Burning Issue - Everything Burns. It's not about the money.....

Have you ever considered how much your life weighs?

1100 Kilos of Burning Issue Magazine may be enough to push a Luton Van overweight. A medium wheel base panel van from VW can carry up to 1,375kg. I know what I would use to move Burning Issue around if I had to. I like to take my nonsense seriously. This appears no differently.

BURNING ISSUE – The World’s First Magazine for Money Burners – SUPER DELUXE EDITION – 23rd JUNE 2018

Burning Issue SUPER DELUXE (2018/19)
160 pages – £12.00 (ISSN 2516-8738)
Double page pullout. Free £23 note and surprise gift.
A4 fine quality ‘art catalogue’ print.

available from Iron Man Records…..

Here are three points that I think might help you make sense of money burning written by Iron Man Records Patron Jon Harris, author of The Money Burner’s Manual: A Guide to Ritual Sacrifice.

1. As the general equivalent value form money is an ideal sacrament. In other words, the idea that money can be anything and everything makes burning it — turning it into nothing — especially potent metaphysically, symbolically and magically. By burning money you are, in a sense, burning everything — including yourself (although hopefully, not literally).

2. Related to 1., is the idea that currency was born of ritual sacrifice. Two theories about it are that money evolved from votive offerings or from spits used to distribute the meat of sacrificed animals. Ritual sacrifice was the focal point for a group’s social, psychological, and sexual relations, and so economic ideas that conceive of money as a ‘social relation’ (as opposed to it being ‘a thing’ or representation of ‘a thing’) build directly upon these sacrificial foundations. What I try to get across within the ritual itself, is that by making a sacrament of currency we are returning money to it’s source.

3. The final and possibly the most important point is about the ritual as an act of pure forgiving. I hope that all those who participated — whether or not they burned — experienced this as engendered within the ritual. Money burning is equivalent to pure forgiving because it is ‘giving without receiving’. Pure forgiveness requires that we forgive the unforgivable. And it’s this contradiction or ‘impossibility’ that money burning approaches.

It’s important to understand that your expectations about money burning will influence your experience of it. Money seems to have a quality that subverts the normal rules of cause and effect. Financial experts talk about the expectations and outcomes that surround money as being ‘reflexive’ — meaning that they operate in a feedback loop with each determining the other. Because of this, in thinking about money burning, it’s best to avoid the trap of conceiving of it as a form of ritualized ‘spending’; as if your sacrifice were the ‘price’ for your experience of it. To do so would be to repeat the same patterns of behavior and thought that characterize our normal financial and economic relations. Much better to have in mind the idea that money burning is pure waste, the creation NOTHING from something.

Of course, the waste of money is in part what makes money burning so taboo. The determination to break a taboo requires a commitment on your behalf. The value of that promise to yourself, is more than the value of the note(s) you choose to burn. You are pushing beyond conventional wisdom and morality and creating a new boundary and a new relation with money. You are subsuming reason — and currency — to your will.

Money will still determine what you can buy. And for most of us it will determine the bigger part of what we do, too. We live in the world of rational calculation. Before we burn we weigh up the anticipated pain against the amount of money. And when done, we are back in the rational world, just poorer. But in the moment of the burn, we destroy currency and the system of thought that surrounds it. That is a moment of new possibilities.

If you can allow for the possibility that there is some form of redemptive magic in money burning, then you will have carved open a space in your mindscape for its reality to exist. It doesn’t need to be an article of faith. You don’t need to declare it to anyone. It just needs to be an idea seeded in your mind which can flower in ritual. Since the dawn of civilization, sacrificial ritual has been a profound originating moment around which our lives have flowed. The wasting of life was experienced as a connection to the Divine.