News From The Vestry 11/03/25

Prometheans!

All Hail, The Staff! May the Blessings of Melusine Be Upon Us!

Welcome to today’s double header - News From the Vestry PLUS a bonus Tuesday Sweary Sermon on Magic.

At various points during the video I call Michael Sheen; Martin, Martin Sheen and Michael Keen. I’m an idiot and I apologise.

We’ll start with the Sweary Sermon.

Sweary Sermon
I will be using bad language from the off. Normally, I don’t swear when in my dog collar. I beg your and Melusine’s forgiveness but I feel - in this instance - it is the most honest and effective way to proceed. It is also justified by its subject. I should issue a trigger warning if stories of abuse upset you. I mean, it was nothing too bad for me, but if such stories - especially relating to your school days - bring back bad memories then maybe skip this post.

When I was a kid just starting secondary school I had a horrible, dirty old nonce of a teacher. His name was Denis Heft. Don’t worry he can’t sue me coz he’s dead. And because he was eventually banged-up for being a dirty old nonce.

This motherfucker was a bully. He taught English and would regularly humiliate and physically and verbally abuse the pupils in his classes. I was one of the lucky ones, really. No-one was safe, but he tended to pick on the kids who weren’t so good with words. The class would fill with nervous, defensive laughter and I think he enjoyed this. He enacted his cruelty as a form of entertainment.

At 11 years old, Heft utterly terrified me. I had the strangest coping strategy which I vividly remember to this day.

Being a Welsh family we always had a cooked breakfast. On the mornings that I had a lesson with Heft I would cut up my food in a particular way. I felt that if I did this precisely, slicing the fried bread in parallel lines, evenly spreading the tomato, cutting up the bacon into perfect rectangles, then somehow this would protect me. Heft’s ire could not be stopped, but perhaps, I believed, it might be directed. Of course, now I think of this as a nascent (or maybe pure) form of magical action.

After a break from Heft during my mid-teens, I had him again for my A Levels. He was still a total cunt of a man. But by 17 years old I was about the same size as him. And I was pretty fit and strong too. Heft ran a boxing club (which was where he did his proper noncing rather than straightforward abuse), but if it came to a fight I felt I had a shot at kicking the shit out of him. And this mitigated my fear.

Eventually, after some tedious exchange with him where he lost his temper with me, I simply gave up attending his classes. He did nothing about it until the very last day of school when he wrote to my parents.

Anyway, that cunt deserves no more words spent on him. I wanted to tell you about my ‘breakfast magic’ because one of our Mightiest Prometheans, Tom, emailed me an honest question about magic this week.

Tom wanted to know if I ever felt there was a connection between me burning my money and me living in a perilous financial state - in the sense that is there some magical connection between my acts of money sacrifice and me having a shitty job that doesn’t pay well?

It’s a searching question, because while I don’t believe that magic and ritual ‘work’ in a cause/effect way, often in moments when I’m feeling a bit down I’ve found myself wondering the same thing.

Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way - of course, burning money makes you poorer. And even more so, dedicating oneself to a project like this, spending all that I have (and haven’t) got to try to nurture it, and choosing a job that gives me the headspace I need - all of these things are causally responsible for me having to drive a van to earn a wage.

But none of that earthly stuff is what Tom and I are getting at. This is about cutting bacon into perfect rectangles to direct powerful forces that are otherwise outside of your control.

So does money burning enact a sort of law of revulsion? Rather than a law of attraction? The simple answer is that I just don’t think magic works like that at all. All that manifestation, law of attraction stuff we see on the socials is like self-help work as far as I’m concerned. It’s not magic.

I see ritual as creating an indent or curvature in the ‘magical’ dimension. Synchronicities swirl around these anomalies and flow down to us. Hence my experience (and maybe yours too?) of a clustering of coincidences around magical actions.

We have to live with the earthly laws of cause and effect. But within that, we make choices. Perhaps the most important determinant of the choices we make is ‘will it make money?’ - or at least, what utility will this choice bring to me or to society? In the Money Burner’s Manual I write about the joy of living magically, of letting go of that utilitarian mindset and following ‘the signs’. The simple act of regarding a coincidence as a synchronicity is itself a magical action. It is an expansion of the possible - an acceptance that mystery rather than knowledge is the primary state of being.

When I go too far the other way - when I succumb to hubris and I start to believe that I’m directing the powers towards giving me an easier time financially - I conceive of it as burning money is creating a ‘lack’. I’m creating a natural vacuum into which other money will simply ‘have to’ flow.

Thinking like this can be dangerous to one’s financial well being! Although, I have encountered it quite often in others throughout my life. I knew one successful business man who swore by it. Recklessness viewed as courage underpinned by a ‘universe will provide’ attitude. And actually, I reckon the magical logics are just a different version of the ‘laws’ of manifestation and attraction.

I could talk about this a lot more. I’d love to bring in the concept of play which David Graeber encouraged us to think of as the basis of physical reality, as the ultimate natural principle. He also said (and this is the point I’m trying to get at about living magically) if you think of the world that way, it’s a very different place.

Michael Sheen’s Million Pound Giveaway

The Free Video Preview cuts off before this- sorry there seems to be maximum time allowed for previews!

But we have work to do! Specifically, I need to talk about Michael Sheen’s Million Pound Giveaway which aired on Channel 4 last night.

Welsh Actor Michael Sheen used £100k of his own money to buy up a million pounds worth of high interest debt and then wrote it off. The project took him two years and he wants it to act as a springboard to change some of the laws on lending to make it easier and cheaper for poor people (like me) to get credit. The documentary ends with Michael meeting Gordon Brown (who, of course bailed out the Banks in the 2008 crash). Brown promises he’ll try to help.

I want to say a few things off the bat. Michael Sheen is great and I love him. Fuck the Banks. Fuck the high interest lenders.

I’m on the same side as Sheen. But. And this is a massive BUT - ultimately actions like this will not work. If you think I’m wrong, and that such actions have a positive impact overall, then it's very unlikely I’ll convince you otherwise. And of course, it is impossible to predict the future outcome of any action today.

But the criticism I make of Sheen and of Dan Edelstyn and Hillary Powell’s Bankjob (more on that in a moment) is basically that they reinforce the very logics they seek to undermine. I mean they literally do this in the sense that new entrants coming into the debt market and buying up bad debt will increase its price. And therefore debt firms will pursue that debt more vigorously because they have a much greater investment in it.

But I’m not even that bothered about the literal effects.

It’s about something much more fundamental that I’ve talked about in various ways over the years. It's something that David Graeber talked about at Church of Burn in 2019. The rich just don’t think about money in the same way as we do.

On the one hand they subvert its logics because all the daily stuff that you and I have to think about - food on the table, rent, bills - it’s just loose change. It’s nothing to them.

On the other hand, they venerate its logics to an extraordinary degree. The rich are defined by money. And in a real sense even more under its control than the poor. A poor man will give away a vast percentage of his wealth to help a friend in need. Wealth that he has a desperate and immediate need for simply to survive. If the rich want to ‘give away’ money it has to be tax efficient and productive. The utility of money - and especially its fecundity - are sacred principles to be upheld at all costs.

This is why burning it is so powerful. It’s why I love that line ‘Pity the Rich’. It’s why Graeber talked about money burning as ‘breaking the spell’.

Imagine 3 or 4 times a year ordinary people burn money en masse so billions of dollars disappear. Stupid billionaires might think they’re richer because of the deflationary effect (I burn £20 the value of your money goes up). But the smarter ones will shit themselves. Money - and our beliefs about it - are the very basis of their power. Ritualised transgression is taking a guillotine to our collective beliefs about money.

Anyway… I mentioned Dan and Hillary’s Bankjob. Last night Dan sent out an email where he basically threatened to sue Sheen and Channel 4. Dan is clearly upset that there was no mention of his Bankjob project (where they ‘blew up’ a million pounds worth of payday loan debt) when he’d been talking to channel 4 about the possibility of a documentary for many years.

I understand Dan’s annoyance. I had plenty of dealings with media companies during Naturalsex and a few - so far - with Church of Burn. It can be very frustrating dealing with them and they suck up so much of your time. You want the exposure for your project because you have a cause or idea that you want bringing to the wider public. But it usually turns out that they have a different agenda.

The problem I think Dan has is actually not all that different to the one I have. It's very hard to criticise something like this. Sheen is acting out of the best of intentions. So were Dan and Hilary. So for Dan to complain that they’ve nicked an idea (which to be fair I think they have) - or for me to complain that debt purchase relief will actually make things worse (which sadly it will) - just seems like sour grapes. Dan, Michael and I all agree that things must change. And so our strategy is to invoke change in the way that society deals with money. But whereas Dan and Michael share a commitment to the tactic of creating a spectacle of debt relief, I don’t.

As we say in Service, the change we need is not out there in the numbers, it's in here with you and me. The primary point, the nexus of money’s value, comes from our most immediate and intimate relations with it. This is something that very few academics understand - or at least, they give little regard to it when they consider how money works and how we can change the way it works.

Blessings All! Now cometh the paywall as some private matters must be discussed with those majestic Prometheans who are using their own money to give life to Church of Burn and sustain The Vestry.