The Degeneration of Coinage
René Guénon — The Signs of The Times
In the question of money, if the merely ‘economic’ point of view as it is understood today is not departed from, it certainly seems that money is something that appertains as completely as possible to the ‘reign of quantity’. This indeed is the reason why it plays so predominant a part in modern society, as is only too obvious; but the truth is that the ‘economic’ point of view itself, and the exclusively quantitative conception of money that is inherent in it, are but the products of a degeneration which is on the whole fairly recent, and that money possessed at its origin, and retained for a long time, quite a different character and a truly qualitative value.
It may easily be observed, provided only that one has ‘eyes to see’, that the ancient coins are literally covered with traditional symbols, often chosen from among those that carry some particularly profound meaning; thus for instance it has been observed that among the Celts the symbols figured on the coins can only be explained if they are related to the doctrinal knowledge that belonged to the Druids alone, which implies a direct intervention of the Druids in the monetary domain, and the truth in this matter is the same for the other peoples of antiquity as for the Celts, of course after taking account of the modalities peculiar to their respective traditional organizations.
If money had been always the profane thing it came to be later, how could the intervention of a spiritual authority, which would then obviously have no concern with money, be explained, and how would it be possible to understand that many traditions speak of coinage as of something really charged with a ’spiritual influence’, the action of which could not become effective except by means of the symbols that constituted its normal ‘support’?
The control of money by the spiritual authority, in whatever form it may have been exercised, is by no means exclusively confined to antiquity, for without going outside the Western world, there is much to indicate that it must have been perpetuated until toward the end of the Middle Ages, that is, for as long as the Western world had a traditional civilization. It is impossible to explain in any other way the fact that certain sovereigns were accused at this time of having ‘debased the coinage’; since their contemporaries regarded this as a crime on their part, it must be concluded that the sovereigns had not the free disposal of the standard of the coinage, and that, in changing it on their own initiative, they overstepped the recognized rights of the temporal power.
If that were not the case, the standard of the coinage would only then have had an importance based on convention, and it would not have mattered, broadly speaking, if it had been made of any sort of metal, or of various sorts, or even been replaced by mere paper as it is for the most part today, for this would have been no hinderance to the continuance of exactly the same ‘material’ employment of it. An element of another order must therefore have been involved, and it must have been of a superior order, for unless that had been the case the alteration could not have assumed a character so exceptionally serious as to end in compromising the very stability of the royal power.
What has happened in the case of money is but an example of a much more general movement, affecting all activities in every department of human existence; all have been gradually divested of any ‘sacred’ or traditional character, and thereby that existence itself in its entirety has become completely profane and is now at last reduced to the third-rate mediocrity of ‘ordinary life’ as it is found today. By continuously surrounding man with the products of modern industry, and so to speak never letting him see anything else (except, as in museums for example, in the guise of mere ‘curiosities’ having no relation with the ‘real’ circumstances of his life and consequently no effective influence on it), he is really compelled to shut himself up inside the narrow circle of ‘ordinary life’, as in a prison without escape. In a traditional civilization, on the contrary, each object was at the same time as perfectly fitted as possible to the use for which it was immediately destined and also made so that it could at any moment, and owing to the very fact that real use was being made of it (instead of its being treated more or less as a dead thing as the moderns do with everything that they consider to be a ‘work of art’), serve as a ‘support’ for meditation, linking the individual with something other than the mere corporeal modality, thus helping everyone to elevate himself to a superior state according to the measure of his capacities: what an abyss there is between these two conceptions of human existence!
Since money lost all guarantee of a superior order, it has seen its own actual quantitative value, or what is called in the jargon of the economists its ‘purchasing power’, becoming ceaselessly less and less, so that it can be imagined that, when it arrives at a limit that is getting ever nearer, it will have lost every justification, and that it will disappear of itself, so to speak, from human existence. Since pure quantity is by its nature beneath all existence, when the trend toward it is pressed to its extreme limit, as in the case of money, the end can only be a real dissolution.
René Guénon - The Sings of the Times 1945
