Post #21. The Invisible Hand: The New Magic of Money in 18th-Century London
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The 18th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, was a period when magic seemed to retreat from the world. The new science of Newton and the rational philosophy of Locke promised to banish superstition and usher in an age of reason. But magic did not disappear; it simply changed its form. It went underground, hiding itself in the new and increasingly complex world of finance, trade, and empire. The new magic was the magic of money, and its high temple was the City of London.
The Rise of Financial Alchemy
The rebuilt city, with its rational street plan and its powerful new financial institutions, was the perfect laboratory for this new kind of magic. The alchemists of the 17th century had sought to turn lead into gold in their fiery furnaces. The new alchemists of the 18th century, the bankers, the stock-jobbers, and the merchants of the City of London, performed an even more miraculous transformation: they turned paper into money, and money into power.
The Bank of England: Founded in 1694, the Bank of England was the central engine of this new financial alchemy. It was a private corporation that was given the power to create money out of nothing, to lend it to the government at interest, and to control the nation’s supply of credit. This was a magical act of immense significance, a concentration of financial power that had no precedent in history.
The Stock Exchange: The coffee houses of Change Alley, where stocks and shares were traded, were the chaotic, bubbling crucibles of this new magic. Here, fortunes were made and lost in a day, based on nothing more than rumour, speculation, and collective belief. The stock market was a new kind of oracle, a temperamental god that had to be constantly appeased and interpreted.
The South Sea Bubble: The speculative frenzy of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 was a powerful and terrifying demonstration of the new magic. The price of South Sea Company stock was driven up to absurd heights by a wave of collective mania, before crashing spectacularly and ruining thousands of investors. It was a lesson in the dark side of financial magic, a reminder that the power to create could also be the power to destroy.
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The Invisible Hand: A New Kind of God
The high priest of this new religion of money was the economist Adam Smith. His concept of the "invisible hand," the idea that the selfish actions of individuals in a free market would be guided, as if by a hidden force, to produce the greatest good for all, was a powerful new magical theory. It was a way of justifying the often brutal and chaotic world of early capitalism, of seeing a divine order in the relentless pursuit of profit.
The invisible hand was a new kind of god, an abstract, impersonal force that governed the lives of men. It was a god that could not be prayed to or appeased through ritual, but only understood and manipulated through the new science of economics. The economists and the financiers were its new priests, the only ones who could interpret its mysterious ways.
Freemasonry and the New Elite
This new world of finance and empire was governed by a new elite, and at the heart of this elite was the powerful and secretive network of Freemasonry. The 18th century was the golden age of Freemasonry in London. The Grand Lodge of England was founded in 1717, and the city’s lodges became the private meeting places of the new establishment: the bankers, the merchants, the politicians, and the aristocrats who were building the new British Empire.
Freemasonry provided the spiritual and ethical framework for this new elite. Its rituals, with their emphasis on reason, on order, and on the Great Architect of the Universe, were perfectly suited to the new age. It was a rational, deistic, and hierarchical form of spirituality, a religion for the men who were building a rational, deistic, and hierarchical new world order.
The magic of the 18th century was a subtle and insidious magic. It was a magic that hid itself behind the language of reason, of science, of economics. It was a magic that operated not through spells and incantations, but through interest rates and bills of exchange. But it was no less powerful for being invisible. In fact, it was more so.
The black magic temple of London had entered a new phase. It was no longer just a centre of ceremonial magic or esoteric philosophy. It had become the central processing unit of a new, global system of financial and imperial power, a system that was, at its heart, a vast and complex magical working.
In our next post, we will explore the dark side of this new age of reason, the world of the London hellfire clubs, where the new elite indulged in blasphemy, debauchery, and a transgressive, satanic form of magic.
Join us as we continue to uncover the secrets of the Secret City.
Solomon Jones (Author/Researcher)
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