Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink. For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Oh the irony.
Or perhaps rather, the karma.
From the birthplace of el modo vinegia (“the Venetian Method”) of Double Entry Bookkeeping, and the modern banking Usurocracy that it spawned more than half a millennium ago, comes academic confirmation of the “outright false accounting” and “double nature” of bank ‘money’.
Professor of Accounting Massimo Costa, along with former international financial markets professor and current World Bank and IMF advisor Biagio Bossone, have confirmed that so-called “money of account” created by Double Entry Bookkeeping is a “systematically concealed” tool for extracting “seigniorage rent” from the labour of the human race.
In academic jargon, it is “a structural element of subtraction of net real resources from the economy, with potentially deflationary effects on profits and/or wages, distributional consequences, and frictions between capital and labor.”
In other words, the global banking system is an enormous parasite, and its parasitic method is fraudulent.
Their article relates to the heart of my essays (eg, here, here, here, here, here) on the ancient, alchemical philosophistry – the word ‘magic’ with numbers added – on which the ‘modern’ banking system is built.
More generally, absent adverse economic or market contingencies inducing depositors to convert deposits into cash, the liabilities represented by deposits only partly constitute debt liabilities of the issuing bank, which as such require [central bank] reserve coverage. The remaining part of the liabilities is a source of income for the issuing bank – income that derives from the bank’s power to create money. In accounting terms, to the extent that this income is undistributed, it is equivalent to equity.
This double nature of demand deposits is stochastic in as much as, at issuance, every deposit unit can be either debt (if, with a certain probability, the issuing bank receives requests for cash conversion or interbank settlement) or equity (with complementary probability).
Despite the fact that they claim to have loaned us all this money, thanks to the magical paradox at the heart of double-entry accounting, they also claim, simultaneously, precisely the opposite to be true — that we have actually loaned all that money to them.
[..]
Believe it or not, there is an explanation—albeit a perverse, morally abhorrent and unconscionable explanation—for this, and in turn, for how the creeping global preparations to legally steal the “deposit” assets of bank customers (refer above diagram) is able to be “justified” by the banks, the financial and political authorities, and the unelected, BIS-funded, Goldman Sachs alumni-chaired FSB.
At the heart of the matter is the ever-present paradox of perspective inherent in the BabylonianDuality Principle on which double-entry accounting is based.
Banks are able to create new (so-called) ‘money’ ex nihilo through the loan origination process. As this is recorded using double-entry accounting, every new loan results in a new Asset and a new Liability on the banks’ balance sheet records.
However, because banks act both as new loan (thus, new ‘money’) originators and as financial intermediaries, there is no way of disaggregating the Liability side of any bank’s balance sheet in order to clearly distinguish between those “deposits” that have arisen in consequence of that bank’s own lending (so-called), and those “deposits” that have arisen in consequence of that bank’s intermediation (i.e., ‘transfers’ of ‘money’ from one customer account to another customer account at the same bank, or, from the customer accounts of other financial institutions to customers of the bank).
Whether or not any particular unit of any particular “deposit” amount could truthfully be defined as ‘money’ loaned to the bank by a customer, or, loaned by the bank to a customer, is dependent on knowing with complete certainty how and when each and every unit came to be recorded in the customer account. The only customer account for which such certainty is possible, is a customer account created by the bank at the moment of first originating a loan, and, before any new entry for even one single fractional unit of the denominated currency has been either added to, or subtracted from that customer account.
There is one further exception – an account established for one of the bankers’ favourite clients—arms dealers, drug cartels, mafioso, and other criminal organisations such as the CIA—at the first moment of the client handing over real legal tender cash notes at the bank to open the account.
In any event, since even a ‘transfer’ of ‘money’ from one bank to another still has the same ultimate origin—an out-of-nothing creation of an electronic record of a mutual exchange of promises to pay—then from a whole-of-banking-system perspective it really doesn’t matter; all so-called ‘money’ on ‘deposit’ is simultaneously owned by the customers, and by the banks.
In other words, the global Usurocracy’s rent-extracting ‘money’ system is based on the arbitrary, subjective, relativist ‘logic’ and philosophistry of Cabala, or what George Orwell called doublethink – “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
Doublethink is related to, but differs from, hypocrisy and neutrality. Also related is cognitive dissonance, in which contradictory beliefs cause conflict in one’s mind. Doublethink is notable due to a lack of cognitive dissonance—thus the person is completely unaware of any conflict or contradiction.
Thanks to 503 years of “progressive” regulatory capture – amounting to nothing less than a thinly-concealed regime of state-sponsored Usurocracy – it is the banks’ exclusive privilege to ‘earn’ compounding usury on all the self-annihilating, +1|-1 Double Entry ‘money’ units that they create out of nothing:
Owing to double nature of commercial bank money, a relevant share of the deposits that banks report in the balance sheet as ‘debt toward clients’ generates revenues that are very much similar to the seigniorage rent extracted by the state through the issuance of state money (coins, banknotes, and central bank reserves).
Costa and Bossone confirm that it is precisely this “double nature” of bank ‘money’ that enables banks to hide the reality of their extracting “seigniorage rent” from the labour of the human race. How?
By not recording the value of their imaginary accounting ‘money’ – supposedly “equivalent” to, or, in more honest words, a counterfeit of, real physical government legal tender cash notes and coins – on their Income Statement:
Under current accounting practices, seigniorage is largely underappreciated, it is systematically concealed, and is not allocated to the income statement (where it naturally belongs), while it is recorded on the balance sheet under debt liabilities, thus originating outright false accounting.
As I extensively evidenced, this fraudulent system is actively aided and abetted by the “secretive”, tax haven-registered, “private” corporations of the international accounting standard-setters; a fact also confirmed – tacitly – by Costa and Bossone:
The stochastic double nature of bank money is consistent with the principles of general accounting as defined in the Conceptual Framework of Financial Reporting, which sets out the concepts underpinning the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). In light of these standards, demand deposits are a hybrid instrument – partly debt and partly revenue. The debt part relates to the share of deposits that will (likely) be converted into cash or reserves, while the revenue part relates to the share of deposits that will (likely) never be converted into cash or reserves. This share of deposits is a source of revenue.
The Mercurial Rebis: A Crowned and Bat-winged Hermaphrodite, Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, late 14th Century (Munich MS, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598). Source: Adam McLean, alchemywebsite.com
What Costa and Bossone (conveniently?) neglect to mention is that the share of so-called ‘deposits’ that “will (likely) never be converted into cash or reserves”, and that is thus “a source of revenue,” is around 97%.
Rather like the banks conveniently neglecting to mention the same 97% on their Income Statement.
Apparently it is sufficient to describe what is in reality the vast majority as merely “a relevant share”.
In “Dishonourable Debt” we saw that effective July 1, 2009 – in the middle of the global banking liquidity crisis known as the “GFC” – the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) introduced Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) §305 Cash andCash Equivalents. This new standard effectively sanctioned – and further concealed – the banks’ misleading and deceptive conduct in renting their electronic records of promises to pay physical cash under the guise of so-called ‘money’. As I observed:
The FASB has ex post facto codified that banks may consider bank ‘credits’ (a record of a promise to pay cash) as actually being “cash” for accounting purposes; that the customers’ perspective of bank ‘credits’ “shall” be that those ‘credits’ are (literal physical) “cash”, and, that they are not amounts owed to them by the bank…
Pure Orwellian doublethink.
This should help us to understand the real reason why, for several decades, there has been an accelerating drive by the international banking system to ‘normalise’ numerous forms of electronic banking and ‘money’ – including crypto currencies – and more recently, to actively discourage and even to incrementally (“Boiling Frog” strategy) restrict or outright ban the use of physical cash.
Contrary to all propaganda, this carrots-and-sticks drive towards a global economy reliant on pure abstraction, rather than real physical currency, has nothing to do with improving “convenience” for the public, or “efficiency” in the banking system, much less with “fighting crime” or “the black market”.
Real physical cash – State legal tender – is perhaps the weakest link in the Usurocracy’s “golden chain” of Double Entry ‘magic’ enslaving the human race.
Real physical cash is what the Usurocracy is counterfeiting, using +1|-1 Double Entry nullities, and then “systematically” concealing by not reporting their counterfeit ‘cash’ on their Income Statements.
Once physical cash is eliminated, the promises-to-pay ‘money’ system will be fully “unfettered” and “independent” from the real, tangible world. It will exist solely in the abstract, “imaginary”, ‘magic’ paradox-riddled, counterfeit world (pun intended) of Double Entry Bookkeeping controlled by the Usurocracy.
“The bookkeeper can be king if the public can be kept ignorant of the methodology of the bookkeeping.”
Do read and share this outstanding resource compiled by Urunu: The Cashless Society.
Faust struck a chord in me and pierced me through in a way that I could not but regard as personal. Most of all, it awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness.
The modern psychologist occupies neither the one position nor the other, but finds himself between the two, dangerously committed to ‘this as well as that’ (…) This is undoubtedly the great danger of the coincidentia oppositorum – of intellectual freedom from the opposites. How should anything but a formless and aimless uncertainty result from giving equal value to two contradictory hypotheses?
The connecting-link I was missing for so long has now been found, and it is alchemy.
Featuring on many “Worst Ever” lists are Batman Forever (1995) and Batman and Robin (1997).
While they may indeed be terrible movies from the perspective of a film critic or a superhero afficionado, for a semiotician they are treasure troves of symbolic meaning.
Batman Forever (1995) was the last of the franchise entrusted to producer Tim Burton. His previous film, Batman Returns (1992), was accused of having anti-Semitic themes by two Ivy League Jews:
[He] “depicts the Penguin as one of the oldest cultural clichés: the Jew who is bitter, bent over and out for revenge, the Jew who is unathletic and seemingly unthreatening but who, in fact, wants to murder every firstborn child of the gentile community. [..] The Penguin feigns assimilation into society and gains the citizens’ trust for a time. But eventually even the ignorant masses understand this false prophet for what he is, a primordial beast who seeks retribution, ‘an eye for an eye.’”
[The Penguin] “is not just a deformed man, half human, half-Arctic-beast. He is a Jew, down to his hooked nose, pale face and lust for herring.”[5]
Their Op-Ed in the New York Times sparked quite the controversy. It was republished across the country, generating numerous commentaries and letters to the editor. One reader and fellow Columbia alumnus, who had initially dismissed their observations, changed his mind after seeing “this vile motion picture,” and wrote in “to add a few of my own”:
One of the Penguin’s chief underlings — whose duties include driving the train on which the Penguin hopes to cart off Gotham City’s first-born children — strongly resembles the stereotype of the haggling Jewish peddler, who holds nothing sacred save the making of a profitable deal. Certainly, Tim Burton’s vision of the Penguin, with hooked nose, absurdly bloated body and plutocrat’s attire, bears more than a passing resemblance to Nazi caricatures of manipulative Jewish financiers, down to the ghoulish, perverted lust for fair, fresh-faced gentile maidens.[6]
The Anti-Defamation League hotly denied the allegations; curiously, using onlyvitriolic ad hominem:
We are bewildered that you gave a major portion of the July 2 Op-Ed page to “Batman and the Jewish Question,” a bizarre and ludicrous pseudo-analysis of the allegedly anti-Semitic implications of the blockbuster movie “Batman Returns” — produced by the lurid and overheated imaginations of two college students. One suspects that what began as a satire for the campus newspaper took itself too seriously somewhere along the way. Students are often earnest, but unaware of their own limitations. [..] It should be left to the movie’s creators, if they so desire, to rebut the article’s many fatuous and overreaching analyses.[7]
Screenwriter Wesley Strick also responded, “as the lone Jew among director, producer and credited writer, and as the architect of the Penguin’s scheme to murder Gotham’s first born.” His putative refutation too is curious, both for its subtle admissions and for its absence of denials:
Some of the points by Rebecca Roiphe and Daniel Cooper are obvious — of course, I was referring to Exodus. Others are clever: the love of herring, parodic Wagner. Still, more metaphors seem a stretch: Penguin’s umbrellas and Moses’ magic staff? Alas, arguments are won by omission or distortion; for example, the “eye for an eye” line (in the movie, it’s “die for a die”) is spoken by Catwoman, whose subtextual meaning the authors oddly skirt.[8]
In context of Tim Burton’s next (and last) Batman production, there are numerous reasons why all of this is noteworthy.
I propose that he redeemed himself – pun intended – with more than a little help from his friends, by producing a Batman Forever with comprehensively Cabalist themes.
Bear with me. Some background information is in order.
First, scholarly and encyclopaedic Jewish sources confirm the association of alchemy with the Jewish people “since ancient times.” Like the authors of ancient alchemical texts, some even claim the origin of the “Royal Art” is Jewish.[9][10]
“Do not touch the philosopher’s stone with your hands;
you are not of our race, you are not of the race of Abraham.”
Second, the father of the “new science” of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, fancied himself to be the folk-hero Messiah-ben-Joseph (“coat of many colours”, the interpreter of dreams), a militant warrior-king, redeemer, and martyr, who prepares the way for the messianic reign of the spiritual Messiah-ben-David :
Freud’s emotional identification with the military Messiah of the Jews catches in metaphor several critical aspects of Freud’s personality. The military Messiah, blessed by Moses, can violate one of the strongest taboos among the Jews, the commandment against killing, and the derivative taboo against thoughts of aggression which might involve bloodshed. Thus by participating in this image, Freud could feel free to indulge in thoughts of killing oppressors in a way which would have been otherwise traditionally closed. His ego could tolerate murderous thoughts. We need only remind ourselves of the great significance in Freud’s writings of death wishes directed against others, particularly the father, and its formulation in the fundamental paradigm of the Oedipus complex.
He refers to Oedipus as that mythical lawbreaker*. Evidently Freud conceives of the Oedipal crime as prototypal of all law breaking.
Freud plays the role of a new Moses who comes down with a new Law dedicated to personal psychological liberty.[11]
That Freud saw himself as an alchemical Messiah-ben-Joseph, ‘healing’ his people of their guilt, and conquering their enemies[12] – reducing them to Base Matter (Massa Confusa, “confused mass”) – is evident in his own words to his associates:
Do you not know that I am the Devil? All my life I have had to play the Devil, in order that others would be able to build the most beautiful cathedral with the materials that I produced.[13]
It is also evident in his “royal road to the unconscious” (1899) – a ‘scientific’ theory of the “dream-work”: mental transformations (condensation, displacement, representation), which supposedly unify the opposites of conscious and unconscious mind content (mind matter, the ‘Above’ and ‘Below’), by means of symbolism. Here we find a remarkable precursor to what Orwell described exactly fifty years later in his dystopian novel 1984 as doublethink – “a vast system of mental cheating”:
In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud describes the process by which “dream-thoughts” may be turned into their opposites.
Nor does Freud limit these considerations to dreams. In the same paragraph he goes on to tell how this technique of resolving elements into their opposites is also used in social dissimulation!
In his view, different and contradictory interpretations could be maintained simultaneously… .[14]
Freud’s double nephew, Edward Bernays – great grandson of the “leading monarch of the mind” of the Jewish world of his time[15] – became the (in)famous father of public relations (“Propaganda”) and thus, of modern “consumer culture” and the Century of the Self:
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes.
Third, Jewish scholars have demonstrated that psychoanalysis is founded on the ontological mysticism and theurgy (practical ‘magic’) of Lurianic Cabala.[16]
Sefer HaKavanot U’Ma’aseh Nissim records that one day Luria’s father remained in the Beth kneset alone, studying, when Eliyahu HaNavi appeared to him and said, “I have been sent to you by the Almighty to bring you tidings that your holy wife shall conceive and bear a child, and that you must call him Yitzchak. He shall begin to deliver Israel from the Klipot [husks, forces of evil]. Through him, numerous souls will receive their tikkun [rectification, healing].”[17]
Freud’s theories on the human psyche are essentially those found in the Babylonian Talmud tractate Berakoth, wrapped in a ‘scientific’ re-presentation of the schema and quintessence of Isaac Luria’s cabalist mysticism – a metaphysics of (bi)sexual ‘alchemy’ between the father/mother/son/daughter ’emanations’ of Ein-Sof – with the antinomian tendencies of infamous 17th century false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi.
It is one of the more important characteristics of psychoanalysis that it views evil as a distortion of love. This paradoxical identification of good with evil pervades all of Freud’s writings so that their classical polarity is virtually obliterated.
[T]he whole burden of psychoanalysis may be regarded as a fulfillment of the Sabbatian ethos.
In our century it has often been pointed out that modern science and psychoanalysis have seemed to “take the place of” religion. Modern psychoanalysis plays a “religious” role in people’s lives, especially with respect to their “sins” as sins are defined by the Mosaic code. The deepest violations of the Mosaic code – aggression, murder, sexuality, incest, etc – are the very subject matter of psychoanalysis. The psychoanalyst stands .. as a nonpunishing superego.[18]
As evidenced in his own words, so too are the theories of Freud’s estranged collaborator, Carl Jung, the promoter of transformative “individuation”, through rectification of the conscious/unconscious ‘opposites’.
The Cabala has been interpreted as a means of understanding the cosmos, the emanations of God, “the framework of practical magic,” but also as a psychological technique.
Lurianic Cabala was created by Isaac Luria (1534-1572) and, based on the Zohar, revitalised Cabala with the theory of tsimsum – God’s withdrawal from himself. This act was seen as a hierohistorical symbol of divine exile, implying that evil is an intrinsic creative force not solely attributable to humanity. The doctrine of shevirat-ha-kelim (breaking of the vessels) and tikkun (restoration) explained how evil is impermanent and called for humanity to restore perfection to the cosmos… . This is significant because of humanity’s active role in redemption; it called for Jews to be part of the cosmic process, interacting with the cosmic scheme and divinity itself, giving humankind divine potential. [..] Tikkun bears a very similar semblance to the alchemical idea of transmutation and Coudert draws a parallel between alchemist physicians and Cabalists in their role as creative and even redemptive agents, placing them heretically among the semi-divine.[19]
[T]hese ‘heretical’ Kabbalists believed that acts which benefit God included deliberate forays into the world of sin, where the illusory nature of evil could be more readily exposed, and the sparks thereby elevated to their Source.[20]
Fourth, Akiva Goldsman’s Jewish parents were child psychologists, who ran a group home for emotionally disturbed children. He says they were occupied with their work and “[b]y the time I was 10 or 12, I realized they had taken my parents away from me.” His scripts often deal with psychological themes, including Silent Fall (1994), and the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind (2001).[21]
Sixth, the plot, characters, and dialogue of Batman Forever are all based on alchemy, the principles of duality, unifying the opposites, and psychoanalysis.
Its female lead character – the lust/love interest and ‘healer’ of Batman/Bruce Wayne’s conflicted opposites – is a blue-eyed blonde psychologist, Dr. Chase Meridian.
The story-tellers’ many-faceted pun was clearly intended.
Batman Forever is deeply Cabalist, right from the opening credits.
From a total running time of 121 minutes, I have (so far) identified almost 60 clips – around 45 minutes in total – depicting cabalist and alchemical themes, all set within the central plot narrative of psychological duality and tikkun (“rectification”).
In Jung’s words, the “great danger” of the coincidentia oppositorum – of “intellectual freedom from the opposites” of good and evil, portrayed as a ‘divine’ superhero ideal.
[E]ssentially alchemy may be described as lying somewhere between science and religion and in contrast the Cabala may be seen as lying between religion and language. In this way both the Cabala and alchemy are ars liminæ, liminal disciplines.
Exemplified by syncretic texts such as Voarchadumia (1550) Cabala and alchemy are comparable in their methods of manipulation; the former lexical, the latter elemental. The transmutation of letters to their prime state can be seen as parallel to the alchemical discipline of transmutation of metals to their base elements.[24]
In the opening credits, the colours assigned to the actors’ names are traditional alchemical symbols. They accurately reflect each actor’s character narrative, and covertly convey an eye-opening depth of multi-layered meanings.
These 44 seconds actually reveal The Key to decrypting the many interpretations of alchemy, Freud’s “new science” of psychology, and the antinomian, self-Deifying philosophistry of the Left-hand Path.
In all of their many disguises, ancient and ‘modern’.
Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem (VITRIOL): “Visit the interior of the earth and rectifying (i.e. purifying), you will find the hidden/secret stone”.[25]
1. Lead dominated by Saturn ♄ ()
2. Tin dominated by Jupiter ♃ ()
3. Iron dominated by Mars ♂ ()
4. Gold dominated by Sol ☉ ☼ ()
5. Copper dominated by Venus ♀ (also: )
6. Mercury (quicksilver) dominated by Mercury ☿ ()
7. Silver dominated by Luna ☽ ( )
Would you like to know why VAL KILMER (Batman) is blue? Or why the credits for NICOLE KIDMAN and CHRIS O’DONNELL change colour?
If you are a Christian, you will be appalled. But not for the reason you may think (spiritually, it’s far worse, but that is not for today).
Here are four visual hints as to their respective ‘lθve’ union relationships and meanings – or what you might call their ‘Jungian’ Mysterium Coniunctionis.[26]
Think colour … and analogy. As quoth Éliphas Lévi, 19th century French occult magus and lord of the left-hand path:
Divination is .. an intuition, and the key of this intuition is the universal and magical doctrine of analogies. By means of these analogies, the magus interprets visions, as did the patriarch Joseph in Egypt, according to Biblical history. The analogies in the reflections of the astral light are as exact as the shades of colour in the solar spectrum, and can be calculated and explained with great exactitude.
To separate the subtle from the gross, in the first operation, which is wholly interior, is to set the soul free from all prejudice and all vice, which is accomplished by the use of the philosophical salt, that is to say, wisdom; of mercury, that is, personal skill and application; finally, of sulphur, representing vital energy and fire of will. By these are we enabled to change into spiritual gold things which are of all least precious, even the refuse of the earth.[27]
It will greatly help if you have read my essays on alchemy, banking, and ‘flow’-stealing sex ‘magick’ – Cheating Females (Part 1, Part 2).
Come, my love, my dove, & pour
From thy cupthe serpent wine
Brimmed & breathless -secret store
Of my crimson concubine
Surfeit spirit in the shrine-
Devil -Godess -Virgin -Whore.
– Aleister Crowley, Leah Sublime (1920)
Ponder thoughtfully the blue within its gold leaf ‘womb’ ▽ in the following emblem, found in the earliest illustrated alchemical text to be written in the German language, Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (“The Book of the Holy Trinity”). It has been attributed to a German Franciscan, Frater Ulmannus – a latinisation of the given name Ulmann, from Old High German uodal–man: Ancestral Man; the cabalists’ Adam Kadmon or Primordial Man.
Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, late 15th Century MS (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598). Source: Adam McLean, alchemywebsite.com
Think “blue blood” … and, “dragon’s blood.”
Consider the Antichrist, Diabolic, or Luciferic (i.e., Putrefaction) Rebis titled Contra Justiciam (“Against Justice”): a crowned, bat-winged[28] hermaphrodite; the conjunction of Hermes-Mercury and Aphrodite-Venus …
‘Contra Justiciam’ (Against Justice): A Crowned and Bat-winged Hermaphrodite, Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, late 15th Century (Munich MS, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598). Source: Adam McLean, alchemywebsite.com
Note that the male’s (right side; left for viewer) armour is not black, but rather silver leaf that has tarnished with age. There are seven different coloured crowns on the body of the hermaphrodite: at the head (silver), chest (green), belly (black), right hand (red), left hand (gold), right foot (black) and left foot (grey). The colours vary in different manuscripts; each crown has been identified with one of the seven deadly sins.
Compare with the next emblem, the now-transformed Mercurial Rebis, crowned with a six-pointed star. The two streams flowing from the ‘stones’ at the hermaphrodite’s feet to the hills from which grow the Solar Tree and Lunar Tree, are known as “Oil of the East” (male side) and “Oil of the West” (female side).
The Mercurial Rebis: A Crowned and Bat-winged Hermaphrodite, Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit, late 14th Century (Munich MS, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, CGM. 598). Source: Adam McLean, alchemywebsite.com
Alas, for a more detailed explanation – in particular, of the metallurgical and spiritual transformations that are symbolically depicted, and far more importantly, secreted, in accordance with the Talmudic-Cabalist ‘law of inversion,’ we must wait for a future essay.
Or rather, a series of essays. In setting out to expound the opening credits sequence alone, dear reader, I failed to foresee the enormity of the task. After some 4,400 words had barely scratched the surface of just three colours, it became clear that a lengthy series of essays – or indeed, a book or three – is required in order to adequately expound the alchemical-Cabalist significance of the entire movie.
I must confess that the prospect of labouring to do so inspires many misgivings.
What I have presented in this essay, is barely the tip of the iceberg.
Having spent over two weeks on identification and editing of clips, and the compiling of 10,000+ words in notes and references, the growing enormity of the task weighs heavily. In consideration of the miniscule readership of this blog, I am compelled to question if the effort to explain the many, evidentially-connected layers of meaning – retracing 2700 years of world history, to Sumero-Assyrian word lists of then-known chemical compounds – would truly represent a worthwhile expenditure of my life energies.
Just as the Devil is said to have tempted Jesus in the wilderness, using the philosophistry of cunning, willful mis-contextualisation of Hebrew scripture, in another classic proof that gemstones of truth can sometimes (but not always!) be found concealed within mountains of ‘clever’ lies, a famous aphorism of nihilist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (The Antichrist), from his lauded Beyond Good and Evil, fits well with my own personal experience of recent weeks in researching this topic:
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.[29]
To slowly have one’s eyes opened to the sheer scale, the almost unbelievable breadth depth and height, of eloquent, malevolent, systemic deception, whose continuity can be traced back over many millennia; to understand the base simplicity of the system – lying, by punning, to the ear and to the eye – and thus, to sense more deeply the non-necessity of suffering, oppression, theft, and murder of billions of human souls over those æons in direct consequence, is truly to gaze into an abyss, and to feel one’s spiritual energies drain away beneath clouds of despair at the futility of one’s own efforts to bring any redress, or even to meaningfully assist in slowing the ‘progress’ of humanity’s acceleration down the Left-hand Path into that abyss.
In recent weeks I have felt increasingly impressed that while exposing the works of darkness continues to be a necessary task, what is more urgently necessary still – at least for me – is to assign a greater proportion of one’s days to looking on the true light.
And so, in consideration of this, I leave for you now a montage of (mostly) narrative clips from Batman Forever, in illustration of what I have written above. A spoiler alert: do not watch if you would prefer to see the movie in its entirety.
In a similarity to a central character in the film – an irony that is far from being lost on me – I too am of two minds, on the question of further elaboration of this research in a series of future essays, or, the retention of it, with a view to a published volume/s in future.
In light of my deeper, spiritual preference, I have made a point of leaving abundant clues here for readers to research further and discover the correct conclusions; both in the text and images chosen, and of course, in my selection of clips for the montage.
If you have found this essay of value to you, I would sincerely appreciate your sharing it with others.
I would also appreciate your leaving feedback, ideally here in Comments, or at my Twitter account @DerorCurrency, as this would help me to gain some insight into the extent of readers’ desire for further elaboration on the Batman Forever theme.
**************
REFERENCES
[1] Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, New York: Random House (1961), p. 235, cited in Henderson David, The Coincidence of Opposites: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Nicholas of Cusa, (2010), Studies in Spirituality 20, 101-113
[2] Jung, C.G. Collected Works, H. Read ed., New York: Pantheon (1953-79), Volume 8 p. 679, cited in Henderson, David, The Coincidence of Opposites: C.G. Jung’s Reception of Nicholas of Cusa, (2010), Studies in Spirituality 20, 101-113
[3] Jung, C.G. 1973, vol. 1, p. 206, cited in Drob Samuel L., Towards a Kabbalistic Psychology: C.G. Jung and the Jewish Foundations of Alchemy
[4] Batman Wikia – “[Lee Batchler] met producer Tim Burton and together they agreed that the screenplay should have focus on the duality of Batman. The Batchlers were hired by Burton and new director Joel Schumacher [..] The final script was revised by Akiva Goldsman…”
[9] Drob, Samuel L., Towards a Kabbalistic Psychology: C.G. Jung and the Jewish Foundations of Alchemy; citing Patai (1994), Suler (1972), Idel (2000), et al.
[10] Patai, R., 1994, The Jewish Alchemists, Princeton Univ. Press, Princeton, p. 76; cited in Vladimír Karpenko, Alchemy asdonum dei, HYLE, International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry, Vol. 4 (1998), No. 1, pp. 63-80; — “In the Hellenistic world particular attention should be paid to Mary the Jewess, one of the most influential personalities of this science. God appears in connection with her, but in a slightly different manner than later. To Mary, alchemy is donum dei, a gift of God; but this gift was given only to ‘chosen people’, Jews. She is reported to have said: “Do not touch the philosopher’s stone with your hands; you are not of our race, you are not of the race of Abraham.’* Thus alchemy was not for alchemists in general, but for the race of Abraham. Alchemy is presented here as the spiritual property of Jews. As pointed out by Patai, the singular form ‘God’ is used strictly in texts attributed to Mary, and this claim that alchemical secrets were revealed to her by God became a part of the medieval alchemical tradition about her.”
[11] Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, New York: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc (1958), Chapters 21-22, pp. 160, 165, 167, 168, 170, 169-183; * p.165, footnote 7: Freud, Col. Papers, IV, p. 383 – In Moses and Monotheism, he refers to the murder of Moses as “the murder of the Father.” (p.165). Freud admitted to selectively choosing what suited him from various scholars’ Biblical analyses, some of whom postulated that Moses was murdered (e.g., Sellin, Robertson Smith). Bakan writes: “The actual evidence for the murder of Moses is very tenuous, but the murder of Moses is something which Freud must assert as fact. What he is doing is projecting a current fantasy onto a past situation, which is done in all mythmaking. It is Freud who wishes that Moses were murdered… Jacob Frank’s assertion that the Torah was dead, Freud repeats with psychoanalytic sophistication.”
“In his writing, Freud frequently did refer to the significance of his own Oedipus complex. Furthermore, he made the infantile relationship of the child to his parents the critical feature in the analysis of human personality. Besides this we find frequent identifications in Freud’s writings of father and God, father and Moses, and father and superego.” (p.165)
“Hence it is necessary for Freud to kill Moses. [..] ..the Moses of Freud’s murder is the Moses each person carries about with him. And in this too he identifies himself with all Jewry. For in his fantasy he is not alone in the murder. The myth he fashions is not of one person murdering Moses. It is a murder which is committed collectively by all Jews.” (p. 167)
“The Jews, because of their endogamy, characteristically had an incest problem, and part of the role of Jewish mysticism was to provide devices for coping with the intense feelings of guilt associated with incest wishes.” (p. 292)
“Thus by writing this book, Freud becomes a Jewish hero in the history of the Jews. He performs the traditional Messianic function of relieving guilt, the very same function he ascribes to Jesus.” (p.168)
“That psychoanalysis should have grown up in the context of the healing of the sick who were incurable by orthodox medical means accords with the Messianic quality of the psychoanalytical movement. For Messianism characteristically proves itself first by miraculously healing the sick. Thereafter it reaches out to large-scale social reform.” (p.170)
[12] Sepehr, Robert, 1666 Redemption Through Sin: Global Conspiracy in History, Religion, Politics and Finance, Atlantean Gardens. Kindle Edition, p. 12, citing Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, (NY: Schocken, 1971) – “Mystical Lurianic speculations about the nature of the redemption, and the ‘restored world’ (olam ha-tikkun) which follow upon its heels, added new content and dimensions to the popularmessianic folk-myth of a conquering national hero, raising it to the level of a supreme cosmic drama.”
[13] Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, New York: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc (1958), Chapter 22 Freud’s Messianic Identification, p. 181, citing Laforgue, R, “Persönliche Errinerungen an Freud,” Lindauer Psychothereapiewoche (1954), pp. 42-56
[14] ibid., pp. 146-147, 262 – “There is yet another alternative in which the dream-work can deal with affects in the dream-thoughts, in addition to allowing them through or reducing them to nothing. It can turn them into their opposite. We have already become acquainted with the interpretive rule according to which every element in a dream can, for the purposes of interpretation, stand for its opposite just as easily as for itself. … We can never tell before-hand whether it stands for the one or for the other; only the context can decide.” (Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 471)
[15] ibid., p. 57 – “Freud’s intimate association with the Bernays family may also be significant. Rabbi Isaac Bernays of Hamburg had been called the ‘leading monarch of mind’ for the Jewish world at his time. He is described as ‘a queer and eccentric personality and his philosophy of Judaism was full of mystic vagaries, some of which were contrary and foreign to the true Jewish spirit.’ As we shall see later, the mystical mood often spilled over into apostasy. As a possible instance of this trend, it should be noted that Isaac Bernays’ son Michael, uncle of Martha [Freud’s wife], was converted to Christianity. Freud’s sister married Martha’s brother; and Martha’s sister, Minna, lived in the Freud household for many years and evidently provided Freud with assistance in his work and also moral support.”
[16] ibid. Chapters 9-10, 31-33 (Part V Psychoanalysis and Kabbala); see also Drob, Sanford L, “This is Gold!”: Freud, Psychotherapy and the Lurianic Kabbalah. – Besides its singular emphasis on sexual and family relationships, the Zohar shares with Freud’s psychoanalytic writings the following characteristics: views on anti-Semitism, the conception of man as bisexual, a theory of sexual-social development, and, perhaps most important, a set of techniques for the interpretation of linguistic productions. (Bakan, p. 84)
[18] Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, New York: D. Van Nostrand Company Inc (1958), Chapters 14-15, 20, pp. 105, 158 – “From time to time events occur in which a vast variety of social forces come to a focal point, and the meaning and implications of these events are active for centuries forward. The appearance of Sabbatai Zevi was such an event. The set of events which surrounded the personality and acts of Sabbatai Zevi, the “false Messiah,” was of the deepest moment for the psychological and emotional patterns of the Jews in the modern period. Sabbatai Zevi may have been a psychotic, as Scholem suggests. He may have been a homosexual, and a confirmed egoist as is suggested by Kastein. The fact remains that to the Jews of the world, he was for a time the Messiah. The Kabbala..had prophesied that the year 1648 would begin the Messianic era. It was also the year of the great Chmielnicki pogrom. With the pre-existence among the Jews of a strong Kabbalistic ideology, particularly of the Lurianic type with its intense Messianism, the suffering and the devastation of that year were interpreted paradoxically as confirmation of the coming of the Messiah. The pogroms were, presumably, the cleansing in preparation.” [..] “Since the year 1648 had failed to produce the redemption, Sabbatai Zevi placed his faith on another year which, paradoxically, had a source quite different from Jewish Kabbala. Sabbatai Zevi had heard from his father, who was an agent for an English firm, that some Christian calculation, based on the Book of Revelation, had assigned 1666 as the beginning of the Millennium. The year 1666 was now the redemption year.” (p.95, 97-98)
See also Sepehr, Robert, 1666 Redemption Through Sin: Global Conspiracy in History, Religion, Politics and Finance, Atlantean Gardens. Kindle Edition, p. 3, citing Scholem, Gershom, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, (NY: Schocken, 1971), and Chamish, Barry. Shabtai Tzvi, Labor Zionism and the Holocaust. (Modiin House: 2005) – “The ‘magical’ emphasis given to the numerological value of dates contributed greatly to the widely held expectations and hope placed on the coming of a Messiah at the time of Sabbatai Zevi’s advent, the 18th day (6+6+6), of the 6th month, of the year 1666.”
[19] Garrard, Samuel, The Syncretic Esotericism of the Renaissance: Historical and Thematic Congruencies in Cabala and Alchemy, pp. 3-4, 7 – “The magical implications of this are evident in the popularity and controversy that surrounded the Cabala in the preceding centuries. Allison P. Coudert, professor of Religious Studies at the University of California, discusses the specific restorative and salvational role of this activist Cabalism as comparable with the art of alchemy and contributory to the “Rosicrucian Enlightenment” as explored by Frances Yates (1899-1981).”
“[Gershom] Scholem asserted that the Lurianic Cabala, with its messianic or utopian dimension, was the driving force behind the Sabbatian movement which was formative of secular, reformative Judaism that followed and was ‘one of the most powerful forces ever to affect the inner development of Judaism, both horizonatally and in depth.’ [Kabbalah, p. 190] The Cabala was directly responsible for the abolishment of the halakhah law. In seeking to reveal paradoxically ‘what is by definition hidden,’the followers of the Cabala performed their own act of transmutation by transforming a dogmatic law to a symbolic one.”
“The theme of potentiality, borne by both Lurianic Cabala and alchemy, stood in opposition to the Christian doctrine of the fall and original sin and provides a link with the tradition that began with the translation by Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) and Lodovico Lazzarelli (1447–1500) of the Corpus Hermeticum originally written in the second and third centuries AD. The theme of Hermetic potentiality is apparent in the monadic tradition and, rooted in the approach of medieval alchemy and strengthened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Frances Yates proposed the theory that this divine potentiality in the individual human was responsible for the confidence and determinism behind the enlightenment and scientific thrust that was to follow.”
“Coudert provides further speculation on Frances Yates’ theory that Hermeticism and Renaissance occult philosophy provided the sine qua non for modern science… . One can detect in Hermetic texts, alchemy, Cabala (in particular Lurianic Cabala) and in Neoplatonism a ‘monadic Gnosis;’ a Gnosticism with no mediator between humanity and God. Cabala and alchemy were formal means by which one could interact direct with God.”
[20] Sepehr, Robert, 1666 Redemption Through Sin: Global Conspiracy in History, Religion, Politics and Finance, Atlantean Gardens. Kindle Edition, p. 13, citing Antelman, Rabbi Marvin, To Eliminate the Opiate (Volume 2), The Zionist Book Club: 2002
See also Bakan, David, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, p.101 – “Scholem advances an interesting hypothesis which is particularly relevant to our interest in Freud. Scholem holds that Sabbatianism .. passes into a rationalism which tends to conceal its Sabbatian origins [original italics]. After the French Revolution, it was the Sabbatians within the Jewish fold that fostered the movements [in the Jewish world] toward reform, liberalism, and the enlightenment. Sabbatianism articulated with rationalism in several ways. For one thing, although Sabbatianism had its own collection of myths, it was opposed to the myths of orthodoxy. For another, the Sabbatians held to a doctrine of the necessity of the descent into evil in order to attain spiritual liberation, a doctrine which was endowed with specific sexual reference by the Frankists… The ‘holiness’ of participating in all things, evil or non-evil, already contains a harbinger of the more enlightened view of pursuing truth no matter where it might lead, with full confidence that ‘truth’ must lead to good. But perhaps most important is the fact that Sabbatianism, as a form of mysticism, shares with rationalism the conviction that the world of reality, all reality, may be apprehended by, and encompassed by thought.”
[21] Akiva Goldsman, Wikipedia, and Akiva Goldsman, allmovie.com. (accessed 27 Feb 2018)
[22] Bob Kane, Wikipedia, citing Irish Independent (“Holy sunflowers! How Batman drove Van Gogh out of Gotham”), March 20, 2010, and Bloom, Nate, Cleveland Jewish News (“Jewish Stars”), July 18, 2008. (accessed 27 Feb 2018)
[23] Weinstein, Rabbi Simcha, A Jewish ‘Joker’: From the Catskills to Gotham City, New Jersey City News, July 24, 2008, (web archive) and Bill Finger, Wikipedia. (accessed 27 Feb 2018)
[24] Garrard, Samuel, The Syncretic Esotericism of the Renaissance: Historical and Thematic Congruencies in Cabala and Alchemy, p. 8, and p. 11 citing Françoise Bonardel, Alchemical Esotericism and the Hermeneutics of Culture, in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, pp. 71-100 (p. 92) – Note carefully the “transmutation of letters to their prime state .. as parallel to the alchemical discipline of transmutation of metals to their base elements.. ,” echoed in Lurianic Cabalist philosophy, particularly in its Sabbatian interpretation: the kellipot (husks of evil) being analogous to the alchemists’ Prima Materia (“First Matter”, “Base Matter”) or Massa Confusa (“confused mass”) – there are over one hundred synonyms.
[25] Stolcius, Daniel (ie, Daniel Stolz von Stolzenberg), Theatrum Chymicum, 1614
[26] Theta, Wikipedia. (accessed 27 Feb 2018) – “lθve”: the Greek letter Theta (θ) is the eighth letter in the Greek alphabet, derived from the Phoenician letter Teth. In its archaic form, θ was written as a cross within a circle (as in the Etruscan or ), and later, as a line or point in circle ( or ) – i.e., the alchemists’ symbol of the Sun (Sol); interpreted by medieval- through Enlightenment-era cabalists seeking to syncretise Jewish mysticism with Christian theology as a symbol of the Son of God, Jesus the Christ (Messiah), divine representative of “love”. In left-hand path lore, Sol is interpreted sexually: as the phallus, and/or, the phallus (point) within the female or male orifice/s (circle).
[27] Lévi, Éliphas, Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, London: George Redway, A.E. Waite transl. (1896), pp. 107, 162-163
Compare Foxbrunner, Dr Roman A., Habad: The Hasidism of Schneur Zalman of Lyady, New Jersey, Jason Aronson Inc, (1993) pp. 108-109, quoting the founder of the Chabad-Lubavitch chassidic sect, Rabbi Schneur Zalman (1745 – 1812) – “Gentile souls are of a completely different and inferior order. They are totally evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever… Their material abundance derives from supernal refuse. Indeed, they themselves derive from refuse, which is why they are more numerous than the Jews… . According to Rabbi Zalman, ‘All Jews were innately good, all gentiles innately evil… For RSZ (Rabbi Schneur Zalman) … gentiles were simply the embodiment of the kelipot…”
[28] McLean, Adam, Pandora series, alchemywebsite.com (accessed 24 Feb 2018). Note that the Hebrew word “bat” (עֲטַלֵּף`atalleph) is a word used for a “daughter”. The bat (flying in the dark) is “reckoned among the birds in the list of unclean animals [Leviticus 11:9, Deuteronomy 14:18]. To cast idols to the ‘moles and to the bats’ means to carry them into dark caverns or desolate places to which these animals resort (Isaiah 2:20: In that day people will throw away to the moles and bats their idols of silver and idols of gold, which they made to worship.).” According to Hoffman (Secrets of Judaism Revealed on Purim), rabbis claim that “bat” (daughter) actually means “bayit” (home), a euphemism for “wife”.
The Jewish demon/ess and feminist icon, Lilith – whom we have met before – is often depicted with bat’s wings. Compare the Book of Revelation (chapter 17) on the Great Whore and Mother of Harlots.
[29] Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886, Aphorism 146, Hollingdale transl., Wikiquote.org via Gutenberg-DE. (accessed 1 March 2018)
“Before I step down from this glorious podium I ask you—scratch that, I implore you—not to forget the one tool we have been instilled with; the mother of all tools, the power grip of global business, of influence, and of the ability to do good in the world. We have constantly referred to this tool as the power of 72.”
— Oren Heiman, graduation speech before the 72 graduating members of the Global Executive MBA program of Columbia Business School and London Business School, January 20121
יהוה The Tetragrammaton
What, then, was the meaning of this mysterious term? It was the name of the four primitive letters of the mothertongue: the Jod, symbol of the vine, or paternal sceptre of Noah; the HE, type of the cup of libations and also of maternity; the VAU, which joins the two, and was depicted in India by the great and mysterious lingam. Such was the triple sign of the triad in the divine word; then the mother letter appeared a second time to express the fecundity of nature and woman.. (…) Moreover, the sacred word was not pronounced; it was spelt, and read off in four words, which are the four sacred words JOD HE VAU HE.2
According to the kabbalist ten is the number of matter, of which the special sign is zero; in the tree of the sephiroth ten represents Malchuth, or exterior and material substance; the sin of Adam is therefore materialism, and the fruit which he plucks from the tree represents flesh isolated from spirit, zero separated from unity, the schism of the number ten, giving on the one side a despoiled unity and on the other nothingness and death.3
As a fact, a strong and determined will can arrive in a short time at absolute independence, and we are all in possession of the chemical instrument, the great and sole athanor which answers for the separation of the subtle from the gross and the fixed from the volatile. This instrument, complete as the world and precise as mathematics, is represented by the sages under the emblem of the pentagram or five-pointed star, which is the absolute sign of human intelligence.4
The number five is that of the soul, typified by the quintessence which results from the equilibrium of the four elements; in the Tarot this number is represented by the high-priest or spiritual autocrat, type of the human will, that high-priestess who alone decides our eternal destinies.5
The number six represents the antagonism of the two triads, that is, absolute negation and absolute affirmation. It is therefore the number of toil and liberty…6
“The rich rule over the poor,
and the borrower is servant to the lender.”
— Proverbs of Solomon 22:7
Rule of 72
The rule of 72 is a shortcut to estimate the number of years required to double your money at a given annual rate of return. The rule states that you divide the rate, expressed as a percentage, into 72:
Years required to double investment = 72 ÷ compound annual interest rate7
The Seventy-two Lettered Name
Of the names of God in the Old Testament, that which occurs most frequently (6,823 times) is the so-called Tetragrammaton, Yhwh (יהוה), the distinctive personal name of the God of Israel.
The Seventy-two-Lettered Name is derived from three verses in Exodus (xiv. 19-21) beginning with “Wayyissa’,” “Wayyabo,” “Wayyeṭ,” respectively.8
With the Tetragrammaton must be included the names of God formed of twelve, forty-two, and seventy-two letters respectively, which are important factors in Jewish mysticism (Ḳid. 71a et passim). They have, according to tradition, a magical effect; for mysticism and magic are everywhere allied. These great names are closely akin to the long series of vowels in the magic papyri, and are obtained by anagrammatic combinations of the effective elements of the Tetragrammaton. The simplest way of determining these three names is to form a magic triangle…9
The Tetractys
The Greek word signifies, literally, the number four, and is therefore synonymous with the quaternion; but it has been peculiarly applied to a symbol of the Pythagoreans, which is composed of ten dots arranged in a triangular form of four rows.
This figure was in itself, as a whole, emblematic of the Tetragrammaton, or sacred name of four letters, for tetractys, in Greek, means Four, and was undoubtedly learned by Pythagoras during his visit to Babylon. But the parts of which it is composed were also pregnant symbols. Thus the one point was a symbol of the [male, phallic △] Active Principle or Creator, the two points of the [female, vulva ▽] Passive Principle or Matter, the three of the world proceeding from their union, and the four of the liberal arts and sciences, which may be said to complete and perfect that world.10
By arranging the four letters of the Great Name, יהוה, (I H V H), in the form of the Pythagorean Tetractys, the 72 powers of the Great Name of God are manifested.11
Abraxas is symbolic of five creatures, and as the circle of the year actually consists of 360 degrees, each of the emanating deities is one-fifth of this power, or 72, one of the most sacred numbers in the Old Testament of the Jews and in their Qabbalistic system.12
Diagram of the Hebrew letters of the Tetragrammaton arranged in a Tetractys shape, showing that by the rules of Gematria the sum is 72. From diagram by German Hebraist/Cabalist Johannes Reuchlin. (Source: Wikipedia)
The Cosmic Rose
Engraving pictured in “Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae” by Heinrich Khunrath (1595). The triangle near the top contains a tetractys of the Tetragrammaton. (Source: Wikipedia)
SIGNO VINCES IN HOC – “In this sign you will conquer”. (cf. Mackey’s Encyclopedia of Freemasonry)
Nashak
נָשַׁךְ nâshak, naw-shak’; a primitive root; to strike with a sting (as a serpent); figuratively, to oppress with interest on a loan:—bite, lend upon usury.13
The World (XXI) is a trump or Major Arcana card in the tarot deck. It is usually the final card of the Major Arcana or tarot trump sequence.14
..the significance of the objects of the Hebrew cultus is for the first time comprehensible. Who does not perceive in the golden table, crowned and supported by cherubim, which covered the ark of the covenant, the same symbols as those of the twenty-first Tarot key? The ark was a hieroglyphical synthesis of the whole kabbalistic dogma; it included the jod or blossoming staff of Aaron, the he, or cup, the gomor containing the manna, the two tables of the law an analogous symbol to that of the sword of justice and the manna kept in the gomor, four objects which interpret wonderfully the letters of the divine tetragram.15
But since in reality Big Brother is not omnipotent and the Party is not infallible, there is need for an unwearying, moment-to-moment flexibility in the treatment of facts. The key word here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.
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.16
The inversion of values can be traced back to the ancient Semitic empires of Mesopotamia, and the fertility cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, goddess of Sex and War, the “Queen of Heaven”:
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.1
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.”2
The most vivid expressions of the goddess’s innate contradictions appear in the following passage:
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….3
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.4
“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”, 1984
Within a few centuries, the new capitalist spirit challenged the basic Christian ethic: the boundless ego of Sir Giles Overreach and his fellows in the marketplace had no room for charity or love in any of their ancient senses. The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity – pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust – into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as ‘bad for business,’ except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.5
— Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine
“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.”
* “And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth.
He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.
And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.”
A real transformation of economics first requires its voluntary death
“All of the greatest religions speak of the soul’s endurance beyond the end of life. So what then does it mean, to die?”
– Eisenheim, The Illusionist
Our world is dominated by an idea. That by performing evil actions, good will come of it.
It is the black sheep, the dark one of twins. They are the descendants of a higher idea, which is the wellspring (wyllspring; “to wish, will”) of a current of ideas known as apotheosis.
To become a god. Release from earthly life, ascension to heaven; death. In other words, a transformation. Elevation to a transcendent position. The apex, culmination, or climax of something; the highest point in its development.
It is also the name given to the idea of a “latent entity that mediates between our psyche [soul] and our thoughts”. Freudian psychology refers to this entity by the concepts of id, the ego, and superego. This is misleading, and an inversion, as we will see. The true mediator is known by the Wise as the Conscience.
The realm of human existence and daily striving known as economics has been dominated for the past quarter millennium by this dark idea of evil acts resulting in “the greater good”. Until this idea is exorcised instead of being exercised, there can be no genuine progress, no true evolution, no real transformation of economics.
This idea is false. It is an enchanting deception. It enchants by granting licence to our lower instincts, in the full knowledge (of the Wise, the Adept, and the Magus) that repeated actions form habits. By encouraging, by tempting us with the licentious idea that we can act on our lower, darker instincts, our ‘animal spirits’, in the interests of a “greater good”, the Magus of Evil Will knows that our conscience will be destroyed. Death by a thousand cuts. Not only will we (and society) not be transformed for the good by evil actions, on the contrary, our conscience becomes increasingly desensitised, inured, and in a sense dead to the harm caused by our evil actions. We are only drawn onwards and downwards, ever deeper, into ever greater acts of evil.
In his magnum opus Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1855), nineteenth century French occult magus Eliphas Lévi explains an eternal truth, one that centuries of “thinkers” have ignored, or swept under the magic carpet of economic theory (emphasis mine):
Not only do the wicked torment the good, but unconsciously the good torture the wicked. The gentleness of Abel was a long and painful bewitchment for the ferocity of Cain. Among evil men, the hatred of good originates in the very instinct of self-preservation; moreover, they deny that what torments them is good, and, for their own peace, are driven to deify and justify evil. In the sight of Cain, Abel was a hypocrite and coward, who abused the pride of humanity by his scandalous submissions to divinity.1
The true Magus, whether of Good or Evil Will, knows that we cannot transcend evil by practicing it. We can only destroy our conscience, creating for ourselves an illusion of evil’s non-existence; becoming, as Lévi eulogises, a “free man” having “liberty” from the “servitude of conscience”. In precisely the same way that practicing evil actions forms evil habits, the practice of good actions forms good habits. Any notion of an inverse correlation is, simply, a lie. If we wish to experience more good in this world, then we must practice the good, and cease from practicing the evil.
But I digress.
While some still debate whether mainstream economics has taken Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” metaphor in The Wealth of Nations (1776) out of context, other, and I would argue, more influential early thinkers in the field once known as Moral Philosophy2 cannot be doubted in their clarity of expression.
In his Discourse on the Nature of Pleasures and Pains (1773), Italian Enlightenment philosopher, economist, and member of the Milanese nobility Pietro Verri stresses the positive function of pain. While pain is not good in itself, Verri says that “pain is the moving cause of all mankind” and so “good is generated by evil”.3
Fellow Italian Giammaria Ortes appears at a casual glance to reverse the order of causation. Or does he? In Della Economia Nazionale (1774) he writes that “The wealth of a nation corresponds with its population, and its misery corresponds with its wealth. Diligence in some compels idleness in others. The poor and idle are a necessary consequence of the rich and active.. .”4
A defrocked Camaldolese monk, libertine, and contemporary of another infamous Italian monk, the magician, alchemist, occultist and swindler Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, the Venetian Ortes is a most interesting, though lamentably lesser known figure in the history of economic philosophy. Karl Marx exalts him in Capital as “an original and clever writer”, “one of the great economic writers of the 18th century.”5 As we will see, his ideas, while undeniably “clever”, are not original. They are very ancient. Their origin, transmission, and far-reaching influence on humanity’s body politic should – like the study of cancer – compel our undivided attention.
If Ortes were living in our time, we would most likely see him employed in a “leading university”, an international money-lending institution like the IMF, or a neoliberal “think tank”. Many of us would, not inaccurately, refer to him as a shill for the oligarchy. Others of us, even less charitably, might call him a Useful Idiot for the 0.01%. Ortes was “closely associated with one of the most important salons or ridotti of the Venetian aristocracy”, the conversazione filosofica e felice (“philosophical and happy conversation group”), “the ideological arm of a closely allied group of Venetian oligarchical families.”6
From the beginning of his magnum opus, Ortes presents an argument that can only be useful to those wishing to promote the convenient-for-oligarchy idea that sovereign (i.e., papal; today, government) intervention can not contribute to material progress for humanity. Ortes provides a rhetorical segue echoing down to our time in the “Don’t tread on me!” anti-government howlings of libertarians, laissez-faire capitalists, Ayn Rand acolytes and others of similar ilk, by the simple expedient of insisting on the futility of any efforts to do so:
[N]ational economy is a matter which cannot be improved in any way by any particular action, and all attempts by persons seeking to organize national economy according to a better system, as regards provision or increase of goods, have to end up as useless efforts.7
Instead of projecting useless systems for achieving the happiness of people, I shall limit myself to investigating the reasons for their unhappiness.8
In the eighteenth century Age of ‘En-light-enment’, as in all ages, it was of course rather easier to “happily” spout let-us-do-nothing arguments for the status quo when your snout had been buried deep in the oligarchy’s trough.
Over one hundred years before Léon Walras, the alleged pioneer of the idea of “competitive equilibrium” and what has come to be known as the General Equilibrium Theory of neoclassical economics (1874), Ortes promoted the core idea of universal equilibrium, a zero-sum ‘higher’ unity arising from the antagonism of opposites – an ancient occult magic belief system – as a rationalisation for the alleged inevitability of inequality in social wealth, all under the guise of what Marx styled a “general natural law”9 (emphasis mine):
In the economy of a nation, advantages and evils always balance one another: the abundance of wealth with some people, is always equal to the want of it with others: the great riches of a small number are always accompanied by the absolute privation of the first necessaries of life for many others.10
The good therefore, understood as the possession of goods in excess of what is needed, can only be expressed between the individual and the commonality as the number zero, and since there is an inevitable lack of goods for some if these are to be abundant for others, this good can only appear as a mixture of economic good and evil, which tends neither to one nor to the other, or as the vector sum of forces which, operating with equal energy in different and opposite directions, destroy each other and resolve themselves into nothing.11
The observant reader will note the remarkable analogue of Ortes’s theory to a host of widely accepted general equilibrium economic beliefs in our day, such as “perfect markets”, and the fundamental ‘laws’ of supply and demand. Perhaps the most important analogue however, is to the assumptions of financial intermediation theory; a primary rationalisation – most useful for money-lenders – for the pretence that banks and debt don’t matter, since banks, according to the theory, act only as mediator between two opposites – savers and borrowers.
You may detect more than a hint of the idea of deification, of man becoming a god (apotheosis) manifesting in this self-serving theory of bankers being a kind of Kristos, an invisible mediator between God (good, wealthy) and man (evil, poor).
However, as proven empirically for the first time in modern history by Professor Richard Werner12, the real truth is that, progressively, slowly but surely, over millennia, ‘alchemists’ have apotheosised a now “Too Big To Fail” global domination system wherein they – the ‘Masters of the Universe’, ‘doing god’s work’ – represent something even greater than just a deified and transcendent, mediating Man-God. Instead, with the 1971 closure of the “gold window” backing (i.e., materially limiting the issuance of) the $USD as the world’s reserve currency, the 0.01% now represent an analogue to the very apex of the Trinity – the Infinite Creator Himself.
Readers of my earlier essays on the ancient origins and fraud-enabling ‘magic’ of double-entry bookkeeping (here, here, here) will also note the precise analogue of Ortes’s “vector sum of forces” theory to the symbolic representation of what I have christened the Paradox of Opposite Perspectives (POOP, or POP) embedded in double entry bookkeeping-based ‘money’ creation ex nihilo (“out of nothing”):
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.
Omnipotence is the most absolute liberty; now, absolute liberty cannot exist apart from perfect equilibrium. Magical equilibrium is hence one of the first conditions of success in the operations of science, and must be sought even in occult chemistry, by learning to combine contraries withoutneutralising them by one another. Magical equilibrium explains the great and primeval mystery of the existence and relative necessity of evil. This relative necessity gives, in black magic, the measure of the power of demons or impure spirits, to whom virtues practised upon earth are a source of increased rage and apparently of increased power.13
Ortes had first written on general equilibrium and the zero-sum antagonism of equal and opposite ‘forces’ twenty years earlier (1754), in a short tract titled Calcolo de’piaceri e de’dolori della vita umana (“A Calculation of Pleasures and Pains of Human Life”). Here we find another quite remarkable analogue to el modo vinegia (the “Venetian Method”) of double-entry bookkeeping.
Academic Marco E. L. Guidi provides us with an invaluable summary (emphasis mine):
Ortes’s exposition moves from a set of hypotheses on [the] human body and on the relation between the physical and the moral constitution, which seem to be derived from Cartesian philosophy. There is also a strong analogy between Hobbes’s and Ortes’s explanation of the origin of sensations. The body is made by more or less elastic fibres and by fluids. When all fibres are in a steady state, fluids freely circulate within the body. This circular flow equilibrium goes along with a state of psychical indifference: a state which seems to be more hypothetical than actual, but nevertheless possible. The contact of human physique with external objects alters the state of fibres, overtending or overrelaxing them, and necessarily driving to a disorder in the circulation of fluids, felt by the mind as pain. Pleasure in [sic] nothing else than the impression produced by a contrary movement of fibres, reestablishing the original state (Ortes 1754: 288-89). This restoration can have two possible effects: either pleasure disappears with the new equilibrium and indifference is felt by the mind (Ortes 1754: 289-90), or the contrary movement which had produced pleasure continues beyond the point of equilibrium, thus altering the state of fibers and producing new pains (Ortes 1754: 292). Therefore, pleasure has a quantitative limit given by the amount of pain it removes. One of the examples given by Ortes is the same that manuals of microeconomics often give to explain to undergraduate students the meaning of Gossen’s laws: hunger which becomes indigestion once the satiety point is reached (Ortes 1754: 307-8). On the contrary, there are no limits to the extent of pain: every pain has a “fecundity” of its own, to the extent that the disorder in fibres can be communicated by fluids to other fibres, and so on in a chain reaction effect.
The assertion that the state of tranquillity can be altered only by pain (Ortes 1754: 307) leads Ortes to conclude that every kind of pain is a positive sensation, whereas pleasure should be defined as a negative sensation, i.e. the reduction of pain (Ortes 1754: 305).
Ortes’s originality can be found in the statement that pleasure is not a condition of tranquillity but a quantity of movement which restores tranquillity.14
For readers who may be unfamiliar with the rules of double-entry bookkeeping, the following chart shows how the entries made on a Balance Sheet are precisely analogous to the rationale of Ortes’s circular flow equilibrium theory of hedonistic calculus.
It requires but a little reflection to see clearly what Ortes was trying to do. By proposing a theoretical correspondence of a universal trinity of paired opposite ideas – physical Pleasure and Pain; the Abundance and Want of material “good” (i.e., possession of wealth); and the moral opposite ideas of Good and Evil – the debauched monk and Venetian oligarchs’ ideological thinker was, from at least as early as 1754, trying to quantify, that is to say, to measure morality.
It is important to note that Ortes sought to measure morality – a perspective of the Higher (non-physical, spiritual) world – by means of hypothetical a priori analogues drawn from the (necessarily finite; that is, limited) perspectives of the Lower world. In other words, Ortes was projecting analogues drawn from the material microcosmos on to the immaterial macrocosmos.
Today, economists do exactly the same thing, in projecting microeconomic analogues (“principles”, “laws”) into macroeconomic models. As the king who is claimed to have received the Wisdom of God and is reverenced to this day in the symbolic Double Triangle of Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun”:
Mercurius Trismegistus begins his admirable symbol known under the name of the “Emerald Table,” by this threefold affirmation: “It is true, it is certain without error, it is of all truth.” Thus, in physics, the true confirmed by experience; in philosophy, certitude purged from any alloy of error; in the domain of religion or the infinite, absolute truth indicated by analogy: such are the first necessities of true science, and Magic only can impart these to its adepts.
As we have already said, according to the sole dogma of the Kabbalah, that which is in visible nature reveals that which is in the domain of invisible nature, or secondary causes are in strict proportion and analogous to the manifestations of the First Cause.
Nature also has four motions produced by two forces which sustain each other by their tendency in an opposite direction. Now, the law which rules bodies is analogous to that which governs minds, and that which governs minds is the very manifestation of God’s secret – that is to say, of the mystery of the creation.
As we have already said, there are two palmary natural laws – two essential laws – which, balanced one against another, produce the universal equilibrium of things. These are fixity and motion, analogous to truth and discovery in philosophy, and in absolute conception to necessity and liberty, which are the very essence of God.
Does not human life present itself also under these four phases or successive transformations – birth, life, death, immortality? And remark here that the immortality of the soul, necessitated as a complement of the tetrad, is kabbalistically proved by analogy, which is the sole dogma of truly universal religion, as it is the key of science and the universal law of nature.
Every individuality is therefore indefinitely perfectible, since the moral order is analogous to the physical, and since we cannot conceive any point as unable to dilate, increase and radiate in a philosophically unlimited circle.15
It should not escape our notice that embedded in Ortes’s moral calculus there are two rather tempting ideas; a paradoxical duality that, from a ‘higher’ perspective, can be seen as a unity of opposites; one that again represents a powerful analogue to the Paradox of Opposite Perspectives in double-entry bookkeeping. These two ideas would doubtless serve as a soothing salve for the seared consciences of the merchants and money-lenders of the Venetian oligarchy: for the wealthy, “the possession of goods in excess of what is needed” actually represents a return to the original state of man (freedom from pain/evil; perfect equilibrium; the number zero; a god-like state of psychical tranquillity and indifference); for others, pain (e.g., the pain of debt) should be thought of as a positive (‘credit’) “movement” or sensation.
Following this chain of reasoning/sophistry then, it is not too difficult to see how, some 250 years on, we find ourselves observing tens of millions actually believing that their favourite “Prosperity Gospel” televangelist, “Christian” businessman, or “conservative” politician simply must be a good man – “approved of God”, indeed – by virtue of his enormous wealth.
According to Jane Gleeson-White (Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance), “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 [monk, magician] Luca Pacioli played a key role. .. [O]nce 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.” 16 (emphasis mine)
In other words, what you can measure, you can control. At least, you can con-vince yourself (and others) that it is so. After all, it does appear to be so with material examples of measurement; why not with the immaterial as well? Indeed, have not the Ancient and Wise clearly advised that the earthly is a mirror (though darkly) of the heavenly? “That which is above is like or equal to that which is below,” say the magi.17
It stands to ‘reason’ then, that if you can find a way, by analogy, to measure morality – if you can measure Good (“God”) and Evil (“Satan”) – then you can control, that is, attain power over the forces of Good and Evil.
Hedonistic (or “felicific”) calculus is usually attributed to the English philosopher, legal scholar, and founder of so-called “utilitarian [i.e., useful] ethics”, Jeremy Bentham. His efforts, like those of Ortes, can hardly have failed to find favour with the money-lending oligarchy. Indeed, we must acknowledge the great historical significance of the sublime eloquence and cunning casuistry of Bentham, in something other than its useful role in the promotion of his utilitarian calculus. It was also the catalysing force for the final capitulation of the remaining vestiges of sincere community-spiritedness within elite opinion, with regard to the traditional legal restrictions on the practice of usury (since Bentham, conveniently and happily rebranded under the more ‘positive’ appellation of “interest”).
In Defence of Usury (1788) he argued against “the Impolicy of the Present Legal Restraints on the Terms of Pecuniary Bargains”. Bentham basically opined that what had been considered legal protections against the predations of money-lenders – protections proven to be a genuine necessity for millennia of human history – are instead “Restraints to the Progress of Inventive Industry”.
Liberty, you see, must include a “right” for “free” individuals to offer and/or accept an offer of usurious (etym., a serpent’s biting) “bargains” with other “free” individuals. As usual with Benthamite notions of “useful” ethics, this nod and a wink to evil is allegedly for the greater good. In this especially egregious example of casuistic reasoning (also known as “special pleading”) for the inversion of traditional moral values, serpentine “pecuniary bargains” are now necessary for the greater good of “Progress of Inventive Industry”.
Usury – like the “positive” pain of Ortes – is a “necessary evil”, don’t you see? It is actually “good” for “progress” toward the apotheosis of Inventive Industry. Without the disequilibrating pain of compounding debt, we would have no incentive to work, to constantly “invent” new (or copied) products and services and convince others (by fair means or foul) to buy them (whether needed or wanted or not). In other words, without the “necessary evil” pain of debt that, having “a ‘fecundity’ of its own”, is constantly growing in a “chain reaction effect” (i.e., compounding “interest”) – a type of pain that has no quantifiable limits, according to Ortes, economics textbooks, and many economists – without this “necessary evil”, we would have no ongoing need to compete with each other for money, or to seek “pleasure” (the “reduction of pain”) in the acquisition of money, and so, in the repayment of debt to the money-lenders, spend our lifetimes in a great apotheotic quest – to restore ourselves to our original “higher” equilibrium state of perfect tranquillity.
Clearly the much-lauded Jeremy Bentham was not so great or original a thinker as some have chosen to believe. A sophist, casuist, and intellectual enabler of the money-lending class would appear to be a more accurate appellation. Indeed, it has been soundly argued that “in the entire school of British Philosophical Radicalism after the time of the American Revolution – including Malthus, Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), James Mill (1773-1836) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) – there is virtually nothing that cannot already be found in Ortes. The British empiricists were, as usual, obliged slavishly to plagiarize their decadent Venetian originals.”18
Karl Marx offers us a further insight into the “Enlightenment” world of the British empire, where we see that indeed nothing has changed; then, as now, public opinion was invariably moved by the tide of eloquent but unoriginal plagiarists shilling for the oligarchy (emphasis mine):
If the reader reminds me of Malthus, whose “Essay on Population” appeared in 1798, I remind him that this work in its first form is nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, &c., and does not contain a single sentence thought out by himself. The great sensation this pamphlet caused, was due solely to party interest. The French Revolution had found passionate defenders in the United Kingdom; the “principle of population,” slowly worked out in the eighteenth century, and then, in the midst of a great social crisis, proclaimed with drums and trumpets as the infallible antidote to the teachings of Condorcet, &c., was greeted with jubilance by the English oligarchy as the great destroyer of all hankerings after human development. .. With the exception of the Venetian monk, Ortes, an original and clever writer, most of the population theory teachers are Protestant parsons.19
If Bentham et al merely re-presented ideas that had first been advanced by Ortes when Bentham was still a child, then where did he get them from? Although praised by Karl Marx a century later as “an original and clever writer”, we have now seen that Marx’s acuity with regard to Malthus seemingly abandoned him with regard to Ortes; the Venetian “charlatan and mountebank” had promoted little more than eloquent self- and banker-serving analogies to the Venetian Method of double-entry bookkeeping.
Around the turn of the 16th century and the high point of the Hermetic Reformation20, better known to us today as the humanist Renaissance (“rebirth” in French), Europe’s most famous living artist, the genius Albrecht Dürer produced a masterful work entitled Allegory of Eloquence*.
A curator at the British Museum informs us that Dürer’s treatment of the subject is “based on a sketch by Hartman Schedel after an antique bas-relief, in his ‘Collectanea’. Schedel’s source for this was the Italian antiquarian and epigraphist, Cyriacus of Ancona (c. 1391-1450). In the legend, used by the ancient Greek satirist Lucian, Hermes (or Mercury) is described ensnaring his audience with the golden chain of his eloquence.”
The trickster god referred to in an early Arabic source on alchemy as “Hermes, the Sage, the Babylonian”21, is depicted by Dürer consistent with classical Greek and mystery school tradition: rising on winged feet, wearing a winged traveller’s hat and bearing in his right hand the double serpents and baculus of the caduceus, symbol of universal generation, eternal life, and universal equilibrium. Over his head shines a six-pointed star, representing the Double Triangle and Keys of Solomon, the “magical law of two forces constituting universal equilibrium”22. Golden chains extend from Hermes’ tongue to the ears of his listeners, including a cleric, a soldier, and a nobleman wearing the familiar tall hat (later silk top hat) satirised throughout the capitalist era to the present day as a quintessential symbol of the oligarchy – that is to say, of the upper class, big business, and bankers.
An inscription in Greek above his captive audience reads: “Hermes, the son of Maia, the son of Zeus, Three Times Great, helper, strong, shining light, who works through law, shepherd, slayer of Argo, with a baculus of gold, herald of the gods, diviner, bearer of fortune, hegemon, who makes profits, a thief, a merchant, who is in the marketplace.”
Eliphas Lévi explains what is the secret of the allegory of Hermes’ golden chain (emphasis mine):
To make the Magic Chain is to establish a magnetic current which becomes stronger in proportion to the extent of the chain.
The Great Work in Practical Magic, after the education of the will and the personal creation of the Magus, is the formation of the magnetic chain, and this secret is truly that of priesthood and of royalty. To form the magnetic chain is to originate a current of ideas which produces faith and draws a large number of wills in a given circle of active manifestation. A well-formed chain is like a whirlpool which sucks down and absorbs all. The chain may be established in three ways – by signs, by speech and by contact. The first is by inducing opinion to adopt some sign as the representation of a force. .. Once accepted and propagated, signs acquire force of themselves.
Printing is an admirable instrument for the formation of the magic chain by the extension of speech.
The magic chain of speech was typified among the ancients by chains of gold, which issued from the mouth of Hermes. Nothing equals the electricity of eloquence. Speech creates the highest intelligence in the most grossly constituted masses. Even those who are too remote for actual hearing understand by sympathy and are carried away with the crowd.
Two things, as we have shown, are necessary for the acquisition of magical power – the emancipation of will from servitude and its instruction in the art of domination.
We have already said that the devil is not a person. It is a misdirected force, as its name indicates. An odic or magnetic current, formed by a chain of perverse wills, constitutes this evil spirit, which the Gospel calls legion, and this it is which precipitated the swine into the sea – another allegory of the attraction exercised on beings of inferior instincts by the blind forces that can be put in operation by error and evil will.
All enthusiasm propagated in a society by a series of communications and practices in common produces a magnetic current, and continues or increases by the current. The action of the current is to carry away and often to exalt beyond measure persons who are impressionable and weak, nervous organisations, temperaments inclined to hysteria or hallucination. Such people soon become powerful vehicles of magical force and efficiently project the astral light in the direction of the current itself; opposition at such a time to the manifestations of the force is, to some extent, a struggle with fatality.
Hence there are two kinds of bewitchment, voluntary and involuntary; physical and moral bewitchment may be distinguished in like manner. .. Bewitchment by means of currents is exceedingly common, as we have observed already; morally as well as physically, most of us are carried away by the crowd.
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 universal dominion over Azoth and the domain of Magnesia, in other words, full power over the universal magical agent.
This solar agent subsists by two contrary forces – one of attraction and one of projection, whence Hermes says that it ascends and descends eternally. .. To be acquainted with the movement of this terrestrial sun in such a manner as to be able to take advantage of its currents and direct them, is to have accomplished the great work and to be master of the world. Armed with such a force you may make yourself adored; the crowd will believe you are God.23
It should be fully apparent by now that these two “contrary forces” of “attraction” and “projection” are simply eloquent metaphors for money-lending; the ‘Magical Art’ of “projecting” and “attracting” money.
Indeed, in a chapter entitled “Mastery of the Sun”, Lévi informs us that (emphasis in original):
The work consists entirely in projection, and projection is accomplished perfectly by the effective and realisable intelligence of a single word. There is but one important operation, and that is sublimation…24
The thoughtful reader should need no reminder that “Magical equilibrium is one of the first conditions of success” in the great work, and that this ‘magic’ is achieved specifically by “learning to combine contraries without neutralising them by one another”. In other words, by working (like Hermes) “through law” to ensure the “attraction” of payment of compounding usury, in addition to the “neutralising” repayment of the original “projection” of the principal.
In The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus, Antoine Faivre provides an important detail concerning the magnetism of “Hermes in the Western Imagination”. He informs us that the French Renaissance humanist writer and monk François Rabelais “knew that Pan was descended from Hermes and Penelope, and had heard tell of the oracle of Hermes at Pharae” (emphasis mine):
Ludwig Schrader has furnished an excellent study of this subject, his interest being particularly in Panurge. .. Panurge can be identified with Hermes.
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.”25
In my forthcoming book I present a controversial yet robustly-evidenced argument: that the fundamental principles of economic theory and practice – the ‘laws’ of supply and demand, market equilibrium, ‘rational’ self-interest, ‘utility’ (“pleasure”) maximisation, hedonistic calculus, and more – are all derived from the “universal science” of Hermetic-Kabbalist Luciferianism.
This whirlpool of ideas is perhaps better known to us today under the rubric “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” of twentieth century occultist and “Wickedest Man in the World”, Aleister Crowley.
George Cooper (Money, Blood and Revolution) recently observed that “One of [Thomas Kuhn’s] greatest insights came in recognising how paradigm shifts are usually led by laymen and resisted by the incumbent experts who have a vested interest in preserving the status quo. When new thinking is needed, Kuhn showed the experts are usually intransigent, dogmatic and unwilling to objectively criticise their own ideas.”26
In a similar vein, Eliphas Lévi warned that “it is weariness and danger to strive against the fluidic currents stirred up by chains of wills in union. .. The man who is eccentric in his genius is one who attempts to form a circle by combating the central attractive force of established chains and currents.”27
Quite so. No matter how compelling the evidence, no doubt there will be not inconsiderable resistance to my argument that not only economic theory but also a multiplicity of widely-held philosophistries including dialectics, humanism, secularism, liberalism, materialism, evolutionary theory, political science and sociology, are all linked by a golden chain of eloquence veiling a universal temptation – the Pride-ful idea of self-directed apotheosis (“progress”) through values-inversion and practicing evil – passed down through time by the keepers and manipulators of the “universal wisdom” and their Magic Chain of “impressionable and weak” Useful Idiots of “perverse wills”.
American historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford says that the ultimate values of the capitalist era – Power, Profit, Prestige – can all be traced back to Egypt (emphasis mine):
Within a few centuries, the new capitalist spirit challenged the basic Christian ethic: the boundless ego of Sir Giles Overreach and his fellows in the marketplace had no room for charity or love in any of their ancient senses. The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity – pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust – into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as ‘bad for business,’ except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.
In sum, where capitalism prospered, it established three main canons for successful economic enterprise: the calculation of quantity, the observation and regimentation of time (‘Time is Money’), and the concentration on abstract pecuniary rewards. Its ultimate values – Power, Profit, Prestige – derive from these sources and all of them can be traced back, under the flimsiest of disguises, to the Pyramid Age. The first produced the universal accountancy of profit and loss; the second ensured productive efficiency in men as well as machines; the third introduced a driving motive into daily life, equivalent on its own base level to the monk’s search for an eternal reward in Heaven. The pursuit of money became a passion and an obsession: the end to which all other ends were means.28
I argue that the chain of transmission of this magnetic “current of ideas” can be traced back through the adepts of the Art of Alchemy to its earliest recorded origin in the Sumerian-Semitic cult worship of Inanna-Ishtar, the androgyne goddess of Love and War, whose priesthood and royalty strove after ultimate god-like power over the elements – and of course, their fellow man – via esoteric knowledge, self-deification, and the symbolic manipulation (through ritual inversion of values) of the ‘universal’ paradox of achdut hashvaah or coincidentia oppositorum, the Unity of Opposites (emphasis mine):
It is well established that the beginnings of science in general started in Mesopotamia and Egypt, and from thence they were transferred into Greece. It is useful therefore to investigate the beginnings of chemistry in these two ancient civilizations since this may reveal to us the origin of several theoretical concepts in both alchemy and chemistry.
The Babylonians believed that the universe originated from water. They noticed also that the universe contains opposite elements. Thus there is day and night; light and darkness; male and female; hot and cold; wet and dry. There is also the good and the evil, and in general, there is for every feature an opposite one. It is also possible to divide matter into two opposite elements, and from these two opposite elements everything can be generated.
The Babylonians were keen observers of the stars; and from their early history they believed that the gods are in control of the planets. They believed also that the sun, the moon and the other planets [CM: five then known; with sun and moon, seven “gates”] have influence on what happens on earth. This was the beginning of astrology. The influence of the planets involves metals; thus sun influences gold, and the moon influences silver, and the other planets control the remaining metals. This linkage between the planets and metals was the biggest contribution of the Babylonians to alchemy or the Art.
The principle of the two opposites of the Babylonians was inherited by Greek philosophers who were thinking about the nature of matter and whose theories were based in part on the Babylonian concept.29
Central .. to the Mesopotamian perspective is the existence of antitheses and contradictions, the delicate balancing of order and disorder.30
The Babylonian elites’ quest continues to this day, mirrored in post-Renaissance humanism’s continuing belief in the doctrine of progressive transformation towards individual, social, economic, and political apotheosis; not by force of Conscience, guiding man’s exercise of willpower to progressive growth in the practice of good and cessation of the practice of evil, but by force of human Ego, directed by “enlightened” human Intelligence – possessed only by an elite cabal of fully “liberated” “priesthood and royalty”, of course.
Same as it ever was.
In her introduction to Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth, the “gifted storyteller and professional folklorist” Diane Wolkstein discusses the legend of Inanna’s Descent to the Underworld, the earliest written evidence for a preoccupation with apotheosis. Her words hint at the magnetically-attractive power of this idea; the notion of the rebirth to deity, through Self-empowerment, and a dead-conscience attitude of “whatever it takes” (emphasis mine):
I read Inanna’s descent again and again. I was drawn to the story of a woman who gave up, at seven successive gates, all she had accomplished in life until she was stripped naked, with nothing remaining but her will to be reborn.31
How positively inspiring!
Unfortunately, Wolkstein herself has been bewitched by the magnetism of clever sophistries passed down through the aeons by the purveyors of the golden “chain of perverse wills”.
The Inanna myth says no such thing:
The moral which an ancient hearer of The Descent of Inanna might take away from it, far from a `symbolic journey of the self to wholeness’ is the lesson that there are consequences for one’s actions..32
Indeed, Wolkstein’s own representations of co-author Samuel Kramer’s original translations of the Inanna myth, are the strongest evidence giving the lie to her enchanted enthusiasms. Rather than Inanna being the powerful independent “liberated” heroine exalted by modern feminists, a Queen who impliedly saved herself through her “will to be reborn”, the story as rendered by Wolkstein herself irrefutably evidences the fact of Inanna being saved from the Underworld by the intervention of a pair of genderless golems (“demons”33), two androgynous mediators representing a unity of opposites sent by her Father … and even then, she was not permitted to leave without providing “someone in her place”:
From under his fingernail Father Enki brought forth dirt.
He fashioned the dirt into a kurgarra, a creature neither male nor female.
From under the fingernail of his other hand he brought forth dirt.
He fashioned the dirt into a galatur, a creature neither male nor female.
He gave the food of life to the kurgarra.
He gave the water of life to the galatur.
Enki spoke to the kurgarra and galatur, saying:
“Go to the underworld,
Enter the door like flies.
Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld, is moaning
…
The queen will be pleased.
She will offer you a gift.
Ask her only for the corpse that hangs from the hook on the wall.
One of you will sprinkle the food of life on it.
The other will sprinkle the water of life.
Inanna will arise.”
The kurgarra and the galatur heeded Enki’s words.
They set out for the underworld.
Like flies, they slipped through the cracks of the gates.
They entered the throne room of the Queen of the Underworld.
…
The corpse was given to them.
The kurgarra sprinkled the food of life on the corpse.
The galatur sprinkled the water of life on the corpse.
Inanna arose….
…
Inanna was about to ascend from the underworld
When the Annuna, the judges of the underworld, seized her.
They said:
“No one ascends from the underworld unmarked.
If Inanna wishes to return from the underworld,
She must provide someone in her place.”34
But again, I digress.
Some scholars believe that the ceremonial inversion of values practiced by the Inanna-Ishtar cult may have served a positive social purpose (“They remind us of the existence of rule”35). However, later initiates in the mystery school religions came to believe in apotheosis by “education of the will” in habituated evil acts; that only in this way is it possible to achieve “emancipation of the will”, to “liberate” the “Absolute Reason” of the Individual from “the servitude of conscience”.
Inanna asked:
“What is this?”
She was told:
“Quiet, Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.”36
Outside of the initiatory mystery schools in Freemasonry et al, and secret societies for future US presidents at Yale University, within the realm of economics there has in recent times perhaps been no finer example of the magnetic power of eloquence to deify and justify (“rationalise”) acts of evil, deaden the Conscience (“liberty”), and convince the “impressionable and weak” of the ‘relative’ merit of inverting the moral order in the interests of attaining “the greater good” of illusory utopian aspirations, than the words of economist John Maynard Keynes in his aptly titled Essays on Persuasion (emphasis mine):
I see us free, therefore, to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour, and the love of money is detestable, that those walk most truly in the paths of virtue and sane wisdom who take least thought for the morrow. We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.37
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.”
Indeed. So let us conclude back where we began.
Not only the realm of economics but indeed our entire world of ‘thought’, is now dominated – possessed, if you will – by an idea. That by slowly killing our Conscience in a death of a thousand cuts, through repeated, habituated, sometimes enchanted but often plain willful acts of evil, somehow a “greater good” will come of it.
The lesson drawn from deep dark history and the earliest written records of humanity, the lesson that I aim to prove beyond all shadow of doubt in my forthcoming book, is that this idea is false … and the truly Wise have always known it to be false.
It is a deliberate manipulation. An inversion of the truth.
A wise old prophet said:
Woe (judgment is coming) to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!
Woe (judgment is coming) to those who are wise in their own eyes And clever and shrewd in their own sight!38
Perhaps we should leave the final word to the Babylonians themselves. In the Descent of Inanna, we are told that as she languished a corpse on a hook of the wall of the Underworld, her faithful servant Ninshubur – “my constant support, my sukkal who gives me wise advice, my warrior who fights by my side” – following Inanna’s instructions given her “If I fail to return”39, went to the temple of Enlil, and prayed to the Air god to save her:
“O Father Enlil, do not let your daughter
Be put to death in the underworld.”
Father Enlil answered angrily:
“My daughter craved the Great Above.
Inanna craved the Great Below.
She who receives the me of the underworld does not return.
She who goes to the Dark City stays there.”40
********
UPDATE 17/4/2017: Added quotations, footnotes 32 and 33
********
Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (AE Waite 1896 ed.), p.132
Michael Hudson, Revolts of the Debtors: From Socrates to ibn Khaldrun, Counterpunch (June 24, 2016)
Marco E. L. Guidi, Pain and Human Action: Locke to Bentham, (1994), p.17 – Guidi examines theories of human action based on pain and pleasure from Hobbes to Pareto with particular reference to Verri and Ortes. He posits that what has been viewed as a single or ‘sensationalist’ tradition was in fact the result of two different approaches to analysis of human decisions. He contrasts these as ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ hedonism (emphasis mine): “Pain and pleasure are for Hobbes (1588-1679) the result of the interaction between two causal mechanisms: the action of external bodies on senses, and from there to the head and to the heart, and the “vital movement” of human body. The confrontation of these causal mechanisms takes place in the heart. Pleasure is experienced when the external causation seconds the internal movement, while pain is the result of the clash between the two mechanisms. However, pain and pleasure are not passive sensations. Human bodies react to the influence of pleasurable and painful events, and are urged to approach the objects which are pleasant, or to escape from those which are unpleasant (Hobbes A: 49-50)1. For this reason, the prime mover of action are inclinations and adversions, i.e. “foreseen and expected” pleasures and pains (Hobbes B: 147; C: I.vi).” p.4
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1 chap XXV sec 4
ibid., n.6
W.H. Tarpley, Giammaria Ortes: The Decadent Venetian Kook Who Originated The Myth of “Carrying Capacity”
Giammaria Ortes, Della Economia Nazionale, (Milano: Marzorati) edited by Oscar Nuccio; quotation from W.H. Tarpley
Giammaria Ortes, Della Economia Nazionale; quotation from Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1 chap XXV sec 4, n.26
ibid.
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1 chap XXV sec 4
Giammaria Ortes, Della Economia Nazionale, (Milano: Marzorati) edited by Oscar Nuccio, p. 45; quotation from W.H. Tarpley
Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (AE Waite 1896 ed.), pp. 46, 74-75
Marco E. L. Guidi, Pain and Human Action: Locke to Bentham, (1994), p. 8
Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual (AE Waite 1896 ed.), pp. 28, 34, 52, 55-56, 337
Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How The Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance (2013)
Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (AE Waite 1896 ed.), p.44; cf. “‘That which is above equals that which is below,’ says Hermes.”, p. 38
W.H. Tarpley, Giammaria Ortes: The Decadent Venetian Kook Who Originated The Myth of “Carrying Capacity”
Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1 chap XXV sec 4, n.6
James D. Heiser, Prisci Theologi and the Hermetic Reformation in the Fifteenth Century, 2011
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 …’.”
Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (AE Waite 1896 ed.), p. 291
ibid., pp. 52, 99-100, 106, 129, 229-230, 260-261, 263
ibid., p. 335
Antoine Faivre, The Eternal Hermes: From Greek God to Alchemical Magus (1995), pp. 36-38
George Cooper, Constant Reformation, Equitile Investments, (July 2016)
Eliphas Lévi, Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie, (AE Waite 1896 ed.), p. 101, 129
Lewis Mumford, Myth of the Machine (1967)
Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, Arabic Alchemy ‘Ilm al-San’a: Science of the Art; History of Science and Technology in Islam
Rivkah Harris, Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and Coincidence of Opposites; History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), p. 267
Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983), p. xvi
Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Kramer, Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983), p. 64, 67-68
Rivkah Harris, Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and Coincidence of Opposites; History of Religions, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Feb., 1991), p. 274, n.70; quotation from Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic Freedom” in Carnival!
Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Kramer,Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth(1983), p. 56-60
JM Keynes, ‘The Future’; Essays in Persuasion, pp. 371-372, Norton and Co Edition, New York, 1963
Isaiah 5:20-21, The Amplified Bible
Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Kramer,Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth (1983), p. 53
ibid., p. 61
* Dürer’s Allegory of Eloquence brought to my attention by Dr. Omar Zaid, published in his paper The Subversion of Reason, SSRN-id2658998 – https://zaidpub.com/
Apocalypse (Revelation, uncovering) of St. John 18:6
18 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory.
2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.
3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.
4 And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.
5 For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities.
I intend to do what little one man can do to awaken the public conscience, and in the meantime I am not frightened by your menaces. I am not a giant physically; I shrink from pain and filth and vermin and foul air, like any other man of refinement; also, I freely admit, when I see a line of a hundred policemen with drawn revolvers flung across a street to keep anyone from coming onto private property to hear my feeble voice, I am somewhat disturbed in my nerves. But I have a conscience and a religious faith, and I know that our liberties were not won without suffering, and may be lost again through our cowardice. I intend to do my duty to my country.1
— Upton Sinclair, Letter to the L.A. Chief of Police, 17 May 1923
A classic proverb holds that “there is honour among thieves”.
For 99% of thieves, this proverb is actually true.
But there is a minority of thieves, alas, who have no honour at all. They are the thieves who create 97% of our money—in the form of debt—through the magic of double-entry accounting.
Thanks to the added magic of compounding interest owed on all the money, the total amount of debt owed worldwide has grown so large, it is now impossible to repay. Although, truth be told, because all of the ‘money’ is actually debt, it has always been impossible to repay, because repaying all the debt would eliminate all the ‘money’.
As two authorities on the matter—one, the High Priest, the other, a mere deacon of the Federal Reserve Bank—intoned way back in the Great Depression:
If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn’t be any money.2
If all the bank loans were paid up, no one would have a bank deposit, and there would not be a dollar of currency or coin in circulation. This is a staggering thought. We are completely dependent on the commercial banks for our money. Someone has to borrow every dollar we have in circulation, cash or credit. If the banks create ample synthetic money, we are prosperous; if not, we starve. We are absolutely without a permanent money system. When one gets a complete grasp upon the picture, the tragic absurdity of our hopeless position is almost incredible – but there it is. It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon. It is so important that our present civilization may collapse unless it is widely understood and the defects remedied very soon.3
If you were not previously familiar with the illogical, paradoxical, circular pseudo-realities that arise from double-entry accounting, then Welcome to Numberland, Alice.
Even though this is the objective truth, the irrefutable reality of how the debt-based ‘money’ system works, most of us continue to believe in the impossible.
That is to say, we continue to believe—falsely—that we are bound to honour our debts.
Famed anthropologist and author of Debt: The First 5000 Years, David Graeber explains:
That common-sensical notion not only that it’s moral to pay one’s debt, but also that morality essentially is a matter of paying one’s debts can bring people to justify things that they would never think to justify in any other circumstance.4
Economist and historian Michael Hudson says that the bankers have known about this anthropological discovery since at least the 1980’s:
They found out that the poor are honest. Almost the only people who believe they should repay their debts are the poor people. And in fact, the less money you have, the more you believe the debts should be paid.5
Nearly 2500 years ago, the man widely acknowledged to be the foundational figure for Western science, philosophy, law-making, and mathematics, gave this instruction to lenders and borrowers:
No one shall deposit money with anyone he does not trust, nor lend at interest, since it is permissible for the borrower to refuse entirely to pay back either interest or principal.6
It turns out that Plato was right.
It is permissible—legally—for all the world’s borrowers to refuse to honour all their debts to all the world’s banks.
The reason why is because—legally—no bank has lent us any money.
In fact—according to the banks themselves—legally, all the money in the banks was lent by us to them.
(Feeling dizzy Alice?)
According to Black’s, the most widely used law dictionary in the United States7, “money” is legally defined as (emphasis added):
A general, indefinite term for the measure and representative of value; currency; the circulating medium; cash. “Money” is a generic term, and embraces every description of coin or bank-notes recognized by common consent as a representative of value in effecting exchanges of property or payment of debts. Hopson v. Fountain. 5 Humph. (Tenn.) 140. Money is used in a specific and also in a general and more comprehensive sense. In its specific sense, it means what is coined or stamped by public authority, and has its determinate value fixed by governments. In its more comprehensive and general sense, it means wealth.8
Rather than lending us legal money, bankers have misled and deceived us into renting a record of a promise to pay legal money.
They have misled and deceived us into believing that their record of their promise to pay us money, is actually money (legal substance).
They have also misled and deceived us into believing that their record of their promise to pay us money, is actually our money (ownership title).
And here’s the real kicker.
Despite the fact that they claim to have loaned us all this money, thanks to the magical paradox at the heart of double-entry accounting, they also claim, simultaneously, precisely the opposite to be true — that we have actually loaned all that money to them.
(We will return to this later – think “bail-in”).
It really does beg the question, “Does anyone really own money?”
Because the ‘money’ that the bankers have purportedly ‘loaned’ to us—that we have loaned to them—is neither money in true legal substance, nor is it certain just whose ‘money’ it actually is, we can confidently assert that the bankers have
misrepresented the sign, true substance, and true value of the “consideration” component of the loan agreement,
engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in the withholding and/or obfuscation of key information pertaining to their capacity to deliver on their promise of performance,
made false, misleading, and deceptive statements and representations in the inducement of borrowers to enter into an agreement of exchange of mutual performances (the “offer”),
failed to deliver on their promise of performance (“failure of consideration”),
engaged in misleading and deceptive conduct in obfuscating their failure to deliver on their promise of performance, and
gained dishonest advantage (“interest”, “yield”, “return”) through these acts of misleading and deceptive conduct.
You may well be feeling—like Alice—rather incredulous about this, and questioning how it is possible. After all, surely the financial accounting standard-setters and our government regulators would prevent such things from happening?
Alas, no.
Just as with double-entry accounting—the magical foundation on which the entire parasite worm-ridden edifice of global banking and finance is built—the truth is exactly the opposite.
Ever since the “financial reporting revolution ushered in by financial economics ascendance in the 1960s”9 and the “increasing hegemony of neo-liberal ideology over issues of public policy and regulation ushered in by Reagan and Thatcher”10, the financial accounting standards bodies and government regulators have aided and abetted the bankers in their misleading and deceptive conduct:
Well documented is the growing dominance of the social sciences and of business education by neoclassical economic ideas (Ferraro, Pfeffer, & Sutton, 2005), which form the intellectual foundation of neo-liberal morality and politics.11
Transforming accounting in the academy into a neoclassical economics sub-discipline (Reiter & Williams, 2002), which the financial reporting revolution accomplished, has impoverished accounting discourse as a moral discourse (Reiter, 1998; Williams, 2000) and led to the understanding of accounting as a practice whose purpose is to cohere with a world made natural by the discourse of neoclassical economics.12
For at least four decades, the private not-for-profit (oh really?) financial accounting standard-setters (FASB, IASB) have continued to actively aid and abet the bankers’ misleading and deceptive conduct, despite frequent accounting-enabled corporate scandals and resultant financial crises, and the often stunning revelations and criticisms presented in the peer-reviewed accounting literature (emphasis added):
The savings and loan failures in the late 1980s and 1990s, the Enron, Global Crossing and Tyco corporate scandals, Andersen’s demise, and the sub-prime mortgage crisis all relate to deception [emphasis in original]. All such scandals involved to varying degrees the telling of accounting untruths…13
Accounting representations are true if they predict, or true if they abet the privileged group to pursue its objectives, a quite different notion of true than implied by the popular usage…14
[M]any accounting signs no longer refer to real objects and events and accounting no longer functions according to the logic of transparent representation, stewardship or information economics.15
[A]ccounting today no longer refers to any objective reality but instead circulates in a “hyperreality” of self-referential models.16
The accounting sign now precedes (and even creates through its ‘‘sign value’’) the referent that it once purported to represent. It is no longer an abstraction or an appearance of any ‘‘real’’ thing. It is its own pure simulation, making circular references to other models which themselves make circular references to accounting signs.17
Are such disasters [Enron] necessary before accountants begin to realise how indispensable it is to make a distinction between conceptual representation (including accounting representations and misrepresentations) and the reality to be represented?18
As mentioned earlier, around 97% of so-called ‘money’ in ‘circulation’ (hint: it doesn’t actually circulate in the true meaning of the word; it magically disappears in one place, and magically reappears in another) is not actually money (“coined or stamped by public authority”)19. It is bank-created ‘credit’.
By legal definition, bank ‘credit’ is not real money.
Bank ‘credit’ is actually just an electronic double-entry accounting record of the bank’s promise to pay real money.
However, this objective legal reality has not prevented the FASB/IASB from aiding and abetting the bankers in their false, misleading and deceptive misrepresentation of the mere sign of money as actually being real legal money, and consequently inducing prospective borrowers into forming loan agreements for the purpose of gain for the bankers (“interest”, “yield”, “return”) on the basis of this fundamental misrepresentation.
For example, effective July 1, 2009—that is, in the middle of the global banking liquidity crisis known as the “GFC”—the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) introduced Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) §305 Cash and Cash Equivalents. This new standard effectively sanctioned—and obfuscated—the banks’ misleading and deceptive conduct in renting records of promises to pay under the guise of so-called ‘money’ (emphasis added; duplicitous weasel words underlined):
Cash
Consistent with common usage, cash includes not only currency on hand but demand deposits with banks or other financial institutions. Cash also includes other kinds of accounts that have the general characteristics of demand deposits in that the customer may deposit additional funds at any time and also effectively may withdraw funds at any time without prior notice or penalty. All charges and credits to those accounts are cash receipts or payments to both the entity owning the account and the bank holding it. For example, a bank’s granting of a loan by crediting the proceeds to a customer’s demand deposit accountis a cash payment by the bank and a cash receipt of the customer when the entry is made.
This codification of the bookkeeping entry record of bank ‘credits’—the record of a promise to pay cash—as actually being (“is“) ‘cash’, is in clear contradiction of the legal definition of money.
An electronic record of a promise to pay cash
is not “coin or bank-notes”,
is not “coined or stamped by public authority”,
is not “currency” or “cash”; that is to say, not in any sense that is or would be “recognized by common consent“ (Black’s) as being actual “currency” or “cash” (i.e., coin or bank-notes; legal tender).
According to the International Institute of Certified Public Accountants (IICPA) in an Open Letter to both the FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) in May 2013, this codification of banks’ electronic ‘credits’ as (not representing but) actually being “cash” is also in breach of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) and the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS); (emphasis added):
Demand deposits referred to by the public as “cash in bank” is recorded and reported by monetary financial institutions (MFI) in units of account by double-entry bookkeeping in a process which the MFIs call “lending” — but which is effectively a nullity — by debiting loans receivable and crediting demand deposits.
These so created units of account are then denominated at will in dollars, pound sterling, euros, etc., depending on the terms of the documentation or underlying promissory note, or whatever is the legal document giving rise to this type of “lending,” using whatever is the name of the currency in the jurisdiction in which it takes place, but legal tender the “demand deposits” are not.
These so-called “loans receivable” that give rise to these so-called “demand deposits”
are not assets within the meaning of economic resources,
do not have the capacity to eventually result in cash inflows (cash being legal tender or central bank money, so called federal funds),
are created bank-internally and therefore in violation of self-dealing,
have no cost basis,
have no market value except by way of assignment against like-kind-nullities to or from other MFIs never settled in legal tender or central bank money.20
If that were not enough, it gets worse.
Astonishingly, the FASB’s ASC §305-10-55-1 Implementation guidance tumbles even further down the rabbit hole of logical and legal unreality—not to mention amorality—in stating what the bank customers’ perspective of so-called “Cash and Cash Equivalents” “shall” be (emphasis added):
Cash on deposit at a financial institution shall be consideredby the depositor as cash rather than as an amount owed to the depositor.
This codification by an unelected, private not-for-profit financial accounting standards organisation of how the general public “shall” consider their so-called “cash on deposit”, is in clear contradiction of
the legal definition of “money”,
the common understanding of the word “cash” as meaning a government-created tangible entity (i.e., legal tender notes and coins),
the banks’ own balance sheet records affirming all customer “deposits” as being a Liability (i.e., amounts owed to customers),
the banks’ perspective regarding ownership title (claim) on this so-called “cash” (a perspective backed, incidentally, by the Financial Stability Board in its G20-wide “resolution regime” in preparation for “bad” bank bail-ins).
The implications of this are disturbing.
The FASB has ex post facto codified that banks may consider bank ‘credits’ (a record of a promise to pay cash) as actually being “cash” for accounting purposes; that the customers’ perspective of bank ‘credits’ “shall” be that those ‘credits’ are (literal physical) “cash”, and, that they are not amounts owed to them by the bank, wholly irrespective of whether or not the banks have actually met (or will actually meet) their legal obligations under contract law.
While the FASB might imagine that it can—without any practical or legal implications—surreptitiously decree how hundreds of millions of “depositors” “shall” view their “deposit”, the truth of the matter is that an immediate contradiction, and critical conflict of interests arises.
Quite simply, the FASB’s ASC §305 Cash and Cash Equivalents codification does not even comply with the rules of double-entry bookkeeping, much less the common understanding of the true meaning of the word “cash”. It has potentially far-reaching implications for the legal standing of banks’ claims on borrowers for the (re)payment of “consideration” (plus compounding “interest” in addition), in that it serves to highlight the false, misleading, and deceptive statements and representations of banks in the formation of loan contracts.
To illustrate this critical point, the following diagram depicts all of the perspectives (views), concepts, and realities that are inherent in a double-entry bookkeeping-based ‘account’ of the bank Lender – customer Borrower relationship. Keeping in mind that—since the time of the Stoics—it has been considered an “indispensable” fundamental of philosophical and scientific discourse to express clearly the difference and relation between the threefold notions of the sign (sound, written symbol, etc), the conceptual idea (meaning) communicated by the sign, and the real (the actual object or event behind the concept)21, all three notions — “Sign”, Concept, (Real) — are clearly marked for each party and each perspective of the two-sided, legally-binding mutual “exchange” of promises-to-pay.
Consider carefully the following:
Irrespective of whether one adopts the perspective of the Borrower or the Lender, any so-called “cash” or “demand deposit” appears only as a sign (sound, name, symbol, i.e., a mis–representation) of the Lender’s IOU,
The real object or event underlying the purported existence of “cash in bank” (or “demand deposit”), is the Lender’s IOU (promise-to-pay); in other words, the real object or event is the Lender’s promise of performance (“consideration”), and not “coin or bank-notes” “stamped by public authority”,
The sign (“cash in bank”, “money”, “funds”, “$”, “€”, “£”, etc) that is purported to the Borrower by the Lender to not merely represent but to actually be the underlying reality, is false, misleading, and deceptive,
As the Borrower has been induced to accept the offer to contract with the Lender on the basis of false, misleading, and deceptive representations, the loan contract is unenforceable,
The Lender’s IOU is simultaneously an Asset of the Borrower, and a Liability of the Lender (contradicting §305-10-55-1),
As a loan agreement requires inter alia the exchange of mutual performances, and the Lender’s obligation is defined as necessarily preceding that of the Borrower, the recording and reporting of the Lender’s IOU as a Liability demonstrates that the Lender has failed to deliver on its promise of performance (“consideration”), i.e., to provide the Borrower with money (“coin or bank-notes” “stamped by public authority”); therefore, the loan contract is unenforceable.
There is one final matter to consider.
Since early 2009, the unelected Financial Stability Board (FSB)—perennially chaired by Goldman Sachs alumni—has been working with G20 governments and financial regulatory authorities to implement a global banking “resolution regime”. One of the Key Attributes of this scheme is the passage of legislation granting governments the power to “bail-in” the “deposits” of bank customers in order to save or reestablish a “bad” bank or “systemically-important” financial institution.
Despite the reality that all so-called “customer deposits” have in fact been created ex nihilo by the banks through the act of “lending” to customers, and are reported as a Liability of the banks on their balance sheets (i.e., as ‘money’ still owed to the customer), both the banks and the FSB’s global banking resolution regime consider the customer to be a “creditor” of the bank.
In other words, rather than the bank having purportedly loaned (but not yet delivered) ‘money’ to the customer, the bank and the FSB deem that the situation is precisely the reverse – the customer has purportedly loaned his/her ‘money’ to the bank (note the implicit assumption of customer ownership).
Believe it or not, there is an explanation—albeit a perverse, morally abhorrent and unconscionable explanation—for this, and in turn, for how the creeping global preparations to legally steal the “deposit” assets of bank customers (refer above diagram) is able to be “justified” by the banks, the financial and political authorities, and the unelected, BIS-funded, Goldman Sachs alumni-chaired FSB.
At the heart of the matter is the ever-present paradox of perspective inherent in the BabylonianDuality Principle on which double-entry accounting is based.
Banks are able to create new (so-called) ‘money’ ex nihilo through the loan origination process. As this is recorded using double-entry accounting, every new loan results in a new Asset and a new Liability on the banks’ balance sheet records.
However, because banks act both as new loan (thus, new ‘money’) originators and as financial intermediaries, there is no way of disaggregating the Liability side of any bank’s balance sheet in order to clearly distinguish between those “deposits” that have arisen in consequence of that bank’s own lending (so-called), and those “deposits” that have arisen in consequence of that bank’s intermediation (i.e., ‘transfers’ of ‘money’ from one customer account to another customer account at the same bank, or, from the customer accounts of other financial institutions to customers of the bank).
Whether or not any particular unit of any particular “deposit” amount could truthfully be defined as ‘money’ loaned to the bank by a customer, or, loaned by the bank to a customer, is dependent on knowing with complete certainty how and when each and every unit came to be recorded in the customer account. The only customer account for which such certainty is possible, is a customer account created by the bank at the moment of first originating a loan, and, before any new entry for even one single fractional unit of the denominated currency has been either added to, or subtracted from that customer account.
There is one further exception – an account established for one of the bankers’ favourite clients—arms dealers, drug cartels, mafioso, and other criminal organisations such as the CIA—at the first moment of the client handing over real legal tender cash notes at the bank to open the account.
In any event, since even a ‘transfer’ of ‘money’ from one bank to another still has the same ultimate origin—an out-of-nothing creation of an electronic record of a mutual exchange of promises to pay—then from a whole-of-banking-system perspective it really doesn’t matter; all so-called ‘money’ on ‘deposit’ is simultaneously owned by the customers, and by the banks.
(Oh yes, by the way, since that ‘money’ is really just a record of a promise, and we all buy and sell mostly by way of ‘transfers’ entered in these electronic records, then, strictly speaking, we are all thieves, because none of us is actually giving real legal money in payment to our fellows in exchange for their goods and services, unless we actually “cash-in” the bank’s “offer” (promise) to pay us real money, in order to pay our fellow in real legal money – government-created legal tender cash notes and coins).
The bankers—aided and abetted by the FASB, FSB et al—resolve this ownership contradiction by choosing to have their cake and eat it too. That is to say, the bankers take advantage of the embedded paradox of perspective in double-entry accounting, and arbitrarily decide who will be deemed the true owner of any and all “deposits” (i.e., who is debtor and who is creditor), depending—of course—on what suits the bankers’ best interests at any given moment in time.
In good times, it’s business as usual — the bankers will consider your “deposit” account to represent ‘money’ owned by and owed to you, and will—if they can—honour their promise to give you real legal cash on demand (but will far more commonly just ‘transfer’ your ‘credits’ to someone else’s account).
In not so good times, the bankers will consider your “deposit” account to represent a loan from you to the bank … and so, as you are now just an “unsecured creditor”, what you thought was your ‘money’ in the bank can (and will) be legally purloined, to “bail-in” the “bad” bankers.
One might well ask why it is that the generally “unsophisticated” (i.e., misled and deceived) customers of banks should be made to suffer any loss or damage arising from a “bad” financial institution’s employees or executives’ malfeasance, misfeasance, or nonfeasance, and/or from their failure to use record-keeping systems and methods adequate to the task of clearly distinguishing between bank assets, and customer assets.
The answer lies (pun intended) in a relatively recent accounting concept advanced by the standard-setters, in consequence of the neoclassical / neo-liberal ideological takeover of economics, accounting, and financial reporting. This wonderfully Orwellian idea is called “decision usefulness” (emphasis added):
For standard-setters the overriding criterion of decision usefulness, which FASB and IASB narrowly define as helping to predict cash flows, has replaced veracity in financial reporting as an end in itself. The ascension of decision usefulness as a public rationale for FASB actions has produced for the profession the situation .. [of] .. simultaneous committing to two, often conflicting ideas of truth…22
Decision usefulness has been and continues to be applied in accounting to justify its activities, a singular emphasis on an accounting discourse which we view as highly problematic and seriously impairing accounting as an ethical practice.23
Truth poses a genuine problem for accounting, one that cannot be so easily finessed by appeals to decision usefulness.24
[A]ccounting standard setters have replaced a responsibility for truth with decision usefulness, which, given the ambiguity of decision usefulness, effectively absolves them of responsibility for the consequences of their actions.25
In his recently released book The End of Alchemy, former governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King makes a similar observation (emphasis added):
“Regulation has become extraordinarily complex, and in ways that do not go to the heart of the problem. … Much of the complexity reflects pressure from financial firms. By encouraging a culture in which compliance with detailed regulation is a defense against a charge of wrongdoing, bankers and regulators have colluded in a self-defeating spiral of complexity.”26
Upton Sinclair famously said that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.
Indeed, there are many who will doubtless object to the argument here presented—that it is legally permissible for all the world’s borrowers to refuse to honour all their debts to all the world’s banks—with a reflexive, ill-considered, tediously shallow and laughably ironic dismissal that “this is all just semantics”.
Quite so.
Semantics (from Ancient Greek: σημαντικόςsēmantikós, “significant”) is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for, their denotation.27
The entire matter pivots on the question of truth. More specifically, the legal argument pivots on demonstrating that there has been a mis-representation of the truth, by the bankers.
What is the true reality, the real object or event that has been promised to the borrowers by the bankers—that is to say, what is the true object or event as commonly understood by the borrowers—and re-presented to the borrowers by the bankers using the signifiers ‘money’, ‘cash’, ‘funds’, ‘credit’, ‘deposit’, ‘sum’, ‘amount’, ‘$’, ‘€‘, ‘£‘, etc?
Has there, or has there not, been any false, misleading, or deceptive statements or representations made by the bankers to the borrowers, in order to induce the borrowers to agree to accept the offer to contract?
Have the bankers made any false, misleading, or deceptive statements or representations to the borrowers, that obfuscate a failure, potential failure, potential unwillingness, reasonably foreseeable or known incapacity of the bankers to deliver on their promise of performance?
And finally, have the bankers gained any advantage (“interest”, “yield”, “return”) from the borrowers through the use of false, misleading, or deceptive statements or representations?
May God grant the reader wisdom, and a sound conscience, to carefully and prayerfully judge the matter for themselves.
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Regina: This isn’t your pixie dust is it. Green: Well when you think about it does anyone really own pixie dust? Regina: The fairies are quite proprietary about it. If they found out you stole it they would… Green: Don’t worry about me. This is about you.
– Once Upon A Time
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DISCLAIMER: This essay is the opinion of the author. Nothing stated or implied in this essay should be construed to be legal or professional advice. For questions concerning your specific situation, please consult a qualified legal advisor.
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[1] Upton Sinclair, Wikiquotes, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair , 8 May 2016
[2] Mariner S. Eccles, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, testimony to the House Committee on Banking and Currency, September 30, 1941, cited by G. Edward Griffin, The Creature From Jekyll Island (Third Edition, 1998), p. 188.
[3] Robert H. Hemphill, Credit Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, foreword to Irving Fisher 100% Money (New York: Adelphi, 1936) p. xxii, cited by G. Edward Griffin, The Creature From Jekyll Island (Third Edition, 1998), p. 188.
[4] David Graeber, What We Owe to Each Other, interview in Boston Review, February 15, 2012
[5] Michael Hudson, In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts, Media Education Foundation transcript (pdf), 2006
[6] Plato, Laws, Book V; Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 10 & 11 translated by R.G. Bury. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1967 & 1968.
[7] Black’s Law Dictionary, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black’s_Law_Dictionary, 4 May 2016
[8] What is Money?, Law Dictionary, http://thelawdictionary.org/money/, 4 May 2016
[9] Mohamed E. Bayou, Alan Reinstein, Paul F. Williams, To tell the truth: A discussion of issues concerning truth and ethics in accounting, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 36 (2011), 109-124
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.
[12] ibid. [13] ibid.
[14] ibid.
[15] ibid.
[16] Norman B. Macintosh, Teri Shearer, Daniel B. Thornton, Michael Welker, Accounting as simulacrum and hyperreality: perspectives on income and capital; Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 25, Issue 1 (2000), 13-50
[17] ibid.
[18] Richard Mattessich, Accounting representation and the onion model of reality: a comparison with Baudrillard’s orders of simulacra and his hyperreality; Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) 443–470
[19] Positive Money, How Banks Create Money, http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-money/, 4 May, 2016
[20] Michael Schemmann (IICPA), Accounting Perversion in Bank Financial Statements — Demand Deposits Do NOT comply with IFRS (GAAP), 1 May 2013
[21] Richard Mattessich, Accounting representation and the onion model of reality: a comparison with Baudrillard’s orders of simulacra and his hyperreality; Accounting, Organizations and Society 28 (2003) p. 450-451, n. 12
[22] Mohamed E. Bayou, Alan Reinstein, Paul F. Williams, To tell the truth: A discussion of issues concerning truth and ethics in accounting, Accounting, Organizations and Society, Volume 36 (2011), 109-124
[23] ibid.
[24] ibid.
[25] ibid.
[26] Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy, quoted in Bloomberg, The Book That Will Save Banking From Itself, 5 May 2016.
[27] Semantics, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics, 8 May 2016
“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.”
“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.”
PSALMISTICE 