Burning Issue – Super Deluxe Edition (Magazine for Money Burners)

Description

The World’s First Magazine for Money Burners

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.

Burning Issue has firm rules governing how the magazines are sold. Most important of these is that the publications are only sold to money burners (and other destroyers of currency). We adhere to Money Burning Propaganda Protocols in the sale and promotion of all these magazines and we have had to agree to strict criteria in appointment as distributor.

In January 2018, the editorial board of Burning Issue Publishing was challenged by a radical faction of money burners, the self-styled Burner’s Revolutionary Congress (BRC) – you can read about this on MBG’s blog. The upshot was a firm restatement of the founding principles of the magazine and its commitment to the ideology of Total Burn. As well as adopting a more muscular social media policy Burning Issue have now also – with the SUPER DELUXE edition (Vol1 S.E) – instigated a policy of one magazine per customer.

Burning Issue are not insisting that accredited distributors adopt this policy. So if you require more than one copy, you are in the right place at the right time. 23:23.

IF YOU ARE NOT A BURNER (OR OTHER DESTROYER OF CURRENCY) THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO. WE ARE NOT INTERESTED IN COMMUNICATING WITH YOU. IF YOU CONTINUE TO TRY TO TALK TO US WE WILL BLOCK YOU.

IF YOU ARE A BURNER (OR OTHER DESTROYER OF CURRENCY) THEN WELCOME!
It’s hard to keep track of our growing community. You’ll understand the need for us to not get involved with ‘utility-dwellers’ (as Spirit of Burn calls them).  To communicate with us on social media all you need do is confirm that you burn money, or destroy currency. Something like the following is fine, but feel free to use your own words. Just make sure that we’re able to read it so we know you really are one of us.

“I burn money” #BurningIssue

That’s it. We look forward to talking to you.

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.

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.