Episode Details

As some of you might remember, I studied law. I worked as a property lawyer in London for a little while. One of the features in English law is this idea that sometimes, for whatever reason, commercial property is let at a peppercorn rent. Generally speaking, in this day and age, no peppercorn passes between the landlord and the person who’s leasing the property. It’s in all the leases. So that was always just a little curiosity to me, as indeed was the fact in contract law, in English and in American contract law, for there to be a contract to take place, there needs to be an agreement. There also needs to be what they call Consideration. If I contract with you, James, to buy 12 widgets, you have to, for the contract to be valid, you have to in some way pay me a deposit. This is the importance of the deposit.

So there’s this reciprocity. I was very interested in this book, which I read a couple of years ago by Marcel Mauss, who is one of the, you know, in every academic discipline, there’s always a few founders who are in every, in the first paragraph in every book. When you look at the laws of Sympathetic Magic, Marcel Mauss is right there.

That’s how I knew I was kind of, this is an interesting area to be in. I noted when I was reading this seminal text that some of you might have read as well called The Gift, by Marcel Mauss is he talked about early Germanic law and early Germanic contract law, which is from... which probably actually then becomes part of English law, even though English law says it’s coming from Roman law, which is a distinct Indo-European tradition from the italic as distinct from from the Germanic but in Germanic law each contract, sale or purchase, loan or deposit entails a pledge.

“One partner is given an object, generally something of little value like a glove or a piece of money, a knife or perhaps as with the French a pin or two. This pledge is in fact imbued,” this is Mauss writing, “this pledge is imbued with the personality of the partner who gave it. And the fact that it’s in the hands of the recipient moves its donor to fill his part of the contract or her part and buy themselves back by buying the thing.”

So when I saw this, I was like, ah, that’s interesting.

What’s going on is if I’m, if James is letting me rent his property, his skyscraper in Manhattan at a peppercorn rent, I give him this peppercorn. Actually in that peppercorn is my energy, it’s my Mana. It’s my personality. I’ve obviously got his because I’m in the I’m in the block itself.

What the whole gift is about and Mauss’s book is about is he’s looking at various different cultures and the exchange that in many different cultures, especially in Ameri-Indian cultures where early examples come from this potlatch, which is this institution of a meal, a communal meal, where you’re being hosted or you’re hosting your child’s getting married. You have to host the whole village. You give them food and drink and stuff like that. That interested me because in a lot of Irish mythological texts are about these big feasts. I always wondered what’s going on here.

It appears as if there is this idea of when you eat, when you partake of the feast, you’re taking something into you. So this is this idea of your energy, your Mana is being affected by what is coming into your body. Just as it is what’s coming into your mind from memes and from disinformation.

Equally, of course, what you’re giving into other people’s minds. So this is a reason. So this is why in my X and Bluesky profiles I say ‘there is Mana,’ ‘Mana is permanent,’ and ‘Communicate positive Mana’ (note the M-N-sound in Communicate, Permanent, and, of course, Mana).

This is this idea that, and what the Russians are doing is communicating just such negative Maa and driving us all to driving us all nuts with it. So this meaning of... And then I discovered this, which I’ve written about in my other project (Finding Manuland/Po