 1571. THURNEISSER ZUM THURN, Leonhart. PROKATALEPSIS ODER PRAEOCCUPATION, DURCH ZWOLFF VERSCHEIDENLICHER TRACTATEN; GEMACHTER HARM PROBEN. Frankfurt: Johann Eichorn, 1571. First edition. (24 June 2017)

[28] Richard A. Werner, To a new understanding of the function of the banking sector: the mechanism of productive credit creation and quantitative easing; presentation to the Russian Academy of Sciences, round table “Anti-crisis fiscal policy of the state in the interests of economic development of Russia” (2015). (watch video)

[29] John Pollack, The Pun Also Rises: How The Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, And Made Wordplay (2011), cited in Wikipedia: Pun (21 June 2017)

[30] Richard A. Werner, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking (2014) — “What banks do is to simply reclassify their accounts payable items arising from the act of lending as ‘customer deposits’, and the general public, when receiving payment in the form of a transfer of bank deposits, believes that a form of money had been paid into the bank. As a result, the public readily accepts such ‘bank deposits’ and their ‘transfers’ to defray payments. They are also the main component of the official ‘money supply’ as announced by central banks (M1, M2, M3, M4), which is created almost entirely through this act of re-classifying banks’ accounts payable as fictitious ‘customer deposits’.”

[31] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p.104

[32] Andy Haldane, Trust and Finance, Institute for New Economic Thinking, Oct 2013

[33] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny; pp. 119, citing White, 1996, p. 28

[34] ibid., p. 123 “‘If the woman is too powerful or too old or too young, terrible things will happen to the innocent man who falls into her trap, a fact often depicted in terms of his losing his fluids’ (O’Flaherty, 1982/1988, p. 56).”

“Now whether the yogis can actually and permanently maintain control over the women through their ‘tricks’ (upaya) is another question. This is solely dependent upon their magical abilities, over which we do not wish to pass judgement here. The texts do repeatedly warn of the great danger of their experiments. There is the ever-present possibility that the ‘daughters of Mara’ see through the tricky system and plunge the lamas into hell.” (p. 268)

[35] ibid., p. 123  “Is this purely a matter of male fantasies? Not at all — a gynocentric correspondence to the thieving seed-absorption is, namely, known from the Kali cults to be a ritual event. Here, the woman assumes the upper position [in] the sex act and in certain rites leaves the man whose life energies she has drained behind as a corpse. According to statements by the Tibet researcher, Matthias Hermanns¸ there were yoginis (female yogis) who received instruction in a technique ‘through which they were able to forcibly draw their partners’ semen from out of the penis’, and the author concludes from this that, ‘It is thus the counterpart of the procedure which the yogi employs to soak up the genital juices of several women one after another through his member’ (Hermanns, 1965, p. 19).”

[36] ibid., pp. 118-119 — “[T]he tantras teach that the semen is originally stored in a moonlike bowl beneath the roof of the skull. As soon as a person begins to experience sexual desire, it starts to flow out, drop by drop, passing through the five energy centers (chakras). In each of these the yogi experiences a specific ‘seminal’ ecstasy (Naropa, 1994, p. 191). The destination of the sperm’s journey within the body is the tip of the penis. Here, through extreme meditative concentration, the adept collects the lust: ‘The vajra [penis] is inserted into the lotus [vagina], but not moved. When lust of a transient art arises, the mantra hum should be spoken. … The decisive [factor] is thus the retention of the sperm. Through this, the act obtains a cosmological dimension. … It becomes the means of attaining enlightenment (bodhi)” (Grönbold, Asiatische Studien, p. 34). ‘Delight resides in the tip of the vajra [penis]’, as is said in a Kalachakra text (Grönbold, 1992a)…”

[37] ibid., p. 123

[38] Richard A. Werner, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking (2014) — “The act of signing the loan contract and purchasing it as a promissory note of the borrower without yet making the borrowed funds available to the borrower (Step 1) has the same accounting implications for banks, non-banks and non-financial corporations alike. In all cases, the balance sheets lengthen, as an asset (the loan contract) is acquired and a liability to make money available to the borrower is incurred (accounts payable).”

Screen Shot 2016-04-09 at 5.24.35 PM

“In Step 2, the lender makes the funds available to the borrower. The fact that in Step 2 the bank is alone among firms in showing the same total impact on assets and liabilities as everyone else at Step 1, when the money had not yet been made available to the borrower, demonstrates that the bank did not actually make any money available to the borrower. This means that the bank still has an open ‘accounts payable’ liability, as it has not in fact discharged its original liability.”

Screen Shot 2016-04-09 at 5.24.57 PM

“For banks only the balance sheet remains unchanged in its EXPANDED position .. In other words: banks do not discharge their liability.”

[39] V. and V. Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003), transl. by Mark Penny, p. 119, citing Grönbold, Asiatische Studien, p. 34.

[40] Stephen D. Simpson, The Banking System: Commercial Banking – Economic Concepts in Banking, Investopedia (1 July 2017)

[41] Zosimos Alchemista of Panopolis, Tractatus Avicennae, Alchemist Wikia, (1 July 2017)

[42] Éliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, 1855; (Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, translated by A.E. Waite (1896), p. 80-81

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Time

The Money $hot: Even Banking Is All About Sex

 

On Double-Entry Bookkeeping, Money Creation, Sexual Alchemy, and the Magickal Inversion of Values

 

“In vulgar opinion, transmutations and metamorphoses have always been the very essence of magic. Now, the crowd, being the echo of opinion, which is queen of the world, is never perfectly right nor entirely wrong. Magic really changes the nature of things, or, rather, modifies their appearances at pleasure, according to the strength of the operator’s will … Speech creates its form, and when a person, held infallible, confers a name upon a given thing, he really transforms that thing into the substance signified by the name. The masterpiece of speech and of faith, in this order, is the real transmutation of a substance without change in its appearances.”1

– Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 1896

 

“In case you thought banks lend moneythey take deposits and lend moneyyou’re wrong. Legally, they do not take deposits, they borrow from the public. The expressions in banking are designed to mislead what’s really happening. What does a bank do? Banks purchase securities .. and they don’t pay up.”

– Professor Richard Werner, Address to the Russian Academy of Sciences, 12 Feb 2015

 

It is often said that “the devil is in the detail”. We commonly understand this to mean that hidden somewhere there is a catch or mysterious element. It serves as a warning to pay close attention in order to avoid error… or entrapment.

When we consider the grand mystical numberland of banking and finance today, with its infinitely labyrinthine mountains of multi-layered financial derivatives—allegedly ‘monetary’ instruments bearing incomprehensible acronyms, innumerable interconnections, and indecipherable obligations—one might be forgiven for believing that the devil and his minions really does now rule the world.

So it is both interesting and ironic that this idiom is itself a derivativeand an inversionof an earlier saying.

“Le bon Dieu est dans le détail” (“the good God is in the detail”)2 means that attention paid to small things has big rewards. It serves as an encouragement to be conscientious in one’s work; that whatever one does, it should be done thoroughly, with an eye to how “the good God” will judge it.

There is one small detail that has been troubling me ever since publishing my June 2015 essay, On Principal And Interest, Hermetic Magick, And The Lords Of Time.

There, we traced the history of el modo vinegia (“the Venetian method”) of double-entry bookkeeping, and unveiled the abundant evidence for its true purpose.

Contrary to popular belief, it was not developed as a dry, moral values-free, coolly rational mathematical tool of accounting and practical commerce. It was, rather, a Hermetic-Kabbalist ‘magick’ method for a very different kind of calculationthe deliberate, willful concealment of the immoral (and at the time, illegal) practice of lending money for gain (usury).

We also demonstrated that the method, both of double-entry bookkeeping, and of bank ‘money’ (credit) creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”), is precisely represented by the Hermetic-Kabbalist alchemical symbol of the hexagram:

LOAN-STAR-CC_DE

 

However, in one small detail, the above diagram has never appeared to me to be perfectly consistent with 19th century French occult magus Eliphas Lévi’s “Double Triangle of Solomon”, as referenced in my essay:

Seal of Solomon, front page of Eliphas Lévi's 'Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual' (Source: Wikipedia)

Seal of Solomon, front page of Eliphas Lévi’s ‘Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual’ (Source: Wikipedia)

 

Lévi tells us that “(t)he notion of the infinite and the absolute is expressed by this sign … the most simple and complete abridgment of the science of all things”3:

The Double Triangle of Solomon, represented by the two Ancients of the Kabbalah; the Macroprosopus and the Microprosopus; the God of Light and the God of Reflections; mercy and vengeance; the white Jehovah and the black Jehovah.4

 

Specifically, the detail that has long troubled me is the two little symbols (and their inverses) in Lévi’s sign, representing inter alia the Hermetic-Kabbalist alchemical axiom, “As above, so below”5:

“That which is above equals that which is below,” says Hermes.6

Screen shot 2015-04-12 at 6.39.30 PM copy 2

 

Comparing with my diagram, the apparent inconsistency is clear:

LOAN-STAR-CC_DE - highlight

 

As you can see, that which is Above does not appear to be the same as that which is Below – that is to say, in the very particular sense of there not appearing to be two different pairs of opposing (inverse) identities on the Left hand side versus the Right hand side, as depicted in Lévi’s “Great Seal”.

Note carefully that the word values (meanings) do not appear to match – even though their numerical values do, as indeed they must (remember the fundamental rule of double-entry bookkeeping – “For every credit there must be a matching debit”):

LOAN-STAR-1s-CC_DE

 

The apparent inconsistency is easily resolved, however, by a closer consideration of Lévi’s magnum opus, with particular attention to the importance of languageand especially of speechin ritual magick (italicised and bold emphasis added):

Grammar itself attributes three persons to the verb. The first is that which speaks, the second that which is spoken to, and the third the object. .. The magical dogma is also one in three and three in one. That which is above is like or equal to that which is below. Thus, two things which resemble one another and the word which signifies their resemblance make three.7

 

What is the word that signifies the “resemblance” of the symbols and their inverses?

What is the word that defines not the form but the substance of the so-called ‘Asset’ and ‘Liability’words that appear to be contradictoryas employed in the process of bank ‘money’ creation?

Interestingly, the correct word is itself a triadic word; one in three and three in one.

Promise-to-Pay.

Or, to use the correct legal term employed by the ‘money’ creators, a Promissory Note (ie, promise-ory). In layman’s terms, an I-Owe-You (“IOU”).

If you have read my earlier essay, you will recall that we went through the double entry process step by step, demonstrating that it is precisely represented by the Double Triangle of Solomon.

Let us review that process symbolically once again, but this time, with a more precise, and complete word definition included. That is to say, we will now include the triadic word (“IOU”) that signifies the unity of the “two things which resemble one another”the two apparent oppositesthat are being created. We will also include the word that signifies the identity of the person issuing the IOU.

When you go to the bank to borrow money, the first critical step is the forming of an agreement – the loan contract:

The contract says, in essence, that the bank promises-to-pay (IOU) a number of Dollars, Euros, or Pounds (the “principal” of the loan), in exchange for your promise-to-pay (IOU) the bank the same (“principal”) number of Dollars, Euros or Pounds back again …

… plus “interest” (usury):

From your perspective as the borrower, on the one (right) hand your IOU to the bank is your Liability – you are going to have to discharge that liability, by paying the bank in future. On the other (left) hand, the bank’s IOU to you is your Asset – when the bank discharges its liability to you, you will have ‘money’ to spend:

Borrower-transformation-IOU

 

Likewise, from the bank’s perspective, their IOU to you is their Liability, and your IOU to them is their Asset:

Lender-transformation-IOU

 

When the loan contracta binding legal documentis signed by both parties, the Sacred Marriage or Divine Union between the male (phallic △) principle (the Lender), and the female (vulva ▽) principle (the Borrower) is ready to be consummated.8

LOAN-STAR-transformation-IOUs - $

 

It behooves one to draw attention to the obvious anthropomorphic metaphor here: the Borrower is about to get ****** by the Lender.

As we can now see, by carefully defining what is the true substance, and not just the magickal form of words used, the Above does indeed match the Below. The legal substance (an IOU) and its numerical value (the principal amount) is identical, as is the identity (person) who “owes” on either side. Only the word form (and thus, the word value, or meaning) is transformed, by inversion:

LOAN-STAR-transformation-IOUs - $-As Above

 

Now, consider carefully that it is the Lender (male △ identity) IOU that appears in its inverse reflections “As above, so Below” on the Left hand side, while the Borrower (female ▽ identity) IOU appears on the Right hand side.

Eliphas Lévi informs us that (bold and italicised emphasis added):

The primeval sages, when seeking the First of Causes, beheld good and evil in the world; they considered the shadow and the light; they compared winter with spring, age with youth, life with death, and their conclusion was this: The First Cause is beneficent and severe; it gives and takes away life. Then are there two contrary principles, the one good and the other evil, exclaimed the disciples of Manes. No, the two principles of universal equilibrium are not contrary, although contrasted in appearance, for a singular wisdom opposes one to another. Good is on the right, evil on the left, but the supreme excellence is above both, applying evil to the victory of good and good to the amendment of evil.9

 

It is apparent then, that the Hermetic-Kabbalist creators of the Venetian method of double-entry bookkeeping have also inverted the traditional correspondence of Good with the Right hand side, and Evil with the Left hand side. In double entry, the rule of law (pun meaningfully intended) is reversed – Assets (“in the black“) are shown on the Left, and Liabilities (“in the red“) on the Right:

If the stunned exclamation “Holy ****!” leapt to your lips in the watching of that video, then you might well be forgiven.

Why so?

Because you are more near to right than you know.

This formalised inversion of values can be traced back to the ancient Semitic empires of Mesopotamia, and the cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, goddess of Love and War, the “Queen of Heaven” (all parentheses in original; bold and italicised emphasis added):

Central to the goddess as paradox is her well-attested psychological and more rarely evidenced physiological androgyny. Inanna-Ishtar is both female and male. Over and over again the texts juxtapose the masculine and feminine traits and behavior of the goddess.10

Her androgyny (also) manifests itself ritually in the transvestism of her cultic personnel. The awesome power of the goddess shows itself in the shattering of the human boundary between the sexes: “She (Ishtar) [changes] the right side (male) into the left side (female), she [changes] the left side into the right side, she [turns] a man into a woman, she [turns] a woman into a man, she ador[ns] a man as a woman, she ador[ns] a woman as a man.”11

Sjöberg… discusses the meaning of the transformation implied here. In his opinion, the passage does not suggest “a changing of the sexes when referring to the Inanna-Ishtar cult. The passages refer only to the changing roles of women and men in the cult ceremonies.” … Note the association in Mesopotamia, as elsewhere, of the left side with the female and the right side with the male. On the “pure right” hand and the “impure left” hand, see M. Civil, “Enlil and Ninlil: The Marriage of Sud”…12

Inanna-Ishtar combines male aggressiveness with the force of superabundance of female sexuality. She encompasses the two forms of potential disorder and violencesex and war.13

The most vivid expressions of the goddess’s innate contradictions appear in the following passage:

To run, to escape, to quiet and to pacify are yours, Inanna….
To destroy, to build up, to tear up and to settle are yours, Inanna….
To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna….
Business, great winning, financial loss, deficit are yours, Inanna….
Neglect, careful preparation, to raise the head and to subdue are yours, Inanna….
Slander, untruthful words, to speak inimical (words) (and) to add hostile words are yours, Inanna….
To initiate a quarrel, to joke, to cause smiling, to be base and to be important are yours, Inanna.14

Inanna-Ishtar’s cultic celebrations and cultic personnel above all reflect her anomalousness and liminality. She is, one might say, externalized into unordered, carnivalesque celebration that demonstrates a reaching beyond the normal order of things and the breakdown of norms. The goddess’s festivals are institutionalized license. They celebrate and tolerate disorder. They are occasions when social rules are in abeyance and deviance from norms is articulated. Through symbolic inversion they attack the basic categorical differences between male and female, human and animal, young and old.15

The chief participants and actors in the goddess’s cult are well known by name … Their transvestism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes. … The cultic personnel of the goddess in their costumes, words, and acts had but one goal: “to delight Ishtar’s heart, give themselves up to (otherwise) for[bidden] actions.”16

Inanna_Ishtar-vase

The male prostitutes comb their hair before her….
They decorate the napes of their necks with colored bands….
They gird themselves with the sword belt, the “arm of battle”….
Their right side they decorate with women’s clothing….
Their left side they cover with men’s clothing….
With jump ropes and colored cords they compete before her….

The one who covers the sword with blood, he sprinkles blood….
He pours out blood on the dais of the throne room.16a

Returning then to our account of the monetary Sacred Marriage or Divine Union that is about to be consummated—that is, now that the all-important legal document (the loan contract) has been signedwe are about to discover that another inversion of (word) values is about to take place. This one, far more crucial. And entirely one-sided.

For clarity, and confirmation, we turn to the ground-breaking empirical research of Professor Richard Werner, the Chair in International Banking at Southampton University UK, author of the best-selling book Princes of the Yen, and the must-see documentary of the same name.

From the video lecture at top this essay:

If you go to the bank and you borrow money you sign a loan contractvery crucial. Your signature creates the money supply. Because the banklegallywill consider the loan contract a Promissory Note, and that’s what it’s considered legally, a Promissory Noteand the bank purchases this contract. That’s what they do; they purchase the loan contract. Now, they owe you money. You say ‘I don’t care about the mechanics, give me the money’. The banker will say, ‘We’ll put it in your account. You’ll find it in your bank account’. Well, what is a bank account? It is not a deposit. What is it? It is a record of the bank’s debt to the public; it is a record of the bank’s debt to the new borrower, and they’ll show you the record of how much money they owe you. That’s it. They don’t pay up.17

 

In other words, the Lenderthe male (phallic △) principledoes not discharge his Sacred Marital (legal) obligation to the Borrower, the female (vulva ▽) principle.

‘Our’ monetary system is really an Un-holy ****”.

It is an anthropomorphic metaphor for the ancient alchemical practice of coitus reservatusan andocentric, misogynist, predatory ritual magick system for the acquisition, manipulation, transformation, and domination of the female power18 principle of fertility or fecundity (i.e., the power to create abundant new life)applied to the realm of ‘money’ creation. The Lender chooses not to discharge his ‘essence’ (substance) or ‘seed’ (the “principal”) that he is obligated to give her, in exchange for her promise to repay him with her “firstborn” (monetary) “child”; the “first fruits” of her “labour”.

Bernard Lietaer and Rivkah Harris (respectively) explain:

Essentially, to pay back interest on a loan requires using someone else’s principal.  In other words, not creating the money to pay interest is the device used to generate the scarcity necessary for a bank-debt monetary system to function.  It forces people to compete with each other for money that was never created19

Play (mēlulu) is an integral part of Inanna-Ishtar’s personality… her playground was the battleground: “Goddess of fights, let the battle proceed like the play of puppets.” .. “Ishtar, whose play is fighting.”20

 

Now that the Borrower has naïvely signed up for her legal obligation to him, the Lender engages in a willful act of deception; he inverts the meaning of the words used to define his own legal obligation to her.

If you will forgive a little wordplay, well might ‘our’ monetary system be called “Malice in Numberland”.

Professor Werner has demonstrated how this is done in his superb research paper, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking.

For our purposes here I have taken the liberty of excerpting from the Conclusion of the professor’s paper, and inserting the relevant tables (my bold and italicised emphasis added):

The act of signing the loan contract and purchasing it as a promissory note of the borrower without yet making the borrowed funds available to the borrower (Step 1) has the same accounting implications for banks, non-banks and non-financial corporations alike. In all cases, the balance sheets lengthen, as an asset (the loan contract) is acquired and a liability to make money available to the borrower is incurred (accounts payable).21

Screen Shot 2016-04-09 at 5.24.35 PM

In Step 2, the lender makes the funds available to the borrower. The fact that in Step 2 the bank is alone among firms in showing the same total impact on assets and liabilities as everyone else at Step 1, when the money had not yet been made available to the borrower, demonstrates that the bank did not actually make any money available to the borrower. This means that the bank still has an open ‘accounts payable’ liability, as it has not in fact discharged its original liability. What banks do is to simply reclassify their accounts payable items arising from the act of lending as ‘customer deposits’, and the general public, when receiving payment in the form of a transfer of bank deposits, believes that a form of money had been paid into the bank. As a result, the public readily accepts such ‘bank deposits’ and their ‘transfers’ to defray payments. They are also the main component of the official ‘money supply’ as announced by central banks (M1, M2, M3, M4), which is created almost entirely through this act of re-classifying banks’ accounts payable as fictitious ‘customer deposits’.22

Screen Shot 2016-04-09 at 5.24.57 PM

This one-sided inversion of (word) values appears like this when depicted in its Hermetic-Kabbalist symbolic form:

LOAN-STAR-transformation-IOUs - $- Acct Payable copy

 

As you can see, the ‘money’-Lender sex magiciansfor all practical intents and purposestransform their own Liability (“AC Payable”) into a fictitious “Client Deposit” (that is, as seen by the Borrower), through the power of authoritative opinion, repeated ad infinitum.

It is worth recalling Eliphas Lévi here (bold and italicised emphasis added):

In vulgar opinion, transmutations and metamorphoses have always been the very essence of magic. Now, the crowd, being the echo of opinion, which is queen of the world, is never perfectly right nor entirely wrong. Magic really changes the nature of things, or, rather, modifies their appearances at pleasure, according to the strength of the operator’s will … Speech creates its form, and when a person, held infallible, confers a name upon a given thing, he really transforms that thing into the substance signified by the name. The masterpiece of speech and of faith, in this order, is the real transmutation of a substance without change in its appearances.

 

This magick power of speech to create form, and to (apparently) transform the substance of a thing simply by conferring a (different) name on it, is only the more pertinent in light of the recent release of the Panama Papers, allegedly containing evidence of tax avoidance (both legal, and illegal) practiced by wealthy individuals and public officials, through their lawyers and accountants, via offshore company entities.

How so?

In yet another inversion of word values (meaning), there is a formal accounting principle called “Substance over form” that enables precisely the kinds of legal obfuscation adopted by these individuals in moving their wealth offshore … and that banks perform in the magickal transformation of their “accounts payable” obligations (bold and italicised emphasis added):

Substance over form is an accounting principle which recognizes that business transactions should be accounted in accordance with their (economic) substance instead of their (legal) form. Economic substance refers to the underlying economic or commercial purpose of a business transaction apart from its legal or tax considerations. Legal form refers to interpretation of a business transaction in accordance with the applicable business laws.

While accounting for business transactions and other events, substance over form principle requires accountants to measure and present the economic impact of an event instead of its legal form. …

Substance over form principle is recognized by all major financial reporting frameworks, namely the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and US GAAP, etc. External auditors are required to attest that companies recognize all business transactions in compliance with the substance over form concept.23

 

In accounting then, the legal definition of a transaction is not considered its substance; it is now only its form, is open to interpretation, and, most importantly, is to be considered only apart from and secondary to the (claimed) “purpose”. The ‘substance’ will now be whatever the accountant (or banker) claims the purpose of the transaction to be.

Since the economic purpose of a bank’s “accounts payable” item is to provide the customer with ‘money’, then according to this barefaced inversion of logic, reason, and morality, it is standard accounting practice for the bank to re-enter (transform) and record its “accounts payable” item as a “customer deposit”, even though the true substance of that item remains, both legally, and from the bank’s own perspective, a Liability (IOU) of the bank!

LOAN-STAR-transformation-IOUs - $- Acct Payable copy
 

As we saw in my previous essay, the Venetian method of double-entry bookkeeping was developed as a tool for the deliberate concealment of illegal (and immoral) practices. So perhaps the “substance over form” example of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) should come as no great surprise.

It is important not to lose sight of the fact that it is not only through the speech of an authority “held infallible” that such a transformation becomes ‘real’ – it is also through the ceaseless repetition of those magick words over generations.

Eliphas Lévi explains (italicised emphasis added):

Had Apollonius [of Tyana] offered a cup of wine to his disciples, and said to them: “This is my blood, of which ye shall drink henceforth to perpetuate my life within you;” and had his disciples through centuries believed that they continued the transformation by repeating the same words; had they taken the wine, despite its odour and taste, for the real, human, and living blood of Apollonius, we should have to acknowledge this master in theurgy as the most accomplished of enchanters and most potent of all the magi. It would remain for us then to adore him.24

M. de Montalembert seriously relates, in his legend of St Elizabeth of Hungary, how one day this saintly lady, surprised by her noble husband, from whom she sought to conceal her good works, in the act of carrying bread to the poor in her apron, told him that she was carrying roses, and it proved on investigation that she had spoken truly; the loaves had been changed into roses. This story is a most gracious magical apologue, and signifies that the truly wise man cannot lie, that the word of wisdom determines the form of things, or even their substance independently of their forms. Why, for example, should not the noble spouse of St Elizabeth, a good and firm Christian like herself, and believing implicitly in the real presence of the Saviour in true human body upon an altar where he beheld only a wheaten host, why should he not believe in the real presence of roses in his wife’s apron under the appearances of bread? She exhibited him loaves undoubtedly, but as she had said that they were roses, and as he believed her incapable of the smallest falsehood, he saw and wished to see roses only. This is the secret of the miracle.25

 

Let us indulge ourselves in a small act of transformation of our own, replacing the forms and identities in the words of Lévi’s tale with those of our present subject:

Why, for example, should not the noble client of St Goldman, a good and firm Christian like himself … why should she not believe in the real presence of money in her bank account under the appearances of a promissory record? He exhibited her a record of the promise undoubtedly, but as he had said that it was money, and as she believed him incapable of the smallest falsehood, she saw and wished to see money only. This is the secret of the miracle.

 

What all this means of course, is that for several hundreds of years (yes, literally), we have all like sheep been led astray.

That is to say, we have been led to believe a lie.

All of the ‘money’ that we believe ourselves to own, and that we circulate daily among ourselves in payment for goods, services, and investments, is neither ‘money’ in true substance, nor are we the owners of it.

The reality of the system is this. Bankers create IOUs out of nothing. These digital tokens represent our IOU to the bank. Then—by a clever accounting trick—they let us borrow their IOUs as ‘money’.

Begging the question – why don’t we all do the same thing, and just lend to ourselves?*

It also begs the question of how it is that the ‘money’ magicians have been able to perpetuate this colossal deception for so long, without being discovered and called to account.

Eliphas Lévi explains:

To become invisible one of three things is necessary—the interposition of some opaque medium between the light and our body, or between our body and the eyes of the spectators, or the fascination of the eyes of the spectators in such a manner that they cannot make use of their sight. Of these methods, the third only is magical. Have we not all of us observed that under the government of a strong preoccupation we look without seeing and hurt ourselves against objects in front of us?26

The secret of invisibility, therefore, wholly consists in a power which is capable of definition—that of distracting or paralysing attention, so that the light reaches the visual organ without impressing the eye of the soul. To exercise this power we must possess a will accustomed to sudden and energetic actions, great presence of mind, and skill no less great in causing diversions among the crowd. Let a man, for example, who is being pursued by his intending murderers, dart into a side street, return immediately, and advance with perfect calmness towards his pursuers, or let him mix with them and seem to be engaged in the chase, and he will certainly make himself invisible. A priest who was being hunted in ’93, with the intention of hanging him from a lamp-post, fled down a side street, assumed a stooping gait, and leaned against a corner, with an intensely preoccupied expression; the crowd of his enemies swept past; not one saw him, or, rather, it never struck anyone to recognise him; it was so unlikely to be he!27

 

There are a variety of words and phrases that come to mind as being apropos to describe this phenomenon.

But perhaps the most apropos word of all would be this.

Chutzpah.

 

* You may be interested to discover an alternate currency ecosystem concept of my own design, that can enable everyone to do this – to be their own central banker. Visit deror.org

*****

ADDENDUM:

I am presently writing a book on the thesis outlined in this, and my earlier essay. As we have seen, the core concepts are traceable right back to the ancient Semitic cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, the “Queen of Heaven”. Of particular interest is the evidences for widespread regional use of magickal talismans and erotic plaques placed at thresholds (eg, doorways, windows) to sexually attract and “bind” prosperity demons:

Source: Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period, Assante. J, (2002)

Source: Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period, Assante. J, (2002)

 

Source: Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period, Assante. J, (2002)

Source: Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period, Assante. J, (2002)

 

If you would be interested in receiving notification upon the book’s completion and publication, please feel free to drop me a line using the contact form at deror.org

 

UPDATE 21/4/2016

Added quotation (footnote 16a) plus video clip “The male prostitutes..decorate the napes of their necks with colored bands”

 

****

[1] Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896), p. 282

[2] John Bartlett, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature, 17th ed. (2002)

[3] Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896), p. 44

[4] ibid, p. xxi

[5] “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of one” – Hermes Trismegistus, The Emerald Tablet, translation by Jabir ibn Hayyan, (Holmyard 1923: 562.)

[6] Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896), p. 38

[7] ibid, p. 44

[8] Julia Assante, Sex, Magic, and the Liminal Body in the Erotic Art and Texts of the Old Babylonian Period (2002)

[9] Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896), p. 46

[10] Rivkah Harris, Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and the Coincidence of Opposites, History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), p. 268

[11] ibid., p. 270

[12] ibid., p. 270 n. 48

[13] ibid., p. 270

[14] ibid., p. 265

[15] ibid., p. 273

[16] ibid., p. 276-277

[16a] ibid., p. 276, cf. n. 83 – DD. Reisman, “Iddin-Dagan’s Sacred Marriage Hymn,” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 25 (1973): 187:45-64

[17] Victor and Victoria Trimondi, The Shadow of the Dalai Lama: Sexuality, Magic and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism (2003)

[18] Richard A. Werner, “To a new understanding of the function of the banking sector: the mechanism of productive credit creation and quantitative easing”, presentation to the Russian Academy of Sciences, round table “Anti-crisis fiscal policy of the state in the interests of economic development of Russia” (2015)

[19] Bernard Lietaer and Jacquie Dunne, Rethinking Money, (2013), p. 39

[20] Rivkah Harris, Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and the Coincidence of Opposites, History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), p. 274

[21] Richard A. Werner, How do banks create money, and why can other firms not do the same? An explanation for the coexistence of lending and deposit-taking (2014)

[22] ibid.

[23] AccountingExplained.com, Substance Over Form (11 April, 2016, 8:39pm AEST)

[24] Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (1896), p. 282

[25] ibid, pp. 286-287

[26] ibid, p. 284

[27] ibid, pp. 285-286

Standard
Time

On Principal And Interest, Hermetic Magick, And The Lords of Time

 

“I would like to continue with an examination of Time. From the moment we enter this life we are in the flow of it. We measure it and we mark it. But we cannot defy it. We cannot even speed it up or, slow it down. Or can we?”

– Eisenheim, The Illusionist

Time. The Fourth Dimension. The Universal Agent.

Imagine having the power to control Time.  To manipulate Time.  To become its master.  Instead of feeling like a slave to Time, imagine what you might do, if you had the power to make Time work for you?

Men have always dreamed of possessing this power.  In 15th century Italy, the discovery of mysterious ancient documents in Byzantium finally made it possible.

Today, we often speak of the value of “our time”.  We speak of “spending time”, and “buying time”.  But in truth, it is not “our” time at all.

Throughout the world, our Time is controlled, manipulated and directed, by ‘Masters of the Universe’.  Men who are adepts in these ancient secrets, and have the power to make “our” Time work for them.

They are the bookkeepers.  The men who keep score.  And just as it is said of the game of golf that “a good scorer can always beat a good player”, so it is with the mystical, magical art of double-entry bookkeeping.

 

“For every debit there must be a credit, and for every credit there must be a debit” – Alas!  How few consider that if this must be the case, the rule to go by, nothing is more easy than to make a set of books wear the appearance of correctness, which at the same time is full of errors, or of false entries, made on purpose to deceive!1

 

When the “Father of the Renaissance”, a humanist scholar, priest, and astrologer by the name of Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum from Greek into Latin, he could not have known that his labour would, in time, condemn most of humanity to slave labour for the Lords of Time.

Bust of Ficino by Andrea Ferrucci in Florence Cathedral (Source: Wikipedia)

Bust of Ficino by Andrea Ferrucci in Florence Cathedral (Source: Wikipedia)

Ficino’s lifelong patron was Cosimo de Medici, scion of the famous Italian merchant banking dynasty, and ruler of the Florentine Republic.  His circle of friends included the greatest philosophers, mathematicians, and elite movers-and-shakers in the Western world.  They now had in their hands the ancient secrets of Hermes Trismegistus, the “Thrice-Greatest”.

Hermes Trismegistus, floor mosaic in the Cathedral of Siena (Source: Wikipedia)

Hermes Trismegistus, floor mosaic in the Cathedral of Siena (Source: Wikipedia)

Starting at the Medici-sponsored Platonic Academy headed by Ficino, the rediscovered Hermetic secret knowledge would light the imaginative fires of the principal scholars, philosophers, and financiers of the Renaissance — also known as the “Hermetic Reformation”2.  It would influence the mind of a monk, magician, mathematician, the Father of Accounting and the man who wrote the seminal book on double-entry bookkeeping, Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli, the “constant companion of Leonardo da Vinci”3. And in a grand syncretism with Neo-Platonism and Jewish Kabbalah, conjured up and expounded by fellow Renaissance men such as Pico della Mirandola (900 Theses), Johannes Reuchlin (De Arte Cabbalistica), and Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres), it would spread throughout the western world, deeply embedded in commerce and banking, the arts and sciences, social philosophy, ethics and morality.  It would change the course of human history (bold and italicised emphasis added):

Our modern urge to measure everything dates back to the late Middle Ages when a “radical change of perception” took place in which mathematics, Venetian bookkeeping, and Luca Pacioli played a key role.  Historian Alfred W. Crosby explains this “radical change”:

‘In practical terms the new approach was simply this: reduce what you are trying to think about to the minimum required by its definition; visualise it on paper, or at least in your mind … and divide it, either in fact or in imagination, into equal quanta.  Then you can measure it, that is, count the quanta.’

And once you can measure something, then you have a quantitative or numerical representation of your subject which you can manipulate and experiment with, no matter how great its errors or omissions.  Such data can acquire an apparent independence from its human creators and, when fed into a twenty-first century computer model, an authority that appears irrefutable.4

Portrait of Luca Pacioli, traditionally attributed to Jacopo de' Barbari, 1495 (Source: Wikipedia)

Portrait of Luca Pacioli, traditionally attributed to Jacopo de’ Barbari, 1495 (Source: Wikipedia)

Now, it is well worth our time to pause for a moment in our journey through past time, to consider the identity of Hermes Trismegistus.  Today, he is considered to be a syncretism of the Greek god Hermes, and the Egyptian god Thoth.  The Greeks considered Hermes to be the god of boundaries and transitions – in particular, the transition to the after-life.  He was also the god of commerce, travel, the patron of thieves and orators, and a cunning trickster who outwits other gods for his own satisfaction.  The Greeks equated him with the Egyptian god Thoth, who shared similar attributes.  Thoth was seen by the Egyptians as the god who maintained the universe, the mediator in disputes between good and evil.  He was the god of equilibrium, who unified or balanced the opposites.  Importantly, in both of their respective cultures, Hermes and Thoth were the gods of writing, and magic.

The more astute reader, and in particular, the reader who has a grasp of the Duality Principle of double-entry bookkeeping — “for every credit there must be an equal debit” — may already be seeing a little light dawning in a corner of their mind.

Ficino and his influential friends at the Medicean court were to discover in the Corpus Hermeticum and in Kabbalah Ma’asit (“practical Kabbalah”) the secrets to controlling Time, the Universal Agent.  At the heart of Hermetic teachings was the idea that man could influence or even control the forces of nature.  To do so, one needed to master the “Three Parts of the Wisdom of the Whole Universe”.  One of these parts, along with Astrology and Theurgy, was the magical art of Alchemy. Similarly, at the heart of Kabbalistic theurgy was the idea that man could magically invoke the creative or Life force — using esoteric knowledge of divine language and writing — for personal advantage in this world.

As with double-entry bookkeeping — and similarly, the dark art of keeping two sets of books — the magic of Alchemy involves a dual aspect or dual nature.  In its esoteric (inner) doctrine, it is the work of spiritual purification; a transformation of common impure man, into pure and perfect Man.  In its exoteric (outer) doctrine, it is the notion that man can transform common “impure” metals into pure gold, through the discovery and mastery of the “Universal Solvent”.

The magic of Hermeticism, with its emphasis on practical experimentation to discover and control the forces of nature, would have a powerful effect on the greatest scientific minds (such as Isaac Newton) for centuries to come.  At the same time, its intrinsic get-rich-quick appeal would pose a constant attraction for over-indebted kings and princes — and for too-big-to-fail international bankers such as the Medici, whose compound interest-bearing loans the princes of Europe could not repay without borrowing even more.

The Emerald Tablet, a key text of Western Alchemy, in a 17th-century edition (Source: Wikipedia)

The Emerald Tablet, a key text of Western Alchemy, in a 17th-century edition (Source: Wikipedia)

Some four hundred years later, a great revival of spiritualism and the magick arts swept over Europe during the late nineteenth through early twentieth centuries.  It is from this time, in the writings of adepts such as the famous occultists Aleister Crowley and Eliphas Lévi, that we can see clearly stated the most fundamental principles of Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick.

As we will see, they are precisely the same principles that form the basic rules of double-entry bookkeeping. Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick has been carried down from the Hermetic Reformation of the 15th century to our time, deeply embedded at the very core of all economic and social life; in commerce, economic theory, the fundamentals of capitalism, and banking.

The Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick principle of double perception is embedded at the core of the money system itself.  In the very act of ex nihilo (“out of nothing”) creation of “our” money in the form of loans — using nothing more “real” than electronic double-entry bookkeeping — bankers enjoy the power of creator gods, employing “divine” magick principles in writing and language to harness the force of Time, transforming it into wealth for themselves.

“Money” created by bankers is simply the symbolic, written expression of this double perception. Each Dollar, Euro, or Pound created as a new loan magically appears (to the borrower) as both a debt (Liability) that must be repaid plus interest to the bank, and simultaneously, a credit (Asset) that the borrower can spend.

Borrower-CC_DE

At the same time, to the bank that very same Dollar, Euro, or Pound magically appears as both an Asset (money that must be repaid by the borrower), and, a Liability too, because the bank must make it available to the borrower to spend.

Lender-CC_DE

This is the embodiment of the Kabbalistic concept of achdut hashvaah (“Unity of Opposites”) — (bold emphasis added):

The coincidence of opposites that characterizes God, humanity and the world can be approximately understood by the simultaneous adoption of two points of view. As put by the founder of the Chabad movement, Schneur Zalman of Lyadi (1745-1813):

(Looking) upwards from below, as it appears to eyes of flesh, the tangible world seems to be Yesh and a thing, while spirituality, which is above, is an aspect of Ayin (nothingness). (But looking) downwards from above the world is an aspect of Ayin, and everything which is linked downwards and descends lower and lower is more and more Ayin and is considered as naught truly as nothing and null.5

LOAN-STAR-CC_DE

When viewed from this Kabbalistic “higher” logic perspective, the mathematical expression “-1 = +1” is actually true; an object and its exact opposite are seen to be one and the same thing. A single unit of “money” is both credit and debit, liability and asset; it just depends on whose perspective it is seen from. But all things balance themselves out, when viewed from the hidden “All-Seeing Eye” perspective of the divine nothingness or Ein Sof. Each number is created from the same central number (“0”); the space “0” between -1 and +1 is exactly “1” from either side, and so each cancels out the other:

When it arose within Ein-sof (the Infinite) to weave Yesh (Something) from its Ayin (Nothing), Ein-sof performed an act of Tzimtzum, contracting and concealing itself from a point, thereby forming a central, metaphysical void. It is in this void that the Primordial Man, Adam Kadmon, and all the countless Worlds (Olamot) emerge.6

LOAN-STAR-1s-CC_DE

In the cryptic, mystical language of Hermetic-Kabbalistic magick, Aleister Crowley, the man once dubbed “The Most Wicked Man In The World”, explains the fundamentals of Magick In Theory And Practice (bold emphasis added):

…the object of any magick ceremony is to unite the Macrocosm and the Microcosm.

It is as in optics; the angles of incidence and reflection are equal.  You must get your Macrocosm and Microcosm exactly balanced, vertically and horizontally, or the images will not coincide.

This equilibrium is affirmed by the magician in arranging the Temple.  Nothing must be lop-sided.  If you have anything in the North, you must put something equal and opposite to it in the South.  The importance of this is so great, and the truth of it so obvious, that no one with the most mediocre capacity for magick can tolerate any unbalanced object for a moment.  His instinct instantly revolts.

…the arrangement of the weapons of the altar must be such that they “look” balanced

…And however little he move to the right, let him balance it by an equivalent movement to the left; or if forwards, backwards; and let him correct each idea by implying the contradictory contained therein.

let him show the basis of that Stability to be constant change, just as the stability of a molecule is secured by the momentum of the swift atoms contained in it.

In this way let every idea go forth as a triangle on the base of two opposites, making an apex transcending their contradiction in a higher harmony.

It is not safe to use any thought in Magick, unless that thought has been thus equilibrated and destroyed.7

 

In his magnum opus Transcendental Magic, French occultist Eliphas Lévi explains that:

There exists in Nature a force which is immeasurably more powerful than steam, and a single man, who is able to adapt and direct it, might change thereby the face of the whole world.  This force was known to the ancients; it consists in a Universal Agent having equilibrium for its supreme law, while its direction is concerned immediately with the Great Arcanum of Transcendental Magic. … This agent… is precisely that which the adepts of the Middle Ages denominated the First Matter of the Great Work.8

Now the ancients, observing that equilibrium is the universal law in physics, and is consequent on the apparent opposition of two forces, argued from physical to metaphysical equilibrium, and maintained that in God, that is, in the First Living and Active Cause, there must be recognized two properties which are necessary to each other—stability and motion, necessity and liberty, rational order and volitional autonomy, justice and love, whence also severity and mercy.  And these two attributes were personified, so to speak, by the kabalistic Jews under the names of GEBURAH and CHESED.9

 

Lévi says that to gain control over the “Great Magical Agent”, one must learn how to use the alchemical formula of opposites, “Solve et Coagula” (SOLVE, to dissolve, to project, to move; and COAGULA, to coagulate, to concentrate, to fix):

The Great Magical Agent, by us termed the Astral Light, …this occult, unique and indubitable force, is the key of all empire, the secret of all power. … To know how to make use of this Agent is to be the trustee of God’s own power; all real, effective Magic, all occult force is there, and its demonstration is the sole end of all genuine books of science.  To have control over the Great Magical Agent there are two operations necessary — to concentrate and project, or, in other words, to fix and to move.10

 

Who can fail to see here, hidden in plain sight, the distilled essence, the Philosopher’s Stone, the whole alchemical formulation of double-entry bookkeeping?

The adept takes every single “common” transaction, and on entering it into his books, he first dissolves it (SOLVE) into a pair of opposites (debit entry and credit entry).

 

TRANSACTION-CC

 

When it comes time to determine his Profits — and in turn, his total wealth or Capital — he “coagulates” (COAGULA) all of the entries in each of two columns (DR and CR) into a single number.

 

PROFIT-LOSS-CC

 

This then, is the apex of the triangle, the “higher harmony” of the “base of two opposites”, “transcending their contradiction”.

 

Seal of Solomon, front page of Eliphas Lévi's 'Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual' (Source: Wikipedia)

Seal of Solomon; front page of Eliphas Lévi’s ‘Transcendental Magic, its Doctrine and Ritual’ (Source: Wikipedia)

 

Eliphas Lévi tells us plainly that the purpose of the Great Work is to gain control over one’s future; that is to say, to gain control of Time itself:

The Great Work is, before all things, the creation of man by himself, that is to say, the full and entire conquest of his faculties and his future; it is especially the perfect emancipation of his will, assuring him… full power over the Universal Magical Agent.11

For the man who is greedy for gain, who sees financial wealth as the secret to a long and happy life, the possession of money is the means to attain “the full and entire conquest of his…future”.  He can transform himself from a pauper into a prince — “the creation of man by himself” — and become a “self-made man”.

How so?

Money is the means of controlling Time.  By lending his money at compound interest, the skillful adept increases his wealth, without risking his health through manual labour.  His little pile of wealth (“capital”) grows inexorably, compounding into an ever larger pile over time.  Just as in Eisenheim’s great illusion of the Orange Tree, the “seed” which was taken by dividing a single orange into two equal parts, grows at a speed which defies Time, “producing” even more golden fruit – fruit that the magician assures us is “quite real”.

This wondrous power is all thanks to the magic of what has been called “the greatest mathematical discovery of all time” and “the most powerful force in the universe” — compound interest.

But in a classic example of circular reasoning, the alchemical wizard’s “right” to charge compound interest is all thanks to a cunning rhetorical device (remember, Hermes was the god of oratory) — the so-called “Time value” of money.

 

Money, wrote [Luca Pacioli’s mentor, Leon Battista] Alberti in the 1430s, is “the root of all things”: “with money one can have a town house or a villa; and all the trades and craftsmen will toil like servants for the man who has money. He who has none goes without everything, and money is required for every purpose.” As historian Fernand Braudel argues, something new enters European consciousness in Alberti’s writing – along with his celebration of money went thriftiness and a concern with the value of time12

 

This clever sophistry of the “Time value of money” has its origin in one of the greatest moral arguments of all time; whether the charging of interest on money (usury) is right, or wrong.

For over 1,000 years the Christian West officially prohibited the practice of charging interest on money (usury).  But in the 15th century, the advocates for usury found themselves equipped with a new box of rhetorical and symbolic tricks with which to convince their audience.  The syncretism of Neo-Platonic, Kabbalistic, and Hermetic philosophies in the Renaissance (“rebirth” in French) resulted in the resurrection of ancient Greco-Roman paganism.  With it came an individualistic, “Me”-centred rather than “God”-centred worldview, with all-pervading emphasis on rationalism, and numerical calculation.  In particular, the calculation of profit (bold emphasis added):

[German economist Werner Sombart] says that by enabling a numerical, monetary (and hence, in his view, “rational”) calculation of profit, double-entry bookkeeping provided the basis on which commerce could be seen as a process of acquisition: as an unending, systematic pursuit of profit.13

Like Sombart, [Max] Weber argues that double entry is significant because it makes possible an abstract measure of income and expenses – and therefore enables the calculation of profit, the key component of capitalistic business practice.14

The economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) also traces the development of capitalism back to double-entry bookkeeping. … Schumpeter says that capitalism adds a new edge to rationality by “exalting the monetary unit – not itself a creation of capitalism – into a unit of account.  That is to say, capitalist practice turns the unit of account into a tool of rational cost-profit calculations, of which the towering monument is double-entry bookkeeping.”  In his view, double entry’s “cost-profit calculus” drives capitalist enterprise – and then spreads throughout the whole culture: “And thus defined and quantified for the economic sector, this type of logic or attitude or method then starts upon its conqueror’s career subjugating – rationalizing – man’s tools and philosophies, his medical practice, his picture of the cosmos, his outlook on life, everything in fact including his concepts of beauty and justice and his spiritual ambitions.”  For Schumpeter, capitalism “generates a formal spirit of critique where the good, the true and the beautiful no longer are honoured; only the useful remains – and that is determined solely by the critical spirit of the accountant’s cost-benefit calculation”.15

 

Double-entry bookkeeping would then, as now, serve the purpose not only of helping the merchant calculate his profits.  It would enable the merchant to “prove” that his profit-making was legitimate; that is to say, in context of the times, that he had not been practicing usury in violation of the Church’s official prohibition (bold emphasis added):

[Luca] Pacioli advises merchants to incorporate explicit signs of Christianity into their books as a way of legitimising their profit-seeking activities.  The use of double entry itself was like the Catholic confession: if a merchant confessed – or accounted for – all his worldly activities before God, then perhaps his sins would be absolved.16

This notion of ‘good’ bookkeeping was soon extended to the point that the use of double entry was seen to confer moral legitimacy on a merchant’s work.  As Pacioli had, Hugh Oldcastle encouraged merchants to use their account books as a space in which to invoke God.  He wrote in 1588: “it behoveth him [the merchant] first in all his workes and business to call to minde the name of God in all such writings, or in any other reckonings, that he shall beginne.”  The first cashbook of the Bank of England, established in 1694, opens with ‘Laus Deo‘ – ‘Praise God’.  As we saw with the merchants of Prato and with Pacioli, such appeals to God were a common feature of the earliest double-entry books and in some parts of Europe continued until the eighteenth century: through the exactitude of their earthly accounting, merchants hoped to gain divine approval in God’s heavenly accounts.17

If you are a businessman concerned with the morality of making a profit, then keeping the fullest possible set of accounts is a bit like confessing your sins.

Even if you are doing something morally suspect, at least you are making a clean breast of it.18

Indeed exactly because accountancy looks like a dry, value-free activity, it can be used as a kind of moral laundry.

When the Nazis stole the personal property of Europe’s Jews, Himmler insisted that all the looted property be meticulously accounted for.

By enforcing stringent accounting, he argued that “in carrying out this most difficult of tasks… we have suffered no harm to our inner being, our soul, our character.” Theft was transformed into book-
keeping.19

 

For an enormously successful usurer like Cosimo de Medici, who had the rare quality for a banker of suffering from a guilty conscience20, the matter of having one’s sins absolved had a profound importance.  At that time, the only way to be absolved of the mortal sin of usury, and so be assured of a transition to Heaven in the after-life (hello Hermes/Thoth), was by making full restitution of all one’s ill-gotten gains.  This meant, of course, that you could not pass on your wealth to your heirs; if you failed to make restitution before death, then in order to set you free from purgatory, your heirs would have to make restitution of all your usurious gains on your behalf:

Giovanni di Bicci de Medici, founder of the Medici Bank and Cosimo de Medici’s father … died intestate because in making out a will “he would have denounced himself as a usurer and might have caused considerable trouble for his heirs.”  This practice had become a Medici family tradition, which Cosimo, Giovanni’s son would continue.21

Cosimo de Medici, Portrait by Bronzino (Source: Wikipedia)

Cosimo de Medici, Portrait by Bronzino (Source: Wikipedia)

The popularisation of double-entry bookkeeping in the Medici’s time offered another profoundly important benefit.  It gave the merchant a way to “rationally” justify all of his “costs” — including the “costs” he perceives himself to have suffered, in extending (lending) “credit” to customers.

This would prove crucial in context of the historical argument on usury.  Then, as now, those who argued in favour of usury have claimed that a man who lends his money to another has a moral right to be compensated for a wholly imaginary expense — the “opportunity cost” of his not being able to use the money he loaned out, to earn more money in some other way.

The “logic” of this argument for charging interest rests on an arrogant presumption — that the lender is certain of earning a “return” in that “other way”, and therefore, he must certainly be suffering a “cost” of lost “opportunity” to “earn”, if he lends his money out instead.

The unstated notion here, of course, is that, one way or another, the owner of money must always receive even more money.  Gimme gimme gimme, more more moar!

It is on the foundation of this sophistry of an imaginary “opportunity cost” suffered by the money-lender — and “proven” to be real simply by writing it into his double-entry accounting books — that an even greater sophistry is built — that of the Time Value of Money.

In a 1991 paper on accounting and rhetoric, Bruce G. Carruthers and Wendy Nelson Espeland argue that the symbolic language of double-entry bookkeeping is as significant as its technical capabilities … They argue that a double-entry account is not just a piece of neutral information, but also an “account” or story; that accounting is not merely a technical practice, but also a means of framing a set of business transactions with a rhetorical purpose.22

Accounting’s use of numbers gives it an air of scientific rectitude and certitude, and yet fundamental uncertainties lurk at its heart.  Indeed, accounting is as subjective and partial as the art of storytelling, the other meaning of the word “account”.23

 

The illusion – for that is precisely what it is – that money possesses within itself an innate characteristic called “Time value”, is quite simply the greatest public deception of all time.  When the arcane teachings of Hermes Trismegistus were infused and codified in el modo vinegia (“the Venetian method”) of double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century, the twin magic arts of writing and sophistry were woven together to form the material of the magician’s cloak, and the curtain behind which the Wizards of Oz have hidden ever since.24

 

As Jakob Burckhardt, and following him, Frederich Nietzsche, said of the Italian Renaissance, it was a time of sophistic.  The sophistic character of the Renaissance is apparent not simply from its rhetorical perspectives and practices, but in its use of the first sophists as well.25

In an essay published in 1985, the historian James Aho linked double-entry bookkeeping to the ancient art of rhetoric, the rules used to make persuasive arguments perfected by the Roman lawyer and orator Cicero (an art, incidentally, which Aristotle says sprang from a property dispute).  According to this argument, medieval merchants used double-entry bookkeeping as a rhetorical tool of capitalist propaganda, to persuade their ‘audience’ that their business was honest, morally sound and its profit-making justified.

Why would bookkeeping need to persuade?  Because, says Aho, it was used to defend these businesses against the Church’s ban on usury.  The rhetoric of a well-kept ledger argued for the honesty of a business and the legitimacy of its profits, as this advice from 1683 makes clear: “If [the merchant] be fortunate and acquire much, [double entry] directs him the way to Imploy it to the best advantage, if he be unfortunate it satisfies the world of his just dealing, and is the fairest and best Apologie of his Innocence and honesty to the World.”26

 

Today, we are born into a world where the “logic” that money possesses a Time Value seems self-evident.  The idea is so deeply embedded in our individual and collective consciousness, it has become part of our common language.  Everyone knows that “Time is Money”.

This belief that money has an intrinsic Time Value is, however, nothing more than a spectacularly sly, self-serving example of self-interested swindlers successfully selling a self-referential, “self-creating” sophistry.  For over 500 years, its purpose has been to persuade us all that money will certainly earn more money over time; and therefore, money possesses the innate power to earn more money over time; and therefore, the Lords of Time must have the right to charge interest for the use of money lent out, as compensation for their “lost opportunity” (ie, Time) to “earn” more money from their money’s innate power to earn more money.

This first half of the “Time Value of money” circular flow of illogical reasoning has come to be universally accepted, largely because so few pause to consider the unstated second half of the circle, which goes like this:  and therefore, the Lords of Time must also have the right to pay interest (if they wish) to people who deposit money with them for “safe-keeping” (storage), as compensation for their “lost opportunity” to “earn” more money from money’s innate power to earn more money — err, say what now?! — (and whose deposits the Lords of Time can also lend out and charge interest for); and therefore, since it is now firmly established that money deposited with the Lords of Time will earn interest over time, this proves that money will certainly earn more money over time, and therefore money obviously possesses the innate power to earn more money over Time, etc etc, ad infinitum.

In its definition of the Time Value of Money, Investopedia unwittingly lets the cat out of the bag, highlighting this circular reasoning which lies (pun intended) at the dark heart of the grand mystical numberland of finance (bold and italicised emphasis added):

 

DEFINITION OF ‘TIME VALUE OF MONEY – TVM’

The idea that money available at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its potential earning capacity.  This core principle of finance holds that, provided money can earn interest, any amount of money is worth more the sooner it is received.

Everyone knows that money deposited in a savings account will earn interest.  Because of this universal fact, we would prefer to receive money today rather than the same amount in the future.27

 

Clearly then, the circular logic of the supposed Time Value of Money fails, if ever the “universal fact” that “money deposited in a savings account will earn interest” fails.

Like, err, now.

At this present time, so-called “ZIRP” (Zero Interest Rate Policy) and even “NIRP” (Negative Interest Rate Policy) is spreading all over the moribund economies of the Western world.  We now receive zero interest on money deposited in a savings account.  Not only that, in an increasing number of Western countries, the Lords of Time are now charging interest (ie, paying negative interest) on money deposited in a savings account.  Yes, that’s right … if not now, then very soon, they will charge you interest for “holding” money on deposit in the “safe-keeping” of their bank.

Why are they doing this?  As with so many magician’s tricks, the key to successfully pulling off the illusion, is movement.  In the sideshow hustler’s game of Thimblerig or Three Shells and a Pea28, the faster the hustler moves his hands, the more difficult it is to see that he has moved or even pocketed the pea.

 

"The Conjurer," painted by Hieronymus Bosch (between 1496 - 1520). The painting accurately displays a performer doing the cups and balls routine, which has been practiced since Egyptian times. The shell game does have some origins in this old trick. The real trick of this painting is the pickpocket who is working for the conjurer. The pickpocket is robbing the spectator who is bent over. (Source: Wikipedia)

“The Conjurer,” painted by Hieronymus Bosch (between 1496 – 1520). The painting accurately displays a performer doing the cups and balls routine, which has been practiced since Egyptian times. The shell game does have some origins in this old trick. The real trick of this painting is the pickpocket who is working for the conjurer. The pickpocket is robbing the spectator who is bent over. (Source: Wikipedia)

 

In the great alchemical trick of Hermes the Thrice-Greatest and his Latter-Day Saints, this vital movement is called “Flow”, or the “Velocity of the Circulation of Money”.  So long as the flow of money in the economy is fast enough, no one notices that the game is actually rigged.  That is, no one notices that there is insufficient money in the system to pay interest.

This policy of zero (or even negative) interest rates on bank deposits, is all about trying to speed up the flow of money in the economy.  The Lords of Time are hoping that this policy will encourage people to spend (“Flow”), not save (“Stock-pile”) money.

Why?  Because the only way for the Lords of Time to keep on “earning” compound interest on the intergalactic levels of debt that they have lent to the world, is to make the “money” flow fast enough.

The real truth of the Money Illusion is this: If everyone had to settle their debts at the same time, there is always far more money owed, than there is money to pay with.  The game only seems to work fairly and honestly if we only look under one shell at any time, and, if we believe the hustler’s claim that the missing pea really is just hiding under one of the other shells all the time.

In a recent article in Forbes titled “The Principal And Interest On Debt Myth”,29 a modern day mathematician and globally renowned academic economist set out to prove to the now-growing crowd of questioning (and in some cases, hostile) finger-pointers, that we should all just “Move along now, there’s nothing to see here”.

That is to say, he challenged the view that “because banks lend principal, but insist that principal and interest be paid by the debtor, the money supply has to grow continuously to make this possible”.

His proof?

A simple model of a “simplest possible financial system” … based on double-entry bookkeeping:

Screen shot 2015-04-09 at 2.29.53 PM

 

Alas, the accounting fraud-riddled history of double-entry bookkeeping ever since its Western popularisation by Fra Luca Pacioli (and more importantly, by his powerful patrons in the world of money-lending), strongly suggests that a reliance on the “logic” of double entry to “prove” anything with regard to banking, money, debt, and compounding interest, is tantamount to using the casino’s own roulette wheel in an attempt to “prove” that the game of roulette is not rigged in favour of the house.

Or, to return to our shell game analogy, it is tantamount to relying on a sideshow hustler’s own sleight of hand skills to “prove” that the pea you couldn’t see really was under one of those three shells all the time.

It all works fine (for the hustler), whilst ever the “flow” of the hustler’s hands is fast enough to fool the common man.  But if the flow is slowed – in economic terms, by a growing “loss of confidence” in the game, resulting in too many people saving or “hoarding” money (Stability) rather than spending it (Movement) — suddenly the hustle begins to be exposed.  At a slower rate of “flow”, it becomes much more easy to see that the hustler has been pocketing the pea all along.

Happily, the economist writing in Forbes did admit that the money-lenders’ money-shuffling game only works “so long as those flows are large enough”:

Critical Caveat - the RATE of Flow is critical to supporting Steves thesis, that the Interest can be paid out of flows

 

He also admitted that his simple model does not reflect the real world, which “is far more complicated”:

Screen shot 2015-04-09 at 3.21.31 PM

 

He also admitted that it is possible to enter different values for the limited set of parameters he chose for his simple model, that would make his conclusion (that interest can be paid without increasing the money supply) “untenable”:

Screen shot 2015-04-09 at 2.34.30 PM

 

But arguably his most important admission of all was not included in his Forbes article.  Rather, it is on his Twitter account that we find his admission, that it is mathematically impossible for everyone to pay their debts at the same time:

Screen shot 2015-04-09 at 4.09.44 PM

 

In his zeal to disprove the claims of a growing crowd of questioning onlookers who are pointing out that the monetary alchemists’ shell game is rigged, the good professor has fallen afoul of the error of oversimplification. A simple double-entry bookkeeping model, of a “simplest possible financial system”, having a limited set of parameters, that obviously does not include all the parameters of the real world’s financial system, but that does include a number of invalid assumptions (eg, the notion that banks are “consumers”, who spend all their earnings back into the “flow” of the national economy); a model that does not reflect the real world “which is far more complicated”, is a model that is quite obviously too simple, and does not prove (or disprove) anything at all.

Jane Gleeson-White, author of Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Shaped Modern Finance, relates an interesting and relevant anecdote regarding Fra Luca Pacioli, the acclaimed father of accounting.  On 11 August 1508, Pacioli gave an introductory public lecture at the church of San Bartolomeo near the Rialto Bridge in Venice (bold emphasis added):

Some five hundred people came to hear the celebrated mathematician speak … The famous Venetian printer Aldus Manutius was there and may have brought along Erasmus, who was staying with him near the Rialto while supervising the printing of his translation of Euripedes and a collection of ancient proverbs.

Intriguingly, after leaving Italy in 1509 Erasmus wrote his famous satire, In Praise of Folly, in which he mocks scientists who use maths to bamboozle their audience.  His description of these boffins rather accurately parodies the methods used by Luca Pacioli in his talk on Euclid: “When they especially disdain the vulgar crowd is when they bring out their triangles, quadrangles, circles, and mathematical pictures of the sort, lay one upon the other, intertwine them into a maze, then deploy some letters as if in line of battle, and presently do it over in reverse order – and all to involve the uninitiated in darkness.”  In his book, Erasmus set out to deflate the pretensions of anyone who claimed special knowledge or importance, whether they were philosophers, merchants or clerics.30

 

In his Praise of Folly .. he calls Mercury the inventor of tricks or of conjuring (“Quos nos ludos exhibet furtis ac praestigiis Hermes?”“What entertainments does Hermes show us, with his tricks and sleight-of-hand?”)31

 

Bernard Lietaer is a former central banker, fund manager, and co-designer of the European Currency Unit (precursor to the Euro), who was named “the world’s top currency trader” by Businessweek in 1992. Today, Lietaer is a currency system reformer with almost 40 years active experience in the field.  In Rethinking Money, he uses the brilliant analogy of the game of musical chairs, to help explain how “our” alchemical money system really works.

His analogy helps to illuminate this fundamental point – that it is only when the music (money “flow”) slows (“economic slowdown”) or stops (“credit crunch”), and people get nervous (“economic con-fidence”) and start looking for a chair to sit on, that we discover there never was enough chairs (“money”) for everyone:

Essentially, to pay back interest on a loan requires using someone else’s principal.  In other words, not creating the money to pay interest is the device used to generate the scarcity necessary for a bank-debt monetary system to function.  It forces people to compete with each other for money that was never created, and it penalizes them with bankruptcy should they not succeed.  When a bank checks a customer’s creditworthiness, it is really verifying his or her ability to compete successfully against the other players – that is to say, assessing the customer’s ability to extract from others the money that is required to reimburse the interest payment.  One is obliged in the current monetary system to incur debt and compete with others in order to perform exchanges and pay the resulting interest to the banks and lenders.32

Although new loans are being created, the interest on the principal is not.  Nowhere in the system is this additional money created.  This gives rise to scarcity, which, in turn, creates competition to acquire the extra money to cover the loans’ interest.  This magic, where one person’s loan becomes another’s deposit, and whereby when you pay interest you are using someone else’s principal, is really monetary alchemy.  This monetary alchemy is one of the esoteric secrets of the monetary system.33

A key point to keep in mind is that this entire money-creation process hinges on loans.  If all debts were repaid, money would simply disappear, because the entire process of money creation would reverse itself.  Reimbursing all loans would automatically use up all the deposits.34

alchemy_woodcut_omnia_unus_est_by_dashinvaine-d62hzol

When a banker  checks a customer’s credit score, it is to assess how successful or aggressive that individual or business will be in contending with others to obtain funds that are not created in sufficiency to pay back the interest on the loan.35

In a manner of speaking, it’s like a game of musical chairs in that there are never enough seats for everyone.  Someone will end up getting squeezed out. There isn’t enough money to pay the interest on all the loans, just like the missing chair.  Both are highly competitive games. In the money game, however, the stakes are elevated, as it means grappling with certain poverty or, worse still, having to declare bankruptcy.36

 

The real brilliance of Lietaer’s musical chairs analogy is that it helps the “common” man and woman to easily visualise, and understand, the alchemists’ critical need for monetary “motion” as opposed to “stability”, in order to conjure an apparent economic “equilibrium” of “constant change” (ie, constant economic “growth”) moving through time. It is, we now see, an illusory “equilibrium”, built on the ancient magic of sophistry and numbers, and contrived to “produce” compound “yields” for the Wizards of Oz hiding behind the curtain:

let him show the basis of that Stability to be constant change, just as the stability of a molecule is secured by the momentum of the swift atoms contained in it.

In this way let every idea go forth as a triangle on the base of two opposites, making an apex transcending their contradiction in a higher harmony.

It is not safe to use any thought in Magick, unless that thought has been thus equilibrated and destroyed.37

 

Unlike these present-day Lords of Time and their legions of high priests all preaching the obscure doctrines of Hermetic-Kabbalistic economic theology, Lietaer is speaking an everyday, “common” language — of “common” imagery and symbols — that we can easily understand. Most important to notice though, is that his clear and simple language is a result of his motivation. He seeks not to obfuscate but to elucidate.

In a telling passage of John Maynard Keynes: Vol 2 The Economist As Saviour 1920-1937, Keynes’ biographer Robert Skidelsky informs us that (bold and italicised emphasis added):

In Keynes’s view capitalism’s driving force is a vice which he called “love of money” … in the General Theory “the propensity to hoard” or “liquidity preference” plays a vital part in the mechanics of an economy’s rundown, once something has happened to make investment less attractive. And this links up with Keynes’s sense that, at some level too deep to be captured by mathematics, “love of money” as an end, not a means, is at the root of the world’s economic problem.38

 

Nearly two thousand years earlier, Jesus of Nazareth pointed to the same thing, in debunking the money-lenders’ illusion (delusion) that “‘Time’ (‘God’) is ‘Money'”:

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon [money].39

 

*******

UPDATE 2/2/2016

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in them both, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it (…) To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality.”

— George Orwell, defining “doublethink” in his book 1984

 

“Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone’s right to the freedom of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.”

— Vladimir Putin, Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly, December 12, 2013

 

UPDATE: 10/2/2016

Added Faivre quotation, footnote 31.

 

UPDATE: 2/3/2016

Corrected first three diagrams consistent with DE balance sheet rule (Assets – left, Liabilities – right).

 

UPDATE: 3/26/2016

Added video clip “It’s called an economy” – see Once Upon A Time – An Allegory For Usury On Primetime American TV

 

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[1] Edward Thomas Jones, Jones’ English System of Book-Keeping by Single or Double Entry, 1796

[2] James D. Heiser, Prisci Theologi and the Hermetic Reformation in the Fifteenth Century, 2011

[3] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013

[4] ibid.

[5] Sanford L. Drob, The Doctrine of Coincidentia Oppositorum in Jewish Mysticism, 2000

[6] Sanford L. Drob, The Theosophical Kabbalah, 2001

[7] Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Book IV, Part III, Chapter VIII; Of Equilibrium: and of the General and Particular Method of Preparation of the Furniture of the Temple and the Instruments of Art

[8] Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual, 1896

[9] ibid.

[10] ibid.

[11] ibid.

[12] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013

[13] ibid.

[14] ibid.

[15] ibid.

[16] ibid.

[17] ibid.

[18] Jolyon Jenkins, How Men In Grey Suits Changed The World, 2010 – http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8552220.stm

[19] ibid.

[20] E. Michael Jones, Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism As The Conflict Between Labor And Usury, 2014

[21] ibid.

[22] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013

[23] ibid.

[24] Bill Still, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: A Monetary Reformer’s Brief Symbol Glossaryhttp://www.themoneymasters.com/the-wonderful-wizard-of-oz-a-monetary-reformers-brief-symbol-glossary/

[25] Richard Marback, Plato’s Dream of Sophistry, 1999

[26] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013

[27] Investopedia, Time Value of Moneyhttp://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp

[28] Wikipedia, Shell Game – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_game

[29] Steve Keen, The Principal And Interest On Debt Myth, Forbes, 2015 – http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevekeen/2015/03/30/the-principal-and-interest-on-debt-myth-2/

[30] Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance, 2013

[31] Antoine Faivre, Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus, 1995

[32] Bernard Lietaer and Jacquie Dunne, Rethinking Money, 2013

[33] ibid.

[34] ibid.

[35] ibid.

[36] ibid.

[37] Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Book IV, Part III, Chapter VIII; Of Equilibrium: and of the General and Particular Method of Preparation of the Furniture of the Temple and the Instruments of Art

[38] Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: Vol. 2, The Economist As Saviour 1920-1937, 1994

[39] Matthew 6:24, The Sermon on the Mount, New King James Version

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