Charles Eisenstein, whose brain I love so much, wrote a brilliant book called Sacred Economics, which presents alternative ways of looking at the economics of exchange based on precedence from our past and in some cases our present. His book is called Sacred Economics because the act exchange is in many ways the act of caring for one another, or at least it has the potential to be, and caring for each other is a sacred responsibility.

Much of the book has stuck with me since reading it, but just holding those two concepts, sacredness and economics in my head at the same time, triggered a tangential revelation about the nature of exchange and its role within the sacred. In the book, Eisenstein talks about gift economies and how the concept is more viable than you would think, describing various aspects of how gift economies function that, while entirely foreign to our modern way of thinking, are not only worth considering in their own right, but also have some very interesting parallels in a spiritual context.

Marketplace dynamics are all about relationality. The many, many transactions that make up an economy are simply a collective of relationships between buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, demand and supply. Like yin and yang, they form a complimentary bond and create balance, and this equilibrium, I believe is just part of how the universe functions.

A void desires to be filled, what goes up, must come down, and all that. While our modern economic system may be the pinnacle of corruption and disaffection, I think what Eisenstein demonstrates in his book is that that is not always the case with economies. Economics is a framework of thinking, a useful illusion, which can either serve to bring us together in collaboration or cause suffering and disparity, depending entirely on how we choose to engage with it.

Modern humans are often predatory due to a reductive worldview that describes the experience of life in purely competitive terms. We see the world as predatory and presume zero sum dynamics. For us to gain someone, something must lose. And this is why we're obsessed with violence, extraction, and domination.

We believe it's an evolutionary imperative to consume everything in a race to prove ourselves worthy of existence. But life is not so simple. There are both predatory and altruistic tendencies in nature, and often the same life form exhibits both just depending on their ability to survive and thrive under their current conditions.

Exchange is natural and necessary to all, and thus is evidence that we must participate in this economy. Survival depends on it. The constraints of life in physical bodies require interaction with other beings. But what of nonphysical beings? Can the same be said of spirits? Why do spirits attend our rituals when called?

Why do they broker relations with us, give us tasks, and offer us advantages if we fulfill them or provide their assistance in return for offerings and veneration. Could it be that spirits need to engage with physical beings to fulfill their purpose, to thrive in whatever way it is that spirits thrive? Just as in nature when species interrelate, there are both subjectively positive and negative types of encounters, and yet at the systemic level, both functions support the continuation of reality.

Both are necessary from a non-dual list perspective. The demand exists. Obviously spirits want to engage with us; the marketplace, if you will, therefore also exists. There are both humans and spirits who value this exchange. What remains is simply to have a means through which to interact -a protocol for engagement.

In this episode, I'm going to explore the concepts of relationality and exchange, the gift economy that's formed through the exchange of resources and favors and serves as a foundation for engagement between beings within a living system and how offerings are simply gifts exchange for the purpose of building affinity, how the modern world failed to grasp this universal truth of interrelationality, and finally, how this understanding opens the doors to engaging with all beings, physical and spiritual, visible and invisible. Stay tuned for all of that in just a moment.

Welcome to the fifth episode of the Postmugglism podcast. My name is Nathan, aka Postmugglism, and this is my show. Every week at 11:00 AM On Wednesday, I release a new episode talking about magic in the post-modern age, skills and techniques for surviving and thriving in our current timeline, and how to dream a better and more enchanted future.

In this episode, I'm gonna talk about a concept I call the spiritual gift economy, describing the give and take between all beings visible and invisible, while drawing tangentially on a variety of sources, namely Charles Eisenstein's book, Sacred Economics, Jacque Vallee's Dimensions, Claude LeCouteux's Demons and Spirits of the Land, and some other materials. And, as always, links for everything that I mentioned in this episode can be found at the bottom of the show notes below the episode, wherever it is that you're tuning in.

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Okay. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest. Now I'd like to begin with the primary inspiration for this idea, Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein. Though this book's title implicates Eisenstein's underlying esoteric inclinations, the book deals brilliantly with a very mundane study of economics in the strictly financial sense.

Nevertheless, reading it inspired an admittedly tangential train of thought, which brought me to something of a revelation. How Eisenstein describes monetary and goods based economies, alternative gift economies, and in his words, our sacred relationships with one another, transcends the intended subject matter of the book; but if there is a spiritual gift economy, then it naturally adheres to the same principles and for the same reasons described in Sacred Economics. While the book aims, in the author's own words, to illuminate what new agreements we might embody within these fiduciary talismans (speaking of money), it nevertheless helped me to realize the systemic importance of gratitude and recognition in the cosmos.

And this understanding applied practically reveals a great deal about the mechanics and purpose of one of the most basic and universal spiritual practices that of giving offerings. Magicians with a regular practice usually ally themselves with particular spirits or energies, developing relationships over time that it would seem are mutually beneficial.

And instinctively we recognize the importance and efficacy of accompanying our prayers or petitions with symbolic gifts of our own. This exchange differs from a traditional transaction in a number of important ways. In particular, there is no set price or agreed upon value. There is an offering, a petition, and an outcome with no discernible proportionality between what's being given and what's being asked.

This is why I call the gifts symbolic. There is no direct relationship between the value of the offering, whatever that might be, and the favor that's being asked, but there is clearly reciprocity. A network for sharing resources built on the principles of reciprocity rather than the principles of one-sided gain is best described as a gift economy.

I make two key points in this episode. First, that beyond trading gifts and services, gift economies exist to build familiarity and trust between parties and second, like there are human economies and economies within nature, there also exists a spiritual gift economy that ties the visible perceivable world to the spiritual one and gives us the tools to work together to our mutual benefit.

But first, the term gift economy itself could use some exploration and rough definition. What exactly is a gift economy and how is it different from a market economy, and how do they relate? Charles Eisenstein does the heavy lifting for this explanation in Sacred Economics, "whereas money today embodies the principle more for me is less for you, in a gift economy, more for you is also more for me because those who have give to those who need. Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself, which yet is not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other."

And later on he says, "unlike a modern money transaction, which is closed and leaves no obligation, a gift transaction is open-ended creating an ongoing tie between the participants." To state it simply, a gift economy is one in which an exchange does not have to create value for both parties, giver and receiver, so long as the system or community is stronger because of the transaction.

I know this sounds incomprehensible at first from our modern perspective, but Eisenstein provides some additional context; explaining how the giver and their social credit and the receiver and their social debt can be detached from one another. The debt can be repaid to someone other than the giver, in fact, this is a key design of the gift economy. Reading now, "while gifts can be reciprocal, just as often they flow in circles. I give to you, you give to someone else, and eventually someone gives back to me. A famous example is the kula system of the Trobriand Islanders, in which precious necklaces circulate in one direction from island to island, and bracelets in the other direction. "Kula", which literally means circle, is the linchpin of a vast system of gifts and other economic exchanges. Marcel Moss describes it as follows. The system of gift through exchange permeates all of the economic, tribal and moral life of the Trobriand people. It is impregnated with it. It is a constant give and take.

The process is marked by a continuous flow in all directions of presents given, accepted, and reciprocated." And now, reading a little further down in the chapter, "Another way of looking at it is that the gift partakes of the giver, and that when we give a gift, we give something of ourselves. This is the opposite of a modern commodity transaction in which goods sold our mere property separate from the one who sells them.

We can all feel the difference. You probably have some treasured items that were given to you that are perhaps objectively indistinguishable from something that you might buy, but are unique and special because of who gave them to you. Thus, it was that the ancient people recognized that a magical quality, a spirit circulates along with gifts."

Eisenstein dances around a deeper truth here in the book that I think he's perfectly aware of, but simply wasn't the topic at hand, and that's the spiritual nature of engagement itself. Life is motion. It's interaction, an extension of its many parts, wildly competing and collaborating, fighting and fucking.

There is no life without exchange. There is no chemistry without exchange either. And chemistry is the language of life. Life cannot express as a state of being only as an act of being together; and this is true at every level. Humans can't exist without other humans. We also can't exist without plants, animals, insects, and microbiota, and neither can we exist without feelings, ideas, and, of course, spirits. Everywhere there is engagement, there is economy. In fact, Oxford Dictionary defines the word economy as the wealth and resources of a place, and I, I think we can also extend that to be a group. And alternatively, the careful management of those resources.

Arguably, any community can have an economy, so place is only relevant in physical communities. Digital communities have economies too, so then why not the invisible realms as well as the visible? Now, with my premise established, let's look back in time for examples of gift economies in the physical world to inform us of what to look for in a spiritual gift economy, if one does in fact exist.

An economic historian by the name Avner Offer, a professor of economic history at Oxford from 92 to 2000, if I read Wikipedia correctly, and also a fellow of the British Academy, wrote a piece for the Economic History Review in 1997 titled "Between The Gift And The Market: The Economy Of Regard", which shares several key points similar to Eisenstein's takes in Sacred Economics.

Offer mentions the story of the kula as well, the circle of gifts of the Trobriand Islanders, but also introduces us to the origin of the potlach feast of the Pacific Northwest. Another example of gift economics at work, he explains with great precision how the exchange of gifts serves the greater role of building affinity community and interconnectedness.

"From the ethnographic record, the following pattern emerges. Reciprocity is usually delayed. Both the value of the reciprocal gesture, and its timing, are left to discretion, though often regulated tightly by convention and custom. Take the practice of hospitality. The middle class exchange of dinner invitations, and the small gifts that accompany them, are an example of delayed reciprocity.

Reciprocity can also be indirect, with no return from the beneficiary who may be unknown, but a credit with the community, to be reciprocated at some other time and place. Unconditional hospitality to total strangers was the norm in many parts of the Mediterranean, Arab, Iranian, and Indian worlds." Keeping in mind that the terminology and use here is, of course, for financial economics and discussing the exchange of currencies and commodities and such, but, stay with me here, it is the shape and texture of economy as a concept that I'm attempting to describe with Eisenstein's and Offer's words. What I want you to keep from all of this is the following set of points. Exchange functions on the premise of reciprocity, and in a gift economy, the bounds of reciprocity extend beyond the giver and receiver of the transaction at hand.

Reciprocity can be delayed indefinitely, and a system of credit and debt is maintained by the community. The benefit of exchange is greater than the value of the transaction. Its true value is in the relationship forged in the process. So keep those thoughts with you as we dig into some of the nuance of this idea.

We've talked about gift economies of the past, but are there examples from more modern context that we might find less incomprehensible than the traditions of seashell trading islanders or Native American Indians? Something to put this idea into sharp relief against a modern backdrop that we can identify with?

Well, the modern equivalence of gift economies are of course not comprehensive economies. We have no agora, not really, save the odd physical black market in the sketchier places of the world maybe. But even most of them trade in some form of currency and are all about gaining an advantage through negotiation because this is the nature of the world today.

Modern gift economies are partial economies. They tend to look like barter economies or even just simple generosity. But underneath the generosity are also certain social mores, which protect and benefit both parties and enforce community standards and values. Such examples include gift giving out of respect, and to demonstrate one's affiliation and are common in various cultures.

These same tactics are regularly employed in statecraft, and diplomacy as well, between mentors and proteges, mutual aid groups, Freemasons, hobbyist groups, and so on. And the difference between participating in a gift economy and participating in or benefiting from philanthropy is slim, to be fair, except that I don't remotely trust the typical modern philanthropic organization.

But there is a difference, and it's that economies are naturally occurring networks and philanthropy is an industrial pipeline. Philanthropy is a reversal of the unnatural, modern trend of wealth, aka resources flowing upwards towards a minority of ultra wealthy recipients, reinforcing the hegemony by implication.

Gift economies, on the other hand, maintain social equilibrium, so the resources go where they're needed, and the reward for hard work and generosity is social; which is one of the reasons that gift economies primarily exist at a small scale within collaborative communities where the participants self-manage according to collective rules and traditions.

Seed sharing communities among gardeners is a great example. People produce what seeds they need and enough extra to share and then distribute them freely to anyone willing to participate in the seed harvesting and preservation traditions of the community. Participants gain status among their peers and contribute to something far greater than their own gardening effort: the preservation of heritage species. How are gift economies sustained through altruism and yet market economies, financial ones, are so bereft of it? Eisenstein believes that it is because gift economies are sacred and revered, and market economies are at best, maligned in purpose, and at worst, outright predatory by design.

I can hardly argue with this assessment, but I think it's also because there are other sources of benefit than just the trade. Underlying the trade is the engagement, and this tends to be highly contagious: one engagement leads to another, which leads to greater frequency, which leads to collaboration.

Avner Offer describes this relationship building feature of engagement in his "Economy Of Regard," "In modern market exchanges, personal acquaintance is immaterial. The gains from trade are all the gains there are. Every sale is simultaneously a purchase. Any delay is priced by means of an interest. In contrast in the gift exchange, the price is indeterminate delivery, and payment can be separated by the exercise of discretion and the passage of time something else is acquired over and above.

The material gains from trade exchange is not only an economic transaction, it is also a good in itself a process benefit, usually in the form of a personal relationship." So it's as much about strengthening the community as it is about disseminating resources. Now, before I continue further, let's revisit the key takeaways of our attempt here to examine gift economies then, now, and in the abstract. And, if I can be permitted to generalize a little, let's call these the fundamentals or universals of a gift economy. Gifts can be practical or symbolic. They can be given according to your means, but are accepted on equal terms. Generosity is expected in return, but not necessarily to the same people that gave to you.

Exchange creates familiarity, trust and rapport, and this is their primary purpose. Owing a debt is not seen as a negative, but as a promise for future support. There is no shame in needing help nor pride in giving it. Generosity is rewarded with clout and support, whereas a lack of generosity generates the opposite.

And now permit me a brief tangent to address the underlying tension around the concept of economy, just the word economy, so that we can all quiet our natural tendency towards revulsion. It's useful to compare the two systems, market economies, the modern financial markets, with the gift economies that I've described to separate them more completely in our minds.

Modern economies are wired with zero sum thinking. They're subject to hegemony and inextricable from the current dynamics of power. As Eisenstein puts so plainly, "For something to become an object of commerce, it must be made scarce first. As the economy grows, by definition, more and more of human economy enters the realm of money, the realm of goods and services.

Usually we associate economic growth with an increase in wealth, but we can also see it as an impoverishment; an increase in scarcity." Basing transactional relationships on a dynamic of scarcity, we're predispositioned to distrust those we engage with automatically, which then also makes it easier to be unfair to them, even ideal to do so. If our economy functions on scarcity rather than abundance, what else does this zero sum thinking due to our society. In reality, power dynamics control the flow of money and resources outside the supposed rules of the economic system. And the real economy doesn't work at all like we believe. Wealthy elites function as a sink for the economy, drawing a disproportionate percentage of wealth out of the economy, and then not recirculating it, and then use extra legal methods to safeguard and grow their share of wealth, safe from taxes and other insufficient market controls.

This causes a demand for new wealth that must be printed out of thin air by governments via central banks, adding to the debt burden of the population, while also reducing the value of the currency through inflation. The modern system of exchange is remarkably predatory, benefiting the few at tremendous cost to the many.

And from this perspective of disparity, the common person becomes anti wealth and decidedly ungenerous. We see the economy as hostile territory where we're constantly being taken advantage of. Understandably, we become disinterested in the very concept of it in our distaste for the modern predatory systems that we're forced to engage with.

We've forgotten the original function of the economy is quite the opposite from what the financial system we've constructed does. The economy is a network of providers and consumers which exchange goods and services and value in order to provide everyone what they need. An economy is simply a network of sharing between parties with various needs and the suppliers which produce the goods or services to satisfy them. But when we talk about economies today, actually we often mean wealth, which is why a modern economy can be said to be thriving if it contains more capital than it did previously, even if that capital is based on debt and the majority of its participants are unable to satisfy even basic needs. Nature, in contrast, is a pristine example of a well-functioning economy at a macro level when left to its own devices.

It maximizes the growth potential of every participant while constraining populations and density to accommodate the greatest diversity within the network, because diversity improves resilience. Nature incentivizes growth when the system can support it and disincentivizes it when resources are limited. Eisenstein puts it beautifully once again, "In nature, headlong growth and all out competition are features of immature ecosystems followed by complex interdependency symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts in each of us.

It will emphasize cooperation over competition. It will encourage circulation over hoarding, and it will be cyclical, not linear. The living world functions, and has functioned, for millions of years because of simple principles which constrain and incentivize every participant in the economy equally. Its stability, except when humans are involved, is so enduring, so timeless that it can be reasonably considered universal.

When something can be found readily and repeatedly in nature, it can be assumed to be true with a capital T and the prevalence of cyclical resource chains, symbiotic relationships, and favorable synchronicities in natural systems demonstrates the universal truth of reciprocity. One fascinating example is the so-called wood wide web, or the mycelial network that connects the roots of all the flora in forested areas.

This clever name was earned by the rhizomatic connections which form between collaborative groups of trees and other flora bound together in the fungal network as allies and collaborators. As a result of this cross species interconnectivity, ancient stumps sometimes continue to live on for hundreds of years with no means of photosynthesis and seedlings sprouting among the roots of established mother trees draw sustenance without having the height to reach the canopy for many, many years.

Another classic example is plant guilds where a natural symbiosis has developed through adjacency, or one might say community. Beans, for example, fix nitrogen into the soil far in excess of their own requirements, which directly benefits neighboring plants. Squash bloom early in the season, shading the soil so that their neighbors seedlings don't cook in the sun before they fully develop.

But the squash are hungry for nitrogen, as are the corn that quickly shoot up in height, but develop slowly over many months, providing natural scaffolding for the late blooming beans who've been feeding the corn's and the squash's roots all summer. The corn doesn't grow tall to suit the beans, and neither does the squash unfurl its massive leaves and blooms for the benefit of the community. Each does its own thing for its own reasons, and yet together they form perfectly balanced and mutually beneficial relationships through exchange. I could talk about collaboration in the natural world for hours, but I digress. At this point, we know that gift economies developed early in human civilization and that there are significant parallels in the natural world, and that these manifestations of reciprocity at work in the world are evidence of natural laws which govern the universe, reality, et cetera. If these are indeed universal truths, then does it not also stand to reason that they're equally as valid in spiritual dimensions as in the physical?

And if so, what would a spiritual economy look like if it existed, and is there any evidence of such a thing? A spiritual gift economy would operate under the same principles, so let's review. Gifts can be largely symbolic. You could give according to your means and still benefit, equally. Generosity towards others would be viewed as reciprocity.

Engagement would engender favor and strengthen relations. Debts could be owed for a long time without being repaid and without some form of penalty. There would be no shame in receiving assistance, and generosity would be rewarded while a lack of generosity would result in receiving less benefit from the community.

Taking each of these conditions one by one, let's see if we can draw some parallels. Offerings are, by definition, symbolic gifts. They need not be expensive or big to be effective. Service to others can be considered an offering. Regular engagement with spirits by giving offerings absolutely strengthens your bond and makes them more likely to respond when you have a need. And time doesn't matter very much to spirits.

Praying and petitioning is the most natural thing to do in the world, and there is no shame in asking for what you want or need. And if you are being generous with others, I think there's a case to be made that that helps you in your outreach as well. To find evidence of this spiritual gift economy, we have to squint as we look at what we know about magical practice, the supernatural, paranormal, the unseen, the realms of invisible beings, spirits, and so on. After all, what's a magical grimoire besides a gift from spirits that provides a detailed contact protocol for reaching other spirits? Jacques Vallee, author and UFO researcher, has proposed some extraordinary similarities between so-called alien encounters and various other supernatural encounters throughout history, which seems to suggest that the two concepts are merely trying to explain the same phenomena from different perspectives.

And his work recounts many UFO encounters, which defy the traditional flying saucer narratives that dominate popular discourse, and several of which I could not help but compare to various spiritual encounters with, we'll be generous and say, similar conditions. In Valee's mind-bending book "Dimensions," he shares lots of details from UFO encounters, but I'll share just a little bit of one in particular that demonstrates how symbolic exchange is a universal contact protocol.

"The time was approximately 11:00 AM on April 18th, 1961 when Joe Simonon was attracted outside by a peculiar noise. Stepping into his yard, he faced a silvery, saucer shaped object brighter than chrome, which appeared to be hovering close to the ground without actually touching it. A hatch opened about five feet from the ground, and Simonton saw three men inside the machine.

One of the men held up a jug, apparently made of the same material as the saucer. His motioning to Joe seemed to indicate that he needed water. Simonton took the jug, went inside the house and filled it. As he returned, he saw one of the men inside the machine, frying food on a flameless grill of some sort.

When he made a motion indicating he was interested in the food, one of the men handed him three cookies, about three inches in diameter and perforated with small holes." These cakes were later analyzed by the Food and Drug Laboratory of the US Department of Health Education and Welfare, and were assessed to be composed of "hydrogenated fat starch buckwheat holes, soybean hulls, wheat bran... The lab concluded the material was an ordinary pancake of terrestrial origin." A bizarre encounter to be sure, but within it is embedded a ritual of symbolic exchange and this is a repeating theme among paranormal visitations. Myths and traditional practices regarding the Faye are very similar, in fact, full of symbolic gifts, perfunctory exchanges, and various approaches for gaining their favor. Vallee describes a comparable story from Celtic fae lore.

In 1909, an American researcher named Walter Evans Wins, who wrote a thesis on Celtic traditions. In Brittany, devoted much time to the gathering of folk tales about supernatural beings, their habits, their contacts with men and their food. In his book, the "Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries", for example, he gives the story of Pat Feeney, "one day, a little woman came to his house and asked for some oatmeal. Patty had so little that he was ashamed to offer it, so he offered her some potatoes instead, but she wanted oatmeal, and then he gave her all that he had. She told him to place it back in the bin until she should return for it. Then he did, and the next morning the bin was overflowing with oatmeal. The woman was one of the gentry." In most of these encounters, the act of giving of exchange feels odd and out of place. The giving and receiving do not appear essential at first until you consider that they're symbolic and that universally they bind together that which appears separate, but is not.

Spirits of the land, if they're actually at all different from the Fae, behave very similarly. Claude LeCouteux's book, "Demons and Spirits of the Land" pulls together traditions from all over medieval Europe to illustrate how these practices are e essentially universal and are a means of negotiating transactions with the natural and spiritual worlds.

In this book, LeCouteux explains the tradition for trading sacrifices for permission to build on wild land, "Almost everywhere, until fairly recent times, we find confirmation of the existence of the rite of sacrificing a living being in order to be able to erect a building. Folklorists and ethnologists interpreted this right as a sacrifice addressed to the local land spirits so they will not oppose the construction.

In fact, the sacrifice appears like a payment of damages for the land being occupied. The individual pays his due to the land spirit in order to be able to establish the hegemony of agriculture over wild." What LeCouteux is pointing out here is that one does not simply walk into the wilds and build a home. Before that can be tolerated by the spirits, which guard and nurture the area some acknowledgements must be made and reparations given, even if it is only symbolic. It's safe to say that giving offering for the purposes of appeasement and to ingratiate yourself with the spiritual powers which rule the areas of life you wish to exert control over is a basic magical technology -essential practice.

We have carried on these traditions for so long and through so much evolution in human culture though that the practice has become rote and mechanical rather than alive and sacred. Reciprocal exchange is an essential natural law. It's something that all well-functioning beings implicitly and instinctively understand and uphold. Only emotionally broken psychopaths are able to circumvent the necessity of reciprocity.

And it says something tragic about the state of human affairs that we have so many of these psychos running around, fucking up the world for the rest of us. And this lack of understanding also precludes us from being able to negotiate effectively with the more than human world, which I believe causes, or at the very least, perpetuates much of the tragedy the modern world inflicts upon itself.

Were we to recognize that the underlying nature of the cosmos is collaboration through self-interest rather than domination because of self-interest, we could easily repair the damage done to our spiritual relationships, and I believe the physical manifestations of this damage would follow over time.

Reading from Sacred Economics again, Eisenstein relates a story about how gift economies shift, not only our way of spending and treating debt, but also how we segregate the community and the self, "I once heard Martin Pretchell speaking of his village in Guatemala explain, 'In my village, if you went to the medicine man with a sick child, you would never say, I am healthy, but my child is sick.

You would say, my family is sick. Or if it were a neighbor, you might say, my village is sick.' No doubt in such a society it would be equally incomprehensible to say I am healthy, but the forest is sick. To think anyone could be healthy when her family, her village, or indeed the land, the water, or the planet were not would be just as absurd as saying, 'I've got a fatal liver disease, but that's just my liver, I am healthy. Just as my sense of self includes my liver, so theirs included their social and natural community. The modern self, in contrast, is a discreet and separate subject in a universe that is other. This self is the economic man of Adam Smith.

It is the embodied soul of religion. It is the selfish gene of biology. It underlies the converging crises of our time, which are all variations of the theme of separation. Separation from nature, from community, from lost parts of ourselves. It underlies all the usual culprits, blamed for the ongoing destruction of ecology and polity, such as human greed or capitalism.

Our sense of self entails more for me is less for you. Hence, we have an interest-based money system embodying precisely that principle in older gift based societies. The opposite was true." Aside from the brokenness of the world and our detachment from her spiritually, the value in appreciating the network of more than human collaboration that I'm describing is a practical matter. As magicians, petitioning is the easy part, it's getting the spirits to show up in the first place that's a trick. Offerings need not always be thought of as a component of worship. What I've presented here, I believe is evidence that symbolic gifts are essentially a universal contact protocol that can be employed as needed to establish rapport with beings you wish to engage.

And the reason that this is so, is not exclusively magical, but it is as crucial to the function of the universe as any of its physical laws.. We are all connected -physically, energetically, and spiritually inseparable- and not in sameness, but as a network of individuals who all contribute to each other's wellbeing, by being. We do what we do through self-interest, but like the cells operating in unconscious unity within our bodies, we each contribute our pitch to choir of beings, which sing the song of Life together as one. We all have needs. Physical beings have chemical ones; we form an unbroken chain passing the base materials of life endlessly around in natural cycles.

Spiritual beings, well, they have their own mysterious ends and means, but they are at least as motivated to work with humans as we are to appeal to them. Through the exchange of energy and intention we fulfill some great cosmic need, or perhaps a truth, that the universe is living only if it's doing and being. i.e., we are all fulfilling the great promise of life by living, sharing, and collaborating in self-interest. The best proof is an experience, so I'll relate some of my own over the last few years since my wife and I let the spirits take the wheel and send us on an adventure to build sanctuary in the jungle.

A regular practice of offerings is how I established contact with the spirits of the jungle, where we eventually bought our land. First, on a research trip to the area in 2019, I took a bottle of rum and a cigar and snuck onto a quiet private beach in Tulum invoked Hekate, and sent my intentions out to the crashing waves and the windy empty beach in the dark.

And like most first attempts, this actually worked rather well. And before leaving Tulum, I was inspired to buy some dirt from the town to keep on our altar for future community. And, for about a year, I worked with the Tulum dirt, giving offerings to it, petitioning it for favor and support and our little adventure to move to Mexico and find our place in the jungle.

At the time, so far from our eventual destination, the results were abstract, inspired thoughts, clues that appeared as synchronicities and things like that. These experiences were admittedly difficult to attribute to land spirits in particular, but nevertheless, they followed closely after my workings and sometimes came to me while I was in the middle of communicating with the dirt.

After moving, once we were here in the area with our feet on the ground, the land spirit work really started generating results. The kind of results that are still progressively harder and harder to. After our real estate agent recommended an area to look in, we started leaving offerings at a local crossroads and bought some local dirt for our altar.

We visited the jungle about once a week, leaving offerings and making our petitions, and I was frequently working with the dirt on my altar, leaving a small offering like a cup of milk or some local fruit, and trying my very best to communicate. My goal was rapport, to build familiarity so that I could eventually make more direct contact and gain the blessing and support of the local spirits for our endeavor.

There was obviously nothing that we could give them that was more than a symbolic gesture, especially at a distance, but the gesture is the point. Gifts, even if they serve no practical purpose, demonstrate respect and acknowledge the existence and the importance of the other. It's the most respectful way to meet someone new, particularly if you need their favor.

In our case, we're at the mercy of foreign governments, foreign languages, politics, culture, and so on. We can't protect ourselves, or our investments for that matter, well enough in the troubling years ahead, all on our own. We're going to need the support of both local people and the local spirits to realize our dream.

But it's no simple thing to figure out how to speak to a jungle from scratch. Experimentation though yields results quickly when the process is approached with humility, respect, and gratitude, above all. This is a universal truth. Adjusting for the differences in perspective, you can essentially use this technique to build rapport with anything.

People befriend crows by trading them buttons. Here in the jungle, people make friends with monkeys in much the same way. This doesn't mean that every being is willing to engage with you. You can't force or expect that outcome, but it does give you somewhere to start from as you attempt to engage with the more than human world.

To summarize quickly, gift economies exist and offer many benefits to market economies, particularly in small and like-minded communities. These gift economies exist in human society, in the natural world, and I think I've made a compelling case for the existence of such a system connecting the visible world with the invisible or spiritual one.

Finally, since reciprocity is a universal experience, reciprocal exchange functions as a universal contact protocol, and now that we see it with the right eyes, we know that magical traditions like giving offerings to spirit are simply an expression of this fundamental truth as magicians. This gesture of gratitude and recognition through symbolic gifts is an essential tool of our trade.

Magic is, by and large, the art and science of negotiating with spirits and knowing how to use this technology to generate practical results is a fundamental skill. It's also useful for your cosmology to have a means to frame the potential motivations of spirits that may provide additional confidence in dealing with unpredictable spirit encounters.

One can rely on reciprocity as a guiding principle and an unbreakable law of interdimensional contact because it appears to be essentially true everywhere in our experience of reality. What goes up must come down. Inputs are required to generate outputs. Everyone has needs, physical beings, spiritual beings, all life, and all forms of awareness engage with one another out of necessity.

Such dealings, build trust and with trust familiarity, which eventually yields allyship and mutual support. And this is the ideal state for practicing magicians, to have a wealth of powerful spiritual relationships, ready to provide magical support whenever it's needed to have luck always on your side, to negotiate with spirits, with leverage, and thereby to achieve your desired outcomes.

Reciprocity is the ledger in which these transactions are settled, petitions are made and granted, and like any system, understanding it deeply enables you to position yourself within it for greatest success. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Postmugglism Podcast and that these ideas have given you something to think about and maybe even some new magic to do.

If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to subscribe and to share it with someone who'll appreciate it. Thanks again for tuning in today and spending your time with me. Check back next week for another new episode. Until then, take care and I'll see you in the next one.