Andvari and Money
by Fuensanta Arismendi
If you covet money,
You will be bought and sold.
—Rumi
Obviously, Andvari loves money. What is less obvious—and this is one of His lessons—is that usually, when we say, “I love money,” we really mean, “I love having money.” Andvari truly loves money in and of itself; all money, whether it is His or not. This is what Andvari has taught us:
“Money is as sacred as dignity and self-worth. Yes, it has been desecrated; but you can only profane what was holy to begin with. Some of the money I have belongs to me by right; some belongs to me by accident. Money that is mine by accident is dormant (no matter how high an interest it yields). It is neutral. When I find the person who owns that money by right, and hand it over, that money regains its sacredness. It lives again. If I do not hand it over, that same money will die and rot. Oh, it will be sitting in my back account; it will show up on my bank statements, but it will poison something within me.
Money is like soil—it must transform, or it will die. It must transform into people’s dreams, or needs, or both. The frightening thing about the dragon Fafnir, whose story is told later in this book and whom so many people unwittingly follow, is that he does not allow the treasure to evolve … to transform itself into college for one friend, or a watertight roof for another, or a garden for the sake of the earth we stand upon. Fafnir’s money sits there and rots, as does he who guards it. But every time one gives something back to its rightful owner, a little bit of the world’s imbalance is corrected.
It is also important to never give away what is yours by right, be it money, strength, energy, or anything else. If you do so, you cause the balance to go off kilter again. It is simply wrong to steal—even from oneself. You keep what you own; you are the steward of what you do not own, until the rightful owner comes along. Andvari did not mind Loki taking His treasure—all but the ring—because it was not His by right. The ring, however, was His. What people don’t understand is that Andvari did not curse the ring; He did not need to. He merely pointed out that it was cursed, because when you take away someone’s rightful possessions, that object becomes accursed. It is the law of cause and effect, not of revenge. All possessions, be they spiritual or material, are subject to the law Andvari teaches.
I love what is mine, and will defend it tooth and nail. I equally love it when I am given the immense gift by the Gods of righting a little bit of what is wrong, of correcting a little bit of the distortion. Maybe because I love money, money has always loved me back. I know that if I ever cling to it (and it is true, even if it is a cliché, that one should not cling to what one loves), it will leave me and find a better owner and a better steward. Money is a live, sentient power with a will of its own, somewhat like a landvaett.
The real difficulty (at least for a Taurus like me with no social graces, with Mercury in Taurus to boot!) is learning a way to give rightful owners their rightful property in such a way that they understand you know it was theirs all along. That way, you are not insulting them by playing at being some Lady Bountiful. I hate patronage. Yet it’s difficult, because people have been conditioned to regard money as impure.
Let’s say you know a person who needs money. Let’s say all you have is $25 to give. If you give that person $25, he/she will most likely resent it on some level, but if you bring them a fruit basket of equal cost that he or she needs like a violinist needs boxing gloves, that’s considered all right. It’s as though money were so defiled that it has to be transmogrified before being offered. The truth is, money is pure. We are the ones needing an attitude adjustment in regard to both giving and taking.
Money isn’t the only thing that has been so desecrated. In our culture, it seems we have a remarkable ability to desecrate the very things that sustain us, be it physically or emotionally: money, love, and sex head the list. We’ve chosen to focus on money here because it is Andvari’s province, but it’s worth noting that it is not the only sacred thing that we’ve sullied by our wrongful attitudes and misguided attempts at “progress”. Money can be a powerful teacher, and by working directly with its vaettir it’s possible to unlearn the harmful lessons our society has taught and learn how to interact with it rightfully. Money hears the hunger of those who handle it for good or for ill; it hears the unspoken fears and wishes and it can respond to them. It can make its desires and that which is right action very clearly known.
It is hard to explain how money manifests its wishes, and yet the thing itself is so clear, once Andvari teaches you to hear money’s voice. It is as though you feel a tug when money wants to go to someone else, and a push when it’s yours to keep. For some time now, I have known there is a soul to money, if you wish. Only recently did I realize there are several “lesser” vaettir of money—the local spirits, so to speak. I found this out when They drove me bonkers because one vaet insisted that I give say, $10 to a friend, while the other vaet was equally insistent that it be only $3—and no, neither of them was willing to split the difference. It appeared that my friend had behaved rightly toward one money vaet and not so rightly toward another. I have the feeling that one of these vaettir governs the money you own by right, and another governs the money you own by accident. There was simply no “rate of exchange” between one vaet’s currency and the other’s.
A “penny” spirit/vaettir is different than the spirit inhabiting a dollar, and is again different from the spirit inhabiting a thousand dollars. Yes, it’s all the same since it takes many pennies to make a dollar … and no, it’s not the same. This is money’s paradox. A little brook has a different spirit than the stream it ends up flowing into. That stream has a different spirit than the river it feeds. In the end, if humans don’t interfere, they all “wind somewhere safe to sea” (to quote Algernon Charles Swinburne in The Garden of Proserpina). Different, does not mean less: is the water in a brook less worthy of honor than the water in a river? And while we’re putting the names of the vaettir in American coinage, this holds true, of course, for any coinage. We could just as readily speak of cents and Euros, or pfennigs and francs.
If money has become such a thing of pain, worry and shame that there is, at the moment, no untangling those particular psychological threads, it can be helpful to look at Andvari’s lessons not in the realm of money but that of exchange and value, including setting value on one’s own crafts and work. Knowing one’s value and the value of that which flows from one’s creativity and hard work is as much a Duergr blessing as any awareness of the sacredness of money. Money, after all, is just the current mode of exchange. The sacredness of reciprocal obligation existed long before coins and bills were minted and invested with power.
It seems as though we are insisting on money more than on Andvari. This is because we as humans have desecrated the whole concept of ownership, which is the absolute cornerstone of Andvari’s teaching. We no longer understand that it is inseparable with the concept of human honor. It is worthy of note that only the Amish appear to have kept an inkling of it; in their respectful way of farming, in their acknowledging that they are “the stewards of the earth,” they seem to realize that they do not own it. They also seem to realize they own their responsibilities, a lesson we would do well to follow, once we adapt it to our own beliefs.
The Duergar as a race are practical to the bottom of their souls—dismayingly, uncomfortably, unyieldingly practical. A devotional to Andvari that would consist of poems in His honor and pretty words would be ignored as only a Duergr can stonily ignore. An attempt to explain what He would like us to learn has a better chance of being received with a brief nod of approval.
There is a Swiss proverb that says, “If you do not honor the cent, you are not worthy of the franc.” Andvari taught me that money is like a hologram, in that no matter into what small amounts money is divided, in some ways, the parts are like the whole. A penny will buy you nothing, and a hundred dollars will buy you much, but soul-wise, there is no difference between them. If you neglect a penny on the floor, literally trampling it under foot, you trample on vaettir and on your luck.