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Re: Origins of Money

Yoshie Furuhashi quoted Dharmachari Jñanavira:

 "Writing in 1571, he [Portuguese traveller Gaspar Vilela] complains
of the addiction of the monks of Mt. Hiei to 'sodomy', and attributes
its introduction to Japan to Kuukai, the founder of Koyasan, the
Shingon headquarters[6].  Jesuit records of the Catholic mission to
Japan are full of rants about the ubiquity of pederastic passion among
the Buddhist clergy.  What particularly riled the missionaries was the
widespread acceptance these practices met with among the general
populace.  Father Francis Cabral noted in a letter written in 1596
that 'abominations of the flesh' and 'vicious habits' were 'regarded
in Japan as quite honourable; men of standing entrust their sons to
the bonzes to be instructed in such things, and at the same time to
serve their lust'[7].  Another Jesuit commented that 'this evil' was
'so public' that the people 'are neither depressed nor horrified'[8]
suggesting that same-sex love among the clergy was not considered
remarkable" (Dharmachari Jñanavira, "Homosexuality in the Japanese
Buddhist Tradition,"
<http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol3/homosexuality.html>).

I just came across the following in an article, "Queer Money", by Will Fisher in the Spring 1999 issue of ELH. The article examines the association of avarice with sodomy in early modern literature.

The usurer's attempt to make barren money breed is the equivalent of the sodomite's attempts to make a non-reproductive sexual object or orifice breed. The usurer and the sodomite thus commit the same crime in different forms.
Renaissance commentators traced the conception of usury as money unnaturally reproducing itself to Aristotle, who argued that usury is "the birth of money from money" and then explains that "of all modes of making money this is the most unnatural." 51 Francis Bacon testifies to the currency of Aristotle's notion of usury in the early modern period when he says that "Many have made witty invectives against usury. They say . . . that it is against nature for money to beget money." 52

These "witty invectives" assert again and again that the usurer perverts money from its proper use (that is, exchange) in the same way that the sodomite perverts sex from its proper use (that is, procreation). Thomas Pie makes this connection in his tract Usuries Spright conjured:

the Usurer perverteth that end and use of money, which is . . . agreeable to nature: namely commutation, for commutation was the end wherefore money was ordained in humane societie; and is the use of it, which naturall use the Usurer turneth into that which is against nature . . . Therefore it is called a kind of Sodomie. 53

This is essentially the same argument that Mosse makes in The Arraignment, but Pie focuses on the proper use of money. By trying to make money produce more money, the usurer turns money away from (perverts) its natural use--"commutation." 54 This willful perversion of what nature has supposedly ordained makes the usurer a kind of sodomite.

Pie insists that money is naturally nonproductive--it is simply a medium of exchange without any inherent value. According to this logic, money is not supposed to be desirable in itself; it is simply a means to an end. The contempt for money is most vividly illustrated by the fact that money is often compared to excrement. As one early modern proverb puts it: "muck and money go together." 55

Associating money with feces serves to denigrate money as an object, but it also suggests money's proper use: exchange. Another proverb states that "Money, like dung, does no good until it is spread."56 Roger Fenton articulates these ideas in his tract on usury: "there is no manner of vse to be made of [money], but only parting from it . . . no more [use of it] than of durt [excrement] in the streete, nor so much, for . . . dung in the ground." 57 Both the proverb and the passage from Fenton reinforce the idea that money is simply a barren medium of exchange.

The fresco of Hell in Collegiate Church of San Gimignano provides a striking visualization of the link between money and feces in its representation of the usurer. 58 In one part of the fresco (figure 2), a devil literally excretes gold coins into the mouth of a usurer. An almost identical characterization of the usurer appears in The Ballad of Gernutus, one of the sources for The Merchant of Venice. After comparing the usurer's money to "a filthy heape of dung," the usurer himself is described as having his "mouth . . . almost full of mucke, yet still he gapes for more." 59 The usurer's purported sin is that he tries to make excrement into aliment: the usurer preposterously inverts the relationship between excrement and aliment by trying to feed himself--to gain his subsistence-- with a barren substance (money/excrement). Roger Fenton articulates this point in his treatise on usury. He says that usurers "meddle not with natures increase, saue onely in consuming and deuouring it; but [they] live and inrich themselues by a thing [money] meerely artificiall; the instrument of transportation." 60 In short, usurers do not produce as ordained by nature; they simply consume. Early modern commentators supported this characterization of usurers by pointing out that the biblical term for usury (Neschech), is derived from the word Noschach, "which signifieth to bite, to gnawe, and devoure." 61

Perhaps this unnatural mode of consumption is one of the reasons why the usurer is placed alongside the sodomite in the fresco at San Gimigniano (figure 3), occupying adjacent spots on the same level of Hell. The spatial organization of the mural thus recalls Dante's Inferno, where the sodomites and the usurers are placed together in the third round of the seventh circle of hell. Earlier in the Inferno, Dante had mentioned that "the smallest round brands with its mark both Sodom and Cahors." 62 The two cities alluded to stand in for the sins that flourished in them: Sodom figures unnatural sexual practices while Cahors figures the unnatural economic practices of its usurers.

The spatial proximity of the usurers and sodomites in Dante's Inferno and in the fresco at San Gimignano is indicative of a perceived conceptual affinity. Neither the sodomite nor the usurer produces as ordained by nature. The usurer consumes gold unnaturally (as in the fresco), while the sodomite unnaturally consumes seed with the anus or mouth. The image of the sodomites in San Gimignano, like that of the usurer, visualizes their supposed sin. The spit running through the anus to the mouth of one sodomite and into the mouth of another, symbolizes two different modes of "unnatural" penetration. The usurer and the sodomite are conflated because they are imagined as inversions of one another. Whereas the usurer attempts to consume a barren thing (money) and thus make it nourishing, the sodomite consumes a potentially productive thing (semen), thereby making it barren. In effect, the usurer turns money into productive semen while the sodomite turns semen into unreproductive money. (Will Fisher, "Queer Money" pp. 11-14) http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/elh/ v066/66.1fisher.html
In his essay on The Merchant of Venice ("Brothers and Others" in The Dyers Hand), Auden points to the same association in Shakespeare.

Ted

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