Real money & hierarchic religion appear to have arisen in the same mysterious moment sometime between the early Neolithic and the third millennium BC in Sumer or Egypt; which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was one a response to the other or is one an aspect of the other?

No doubt that money possesses a deeply religious implication since from the very moment of its appearance it begins to strive for the condition of the spirit--to remove itself from the world of bodies, to transcend materiality, to become the one true efficacious symbol. With the invention of writing around 3100 BC money as we know it emerges from a complicated system of clay tokens or counters representing material goods & takes the form of written bills of credit impressed on clay tablets; almost without exception these" cheques" seem to concern debts owed to the State Temple, & in theory could have been used in an extended system of exchange as credit-notes" minted" by the theocracy. Coins did not appear until around 700 BC in Greek Asia Minor; they were made of electrum (gold and silver) not because these metals had commodity value but because they were sacred--Sun & Moon; the ratio of value between them has always hovered around 14: 1 not because the earth contains 14 times as much silver as gold but because the Moon takes 14" suns" to grow from dark to full. Coins may have originated as temple tokens symbolizing a worshipper's due share of the sacrifice--holy souvenirs, which could later be traded for goods because they had" mana", not use-value.(This function may have originated in the Stone Age trade in" ceremonial" stone axe-heads used in potlach-like distribution rites.) Unlike Mesopotamian credit-notes, coins were inscribed with sacred images & were seen as liminal objects, nodal points between quotidian reality & the world of the spirits (this accounts for the custom of bending coins to" spiritualize" them and throwing them into wells, which are the" eyes" of the otherworld.) Debt itself--the true content of all money--is a highly" spiritual" concept. As tribute (primitive debt) it exemplifies capitulation to a" legitimate power" of expropriation masked in religious ideology--but as" real debt" it attains the uniquely spiritual ability to reproduce itself as if it were an organic being. Even now it remains the only" dead" substance in all the world to possess this power--" money begets money". At this point money begins to take on a parodic aspect vis-à-vis religion--it seems that money wants to rival god, to become immanent spirit in the form of pure metaphysicality which nevertheless" rules the world". Religion must take note of this blasphemous nature in money and condemn it as contra naturam. Money & religion enter opposition--one cannot serve God & Mammon simultaneously. But so long as religion continues to perform as the ideology of separation (the hierarchic State, expropriation, etc.) it can never really come to grips with the money-problem. Over & over again reformers arise within religion to chase the moneylenders from the temple, & always they return--in fact often enough the moneylenders become the Temple.(It's certainly no accident that banks for along time aped the forms of religious architecture.) According to Weber it was Calvin who finally resolved the issue with his theological justification for" usury"--but this scarcely does credit to the real Protestants, like the Ranters & Diggers, who proposed that religion should once & for all enter into total opposition to money--thereby launching the Millennium. It seems more likely that the Enlightenment should take credit for resolving the problem--by jettisoning religion as the ideology of the ruling class & …