Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and you’re OK
Money, it’s a gas
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash
Unitary Moonbat once suggested that I should offer Kossacks a few basic tips on magic for the uninitiated. I explained to him(her?), of course, that because magic is an experiential art there are very few things that one can teach by anonymous remote contact; that with that given, there are even fewer things that one would want to teach to a void of unknown lurkers of uncertain parentage and morals, and that of the things remaining, almost all of them are things that nobody is going to believe or really wants to know. This goes trebly when dealing with a community of highly educated persons who are deeply invested in a materialistic and scientific worldview. If there isn’t much room in the Kossack heart for a Created Universe or a Personal Diety, that tends to spill over into a general dislike for miracles, seances, spirits, saints, angels, daemoniae, and Things That Go Bump In The Night.
That being given, the current economic crisis put me in mind recently of an old, old spell lying moldering in the back reaches of the filing cabinet. A very simple spell, really, one that any apprentice can manage with no special preparation or equipment; although a small ceremonial cauldron is useful a suitable one can usually be bought around Halloween for less than $5. It also requires no pre-existing beliefs, no competence in archaic languages, and no activities likely to be noticed by a neighbor. You might even be able to manage it in a college dorm these days, and although in my experience college students have better things to do with their money than burn it, if you’re already burning it up anyway, you could consider this as an alternative. It will be most useful, though, to what I’d call today’s "worried middle-class". People who are trying to fill the gastanks of SUVs they bought for the necessity of ferrying several children on increasingly complicated schedules, who can make ends meet by cutting out the expensive lattes and dinners out, but who’ve just seen half the value of their retirement plans evaporate on Wall Street and lay awake at night wondering whether they’re going to survive or get fired next week. And I suspect from the demographics, that we have a lot of these people on Kos.
Ready? Supplies: 1 candle. 1 cauldron. $365 in single bills, to be used over the course of one year. Optional Soundtrack: Pink Floyd’s "Money", from the album Dark Side of the Moon.
Money, get back.
I’m alright Jack keep your hands off my stack ...
In a private and comfortable spot with dim lighting, light the candle (there are rituals for this if you’re a stickler, but being Mindful of the meaning of Light and Fire is sufficient). Take the dollar bill and kiss it. Lay it in front of you and genuflect to it in solemn worship. Set the dollar in the (fireproof metal!) cauldron, and use the candle to set it on fire. Watch it burn. Free-associate on everything that money means, how it exists, where it goes, what it does and doesn’t do ... whereever your thoughts take you, until the dollar bill is ashes. Throw the ashes out the window.
Repeat every day without exception for one year.
Now, it’s possible that you don’t get the point of this exercise reading it. Don’t worry. If you try, it will dawn on you by the end of the first month. In fact, it is extremely likely that at some point you will be seized by the desire to up the ante, and start throwing even MORE money on the fire. One dollar will seem pitiful, ludicrous even. You’ll want to destroy more. Release more. Set yourself free from more. You must resist this impulse. Excess will only lead to a rebound, when you wake up the morning afterward not one, but fifty or a hundred dollars poorer and unable to remember the strange ecstasy that possessed you. And then fear and desire will set in again, and any good accomplished by the spell will evaporate like mist in the hills.
One thing to point out: this spell will NOT make you richer. It may enable you to take risks and make decisions that might make you money in the long run ... or it might enable you to make decisions that impoverish you financially. What it will do, if you actually work it all the way through, is set you intellectually and emotionally free of the NEED for money. It will allow you to walk in a money-oriented world without becoming obsessed by the general delusion. But it won’t make your landlord decide not to collect the rent. Probably.
The thing that’s impossible to explain about magic, is how things start to happen when you make a slight shift to the rollercoaster we call Life. Weird things, very often. This spell is small enough, gentle enough, and circumscribed enough that the changes are fairly predictable and limited ... IF you don’t ever burn more than one dollar at a time. Please remember that. Major cautionary. DON’T burn more than ONE dollar per day. Even if your budget can handle it, your mind most likely can’t. The most likely thing, of course, is that like any addict who has just waken up from a binge, you will decide to quit working the spell. Then you lose all the effort you put into it, and that rebounds into an increase in your attachment to the stuff, which just isn’t good for you or the rest of us, which is the main reason I’m offering the spell in the first place. But if you don’t quit at that point ... well, there are consequences worse than running out of money to burn, and you’ll get to both. Just don’t do it.
Why am I deciding to publish this spell, at this time, in this place? Well, it’s a good spell for a monetary crisis caused by greed, because what it does, is to dissolve the power money holds over individual hearts and minds, one by one. So it disengages Greed at the root. But it does that by the free choice of individual people to free themselves of an emotional burden. And right now ... we’re going to need a lot more people who are free; and a lot more people are going to be happy enough not to want money, rather than wasting their willpower hoping to Get Rich.
Money, it’s a crime
Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie
Money, so they say
Is the root of all evil today
Do as ye will.