Peter Lamborn Wilson

“Money is proof that magick

works, it is perhaps the only
proof.”
"Moloch merely shovels babies into the fire of productive capitalism. Mammon hooks them
on the dead heroin of envy." - Peter Lamborn Wilson

Peter Lamborn Wilson Tells the Truth About Money

After much whinging and gnashing of teeth, I finally decided / was persuaded by the lovely
Rose Darling to hop the Fung Wah Bus and make my pilgrimage to New York City to see
Peter Lamborn Wilson AKA Hakim Bey speak. For those of you not hip, Peter Lamborn
Wilson is one of the last men standing from his generation which also included Robert Anton
Wilson, Christopher Hyatt, Timothy Leary, William S. Burroughs and just about everyone
responsible for my view of the world. He rarely makes public appearances due to declining
health, so the chance to see him was impossible to resist, even given my furious, blinding
hatred of New York City and all its skinny-jeaned, up its own ass, self-congratulatory glory.

Short story? It was worth it. Pics to prove it:

Hakim Bey and Ulysses Lazarus, Together at Last

Peter's talk was on money, specifically, a long historical view of money viewed through
magickal / hieroglyphic lens. Like a lot of people I know and a lot of people I hear, he claims
that he saw the whole economic collapse coming about a year ago. This is either an example
of 20/20 hindsight on a massive scale or the collapse was that obvious to see coming over the
horizen. I tend to believe the latter. Mostly because of something that Mr. Wilson himself
said. "An important key to understand reality is economics." People that tend to understand
reality tend to understand economics- at least in the larger strokes. Still, I think it will forever
confuse me why people like Mr. Wilson don't do something with this knowledge. He claims
that if he had a million dollars last year he could have twelve millions today. It's not so much
that I doubt the veracity of this claim so much as I lament it staying in the stage of the
unverifiable. Money may not be wealth, but it can get you some very useful commodities like
cigarettes, guns, food, land, housing, etc.

Mr. Wilson points out that "the Stone Age knows starvation but it does not know poverty." In
other words, there might be a famine, your village might get raided, there might be crop
blight, but the village will either thrive together or starve together. The Stone Age knew
starvation, but it did not know a parasitic ruling class gorging itself while masses outside
starved to death. Money, Mr. Wilson says, begins as Sumerian clay tokens shaped into the
tradable commodities (oxen, barrels of wheat, bars of silver, etc.). Records of debt (at
usurious interest rates up to 33.3% annually) were kept by (who else?) the scribes and priests
of the temples who at that time monopolized the art of writing. This kept not only the
peasantry and laboring classes in debt peonage, it also kept the merchant class in thrall to the
temple. Peter has considered the anthropological facts about money alongside the more
mytho-poetic evidence existing from the time, such as the Babylonian creation myth of the
war between Tiamat and Marduk, and the legends of Staghorn and Gilgamesh.

Clay tablets existed in ancient Mesopotamia. Specie, that is coinage, did not. This is an
invention of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor and the Greek Islands. Here we see money
gaining a more explicit religious and magickal quality. Gold was plentiful in this area, and is
also a malleable metal easy to imprint with both words and images. When temple sacrifices of
the local bull cults became so popular that not everyone could get a piece of bull, an ingenius
method was reached to give every pilgrim a symbol of involvement in the ritual- the temple
token. Rather than a piece of bull, pilgrims were given a small piece of gold with a bull
impressed on one face. The two sided coin comes later with an image on one side and a
caption on the other. Money becomes qualitatively more magickal with this step, uniting the
image and the word into a talismatic object which has a value unrelated to its real value as
commodity. It is no longer simply a magickal document recording debt and / or wealth. It is a
magickal object whose value comes from belief. As Peter points out: All money is fiat
money. Gold has no inherent value. It's shiny, and makes cool jewelry and all that, but it is
not what the anarcho-capitalist types will have you believe, a universal medium of exchange.
Sure, it holds value over millenia (particlarly with regard to silver), but there is not reason to
use gold more than say, diamonds or uranium or coal or any other commodity in limited
supply. Quoth Mr. Wilson: "Money is proof that magick works, it is perhaps the only proof."

Peter gave the room an interesting story to illustrate this. Paracelsus the Alchemist was
travelling through medieval Germany when he was invited to the court of the Count of one of
the local statelets of the Holy Roman Empire. The Count begins asking the great alchemist
about the secrets of alchemy. This, of course, leads to the Count asking for the secret of
transmuting base metals into gold. The alchemist tells the Count that he is merely a puffer or a
quack while the Count is a true alchemist who already knows the secret of making gold out of
thin air. He tells the Count to give a license to create a bank and then borrow money from the
bank. Remember that the United States, United Kingdom, and Euro countries do not mint
their own currency. They have a private company such as the Federal Reserve or the Bank of
England do it and then borrow that money at interest. As is often the case the alchemists of
the middle ages knew more than we give them credit for.

In the final analysis, money is debt just as property is theft. If you take a look at what Mr.
Wilson calls the "one dollar Bible of America" you will see an inscription which says that the
bill is legal tender for all debts public and private. It is not legal tender for wealth. It is said
that if one had all the money in the world one could buy all the wealth in the world three
times over, a figure which Mr. Wilson estimates to be closer to ten times. All banks- not just
the Federal Reserve- create money, but they do not create wealth. And it gets worse.
Gresham's Law, a maxim of economics, states that bad money will always drive out good
money which makes things like Labor Dollars (you know them as Ithaca Hours) and Social
Credit inherently unworkable unless the entire world switches all at the same time. Two
excellent proofs of this are the migration of productive capital to the 3rd world, and the Soviet
Ruble which was not available for export.

Indeed, the last point about the Soviet Ruble is also an operation proof for another of Mr.
Wilson's claims. That Marxists do not understand the spiritual nature of money. I would go
one further and say that they do not understand the spiritual period and that is why they
alienate most working class people. Peter arrived at his analysis of money through what he
calls a Hermetic and Hieroglyphic technique. He suggests that we fight the power of money
by creating our own myths to compete with it. But as any truly wise man will also tell you, he
says he doesn't know what to do and doesn't have any real answers. He only raises questions.
And if enough people start contemplating those questions then maybe one day we'll come up
with answers.

Recommended Reading

As suggested by Peter Lamborn Wilson on the subject of money

The Gift - Lewis Hyde

The Accursed Share - Georges Bataille

Michael Hudson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

Jesus the Magician - Morton Smith

Confessions of an Economic Hitman - John Perkins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulipomania

Honore de Balzac