Time

Dishonourable Debt: Why Borrowers Are Not Legally Bound To Repay Bank Loans

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:

μηδὲ νόμισμα παρακατατίθεσθαι ὅτῳ μή τις πιστεύει, μηδὲ δανείζειν ἐπὶ τόκῳ, ὡς ἐξὸν μὴ ἀποδιδόναι τὸ παράπαν τῷ δανεισαμένῳ μήτε τόκον μήτε κεφάλαιον

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 account is 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 considered by 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 Babylonian Duality 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: σημαντικός sēmantikós, “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.

********

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

********

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.

********

[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

Time

The Money $hot: Even Banking Is All About Sex

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

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

– Eliphas Lévi, Transcendental Magic, 1896

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

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

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

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

So it is both interesting and ironic that this idiom is itself a derivative—and an inversion—of an earlier saying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comparing with my diagram, the apparent inconsistency is clear:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promise-to-Pay.

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

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

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

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

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

… plus “interest” (usury):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why so?

Because you are more near to right than you know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The male prostitutes comb their hair before her….
They decorate the napes of their necks with colored bands….
They gird themselves with the sword belt, the “arm of battle”….
Their right side they decorate with women’s clothing….
Their left side they cover with men’s clothing….
With jump ropes and colored cords they compete before her….
…
The one who covers the sword with blood, he sprinkles blood….
He pours out blood on the dais of the throne room.^16a

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

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

From the video lecture at top this essay:

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

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

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

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

Bernard Lietaer and Rivkah Harris (respectively) explain:

Essentially, to pay back interest on a loan requires using someone else’s principal. In other words, not creating the money to pay interest is the device used to generate the scarcity necessary for a bank-debt monetary system to function. It forces people to compete with each other for money that was never created…¹⁹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliphas Lévi explains (italicised emphasis added):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eliphas Lévi explains:

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

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

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

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

Chutzpah.

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

*****

ADDENDUM:

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

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

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

UPDATE 21/4/2016

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

****

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

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

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

[4] ibid, p. xxi

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

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

[7] ibid, p. 44

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

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

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

[11] ibid., p. 270

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

[13] ibid., p. 270

[14] ibid., p. 265

[15] ibid., p. 273

[16] ibid., p. 276-277

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

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

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

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

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

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

[22] ibid.

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

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

[25] ibid, pp. 286-287

[26] ibid, p. 284

[27] ibid, pp. 285-286

Time

Once Upon A Time – An Allegory For Usury On Primetime American TV

“All magick comes with a price.”

– Rumplestiltskin / the Dark One / Mr Gold, Once Upon A Time

It premiered in 2011 as the top-rated drama. The pilot episode attracted almost 13 million viewers.

Now in its fifth season—and recently confirmed for a sixth—around 5 million fans in North America alone still tune in on Sunday nights to the ABC’s primetime TV series Once Upon A Time.

Doubtless very few have a clue that it is really a brazen allegory for money-lending. More specifically, for the practice of usury.

Couched in the guise of a modern fairy tale, it is really a story of magick debt “money”, that breeds more money.

For the magician, that is.

How?

By the “magick” spell, of the binding contract.

The Promise To Pay. The I Owe You.

All the magician has to do, is tempt you to sign on the dotted line.

What do we owe, in “return” for this magick?

Our “firstborn”. The first “fruit” of our “labour”.

Most of us don’t really understand the “price” of magick. Compound interest is the “small” yet ever growing “price” we must pay, for enjoying the comforts of “magick” debt money.

I have watched only the first series of Once Upon A Time. From the premiere episode (clip below) onwards, it is filled to overflowing with symbolism and thinly-veiled allusions to the system of debt magick that has enslaved us all in a prison of Time.

All the other clips shown here are from episode four—aptly titled “The Price of Gold”—which first aired on November 13, 2011. Yes, that is 11/13/11 for fans of numerology, occultism, and conspiracy.

Please watch attentively the three slightly longer clips below, for a fuller context of that particular episode.

And for a comprehensively footnoted essay on how our modern system of debt money—and its supporting schools of economic theory—arose from the Hermetic-Kabbalist principles of double-entry bookkeeping in the 15th century, please read On Principal And Interest, Hermetic Magick, And The Lords Of Time.

A final thought.

Some—myself included—believe that private, for-profit banking corporations should not have the exclusive, government-backed and -enforced legal privilege of money creation. Especially when the only form of “money” these magicians create, is usury-bearing debt.

So if you have found some value (information, knowledge) in this post, perhaps you might be generous-hearted enough to do me a small favour.

That is, other than sharing this post with others.

Please take a look at the concept website I have created, explaining my idea for an alternative “money” (currency) system – deror.org.

I think every man (and woman) should be their own central banker.

UPDATE:

Should you still hold any doubts that Once Upon A Time is an allegory for usury, here are some snippets from the episode immediately following the one depicted above. Episode five—titled “The Still Small Voice”—also helps us to see that the “money” magicians are without excuse; that they know right from wrong, but choose to ignore the still small voice of God within (Conscience).

Importantly, it also confirms the foundational truths about the debt-money economy, as detailed in my essay.

And again, a slightly longer and more revealing clip, for context:

PSALMISTICE

ἀνάπαυσις

Tag Archives: once upon a time

Dishonourable Debt: Why Borrowers Are Not Legally Bound To Repay Bank Loans

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

Once Upon A Time – An Allegory For Usury On Primetime American TV

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

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