Money

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MONEY

MONEY . In examining the significance of money in the history of religions, one must begin by making a distinction between the commercial use of money in societies that have developed a market economy and the uses of money in societies with nonmarket economies. In the former, money is used primarily as a medium of exchange and standard of value in the marketplace, and its value lies in its abstractness, in its ability to mediate the exchange of goods between all persons who desire to engage in exchange, regardless of their social status and regardless of the nature of the goods involved. In this context money plays a major role in the economy, and the economic sphere is relatively independent of the social and religious spheres. When money is used in the context of a nonmarket economy, on the other hand, its use is more intimately connected with social and religious institutions. Whereas in a market economy money is used primarily for the commercial exchange of essential goods, in nonmarket economies such exchanges are often accomplished through nonmonetary means (such as barter or redistribution by a political authority), and money is reserved for a more exclusive set of exchanges that are at once social and religious in significance. This article will accordingly focus on the social and religious significance of money in communities with nonmarket economies.

Marcel Mauss (1914) was one of the first scholars to call attention to the religious significance of money in so-called primitive and archaic societies. In 1914 Mauss noted the use of objects like shells and precious metals as means of exchange and payment by peoples who were without a system of coinage. Drawing on evidence from Africa, Oceania, and North America, he insisted, against the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, that such objects are rightly described as money, but he added that they are to be distinguished from modern money in being used only in specific social contexts and in being endowed with numinous or sacred value over and above their economic worth.

One of the most famous examples of such money is provided by the kula ring of the Trobriand Islanders, studied by Malinowski and discussed as well by Mauss. The kula ring is a complex system of exchange by which armbands and necklaces made of shells, collectively called vaygu'a, are traded around a large ring of islands just east of New Guinea. The armbands and necklaces, items of high value but of little practical use (they are seldom used even as ornaments), are traded in opposite directions around the circle by various sets of trading partners who make periodic voyages between their respective islands. The complex system of gifts and countergifts that develops is closely connected with the social order. The higher a person's social status, the more trading partners that person is liable to have, and the more generous he or she may be expected to be in gift giving. Not only is status an important factor in the giver, but the vaygu'a themselves develop a kind of status. The more a particular necklace or armband is traded, the more valuable it becomes, receiving a name and personal history and taking on a certain numinous quality. This trade in vaygu'a forms the heart of a more extensive trade between the islands that includes trade in ordinary commodities as well as in the valuable shell ornaments. Furthermore, the vaygu'a themselves can be given a definite price, in terms of baskets of yams, and in some specific circumstances can serve as a means of payment for services. Mauss argued that they could therefore be considered as a form of money, although clearly not the impersonal medium of exchange normally intended by that word. The kula ring thus provides a good example of money in a nonmarket economy, where it is an integral part of the economic system and yet still has a definite social and magico-religious value.

The use of shells as money goes far beyond the Trobriand Islands. The commonest form of shell money is the cowrie shell, which is found in China, India, the Near East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. This small, attractive shell is well suited to serve as money because of its portability, countability, and immunity to counterfeiting. However, the use of the cowrie as money was originally motivated by more than its practicality. Mircea Eliade (1969) has pointed out the rich symbolism of shells in general, and the cowrie is no exception. It has been used widely as a talisman and is commonly viewed as a symbol of fertility, while among certain Indian tribes of North America it was treated as a sacred object. Like gold and jade, both rich in symbolism, cowries were also quite commonly buried with the dead. In China, cowries were placed in the mouth of the dead person, perhaps as a kind of passage money, similar to the obol for Charon in ancient Greece. The association of cowries with gold is evidenced by the fact that cowries actually made of gold have been found in Egypt and Cyprus. The popularity of the cowrie as a form of money is thus also due to its intrinsic symbolic properties.

Another widespread form of money is the glass bead. These seem to have been particularly common in Africa, where they were believed to grow naturally in the ground and thus to partake of the sacrality of the earth. Like the cowrie, they provided a convenient form of currency that was also endowed with numinous and magical properties. They were used not only as money but also in various rituals. Among some African peoples they were ground up, mixed with water, and rubbed on children to aid their growth. Again like the cowrie, they are often found in graves.

Not only were many types of primitive or archaic money endowed with an intrinsic numinous quality; some were also used as the specified means of payment for various religious services. This is seen clearly in ancient India, where the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa enjoins that the payment (daksina ) of the priests officiating at a sacrifice be made in gold, cattle, clothing, or horses. With the possible exception of clothing, all these objects are laden with religious symbolic significance. Their value was at least partly intrinsic, and it was this intrinsic worth and not their raw economic value that made them fit for the remuneration of priests. Their economic value was located within a broader context of social and religious value.

A particularly interesting case of an exclusively religious use of money is the Chinese custom of making offerings of paper money to gods, ghosts, and ancestors. Four centuries before paper money began to be used for commercial exchange in China, it was already being used as a sacrificial offering. The money itself consisted of pieces of paper in varying sizes and colors, decorated with designs, depictions of gods, or Chinese characters. A small piece of tin foil was sometimes attached to the center of the paper in order to represent silver or, when dabbed with yellow tint, gold. Obviously this paper money had little real economic value, but this was in fact intentional, because it was believed that what was a mere imitation in this world would become, when transformed by the sacrificial fire, a genuine treasure in heaven. There it would be added to the Celestial Treasury for the benefit of the person making the offering. This paper money is still in use in Taiwan, where four principal types are found: "gold" paper money, offered to the gods; "silver" money, offered to ghosts and ancestors; "treasure money" for repaying the "debt of life"; and "money for the resolving of crisis," used primarily in rites of exorcism.

It goes without saying that gold and silver have been favorite forms of money from earliest times. Long before they came to be used for commercial exchange, however, they were used for gift exchange and as a standard of value among various political, social, and religious elites. Exchanges of articles made of these precious metals were a primary means of asserting and maintaining one's status. The cups, tripods, bowls, and arms exchanged among the ruling elite of Homeric society, for instance, were often made of precious metals and were endowed with the numinous quality that is associated with these metals more generally. A king's treasury could express not only his political sovereignty and personal wealth but also an intrinsic sacred power that could come to the aid of his kingdom in times of crisis.

The close association of gold and silver with royalty, on the one hand, and with religious values, on the other, did not cease when these metals eventually began to be used in the manufacture of coins. Although it has been customary in textbooks on economics to attribute the introduction of coinage or "real" money to a merchant class seeking to overcome an awkward system of barter, this hypothetical reconstruction contains little historical truth. In fact, as illustrated above, the use of money cannot be equated with the use of currency in a market. Furthermore, the transition from a nonmarket to a market economy is a gradual one that is not identical with the introduction of coinage. According to Édouard Will (1954), who builds upon the earlier work of Bernhard Laum (1924), the introduction of coinage in ancient Greece must be understood in the context of the social and legal reforms of the time of Solon (c. 630–560 bce). Far from being intended to facilitate trade (which was in fact not a Greek but a Phoenician concern), coinage was introduced by the state in order to provide a new standard for an older system of exchange that had become decadent and unjust, and to provide a standard means for payments made to the state such as taxes, fines, port fees, and the like. The introduction of coinage was thus the initiative of the same group with which gold and silver were already associated, namely, the royalty.

The religious significance of the earliest coins must be seen in this larger political context. Although it was argued in the nineteenth century, in particular by Thomas Burgon and Ernst Curtius, that early Greek coinage had a direct religious origin, it seems more likely today that the numerous religious symbols found on these coins are to be understood both as symbols of the issuing city-state and as symbols of the divine sanction behind a specific issuing body and hence behind the value of its coinage as well. This is not to deny that religious representations have been favorite themes on coins throughout history; but these representations are to be understood as expressing the religious values of the issuing body and not necessarily as implying an intrinsic value in the material coin itself.

With the introduction of coinage, therefore, a gradual movement began away from the more archaic pattern of attributing sacral value directly to the material objects used as money and toward the highly abstract forms of money used today, which are valued purely on the basis of their usefulness as indirect media of exchange in commercial markets.

With the introduction of fully monetized market economies, one begins to encounter a reversal in religious attitudes toward money. Whereas the earliest forms of money had a positive numinous quality for many archaic peoples, the disruptive effects that moneys and markets can have on the social structure of previously nonmarket societies can lead to negative evaluations of money as an evil. This can be seen clearly in the medieval West, where the introduction of markets and the increased use of money from the eleventh century onward led to a variety of religious protests. Money was increasingly represented as demonic. Feelings of awe before the numinous qualities of gold and silver were transformed into feelings of disgust for gold and silver coins, which were increasingly compared to excrement. By the end of the thirteenth century, depictions of apes defecating coins begin to appear in the margins of manuscripts. One also finds a picture of the head of a monster vomiting gold coins into a golden bowl. In less extreme forms this religious suspicion of the role of money in a market economy has persisted into the modern era.

Bibliography

A good introduction to money considered in its social contexts is provided in Walter C. Neale's Monies in Societies (San Francisco, 1976). Numerous studies of money in nonmarket economies, including two of Malinowski's essays on the Trobriand Islanders, have been collected by George Dalton in Tribal and Peasant Economies: Readings in Economic Anthropology (Garden City, N.Y., 1967). Both Neale and Dalton are students of Karl Polanyi, some of whose more important essays have been edited by Dalton in Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics: Essays of Karl Polanyi (Garden City, N.Y., 1968). The two standard studies of "primitive money" are Paul Einzig's Primitive Money, 2d rev. ed. (Oxford, 1966), and A. Hingston Quiggin's A Survey of Primitive Money (London, 1949). These two books are mines of information but need to be supplemented by the more theoretical works listed above.

The symbolism of shells has been studied in Mircea Eliade's "Observations on the Symbolism of Shells," chapter 4 of his Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism (New York, 1969), pp. 125–150. Chinese paper money has been studied recently in Hou Jinglang's Monnaies d'offrande et la notion de trésorerie dans la religion chinoise (Paris, 1975). On the origins of Greek coinage, see both Ernst Curtius's "On the Religious Character of Greek Coins," Numismatic Chronicle 10 (1870): 91–111, and Édouard Will's "De l'aspect éthique des origines grecques de la monnaie," Revue historique 212 (July–September 1954): 209–231. The classic work on the origins of Greek money remains Bernhard Laum's Heiliges Geld: Eine historische Untersuchung über den sakralen Ursprung des Geldes (Tübingen, 1924). Marcel Mauss's groundbreaking article, "Les origines de la notion de monnaie," first published in 1914, has been reprinted in his Œuvres, vol. 2, edited by Victor Karady (Paris, 1969), pp. 106–112. Also to be consulted is his classic study The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1954; New York, 1967).