Our Story - TMBM 2nd Edition 2018
The Money Burner's Manual - 2nd Edition
The 1st Edition of The Money Burner's Manual was completed in just three months; between the Overhill Grove Ritual on 23rd of August 2015 and the Cube Cinema Burns on 22nd November 2015. Only 23 copies were produced in a ring bound A4 format. All of these were given away except for a single copy kept by its author, Revd Jonathan.
The ambition to write a more polished version of the text - and to publish it in a standard book format - was finally realised a couple of years later. The 2nd Edition is the key text for understanding the backstory of Church of Burn and ideology of money burning.
Below is the Prologue Money and Time :
“Beyond doubt: a secret connection exists between the measure of goods and the measure of life, which is to say, between money and time.”
ON SUNDAY EVENING, 23rd August 2015 in a clearing in Overhill Grove, an ancient elm wood near the village of Knapwell in Cambridgeshire, I put LD37 959355 £10 and LE13 591276 £10 to the flame. Angela joined me with CB70 408977 £20. The burnings took their most ritualized form yet. I found it a deeply moving and potent experience. The Ritual was a whirlpool, manifesting a perfect energized stillness - a nothingness - around which time flowed. Being within it was wonderful.
Over the last few years, the idea formed in my mind that in its most perfect form money burning would be the constitutive element of temporality rather than an event marking a moment in time. In other words, one would burn not because it’s the 23rd of October (or August, or whenever it happens to be) rather, it would be that day because one burns. I felt there was something more here than merely turning around my thoughts. My intuition was that the ‘secret connection’ between money and time had to do with ritual.
We readily accept that time is marked by all sorts of rituals; in our days by morning coffee and afternoon tea, in our years by Christmas, Easter and all manner of high days and holidays, and in our lives by birthdays, marriages and funerals. We just assume, as a matter of course, that humanity floats along in a river of time and that these rituals are the ripples we create. Both science and philosophy have questioned our assumptions about time and within a few rarified strains of metaphysics and some extensions of psychoanalytical theory there has been speculation about how redemptive cycles are constitutive of our temporal experience. Even so, such intellectual understandings whither in the face of time. Its onslaught is relentless, seemingly paying no regard for our conception of it.
However. The Ritual stood steadfast against time. At least, that’s how it felt. There was no confrontation and no diversion, time just slipped past as if The Ritual were invisible and unknowable to it. And there was more. Something of the ‘secret connection’ between money and time was revealed. That revelation was not of a form that could be taken from The Ritual and expressed to you here through the medium of language. But rather, it is inherent to The Ritual itself. All I can do for you is offer a contradiction; a representation of the unrepresentable.
You can purchase the hardback here, or the softback here.