One ritual closes, another opens in its sacred space. Cosmic Triggers old and new sign and declare their solemn pledges to The Cosmic Book of Will, a beautiful leather bound tome of great sentimental, and not inconsiderable economic value, which will be burned should any of the pledges remain unfulfilled by the 23rd July 2016.

My pledge: TO CREATE ‘ The Money Flame ’ — a currency collage made of £230.

I’m 50 now. I made my last collage when I was eight years old. ‘Dog Heaven’; a felt collage of dogs, bones and lamp-posts. Teacher was dubious about the idea when I planned it out. But in the end it looked good and she said so. Collages, and the making of them, reach deep for me.

The doing of it makes me think. How is cutting money up and gluing it down different to burning it? Both are ways of destroying money’s value. I realize that in the process of creating a collage there is no guarantee of success. If The Money Flame ends up with neither aesthetic nor economic value, is that the same as burning it?

The Money Flame — A currency collage of £230 measuring 230mm x 230mm

Alongside The Money Flame, I also make a more direct invocation in the form of BURNING ISSUE — the world’s first magazine exclusively for money burners.

To spell the magic out for you (no pun intended); in the future world, where The Staff [All Hail, The Staff] is properly venerated, everything will be in one way or another under dominion of Money Burning. It will be as ubiquitous as ‘the day and date’ is today. Any act I undertake to invoke that future is by definition, a magical act. Whether that act is successful or not, is another thing.

A rule I set myself from my first burning, is that I should never ask or tell anyone to burn money. The full potential of money burning is most accessible to those who come to it of their own free will. So any pressure I put on people might diminish their experience. The difficulty with this rule — which seems to make sense both morally and rationally — is that it stands in conflict with my duty as The Holder of The Staff to do what I must, to manifest a future world more appropriate to The Staff’s being. [All Hail, The Staff x 2]

In short, the universal adoption of ritualized money burning is rather tricky to achieve, if you can’t ask people to burn their money.

BURNING ISSUE then, is the compromise between those two opposing positions — the magic in the middle. It’s addressed exclusively to people who are already money burners.

I talk about it on social media. A stranger asks, “Is there really a community of money burners? The mere act of asking proves that a space for possible becoming has already been hewn from the mindscape.

I email all the money burners I know to ask for contributions. And of course, as happens in magic, the mycelia spread.

Someone I’ve never met before comes up to me at the #ArtMoneyCrisis conference and tells me an amazing money burning story. She writes it up for me. I’m there with another money burner. He writes up his story. Things get tough. Up against it with time and money. Then a random email. A money burning story and an article. Things start to flow. More contributions. More writing. Then, just crossing publishing deadline there is one final contribution needed, one last page to fill.

HILLARY BILLARY (left) DOLLAR DONALD (right) by Mark Wagner (These are NOT the pieces in the magazine)

My experience making The Money Flame forces an amendment. I broaden the magazine’s audience to ‘money burners (and other destroyers of currency)’. This allows me to ask the currency collage artist Mark Wagner if he’d like to contribute.

Mark’s been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, Wall Street Journal and Harpers. In progress in his studio are two portraits of the nominees for the US Presidency. He’s wondering what he’ll do with them after they’ve been exhibited at his forthcoming show in New York (Sept 8th to Oct 15th 2016). Unknown to either of us, there is a symmetry in our positions. I’ve been burning money for years and I’m now creating a money collage. Mark has been creating money collages for years and he’s now thinking about burning money. As my request arrived he’d decided that the loser of the election would burn.

Under those circumstances it would have been difficult for him to say ‘no’.