The City of London is a magical place. Surrounded by a ring of treasure hoarding dragon sentinels, the glass and steel buildings that are the statements of financial power tower over the landscape.

This is a place protected by the iconic London Stone which is usually housed within the City limits. However at the moment this monolithic guardian is outside the formal boundary of the financial district, having been temporarily moved to the Museum of London. The absence of this famous symbol from the place it protects just happened to coincide with an action proposed by C.J.Stone; a spot of situationist magic, aimed at transforming the way that money operates in our culture. On the 7th of November, a group of activists, Druids, occultists, artists and others made their way into the heart of the City to perform a series of rituals at locations such as the Monument (to the Great Fire of London), the Bank of England, St. Paul’s Cathedral and finally The Royal Court of Justice.

Trying to articulate what comes after capitalism is probably a bit like asking someone from the Middle Ages what would come after monotheism. While many people have a profound sense that something is deeply wrong with our culture of environmental over-exploitation, social inequality and frustration at the status quo, exactly what we should do about this is far from clear. The recent votes on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’s membership of the European Union, and the United States of America’s election of President Donald Trump, are perhaps expressions (albeit maybe misguided ones) of this desire for change from the way things are.

The details of the actions we performed are recorded by C.J.Stone on his blog. You can read what we got up to here and here (with more material to follow soon). If you want to join in this action, one that seeks to question the role that money plays in our lives and strives to discover more equitable economic social relations, you may want to use the sigil that we deployed as part of our process.

This sigil, known as ‘The Equaliser’, is formed from the signs for greater than >, less than < and equal to = (the equals sign of course appears as part of a number of currency symbols such as some versions of the Euro, Dollar, Pounds Sterling and Yen signs). The sigil also includes some runic associations, as well as the link to the Chinese character for ‘well’ which C.J.Stone spotted after it was created (see his blog post). There’s a chant too, to help power-up the sigil; “Greater Than, Less Than, Equal To”. Simply write this sign on the paper money you have and use it, sending the sigil into the currency in circulation. As C.J. records on this blog we were able to send £100 in old-style £5 notes into the heart of the City by the simple expedient of swapping these for new polymer fivers at the Bank of England. The statement on British banknotes,’I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ‘, means that you can go to the Bank of England and swap it for another note of the same value.

Folks who are familiar with sigil magic will know that the classic way of deploying a sigil is to burn it once it is charged, the theory being that as the image is destroyed physically it goes to work in the unconscious ‘deep mind’ of reality. It’s rather nice to realise that the sigilised five pound notes that C.J. handed into the Bank of England will be destroyed by them in their incinerators in Slough. Slough is a town in Berkshire outside London. Its name derives from the use of the word to mean a depression, or ‘mire/swamp’. A ‘slough’ is a time or place of a falling away of non-vital things. It’s the word we use when a serpent throws off a layer of skin, a symbol of transformation indeed!

JV