Magic Monday

[ecosophia]

It's nearly 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 or comment 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've been tracing my lineages back as far as I can, and last week took my Martinist lineage back as far as they can be documented. The next step -- and it's the last step in the entire process -- involves a fair bit of speculation, but it's speculation backed up by some evidence. It's been suggested by some historians, Marsha Keith Schuchard foremost among them, that the mysterious Knight of the Red Feather who conferred the Templar lineage on Baron von Hund, last week's honoree, was none other than Charles Stuart, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of Scottish song and story. The claim is that in the years immediately before 1745, when the House of Stuart made its last (and disastrously unsuccessful) attempt to reclaim the British throne, Charles and his inner circle of supporters used various forms of clandestine Freemasonry to raise funds, engage in espionage, and gather arms and supporters for the planned rising. Baron von Hund's initiation was an incident in that process. Martinez de Pasqually, who was honored a couple of weeks back, also claimed to have a charter signed by Charles Stuart as the basis for his occult Masonic order. So it's possible that what lies behind one of the great traditions of Western occultism is a failed political intrigue that got picked up and repurposed by a couple of canny occultists. Stranger things have happened in the history of occultism.

...And with this, the rambling tale of the odd lineages that I've inherited comes to an end. Now I'll have to think of something else to use as illustrations to Magic Mondays!

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With that said, have at it!

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

***Please note -- when Magic Monday is closed, IT'S CLOSED.  I just had to delete a flurry of attempted comments posted up to eleven hours after I shut things down. I do need some time to write and do other online chores, you know, so please don't keep trying to post after 12:00 am Monday night/Tuesday morning -- there'll be a new Magic Monday in a week, you know. ***

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

The Christian parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) mentions the master being rightfully angry that the third servant didn't at least leave his money with a bank to be lent out at interest. For some reason, either whoever was proscribing usury thought of whatever the thing was that they were proscribing as being different from that, or the contradiction with that part of scripture just sort of got fuzzed out of awareness somehow.

(This is a little bit of an anomaly in need of explanation, really, since usury was dogmatically defined as a "mortal sin" -- i.e. a choice so evil as to justify torturing that human soul literally forever leaving that human soul to its putative original existentially inherent fate of rightly earning a literally infinite amount of torture. Now I know that Catholic moral theology was kind of trigger-happy with the eternal torture punishment abandonment-to-one's-fate justification -- even missing Mass on a Sunday, or one of a dozen-odd other designated holy days sprinkled throughout the year, without a serious reason, is defined as also being an act so evil as to justify punishing abandoning someone to a literally infinite amount of torture -- but still. And for centuries and centuries, Catholic teachers were almost the opposite of careful to distinguish usury from the thing Jesus is recorded as having spoken favorably (within the frame of a parable) about. Even Aquinas, famous for engaging with theologically inconvenient points, doesn't touch this one with a ten foot pole ( https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~Matt.C25.L2.n2071 ). The Vulgate reads "oportuit ergo te mittere pecuniam meam nummulariis et veniens ego recepissem utique quod meum est cum usura", but Aquinas's paragraph headers are just "Oportuit ergo te pecuniam meam committere nummulariis" and "Et ego veniens recepissem utique quod meum est". Maybe he's using a Vetus Latina translation or one of his own?)

From what little I've read, for a long time it was thought of as normal to charge 20-80% interest per year as a way of recouping the risk of non-repayment in a world with a less developed set of market and state institutions for identifying, tracking, and sharing information about individual borrowers. That might be part of it. (I wonder if anyone engaged in the somewhat saner practice of having a large up-front financing charge for the risk of non-repayment and then a more reasonable, opportunity-cost-proportional interest rate going forward.)

I'm going to present the case for why Jesus could have spoken about lending at interest favorably.

From one point of view, a loan at interest isn't repaying the lender for doing no work; it's repaying the entire lending market for doing the administrative work of figuring out which use of some given capital results in the most production later. Now, this implies that maybe loan profits should be restricted to match how much money would have been retained by the owner of an estate or business concern who had put in the work on equivalent decisions, versus paid to the owner's employees. And I don't know how one would make that happen within a lending-at-interest system.

In other ways, a loan is the manifestation of the underlying logic of ultimatums like: "I can do productive work X (or let go of an amount of wealth X I got in exchange for prior productive work) at time T, to produce enough capital that you will have accumulated 2*X amount more of production twenty years later, so long as you'll agree to let the law make sure I get my slice of the pie later. If you won't agree to that, then the deal's off, I'm going to spend time T going fishing / playing golf / swimming in my money bin instead." If enough people feel that way, and loans are illegal, and the people don't have something else such as their family's future to plow produced capital into, then the 2*X production later won't happen.

This capital can compound over generations, and since that's an exponential effect maybe it's very important. Although then you get into some contentious questions about whether and when more wealth or population is even better, given whatever the longer-term context is that makes situations like "wealth" or "population" in the foreseeable future more or less valuable. Within Christianity, there's this command about "be fruitful and multiply", and it's not clear from the context of the command what the points are at which you're supposed to start trading away fruitfulness and multiplication for the sake of other things.

But then, if we decide to allow lending at interest to get this exponential effect over generations, we end up with situations where more and more of the pie goes to financiers and the finance system. So long as the slices-of-pie that are on offer include perpetuating one's own wealth and power into the future, why wouldn't the people and collectives with the wealth and power be the kinds who would hold out for those offers? (And if you forbid loans, then more and more of the pie instead goes to merchant families, I guess. But more slowly.)