omniharmonicSacred Economics
Sacred Economics is Charles Eisenstein’s excavation of the mythology that conditions our understanding of economics at the root. Drawing on the anthropology of the gift, it shows that human communities are constituted not through barter but through giving: a gift extends a bond where a finished transaction severs one.
Money as we have built it is a primary technology of that severance — a universal solvent that renders all things commensurable and, in doing so, dissolves the uniqueness-in-relationship that makes a thing sacred. Its engine is interest, which compels the endless conversion of gift and commons into commodity and manufactures scarcity in the midst of real abundance (see debt-based money). Yet the argument is finally redemptive rather than renunciatory: money itself can be made sacred, designed to circulate rather than accumulate, backed by the wealth of the commons, an agent of connection rather than separation.
Alongside Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money — which locates scarcity not as a fact about the world but as a wound in our relationship to it, and answers it not with abundance but with sufficiency — sacred economics supplies the mythological layer beneath regenerative economics. In bioregional economics it is the basis of the third pillar, mutuality: reciprocity as the basis of exchange, in which every transaction has a third party, the whole.