“Didja ever look at a dollar bill, man? There's some spooky shit goin' on there.”—Slater, Dazed and Confused
An often forgotten inspiration to the 1960s counterculture was the philosophy professor Norman O. Brown, who in melding the scatalogical vision of Martin Luther and Freud's psychological theory arrived at a positively Gnostic view of the world-as-corrupt in which, instead of psychotherapy, mysticism and magick provide the only way out.
In his Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History, Brown draws parallels between the Reformation conception of the Devil and the realities of the operation of capitalism. Sourcing Martin Luther's near-Manichean view of the world as the property of the Devil, he analogues the Devil to both excrement and money. All of these ideas can be summed up by two highly loaded symbols: the pyramid on the back of the one-dollar bill (symbol of the viewpoint of the ruling class of our most Protestant, capitalist, and Freemasonic of countries) and the fifteenth trump of the tarot, The Devil (one of 78 elucidations of the Western alchemical and mystic conception of the world). Connect these with Foucault's analysis of the Panopticon and many of the secrets of capitalism are laid out plain and simple–the pyramid on the money we exchange daily is a glyph of the Panopticon, which is in turn the system used by the capitalist system to move the world as resources–in Luther's estimation, The Devil.
The occult symbols of The Devil and the Eye in the Pyramid are banal in the extreme; as is the process of trying to decipher them–but how can we not attempt to decipher things so basic as the ultimate boogeyman we are terrorized with as children and a symbol on the money which rules our lives and passes through our hands every day? "In the case of interest-bearing capital," Marx wrote in Capital, "the self-reproducing character of capital, the self-expansion of value, the surplus value, surrounds itself with the qualities of the occult."
The language of the occult runs throughout the text of Life Against Death, not only in Brown's discussion of the Devil as ruler of the world but especially in his calling upon the powers of alchemy and mysticism as the way out of the constriction of the death instinct. But for the purposes of this essay, the symbols of the occult and of Freemasonry will be taken as a semiotic code which may or may not have any bearing to the world as it actually is–not as the fundamental symbols of Jung's collective unconscious, as they are usually suspected to be, but rather (for reason's sake) as an internally consistent code which is used not only by Western power elites (and this is well demonstrated by Laum's observation that the value ration of gold to silver has remained stable from the time of antiquity until the present at 1:13 1/2, because it is based on the astrological ration of the sun and moon--boo!) but also by many Western mystics who, in attempting to unlock that code, so attempt to gain access to and understanding of the sacred base of culture that Norman O. Brown all so readily points out exists in all cultures, even our own: "Society must always be a secular superstructure on a sacred base–i.e....society can never get rid of irrational residues."
Tracing the Lutheran conception of Satan to the rise of capitalism, Brown states: "The fundamental aim of Satan himself is the same as the fundamental aim of capitalism--to make himself princeps mundi and deus huius seculi. And Luther sees the final coming to power in this world of Satan in the coming to power of capitalism. The structure of the entire kingdom of Satan is essentially capitalistic: we are the Devil's property. [Luther states]: 'Money is the word of the Devil, through which he creates all things.'" And if the Lutheran Satan is fundamentally scatological, as Brown asserts, then here is another link to money, which is a stand-in for excrement as a marker of territory and power. Now, if Satan (or Beelzebub, "Lord of the Flies" which buzz around the shit of the world) / capitalism is truly the ruler of this world as Luther states (and one is reminded of Pasolini's immortal film Saló, his update of De Sade's 120 Days of Sodom for fascist Italy, in which one of the four "libertines" who represent the rulers of the world defecates on the floor and commands one of the libertines' captive children to eat it with a spoon, crying "Mange! Mange! Mange!" in a riff on processed foods and the capitalist power structure) then exactly how is he (the capitalist system) able to keep control?
Turning to Foucault, we see that the French philosopher wrote extensively about Bentham's Panopticon as one of the central modes of discipline in the modern world, a technology for social control that came into full effect during the eighteenth century, coinciding with the full bloom of capitalism. In the Panoptic system, all constituents of society are under constant threat of observation–for all may be seen at any time without knowing.
"Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assure the automatic functioning of power... The Panopticon is a marvelous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power." A society so constructed can enslave all without anyone ever being aware they are slaves, for no more bars or chains are needed. For "The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use... It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms."
It is the accumulation of power over men in this way that is analogous–and interdependent with–the accumulation of capital. Men become money, resources to be used. And money is shit. And a world of shit is a world of the devil. And is it any wonder why we feel so guilty as money passes through our hands, as Brown remarks? For we are literally being watched while we shit. Foucault: "[The Panopticon's] power can be assured only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden, violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty."
This subtle exercise of Panopticism is achieved in the constant exchange of money that bears the glyph of the Panopticon. The eye-in-the-pyramid on the back of the one dollar bill is not only a representation of but in a very real sense is the Panopticon; and perhaps represents a not-totally-archaic method of control that existed as a predecessor to the moment when the ruling elite could place security cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny in the world (even in some bathrooms these days! Hah hah!) If we are not actually being watched by our money (the shit of the system that we must sustain our lives with, as in Pasolini's film), than we are certainly being given the unconscious sense that we are, which perfectly achieves the goals of the Panoptic system.
In such a system, we are permanently visible and made permanent subjects to the capitalist stucture–the Devil. "And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticism enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines the limits that are traced around the law."
The Panopticon of money expanded its range of sight with the surveillant gaze of the Spectacle that the Situationists rebelled against (unsuccessfully, I might add).
The connection between capitalism, the Panopticon, and money is easy to make, but for the connection to the Devil we must turn not only to Luther but we must also, ahhh... consult the tarot. ATU XV, The Devil is not only a card in a system used for divination, but is also a placeholder for one of the connecting paths of the Qabalah. The tarot in its "true" function is essentially a study aid for the Qabalah, a structure of Jewish mysticism which purports to categorize the secrets of the universe, being a map of the layers of reality between Man and God, which ultimately reveals a method for their ascent; the Qabalah lies at the heart of the Western Esoteric Tradition of which--through Freemasonry--many of the founding fathers and subsequent presidents of America have been subjects of.
In this case, The Devil is a placeholder for the 26th path of the Qabalah, between the spheres of Tiphareth (the universal Christ Consciousness–or "resurrection of the body" of mankind which is, essentially, what Norman O. Brown is mapping a road towards in Life Against Death) and Hod (pure intellect–the left hemisphere of the brain). The symbols associated with this path, according to Crowley's 777, (which reveal the internal symbolism of the Devil card) are the Hebrew letter Ayin (which means "Eye"), the Greek god Pan, the Goat or Ass, and the phallus.
The esoteric meaning of the Devil card is, according to Paul Foster Case, "the limitations of the visible, and the bondage of ignorance resulting from the acceptance of these limitations and appearances as being all there is," the chains around the world that are the results of man's ignorance, the assurance that everything is under control–by the wrong people.
The essence of the symbolism is the Pan figure (male virility, hence dominance) and the Eye (there is also a connection to the scatology of the "nether-eye," as "Ayin" also means "foundation"–the picture depicts the brown Devil squatting on a black box which looks like either a toilet or shit itself, which the man and woman are chained to as fruits & flame emerge from their nethers to be harvested by the mercantile Devil.)
Pan. Eye. Panopticon.
Boo.
and since nobody is maintaining and expanding the original OF Library on OF, I decided to come out of the dark and officially let everyone know about this. I'm continualy improving and maintained sacred-magick.com almost daily up to now since July04 and I am usually out on a hunt for new updates about once a week. There's no point of me promoting knowledge and go quite about it, so I say it outright here in this thread.
