What Money and Astrology Have in Common

The news media these days is full of contentious comments about what the government must do to live within its financial means. Occasionally, the public is scolded for its continued, stubborn interest in astrology, which some scientists insist is medieval superstition or worse.

What do money and astrology have in common?

The public has been misinformed about the true nature of both. Public concern is focused on money as a valuable commodity itself, when in reality money’s true function is as a means of exchanging things of value. The public is likewise “educated” to mistake sun sign astrology—those fortune-cookie blurbs in newspapers and magazines—for what astrology is, when in fact astrology is much more and much more complex than that.

According to Wikipedia, sun sign astrology in print media began in 1930 when astrologer R. H. Naylor is said to have predicted the crash of a British airship named R101. Forty-eight people were killed when R101 crashed in France October, 5, 1930, a loss of life greater than in the Hindenburg disaster of 1937. Naylor was urged to come up with a simplified system of astrology suitable for a newspaper column. It proved so popular, print media has been carrying like columns ever since. Some of these columns are written by non-astrologers, much to the chagrin of accomplished astrologers.

The privatization of the USA’s monetary system likewise distorted our relationship with money. That privatization was accomplished by Congress on December 23, 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created as America’s central bank. Given the name federal, the public believed this new central bank was another agency of the federal government when in fact it is owned by a private cartel of bankers. In effect, this made the nation’s money the private property of these bankers, to be loaned out to everyone else at interest, including the federal government.

Deceptions Stubbornly Persist

Both deceptions have persisted despite objections to sun sign astrology by hosts of accomplished astrologers and objections to the Fed by a variety of politicians, economists and citizens—and the lament years later of President Woodrow Wilson, who had signed the bill. The sun sign scam has become so popular that even Nobel Prize winning scientists believe it is all there is to astrology. And the Fed has become so firmly established that even some Ph. D. economists assume it’s a government agency.

Most of the money used by the federal government is borrowed from the banks of the Federal Reserve by selling Treasure Bonds and Bills. The debt is transferred to taxpayers, at ever-compounding interest, and this constitutes the national debt. Interest payments on the national debt now account for about half of each annual federal budget.

We are taught to disdain anything that is not scientific, yet the study of money and monetary systems is so lost in the mists of banking distortions that, like astrology, it does not lend itself to scientific verification. The true nature of money cannot be understood without exploring its origins and its varieties of modern forms. Likewise, astrology cannot be proven or disproven by the conventional scientific method. Both the money system and astrology can be understood only in terms of their own paradigms.

More To Money Than Paper Bills

There are worlds more to money than the paper bills and coins in our pockets. Likewise there are worlds more to an understanding of astrology than reading your sun sign blurb for the day. Focusing strictly on sun sign astrology is like assuming that dollar bills and coins are all there is to money, when in fact dollar bills and coins constitute less than 3% of what we call money.

Both money and astrology have evolved and changed tremendously over the millennia. The historical origins of both are so remote and so lacking in reliable records that we are likely to learn more about both from archeological digs than from the recorded history of either. Astrology was developed by priests and scholars, many of whom were renamed astronomers after the Renaissance, i.e., Kepler, Galileo, Newton. Money systems were developed by ancient and medieval moneychangers, the precursors of today’s bankers.

There are both practical and theoretical components to both money and astrology. What monetary theory a society applies to create and distribute whatever it chooses to use as money determines whether it will prosper and grow, or flounder in conflict and disintegrate. When money is presumed to be the private property of the few and loaned to everyone else, economic imbalance eventually distorts that society. Where money is issued by government in response to needs and balanced between demand and supply of goods and services, society prospers.

As for astrology’s practical and theoretical sides, the two most dominant theories today are the Vedic tradition from India and the Western tradition from Babylonia. But there is also the ancient Chinese astrological mapping of the heavens, and the ancient Mayan calculations of planetary and other celestial movements. Although the ancient Chinese and Mayan map of the heavens appears very different from the Western or Vedic, all these traditions agree about the basic tenets of astrology. All ancient peoples around the world discovered the same astrological phenomena, but each symbolized it differently.

Just as ancient astrologers in different cultures developed different ways to map our celestial surround, ancient societies developed different forms of medium-of-exchange money. Five thousand years ago, Egyptians used cattle and grain seeds as money. Eighth century BC Sparta used iron ingots for coins while eighth century Rome used bronze coins. Although gold and silver became preferred in Europe and the Middle East, China avoided gold and silver, and the Inca of ancient Peru used gold religiously but not as money. The Inca may have used a system something like the Medieval English tally sticks (2) to keep track of who owned whom how much. When the British Crown outlawed the creation of money in the American colonies, colonists came up with paper bills or IOUs. Ben Franklin is sometimes called “the father of paper money,” but it was actually the Chinese in the 12th Century who first used this form of money.

Theoretical Conjuring and Speculation

How money works is as esoteric as how astrology works. Both are the subjects of endless theoretical conjuring and speculation. The Moon’s gravity is what is presumed to account for such phenomena as ocean tides, but this does not explain the Moon’s effect on a variety of other earthly things, including female menses. Nor does it account for the noticeable effects of other planets. More than 97% of what falls under the category of today’s money is really credit to banks and debts to a variety of borrowers, including those unwitting borrowers called taxpayers, stuck with the debt for money borrowed by governments.

Financiers are probably the most open-minded about the true nature of both money and astrology. J. P. Morgan famously quipped that millionaires do not use astrology, billionaires do. Of course Morgan was not speaking about sun sign astrology; he was referring to in-depth readings from his personal astrologer.

Some scientists believe astrologers invent their readings as entertaining fictions, and presume that our money system is reality-based. The truth is that bankers conjure money from thin air using very loose criteria called “fractional reserves,” (1) which can be expanded or contracted at will.

Astrologers combine mathematically accurate astronomy with the ancient myths of the gods and goddesses in their attempts to “read God’s newsletter.” The planets were named for the gods and goddesses in ancient pantheistic traditions, so that the Mercury of the Romans is the same planet as that named by Native Americans for their god Coyote. Thus the names of the planets can be translated from one culture to another by the names of ancient pantheistic deities. The same deity is depicted uniquely by each culture, however, which baffles many moderns seeking standardization. Depictions of the Egyptian Thoth looks nothing like the Roman Mercury, yet both are the symbolic personifications of the same quality of the energy science tells us is all at various rates of vibration.

While the currencies of different nations can be exchanged for one another, the modern world has something of a schizophrenic split about the true nature of money. While privatized central banks lend money to governments in the West. the government-owned and operated central bank of China lends money to private banks. India, Brazil, Russia and other nations have adopted the Chinese system, or a version of it, and created government-run central banks which no longer burden their populations with national debts. This has caused some Western ideologues to call the Chinese system “autocratic state control.” The banks of the West, controlled by private individuals, are no less autocratic.

Ironically, all money is created out of thin air, whether in China or the USA, while astrological readings are based on precise astronomical calculations combined with the ancient deities each planet’s influences personify. In this regard, monetary systems are far more fictitious than astrology. For astrologers rely on ancient pantheistic mythology which is universal, while modern bankers are free to improvise reasons and justifications based on momentary whims, wishes or rationalizations.

You want to build a McMansion in the Hamptons? Convince your banker that you can resell it for more than the cost of its construction and your banker’s fingers will hit the keyboard to write in the numbers of dollars requested, and transfer that sum to your account with the click of a mouse. No such conjuring from thin air is possible in astrology. When certain planetary patterns form, we know from past history what types of events are likely to manifest.

Trillions of Digitized Dollars

What is now called cyber money or digitized dollars exist in unimaginable trillions. The Fed justifies lending these trillions of abstractions at low or no interest to big multinational banks, while constricting credit to taxpaying citizens. Why? Well, bankers are birds of feather who flock together and feed on the productive output of hard-working people. That’s their game—they’re in business to make profits. In fact, they are legally obligated to make profits for their shareholders.

Most astrologers work alone and are paid fees by clients, and hope they can earn enough fees to pay their bills and stay in business. Astrologers are among the masses whose production and consumption of goods and services feed the profits of the multinational bankers. The product produced by a worthy astrologer helps clients in various ways, including making decisions that increase each client’s ability to earn more money, and thus pay more taxes—with 40 cents of each tax dollar going to pay interest on the national debt created by the Fed’s system of lending to government at ever-compounding interest.

Astrology offers logical explanations for intuitive hunches. The money system is counter-intuitive and counter-logical.

Any astrologer can erect a chart for the creation of the Fed on December 23, 1913, at 6 pm, and see that the Fed-run money system’s days are numbered. An astrologer could have deduced this decades before the financial collapse of 2008, which was created by the Fed-run, debt-creating money system.

Congress responded to the collapse by rewarding the beneficiaries of this system, throwing more money at the crumbling financial infrastructure, on the illogical grounds that these corporate entities were “too big to fail.” Too small to succeed in this system were millions of taxpayers who lost their homes, had to declare bankruptcy, saw their pensions greatly diminished or evaporated, or wound up jobless in an economy that had shipped their jobs to cheap labor markets overseas.

Steeped in Faith-Based Theory

Most modern economists who theorize about money systems are too steeped in faith-based theory to deduce that rewarding monetary criminals for wrecking a society is socially destructive. Yet any astrologer—be she or he ever so ignorant about how the money system works—can read the upcoming transits of the Fed’s natal chart and see that it is in for some horrendous transformation, or possibly a complete disintegration.

Debunkers often accuse astrologers of practicing a superstition that has not changed since medieval times. Actually, there have been dramatic developments in astrology due to computers and telescopic explorations of the universe. Today’s astrologer can take into consideration the seven visible planets or yore, plus Uranus, Neptune and Pluto visible through telescopes, and a host of asteroids, each with an interesting history of influences.

As for money, although bankers lending to government was established in 1694 (the Bank of England), the forms of money have greatly expanded since then. Trillions of dollars are routinely bet on price moves in derivative markets each day, via the electronic transfer of computer digits. There is nowhere near enough gold in existence to back these trillions of cyberspace dollars. Are they backed by reserves? Who’s counting?

If we define superstition as a belief not based on reason or knowledge, today’s debt-based money system is superstitious, for it is based on the belief that we must all borrow what we use as medium-of-exchange money from wealthy bankers, who conjure it from thin air, or withhold it, often as momentary whims dictate. And the belief in this system is so firmly embedded in us that we do not see it as absurd, even as we daily use money as a public utility.

By contrast, astrologers work in a realm where history repeats but does not duplicate. Uncertainty is ever present. For although astrologers can predict, based on past history, that a given planetary cycle will bring another time of travail, they cannot predict exactly what events will manifest to constitute this travail. Since the industrial revolution, for instance, every great depression (as measured by an economic standard) has occurred under a repeating planetary pattern, yet each great depression has manifested unique events. Planetary cycles recur in an ever-changing celestial context. No two moments in cosmic time duplicate. Likewise, history repeats but does not duplicate. This makes the practice of astrology an adventure in uncertainty very much like the study of quantum physics and its investigation of subatomic particles. There is no explanation for why these particles behave the way they do, nor why they are often idiosyncratic. Likewise, there is no explanation for why planetary patterns influence the way they do.

Matching Need With Resources

Nor is there an explanation for why we tolerate a monetary system that creates debt when the logical way to inject money into a society is the way Ben Franklin did it back in Colonial Pennsylvania—matching need with resources, demand with supply. Instead of creating a debt for taxpayers, this system generated enough interest income to relieve taxpayers. The irrational objection to this logical monetary system is that it is an affront to a divinely appointed aristocracy. When President Abe Lincoln used it to avoid borrowing from bankers to fight the Civil War—creating government issued “greenback” dollars—the London Times expressed outrage on behalf of the banking aristocracy thus “cheated” out of profiting from the war:

“If that mischievous financial policy which had its origin in the North American Republic should become indurate down to a fixture, then that government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off its debts and be without a debt. It will become prosperous beyond precedent in the history of the civilized governments of the world. The brains and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That government must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe.”

It was an outraged banking aristocracy that eventually led to the creation of the USA’s Federal Reserve and the national debt and deficit today’s pundits and politicians agonize over today.

Endnotes:

Fractional reserves means that a certain fraction of sums a bank lends must be kept on hand in case depositors wish to take out cash. What that fraction is depends upon the law, or the whims of bankers, or alternately both. For decades during the 20th Century, bankers were required to maintain 1/10 of all money on loan to borrowers. This requirement is intended to protect against panics when larger numbers of depositors demand their money back. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was formed with government insuring deposits up to $100,000. Recently that amount was increased to $250,000.

“A tally (or tally stick) was an ancient memory aid device to record and document numbers, quantities, or even messages. Tally sticks first appear as notches carved on animal bones, in the Upper Paleolithic. A notable example is the Ishango Bone. Historical reference is made by Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) about the best wood to use for tallies and Marco Polo (1254–1324) who mentions the use of the tally in China.” Wikipedia.