New Money for a New World

by Bernard Lietaer

  Amber was another commodity currency used in antiquity and was especially important in international sea trade. In Dynastic Egypt, it was more highly valued than gold. Found in its natural state of fossilized resin, then as now, on the beaches of the Baltic Sea, pieces of amber were considered to be the “tears of the Great Mother.”

  The Cowrie

  Another form of money related to the Great Mother is the cowrie. Cowries are small, smooth shells usually found in the seas off tropical islands. They were an ancient form of currency used in Africa and elsewhere, and remained in circulation in some countries, such as Nigeria, until quite recently.

  In ancient China, the cowrie played such an important monetary role that its pictogram was adopted in written language as the character for money. The first Chinese production of bronze and copper currency took the form of imitation cowries.312

  Monetary historian Glyn Davies explains the cowrie’s enduring choice as a form of money:

  The cowrie shell, of all forms of money, including precious metals, was current over a far greater space and for a far greater length of time than any other…Cowries are durable, easily cleaned and counted, and defy imitation and counterfeiting…For many people over large parts of the world, at one time or other they have appeared as an ideal form of money…They were still officially accepted for payment of taxes until the beginning of the twentieth century in West Africa.313

  The vulva-like cowrie shell is associated with water, the setting in which the shell is formed. In many cultures, water is traditionally related to the Great Mother through its symbolic elemental connection with fertility, sexuality, prosperity, and fecundity.

  The cowrie is also associated with death, in that its utility as currency starts only after the death of the creature that originally inhabited the shell. It has appeared in burial ornaments as far back as Paleolithic times. French archeologist Abbé Breuil explains the cowrie’s presence in tombs: “It connects the death with the cosmological principles of water, the moon, the feminine and rebirth in the new world.”314

  In Spanish, the feminine name Concepción (conception) is still abbreviated as Conchita (literally, “little shell,” which is also the slang for the female sexual organ). To the Aztecs, the moon Goddess Tecaciztecatl, whose name translates as “the one from the shell,” controls the process of birth and generation and is represented by a vulva.315

  The cowrie shell is also etymologically connected to the Great Mother archetype through cattle. The word “cow” comes from the Sanskrit gau and the Egyptian kau. It is also the origin of the words gaurie or kaurie, from which the English term “cowrie shell” derived. The words cow and cowrie shell thus literally share common ancient roots.

  The Shekel

  In addition to her generic linkage with money, the Great Mother was connected to many of the earliest coins. The ancient Sumerians called their first coin-like object the shekel, derived from the words she (meaning “wheat”) and kel (a measurement similar to a bushel). Hence, this coin was a symbol of the value of one bushel of wheat.

  The shekel was originally used as proof that wheat taxes had been paid to the temple of Inanna, the Sumerian goddess who ruled over life, death, sexuality, fertility, and wealth. Her temple, as well as being a ritual center, was also the storage place for reserves of cereals, which supported the priestesses and the community, particularly in lean times.

  Farmers brought their contribution of wheat to the temple to fulfill religious obligations to society and to the Goddess. In exchange, they received a shekel, which then entitled them to sacred sexual intercourse with the priestesses at festival time.

  Two thousand years later, the Judeo-Christian worldview reinterpreted these rituals quite differently. The Bible describes these priestesses as “temple prostitutes.”316 Such practices and their significance, however, must be understood within the context of their particular culture and time. The priestesses were representatives of the Great Mother, and intercourse with them was considered as a holy rite with the Goddess of Fertility herself—not an act to be taken lightly. At that time, fertility was truly a matter of life and death, as failure of the crops meant starvation. To the Sumerians this ritual was sacred and ensured fertility in crops, animals, and children, each of which were requisites for survival and future prosperity. The word shekel survives in modern-day Hebrew as Israel’s monetary unit.

  Juno Moneta

  The word money is itself related to the Great Mother, deriving from the Latin moneta. The first Roman mint operated out of the basement of the temple of the Goddess Juno Moneta—symbolically, her womb. The choice of that particular location within the temple is a direct reminder of the relationship of money to the essential feminine (see insert).

  The Goddess Juno Moneta

  Juno was a very ancient Italic goddess, initially different than the Greek Goddess Hera, with whom she became culturally amalgamated later during the expansion of the Roman Empire to Greece. Both Juno and Hera, however, were essentially Goddesses of Womanhood.

  Juno was part of the Capitoline triad, the Trinity that ruled Rome (with Minerva, the Goddess of Wisdom, and Jupiter, the Sky God). As daughter of Saturn, Juno ruled menstrual cycles and was, therefore, worshipped by Roman women every month at the Calends, the first day of the new moon. Juno presided at all key feminine occasions: she was the Juno Pronuba, who made marriage abundantly fertile; Populonia, the Goddess of Conception; Ossipago, who strengthened fetal bones; Sospita, who ruled labor; and Lucina, the Birth Goddess, who led the child to the light.317

  To the Romans, just as every man had his genius, the essence of his masculinity, every woman had her juno, the essence of her femininity. One modern relic of the Great Mother tradition is that many brides still choose to marry in June, because it used to ensure the blessings of the goddess for whom that month is named.318

  CLOSING THOUGHTS

  The creation of money was inherently and symbolically related for millennia to the Great Mother archetype. Every monetary transaction was seen at that time as a way of honoring the Great Mother and the abundance she represented.

  All this happened, of course, when words reflecting feminine characteristics had not yet acquired their pejorative bias. Words like “silly” still meant “blessed by the Moon Goddess Selene,” and “hysteria” implied “having a womb,” not a mental disturbance.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE - Repression of an Archetype

  We rarely hear the inward music,

  but we’re all dancing to it nevertheless.

  ~RUMI

  How then, did money come to be divorced from the archetype that had inspired it? The key is the repression of the feminine in general, and the Great Mother archetype in particular.

  CLIMATE CHANGE AND INDO-EUROPEAN INVASIONS

  Repression of the feminine traces its origins back to the rise of aggressive warrior energy during the fourth millennium BCE. This followed a period of massive climate change, which led to intense desertification from North Africa through the Middle East all the way to southwestern China. As a result, these lands, which include the Sahara, Arabian, Syro-Iraqi, and Gobi deserts, were no longer able to support farming or wildlife.

  According to one hypothesis, Indo-European invasions were a chain reaction of large-scale population dislodgements initially triggered by this climate change. Affected communities could no longer depend upon their own lands to meet their requirements. They thus became pillaging, nomadic, authoritarian-ruled, patriarchal societies that spread their violent behavior over very large distances. The communities that came in contact with these nomads were either exterminated or survived only by “toughening up” and adopting warlike cultures themselves.319 Data to support this hypothesis includes geological and archeological evidence of increasing desiccation, and the geographical distribution of societies most closely associated with the more extreme forms of feminine repression—still observable today—in and around the big desert areas.

  The powerful influence of the Great
Mother during the Stone Age began to wane. Male deities, particularly gods of war and conquest, replaced images of her. As archeologist Philip van Doren Stern describes: “Along with ruthless invasions, undeclared warfare, and appropriation of women as their rightful spoils, they [warrior tribes] were developing a society in which masculinity was supreme. An insatiable desire for property and power, together with insensitivity to pain and suffering, characterized everything they did.”320

  After military conquest, the standard procedure by these warrior cultures was to kill off all the adult males of the vanquished group, then rape and enslave the females. In the short span of a few generations, the genetic and cultural makeup of entire regions was dramatically transformed. The ancient all-powerful Great Mother was divided into different goddesses to fill many different functions, each of whom became attributes or less important partners of dominant male gods. Repression, control, and subservience of the feminine, particularly the sexuality and fertility aspects of the Great Mother, have been familiar outcomes ever since.

  GREEK CIVILIZATION

  The incomparable contributions made by Greek civilization to virtually every aspect of human endeavor—including architecture, drama, governance, modern language, geometry, medicine, and philosophy—are well noted and have profoundly influenced and enriched our world. Greek culture was, however, also strongly patriarchal and played an influential role in the sweeping alteration of so-called archaic matrifocal mythologies into patriarchal ones.321 The amber “tears of the Great Mother,” for instance, became the “tears of Apollo,” which he shed upon his exile from Olympus to Hyperborea.

  The Greek awakening of the so-called “rational mind” provided new arguments for the repression of the feminine, and became the cornerstone of Western thinking for the next 25 centuries. These include Parmenides’ purported declaration of the independence and superiority of reason—portrayed as a masculine attribute—as the only legitimate judge of reality. All the senses were believed to mislead. Intellectual reason alone is able to perceive reality.322

  Socrates and Plato built on this intellectual argument. Reason became associated with the transcendental, spiritual desire, and the absolute. Everything considered to be outside of reason was dismissed as irrational. The inherent imperfections of matter and the senses, together with instinctual desires and the relative, were all ascribed to the feminine.

  Aristotelian philosophy subsequently claimed that women are incomplete and damaged human beings of an entirely different order than men: “For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male.”323 Her womb is but a passive receptacle for the holy male sperm. Aristotle’s conclusion was, “The male is by nature superior, and the female inferior…the one rules, the other is ruled.”324 Twenty-three centuries later, Sigmund Freud would still refer to this “incompleteness” in women’s nature as proof of their “natural inferiority.”325

  For the ancient Greeks the very act of founding a civilized community became symbolized by “cutting the feminine” (see insert).

  “Cutting the Feminine” as a Civilizing Act

  Greek priests would found a new city by cutting a large cow-skin with a knife into a single, thin, uninterrupted rope. That rope would then be spread out to create the perimeter of the new city. This ritual was a metaphor for expunging the feminine nature—symbolized by the cow-skin—thereby creating an ordered “civilized” space.

  The founding ritual for Roman cities had the same symbolic content. Rome itself and all subsequent cities founded by Romans involved ritually cutting the Earth—the symbol of the feminine—with a plow, replacing the Greeks’ knife, pulled by oxen to mark the perimeter of the new town.

  WESTERN RELIGION

  The consequences of Great Mother archetypal repression were felt in all major domains of human activity and belief systems, particularly religion. As the roots of our contemporary monetary system emanate almost exclusively from Western civilization, we focus on its predominant religion over the course of the last 1,500 years—Christianity.

  Although we draw attention to the excesses and patriarchal attitudes associated with the Church through the centuries, it is important to keep in mind that Christendom was also responsible for Western civilization’s honoring of the Lover archetype. This is expressed in such noble ethics as charity, caring for one’s neighbor, the concept of loving one’s enemy, blessing those who curse you, doing good to those who hate you, and praying for those who would persecute you—values that were nonexistent in Antiquity.326 The Church also concretized these noble values systematically on a pragmatic level, in the many vital services and support structures for communities, for example, orphanages, hospitals, and charitable foundations. In addition, and as noted earlier, Christianity was also a primary opponent of the practice of usury.

  Nevertheless, monotheism—the belief that there is only one God, who is masculine—would over time leave less and less room for the Great Mother and feminine values. The sole male skyward deity, who ruled as absolute monarch from the heavens, would negate the earth-bound divinities, with repression of Great Mother arechetypal energies.

  Adam and Eve, the biblical creation story of Western culture, made Eve, “the mother of all living things,” responsible for the Fall and for all subsequent suffering of humankind, along with her accomplice the serpent—not surprisingly, one of the oldest symbols of the Great Mother.

  Attacks on the remnants of the Great Mother cultures can be further explained by history. Christianity initially spread most successfully in the cities of the fallen Roman Empire. Its foremost opposition came from the pagans (literally, pagani, meaning “people of the countryside”) or from villagers (those living in rural villae, from which derive the words “villain” and “vilify”), who were more closely connected to nature, the land, ancient fertility rituals, and thus to the Great Mother.

  Centuries later, repression of the Great Mother archetype would find its most violent expression in the Inquisition, in which an estimated six million women would be burned at the stake or otherwise put to death as witches.327 This appalling period of history, which spanned more than three centuries, coincided not with the “dark” Middle Ages as is commonly thought, but rather with the Renaissance and the early Modern period (15th to 18th centuries CE).328 It was during that same period that our present-day monetary system took form.

  Western civilization’s extraordinary continuity down through the ages with regard to the repression of the feminine can be summarized by the following set of quotations:

  Sin began with a woman and thanks to her we all must die.

  Ecclesiasticus 25:24 (second century BCE)

  Women are the gate of the devil, the patron of wickedness, the sting of the serpent.

  St. Gerome (fifth century CE)

  Men have broad shoulders and large chests and small narrow hips and are more understanding than women,who have but small and narrow chests and broad hips;to the end they should remain at home, sit still, keep house and bear and bring up children.

  Martin Luther (16th century)

  Husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage.

  William Blackstone (18th century)

  While the closing decades of the 20th century enjoyed palpable strides forward in the reemergence of feminine values, five millennia of repression continue to permeate the beliefs and systems of Western society, particularly our monetary system.

  CLOSING THOUGHTS

  The importance of the Great Mother archetype to humanity is clearly noted by the responsibilities entrusted to her symbolic care. This was acknowledged and expressed throughout antiquity by her many representations in money—the tool that provides the means to achieve our sustenance and very survival. The symbolic thread continues to this day, as noted in the etymology of the words capital and money.

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO - Shadows

  The Dark is the Light we cannot yet see.

  ~V.J. SHA
WKAR

  The invention of money occurred during the vast period in which much of the world honored the Great Mother archetype. Our system of national currencies came about, instead, at the onset of the Industrial Age, in a culture conditioned by severe repression of this same archetype. The link between our money and this repression has many profound effects.

  To provide a deeper understanding of money’s impact upon us, another basic concept of Archetypal Psychology relevant to our work is herein introduced—shadows. Shadows helps explain how specific actions and attitudes come into being, persist, and spread. Its influence is typically unconscious.

  SHADOWS

  When an archetype is repressed, it does not just disappear. By definition, the rejected psychological content instead manifests in a destructive shadow form.