ABSTRACT
Social stratification and accumulation of wealth and power are key elements of civilisation. This chapter explores some mysterious and beyond-the-rational properties of money and considers the ‘magical’ associations between money, metals, treasures, and the enchanted subterranean realm from the Bronze Age to the present day. In traditional accounts, money was invented to facilitate palace economies and used with a view to economic rationalisation in increasingly complex urban societies. This modern myth of the origins of money has been challenged by anthropological studies, which argue that far from being just a vehicle of economic transactions and quantification, money is a social phenomenon and deeply embedded in magical thinking. Money and its value are closely associated with metals and extractive industries are thus directly linked to money, just as they are integral to cities and ultimately to all aspects of civilisation. Extractive industries led, among other things, to an unprecedented accumulation of wealth. The complex relationships between metals, money, and the subterranean comprise an ‘infrastructure’ for the magical dimensions of money, linking the ancient world to the present-day virtual currencies (like Bitcoin). This chapter explores these relationships and the ways in which money continues to be entangled with the weird. It also discusses the folklore on hidden treasures and the practice of treasure hunting, the symbolic (or image magic-based) associations of money from the ancient world to early modern times and the present, and how certain aspects of money in both the past and present are related to broadly religious phenomena.
