how to make a lot of money with meaning & magic — the Hermetic arts

In my last blog post I talked about the possibility of going from feeling doubt and lack to being on-fire with inspiration and flooded with wealth of all kinds.

A rather grand idea, yes?

And totally possible.

I know this from my personal experience of going from being broke and miserable to making 7 figures last year and becoming rather obnoxiously happy…

…. and of teaching thousands of other people how to make similarly dramatic transformations.

In this blog I want to show you a big piece of how to do this.

Specifically, we’re going to talk about the inspired making of material wealth in the form of money.

The key to making a lot of money in a wondrous and delightful fashion rests in working with the ars Hermetica — the Hermetic Arts.

Hermes, of course, was the ancient Greek god of meaning (language and writing), magic, and money.

As the Greeks understood, these three “m”s are deeply intertwined.

And the ancient Greeks did know a thing or two about money — they invented it.

As historian Felix Martin explains in Money: The Unauthorized Biography, from Coinage to Cryptocurrency…

… money as we know it emerged when ancient Greek tribes combined the technology of writing, inherited from Babylon, with their custom of dividing things of value into equal, standardized units for all members of the tribe.

You see, the ancient Greek tribes had a rather strange habit: when they went hunting, they would divide the kill equally amongst all the male members of the tribe.

This custom of dividing the fruits of the hunt into an equal, standard portion amongst the “citizens” of the tribe eventually developed into Athenian democracy, where each citizen got one vote, all votes equal in weight.

This custom of standardization also evolved into money as we know it.

Money as we know it is record of debt (you need writing to keep track of this debt), made into a standardized unit of meaning.

The invention of money greatly disturbed and up-ended the feudal system of aristocracy which had existed in Ancient Greece up to that time.

Before money, the primary means of economic exchange in Greece consisted of gift economy — -

— great families who had come to power through triumph in war gave gifts back and forth to each other, enhancing their status based on who could give the biggest gifts.

The only way to get wealth was to inherit it, seize it at spear point from someone else, or receive it as a gift from another aristocrat.

The term “gift economy” sounds real nice, but it’s a code term for “feudal elites that pass wealth back and forth amongst themselves while straight up enslaving everyone else.”

The aristocracy greatly resented the Hermetic emergence of money and markets and trade because it made wealth so much more fluid and transferable…

… able to cross class boundaries and flow to whoever could create the most desirable goods.

Thus, from the aristocracy, Hermes the god of writing, magic, and money took on a reputation for being a liar and a thief, a transgressive scoundrel who stole their ancestral monopoly on wealth.

Interesting, yes?

Today spiritual people tend to think of money as an oppressive force, but it’s actually hugely liberatory, flowing, and gentle compared to the restrictive system of inheritance and seizure that preceded it.

Back to discussing the nature of money.

Money as we know it is a unit of meaning.

(I’m about to get real philosophical for a minute as I explain making a lot of it — please bear with me.)

Like language, money is a form of social magic that relies on agreement about quantifiable value, and this agreement constitutes meaning.

Value is just a quantifiable, measurable variety of meaning.

In mathematics, the “value” of an integer is its meaning.

Likewise, it’s impossible to find something meaningful in your life that’s not also valuable, if not to you then to someone else.

Your family members, for example, mean a lot to you, and you value them highly, more than anything else.

But let’s say you also have a pile of gold on your living room floor, and it means *nothing* to you, because you’ve evolved beyond material concerns.

Still, gold is valuable in the marketplace because other humans desire it.

Gold has a social meaning of beauty, power, status, a meaning that gets quantified into value by the market.

So even if the gold is meaningless to you, its social meaning makes it valuable in the world at large.

So here’s where we get very, very practical:

if you want to make a lot of money, you need to create a lot of social meaning for your product or service.

In other words, you need to tell a riveting story (with both your words and your actions) that grips attention and imagination (i.e., consciousness) and ….

…. creates a context in which your product or service (or labor, if you have a career working for an organization) is especially meaningful and therefore valuable in the market.

Business bro’s say you need to “add value” which is true enough…

… but it’s more direct to focus on creating a social context of deep meaning, since, as we’ve discussed, value is just *a variety of meaning* quantified by the market.

Imagine for a moment what it would be like if you knew exactly how create a social context in which your work is especially meaningful …. and therefore wildly valuable?

This is what mastery of the Hermetic arts, the arts of meaning-making (and therefore magic-making) empower you to do.

The first step to creating a riveting context of social meaning for your work…

…. is to find a shockingly honest meaning for your being and your life that’s far, far larger than anything you’ve ever dared to dream of before.

In my next message, I’ll discuss the ins and outs of how to do that.

love and villainy,

Carolyn Elliott

author of Existential Kink: unmask your shadow and embrace your power

P.S. The WEALTH alchemical community for leaders will open for registration next week, stay tuned for more details.

P.P.S. Join me at the live virtual event, The Magician’s Guide to Getting What You Want on March 19, where I’ll be laying out everything I know about manifestation magic in one rollicking hour.

Here’s the link to register: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/magicians