Instruments

Money itself is a magic(k) trick. Essentially a symbolic token of trust, money defines a person’s val-you within society. Societies, too, get defined by how much they’re worth, so human and social realities are shaped by something that has no intrinsic value beyond what people think it means. (That trick’s even more profound when you consider virtual money; burning dollar bills generate very little heat, but numbers in a database generate no heat at all.) Obviously, then, money provides a magickal focus for folks who know how to use it… and no faction understands money as well as the Syndicate does.

As a magickal tool, money has two potential forms: physical cash and virtual trade. Cash – paper money, coins, tokens, and so forth – allows the mage to pass along an Effect by passing along the cash. A $20.00 bill could carry a mind Effect that reminds someone of his mother; a Spanish piece of eight could bear an ancient curse; a defaced dollar bill might feature the message THIS IS NOT YOUR GOD stamped in red ink, focusing a Mind or Entropy Effect that degrades people’s trust in social institutions. Cash often holds Resonance too, especially if it’s been tainted by criminal acts or emotional desperation. As any mage knows, blood money is a real thing when you understand Resonance.

Virtual trade focuses Mind and/ or Entropy Effects that get people to believe that abstract numbers determine their fate. Checks, credit and debit cards, credit ratings, bank statements, and approval processes reflect uses of virtual trade. Such tools can be extraordinarily effective and dangerous. At the time this section was originally written, in real life, the United States government was temporarily shut down over an imaginary crisis built around virtual values that have no physical counterpart, only the emotional reality of what people think a bunch of numbers mean. Societies can rise and fall over such ideas, so the practice of hypereconomics (see The Art of Desire/ Hypereconomics) manipulates virtual trade on a scale far beyond the possibilities of physical cash.