ecosophia | Magic Monday

It's almost midnight, so we can proceed with a new Magic Monday. Ask me anything about occultism and I'll do my best to answer it. With certain exceptions, any question received by midnight Monday Eastern time will get an answer. Please note: Any question received after then will not get an answer, and in fact will just be deleted. (I've been getting an increasing number of people trying to post after these are closed, so will have to draw a harder line than before.) If you're in a hurry, or suspect you may be the 143,916th person to ask a question, please check out the very rough version 1.0 of The Magic Monday FAQ here. Also: I will not be putting through or answering any more questions about practicing magic around children. I've answered those in simple declarative sentences in the FAQ. If you read the FAQ and don't think your question has been answered, read it again. If that doesn't help, consider remedial reading classes; yes, it really is as simple and straightforward as the FAQ says.

The picture? I'm working my way through photos of my lineage, focusing on the teachers whose work has influenced me and the teachers who influenced them in turn. Like Allan Bennett and George Cecil Jones, who were introduced over the last two weeks, this week's honoree was a teacher of Aleister Crowley. Theodor Reuss was a German occultist and Freemason who, like our past honoree Sylvester Gould, was a member of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light, the successor order of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor (HB of L). He founded and headed the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), a magical lodge originally envisioned by Austrian occultist Carl Kellner, which passed on the occult traditions of the HB of L and certain specific teachings that originated in another of our earlier honorees, African-American occultist Paschal Beverly Randolph. Reuss passed on the teachings of the OTO to Crowley and eventually made him the head of the OTO in the English-speaking world, setting off a cascade of events that would make a first-rate melodrama or a really good tell-all book. Since I'm not a member of the OTO, my only connection with any of that story is that one of my teachers was taught by a student of a student of Reuss...

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~~With that said, have at it!~~

***This Magic Monday is now closed. See you next week!***

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Greetings JMG,

This question is open to you and others.

What is your view, and the view of the occult or alternative spiritual traditions on debt, and particularly interest based debt?

I ask cos I’ve been fairly embedded in the world of finance the last decade and and am starting a banking and credit business, and thus the moral nature of what I’m about to embark on has been heavily on my mind lately.

While I am not from the Abrahamic tradition, all 3 of them seem to heavily prohibit interest rate based lending as a type of corruption. This proscription have been severely watered down via both legalistic interpretations (as among the Jews) as well as the general reformation and dilution (only high interest rates, rather than all interest rates as was previously considered) of the scripture that happened in the renaissance as banking took off and was closely linked to the church (incl the medicis installing one of their own).

In the world we are in now, this financial structure of debt based currencies, trade, finance and payments seems impossible to unseat without massive collateral damage.

Also, it’s hard to dispute that time value of money ( measured by interest or discount rates) has been a very useful capital allocation mechanism to finance all types of entrepreneurship and science, which was very difficult before when it was only accessible to elites.

Yet, the argument that interest rate based structures may have pernicious effects on the human mind, spirit and society weighs on my mind. I’m spending time thinking of how I can try to do things differently (there are many interesting attempts on-going at non-commodity money or local credit networks/ledgers, mutual credit obligations to trade goods and services directly etc but nothing that has truly cracked it and can be a viable alternative to the world of finance we’re subject to).

Any thoughts are welcome.

PS. I cast a I Ching asking “what is the moral nature of interest rates” and it returned Unchanging 18 (corruption). Hah, funny.

Are you sure it's not simply saying that interest rates are a Saturnine phenomenon? Because interest rates, decay, and hard work are all very Saturnine phenomena. "Corruption" in your sense seems more like 11 (stagnation). Decay includes positive things like "soil", "bioremediation", and "zymurgy".

You should be able to get most of the Saturn associations from comparing English translations. One you might miss is that in Chinese each of the line readings is the same short length (four characters).

I've never seen any discussion of the morality of lending at interest in occult literature. My own take is complex, and sees that as an inevitable evil that emerges over the course of a civilization's life cycle and plays an important role in bringing the civilization down. I don't think there's much likelihood that lending at interest can be replaced by some other mode of allocating collective capital, for the simple reason that the wealth and power of the ruling classes of our society depend on their control of capital and they can therefore be expected to fight like rabid honey badgers to preserve the system that maintains their power.

Interest rates are just how a private property market economy navigates certain naturally occurring tradeoffs, wherein you make a sacrifice of options that are slightly below your personally-market-clearing rate of return in order to free up resources for options that are slightly above your personally-market-clearing rate of return.

If you have to overcome interest-based finance, you might need a system of practice with a way of organizing and incentivizing a community's productive labor and capital allocation over time, that demonstrates itself to be better at benefiting from that kind of natural wealth-producing option, in a virtuous and balanced way, than the financial system is.

To give some idea of what this could look like: In an imaginary universe, where you had people who really understood on a visceral level how tradeoffs over time worked, and where they all had a consistent idea of how much they all cared about themselves and their beneficiaries now and in the future, you could get a situation where those people were naturally as productive as if they'd been lending and borrowing at interest, without any lending or borrowing at interest. What would normally have been a default on a loan in our universe would then, in that imaginary universe, just be an understandable failure from someone who was genuinely trying the-right-amount-of-hard. Not just in how hard they were working, but also in how carefully they were thinking through possibilities and realistically planning around long shots and misfortunes, and, in the long run, in how attentively they adjusted their habits of paying attention to some aspects of the world and not others, given the effects on what wealth-affecting possible outcomes they noticed. But then, all of that is like saying "in an imaginary universe where Communism worked". In our universe, if you tried to arrange people that way without either market discipline or a lot of non-obvious cultural technology, the enterprise would fail on many levels of kybernesis simultaneously. The usual economic terms are "free-rider problem" and "principal-agent problem", and there's also the sociobiology/ev-psych "coefficients of relatedness" to consider.

There's a little bit of social science about why a few communes succeed and most fail. Supposedly there was a finding where religious kibbutzim with more hours collectively spent in communal religious ritual time per week were more likely to succeed than secular kibbutzim. But I didn't find a citation. I did find that papers liked to bring up the question of what it does to a kibbutz or other kind of commune to be in implicit competition with an external market economy. That literature might be a good place to start reading, to understand what you'd have to get right.

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