coinage and spirituality.

The concept that spirit and flesh were separate seems to emerge with coinage. A tree is living thing, but can be abstracted as wood, which carpentry can turn into a chair, or some other object. A coin is even more abstract, since it turns metal into a collective promise. All in the community agree to accept it, making it transmutable into anything.

Thus peace and community are not things which emerge spontaniously, but need to be stamped onto our baser material nature, just as divine insignia stamped into a block of metal turn it into money. Yet what is money?

Graeber adds that the revolution in spirituality which coincided with the introduction of coinage was NOT the introduction of the concept of a spiritual realm, but rather the introduction of the material realm.