Bernhard Laums: “Holy Money” – Culture

If habitual consumption exceeds the habitual amount of money pocketed, coffee at the kiosk no longer allows the newspaper, then that is quite concretely what the news succinctly calls inflation. But at least since the beginning of the pandemic, cash has been a hotbed of evil contagion: what lies there is the subject of a rampant consumption. But it is possible that the value of money has migrated so far into the collective imagination that it no longer needs to be expressed separately.

At least that’s what the German classical scholar Eske Bockelmann thinks, who presented a radical theory of money two years ago. At his instigation, a classic of economic history has now been reissued: Bernhard Laum’s “Holy Money” from 1924, published shortly after the end of one of the most radical monetary devaluations in history. It is immediately obvious that hyperinflation raised the question of the origin and thus the reliability of money.

Not even Marx had attempted a primal scene of money

Laum, originally a Greek scholar but later appointed to a chair in economic history, derives profane money from ancient temple sacrifices. This idea was quite unusual, since the historical reconstruction of the concept of money was considered as impossible as it was unnecessary – it was simply proclaimed by referring to primitive exchange. Not even Marx had attempted a primal scene of money. On the other hand, with Homer’s help, Laum begins the search for the earliest binding standard of value.

She leads him to the temple precincts of Athens, where people express their desires through sacrifices. In a derivation that is as bold as it is elegant, he identifies cattle as “the most frequently exchanged, most coveted good (…), by which all others are measured, (…) with which all others are acquired”. The cattle was the most important animal in agrarian self-sufficient communities, and in mythology one of the preferred manifestations of the supreme god. The cattle were killed and partly burned, at the same time they represented payment for the priests or prepared the table for the banquet of the notables.

The self-portrayal of urban society in terms of religious sacrifice renewed collective optimism. When you had eaten your fill – eventually you got tired of even the best meat skewers – you resorted to making do with symbols instead of eating or trading actual cattle. According to a formula popular in German spiritual science, the cult became culture. And while in the temple district the obeloi – the meat skewers – gradually gave way to the obolus as a coin, and thus the immediate enjoyment of the gifts to the promise of future exchanges in kind, the gods got used to the fact that people no longer killed for their sake, but presented them with images of the offerings.

At no point does Laum mention Plato. But his prehistory of money represents an application of Platonism. By turning the ambivalent Homeric gods into civilized inhabitants of the heaven of ideas, who instead of the vitality of animals or sacrificed people enjoy their pure form, instead of empirical randomness, standardized ideality, just as they can only be found in image is possible, he allows them to take the big step towards “culture” which, in his own opinion, makes the Occident so extraordinary.

Laum’s etymological derivations, his narrow but thoroughly cultivated material base – the Homeric epics – make the argument vulnerable but not inconsistent. Speculative and stimulating is his distinction between the state-supporting sacrificial cult and popular magic, whose belief that one thing can stand for another is what first made it possible to replace the victim, his “spiritualization”, on a large scale. This idea owes its existence to a theory of magic that is at the same time a theory of language. It can be found in James G. Frazer’s “Golden Bough” (1890) and, in Laum, becomes part of an economics theory in which the empirical world and its superstructure can only harmonize with one another at the price of contamination – precisely through primitive magic – and one culture produce, which represses the other of themselves as their enabling condition.

The book will soon be 100 years old, and yet it is still amazingly readable and worth reading

Marcel Mauss’ “Essay on the Gift” was published in the same year that “Holy Money” was published. It is not about the purification of the victim, but about his reciprocation. The focus is on the “fait sociale totale” of exchange, not the establishment of a value, but the fact that every practice at some point experiences its institutionalization. This approach represents a reversal of Laum’s central thought. It also points to a blind spot in the derivation: the sacrifice made to the gods already presupposes the functioning of society, within which it achieves the desired effects. The effects of the sacrifice do not consist in standardized divine gifts in return, but in a good life.

How readable and worth reading Laum’s book is after a good 100 years is shown by its editorial framework: On the back of this story, Christina von Braun discovers the need to consider the “ability of signs to materialize”, for example using the prostitution of women as “living coins “. And Eske Bockelmann, who has been thinking about money as a transcendental condition of our culture for the past 20 years – from the appearance of all objects as goods to the money form of rhythm – would like to rename the book: “Holy, NOT money”.. Because the goods that Laum writes about are indeed those that are exchanged for one another or measured against one another. But they would not be compared using a common third party. In doing so, Laum is developing before our eyes a “way of living together that we have lost and that we should gratefully accept being able to perceive here anew”.

With a view to the history of classical philology as a hallucination and supreme discipline in the humanities, this is definitely “philology of the future”. Just like every revision of the history of civilization, it looks into a world of innocence and adventure, which nonetheless could never be had for free.