Culture Blogs

Exploring Pagans and their relationship with that earthiest of earth symbols, money.

  • Home
    Home This is where you can find all the blog posts throughout the site.
  • Tags
    Tags Displays a list of tags that have been used in the blog.
  • Bloggers
    Bloggers Search for your favorite blogger from this site.
  • Login
    Login Login form

Pagan savings challenge, week twenty-one: near and far

If you're a magical sort of Pagan, you may know that money from farther away can be used for money-drawing and prosperity spells.  Foreign money is often used in this way.  That makes sense to me as a Hellenist; Hermes isn't god of travel and commerce without reason.  I submit to my readers that if money coming from a distance has some added value, then knowing where a particular piece of currency has been is also valuable.

That's right, I'm talking about my currency-tracking hobby, Where's George? by name.  I attended a gathering this past weekend.  That's when a bunch of hard-core Georgers get together and trade bills with each other, in the hopes that those bills will get to places never before reached -- I myself have seen one of my bills arrive in St Martin thanks to one of these gatherings.  These are hobbyists at the top of their heap, some of them having entered over a quarter-million separate bills into the system over the course of many years.

Preparing for this gathering has had an interesting effect on cash flow.  As I entered and marked bills in the months leading up to the event, I set them aside so I wouldn't spend the bills I wanted to trade.  It was only a few a day, but last year I didn't bring that many, as it was my first time, and I wanted to have enough to trade with a dozen or so people.  Even as I've been saving for this challenge, I've also been setting some bills aside for this gathering.

So now that I have been to the gathering, trading stories and jokes and lots and lots of bills, I find that I am awash with small bills.  It's actually no more or less than I had before the gathering, but it's different, because these are not bills I'm setting aside any longer.  It's like I pulled them out of a portable hole.

And these bills have already been far, some of them!  California, for a few; Florida for others.  Some Georgers aspire to enter a bill in every ZIP code in the US.  (Entering a bill, in the site's jargon, is when you first put it into the database.  When someone else finds it, that's a hit.  Entry is something the hobbyist can control, while hitting e largely cannot.)  So even though this money is all from my native country, I can tell for certain that some of it has traveled thousands of miles before it came into my hands.

I can't imagine that Where's George doesn't have magical applications, in fact, so if you're inclined to take up this hobby, I created a group on the forums just for us:  Pagan Georgers.  Care to join me?

My week twenty-one savings:  $231, 9% ($21) of which I saved this week.

Last modified on
Terence P Ward is a business writer and journalist who blogs under the rather cumbersome moniker of True Pagan Warrior.  He can generally be found at home, tending to his gardens and the many demands of his cats; in the alternative, follow TPW on Facebook. 

Comments

Additional information