The Separation of Church and State

Today's post focuses on those times and places in human history when government and religion either got along or didn't, or maybe they didn't even notice each other for a while, or maybe, like, Religion got all weirded-out and did some stuff that got the government all p-o'd and junk, which made Religion behave even weirder until government was all like, "Yeah, no, you can't ever do that again, so we're just gonna kick you and all your followers out."  So Religion was all like, "FINE, what-EVER, just don't go bother us right before you DIE and want to be saved from the ultimate unpleasantness that awaits you on the OTHER SIDE, because we'll probably just ignore you, so HA!"

Not very mature for a venerable institution like Religion, which actually predated government in the chronological order of sociological institutions.  This is because the first of what we might call governments were probably extensions of the family's extended cousin, the clan.  Humans are similar to dogs, cats and naked mole-rats in that they are social animals who like to live together in groups.  There are genetic and psychological reasons I won't go into here that evolutionarily favor species that can live together without killing each other or eating up all the food in sight, so until early humans figured this out and set up actual rules for living together in groups larger than a clan, Religion had the whole place to itself.  This is because humans are the Earth's only animals that practice religious rituals.  Note, for example, the complete lack of synagogues inside a termite mound.

How do we know humans practiced religion?  A combination of two things: they way they treated their dead, and the pictures they drew on rock walls.  As far back as 50,000 years ago, people were burying their friends and families underground, arranging the corpse carefully, and including stuff the dead person owned along with the body.  This implies a belief in some sort of an afterlife, where the deceased person will need his stuff in order to get along.  What would you like to be buried with?  If

Ok, there's Fred, Jacquie, Wanda, Billy, your Mom and some random dude,
but WTF, who is that HUGE guy-thing on the right?!?

you believe the song, Willie the Wimp was buried in his Cadillac Seville.  Now, about those cave-rock wall- rock overhang drawings: they seem to show supernatural beings interacting with primitive people.  Could these be ancient aliens? --or could they be Supreme Beings conjured from the minds of primitive artists?  Also, among the animal paintings at Lascaux cave in France, there is a picture of a fearsome cave lion that had been struck thousands of times.  This implies a ritual --a ritual killing of a powerful predator in this case.


Government and religion ultimately collided in that totally man-made, artificial environment called the city-state.  These places were breaking out all over the Near East (as opposed to the Way-the-f*ck-over-There East) in places like Jericho and Sumeria.  Historians are fairly certain that the earliest governments of these places were priest/kings.  Why?  Because up to that point, only religious leaders could convince that many people to do things they might not ordinarily do, such as dig and maintain irrigation canals, not immediately kill people who offended them in some way, or construct these really weird statues and temples dedicated to gods and goddesses,  In Sumer, the priests even had a corner on the sex-trade market.  The temple of Ishtar was staffed by priestesses who were literally prostitutes.  For a price, men could lie with a priestess who was specially trained in the arts erotica.  Even amateurs got into the act.  If a Sumerian girl wanted a husband and wasn't rich enough or pretty enough to get a lot of suitors, all she had to do was to hang-out at Ishtar's temple and give it away for free --just as long as the guy took her home and raised a family with her.

My victory over these infidel unbelievers is made all the more complete
by using my wind-up horse chariot to smash the city's idols!  Mwa-ha-ha!

Religious leaders had to take a back seat to military leaders once cities started raiding each other for scarce supplies, but religion was still important.  What would make an army fight even better than usual?  Why, a special blessing from a priest!  However, there was trouble on the horizon.  See, whenever a victorious army broke into the walls of an enemy city, the second thing they did was to trash that city's gods by smashing the idols and killing the priests.  The first thing the army did was, of course, wipe their hobnailed boots on the corpses of dead enemies.  Thus began humanity's first religious war, a war that has been raging off-and-on for about four thousand years!

Sometimes, religious leaders and government leaders in the same city got into spats.  These usually worked themselves out with select banishments or a few well-chosen executions.  Sometimes religion won; sometimes government won.  This was the state of things when the Roman Empire was forced to deal with a new religious cult that had started in one of its eastern provinces.

Colosseum cat-food time!

On the whole, Romans thought of themselves as very open-minded when it came to the subject of religion.  There was, in fact, a temple in Rome called the Pantheon that had idols of every god/goddess/religious-type-thing worshipped in every corner of the Empire.  Romans had their own religion, of course, which was bits borrowed from the Etruscans, Greeks, Carthaginians and stuff they had pulled right out of their own toga-covered asses, but they generally left the different peoples within the empire alone when it came to practicing religion, except when that practice included human sacrifice which, strange as it may seen what with their love for gladiatorial contests and public executions, the Romans totally hated.  Because the Celtic Druids were big into the old kill-em-for-piety's sake rituals, the Romans got rid of Druids wherever they found them.  So what were they supposed to do with this weird messianic cult of ex-Jews who reportedly ate flesh, drank blood, and nevertheless professed to love their neighbors?

The first Christians were, of course, Jews who followed the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, an itinerant rabbi who had his own problem with the Roman state --it crucified Him.  After Saul of Tarsus' conversion on the road to Damascus, Paul, as he was now called, enlarged the Christian communion to include Gentiles, ie., guys who still had their foreskins attached.  Pretty soon, there was even a bunch of these Christians living in Rome itself --they had followed the Apostle Peter there and helped him set up a church.  All went swimmingly until the sect began to grow and flex a little political muscle among the Roman plebeians, the working stiffs of Rome, with whom the new cult was very popular.  Slaves liked it too.  Emperor Nero came up with the idea of blaming the Christians for the great fire during his reign ("Woah, I've seen fire during my reign," he reportedly sang from his own private stage during the worst of the flames), and thus kicked-off a kind of free-for-all on Christians.  Things got so bad that Christians were driven literally underground into these burial vaults called catacombs, where even there they were sometimes ratted-out by a jealous neighbor or a total dipshit.

The Mass is ended.  Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.  And Tiberias? Tell your mom to keep her big, fat mouth shut!

However, Christians hung in there (some at the end of their ropes) and eventually were made the official religion of the Roman Empire.  There was only one small problem: the Roman Empire kind of sucked at this point.  It was invaded by a bunch of Germanic tribes and one Central Asian bunch called the Huns, until nothing was left but the Greek part which historians later called "The Greek Part of the Former Roman Empire," later shortened to "Byzantine," just because.  So now that the Church was still relatively ok and the State was on life-support --at least in the West --the Church busied itself with setting up a hierarchy because it knew that the state would come around sooner or later and have it out with the Church.

Note to self: don't piss-off Henry I-
he's a really mean drunk!

And a mere 604 years later, trouble broke out between Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over something called investiture.  Basically, this bit of silliness was over the question of who got to hand out Church offices like Bishoprics and Archbishoprics: the Pope or the Emperor?  To be fair, the Church was well-meaning, attempting to curb the practice of Simony, where Church offices were sold to rich people.  When Gregory's reform-minded clergy told the Holy Roman Empire's nobility that Church offices were no longer for sale, the Emperor himself got into the fray, sending off some nasty-grams to the Pope, calling Holy Father, "Hildebrand, not-Pope but false monk," and other such neener-neenerisms that made Pope Greg hopping-mad.  This issue even darkened the relationship between Henry I of England and Pope Paschal II, resulting in Henry's pal, Thomas `a Beckett, getting sliced-up by a quartet of Henry's knights in the basement of Canterbury Cathedral.

It wasn't until 1122 that H.R. Emperor Henry V and Pope Calixtus II settled the whole unpleasantness with the unappetizing-sounding Concordat of Worms.  The meat of the Concordat is something like this:  kings and emperors and, I don't know, Grand High Poo-bahs, have this stuff called secular power, with which they can make Bishops in their territory help equip an army if the place gets invaded.  Popes have this stuff called sacred power, with which they give Bishops the power and authority and the duty to go out there and save some souls for Jesus.  So yeah, after all the pushing, shoving and at least one murdered Archbishop of Canterbury, it all came down to a compromise between Church and State that puts Bishops under both authorities.  Still want to be a Bishop?

Now you would think that with this kind of sensible solution, there would never again be a problem between the Church and State, right?  I sure thought that!  But alas and alack, this was not to be.  See, there was this little dust-up called the Protestant Reformation that brought out some... issues... that had been swept under the ol' altar rug for about 350 years.  In England, a different numbered Henry --number VIII --completely kicked the Catholic Church out of England and set up his very own church just so he could get a divorce.  And that new church, the Anglican Church?  Yeah, the English King was in charge of it.  In Germany, there were a couple of small wars (the Schmalkaldic Wars) that ended with the Peace of Augsburg, which basically gave German princes the right to pick Catholicism or Lutheranism as the official religion of their territory.  Protestantism continued to spread to places like Sweeden and Switzerland and even to the Netherlands, which made some devout Catholic kings totally furious.

Things got positively out of control with religion and the state with the 30 Years War, which lasted, um, 30 years.  It pitted the Protestant nations of Europe against the Catholic nations.  Nobody really won, lots of people got killed, but the French --who entered the war late and on the Protestant side, which is weird because the country was run by a Catholic Archbishop --kind of came out on top by not losing as badly as everyone else did.  They even got to thrash their next door neighbors, those miserable Spanish, in the process.  Hooray for religious wars!

Those are the Spanish on the horses, wisely choosing to not make horse-kebabs on the ends of French pikes.

Church vs. State conflicts became a bit more subtle after the 30 Years War, and it mostly had something to do with how much influence States allowed the Church to have in their countries.  There were countries like Spain and England where a person's religion was basically ordered by the State.  In 1492, Spain kicked all the Moors and Jews out, then created the feared Inquisition to find people who had fake-converted to Catholicism but were still secret Jews or Muslims.  The Catholic Church would hang onto this much influence in Spain until the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the 1970's.  In Elizabeth I's England, she didn't really care of some English people were Catholic, just as long as they showed up once a month to an Anglican service.  Those who followed were less tolerant.  James I kicked the Pilgrim Separatists out, first to Holland, later to Plymouth, Massachusetts.  His son, Charles, got his head cut off because 1. he married a Catholic; 2. he probably was a Catholic; 3. he pissed-off the Puritan Parliament.  Oliver Cromwell then set up a Puritan military state in England and attacked Catholic Ireland because he was that much of a dick.  He even attacked the Protestant Dutch because he may or may not have gotten an STD from an Amsterdam hooker (ok ok, I just totally made that up- but the Anglo-Dutch war really happened).

In America before our revolution, Church and State had a mixed relationship.  New England started out pretty much as a theocracy lead by fiery Puritan Calvinist preachers, which went great until Salem and some other towns were convinced they were besieged by witches and hanged a bunch of mostly harmless old women who had a few too many pet cats.  In Virginia, they allowed so-called "dissenter meetings" such as Presbyterians and Baptists, but they had to pay a tax which was used to support the Anglican clergy in Virginia.  Maryland was basically set up as a place that English Catholics could go and, if they didn't starve or get killed by Indians, live in relative peace and quiet.  However, Maryland was soon overrun by Protestants, and Catholics had to put up with not being able to openly go to Mass without being molested by their neighbors.

I am Thomas Jefferson.  #*$! religion!

Enter Thomas Jefferson.  He was a young man who traveled in Europe, was a good student of Enlightenment authors, and although a nominal Anglican himself, was kind of bugged by Virginia having its own "official" religion.  I guess some of his best friends were Quakers, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Catholics, or Presbyterians.  He drafted Virginia's Religious Toleration Statute, which was basically copied and stuck into the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights which, along with Article IV, made the United States of America the very first country in the entire world that explicitly separated Church from State.

Over the years, lots of Supreme Court cases tested and further refined the "Establishment," "Free-Exercise" and "Religious Test" clauses of the Constitution, which has had the effect of really pissing-off the fundamentalist Christian right-wing wack-o's who basically want to unite Church and State and have THEM in charge of BOTH.  On the other side of the coin, atheists get all bent when they look at the money in their pocket and have to read, "In God We Trust," or send their kids to a school where the Pledge of Allegiance is recited, especially the "One Nation, under God" part.  There's basically just no pleasing some people!

Go in peace, and thank you very much.

There are a lot of religions in the United States today, some familiar, some exotic, some weird, and at least one completely preposterous religion.  I am referring, of course, to the Chapel of the Church of the Divine Elvis Presley, a "religion" that was invented by my friend, Voga Wallace, as a way to get out of paying his city property tax by claiming part of his apartment was a religious shrine devoted to --you guessed it --Elvis.  A small room that was probably supposed to be a pantry was outfitted with four Elvis posters lit by a dangling black light, an old guitar case was set up on a trunk, into which people were encouraged to leave free-will "Love Me Tender" offerings, and the perpetual "Elvis Light," a candle stuck inside an Elvis drinking glass, was always lit --whenever Voga remembered to do it.  And I am completely not making this up when I tell you that the city bought this charade, even listing it as one of the city's "places of worship"  on some grotty official publication.  That, despite the fact that the whole time I hung out with him, there was never one, not one person who visited Voga's stupid shrine!

Lastly, let me just say this: even though our state and religion are separate here in America, that doesn't mean that Americans aren't friendly towards religion in general.  Just look at the parking lots that surround mega-churches on a Sunday morning and you'll see what I mean.  So Iran can just suck it whenever they try to pass us off as the Great Satan or whatever.  I bet you there are more mosques in America than there are in Iran, tons more synagogues and tons-squared more churches to boot.  We just don't think our religious leaders should have a say in fixing potholes in the streets, or whether or not to go to war with some country whose religious leaders call us the Great Satan.  Get it?  So here's to religion and government: may they peacefully coexist as separate institutions because bad things tend to happen whenever they team-up.

A Visit to the No-Tell Motel

After a particularly nice stay at a Marriott Comfort Inn and Suites (with soft-core porn on demand!  That, AND a make-your-own-waffle machine), I got to wondering about who and where the world's first ever hotel was, and whether or not they had as great a breakfast buffet as my Marriott (granola!  bacon AND sausage!  scrambled eggs that weren't slimy at all!)

Note the complete absence of unsupervised children running amok

The first hotel was probably in one of the first cities, Jericho and Chatal Huyuk in contention for that honor, and was probably nothing more than a spare room in a house where the kids had grown up and married, grandma and grandpa had died, and the dog had been roasted in honor of a local deity's feast day.  There are no records of this first hotel: no advertising, receipts, star-rating or snarky comments on the ancient equivalent of Yelp!.com.  Ancient peoples were more concerned with getting out of the rain and wondering if their hosts would rob them during the night to bother with filling out the obligatory guest survey.

That's your room on the roof under the stretched goat skin.  Check-out at 10 am.

Those wacky and wonderful Sumerians upped the hospitality-game by featuring inns run by widdows that served beer and that exotic import, wine.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of these fine establishments shows up, in all places, and I am completely NOT making this up, at the END  OF  THE  WORLD (not to be confused with Douglas Adams' Restaurant at the End of the Universe).  Here is what happened when the title character, Gilgamesh, showed up at this tavern at the end of the world:

You like my kitty?
He's an actual lion

The tavern-keeper Siduri who lives by the seashore,she lives...the pot-stand was made for her, the golden fermenting vat was made for her.She is covered with a veil ...Gilgamesh was roving about...wearing a skin,...having the flesh of the gods in his body,but sadness deep within him,looking like one who has been traveling a long distance.The tavern-keeper was gazing off into the distance,puzzling to herself, she said,wondering to herself: "That fellow is surely a murderer(!)! Where is he heading! ..."As soon as the tavern-keeper saw him, she bolted her door,bolted her gate, bolted the lock.

Apparently, ancient bar-keeps had the same problems as modern ones, what with murderers and creepy-looking semi-mythical heroes strolling by and wanting a drink.

You probably remember from your kid's Christmas pageant the Inn at Bethlehem that didn't have any room for Joseph, Mary and the future Baby Jesus, thus missing out on the best free publicity any hotel could ever hope for, especially once the Magi finally showed up.  What you probably never heard about was the fact that the Romans --who basically invented the interstate highway --recognized this problem and actually did something about it.  Emperors from Augustus to Constantine made it a policy to encourage inns, hostels, horse-stables, rest areas and scenic views all along their superb network of roads in order to make the traveller's journey a little more pleasurable.

I had to give birth in a STABLE
 because YOU wouldn't call ahead for a RESERVATION!

Travel accommodations got the royal treatment during the Middle Ages when a king-on-the-road could expect lodgings at any one of several castles owned and operated by his vassals.  Amenities typically included hunting, feasting, fooling-around with the kitchen wenches, hawking, feasting, recreational horseback riding, feasting and feasting.  Even a nobody-knight could expect hospitality from brother knights and terrified peasants along the way.  Before you wax nostalgic about the days of yore, remember that staying at a castle was no picnic: they were cold, drafty, unhygienic, crowded --they basically had the same ambiance of a National Guard Armory.

Your room does include a bath, but unfortunately it's located in the dining hall.

And while we're on the subject of the Middle Ages, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the great accommodations offered by religious denominations along the pilgrimage routes.  These could be had at the hostelry or hospital of any monastery --word has it that the Benedictines were the best.  In fact, a whole order of chivalry was dedicated to the hospitality industry: the Knights Hospital, or the Hospitalers.  They are particularly noted for providing security for Jerusalem-bound pilgrims and for surviving the destruction of the Knights Templar order.

Would you prefer a smoking or a non-smoking room?  With or without armor?

As cities and commerce recovered during the High Middle Ages, inns and public-houses proliferated at about the same rate that stay-and-bugger-off-without-paying travelling salesmen, so much so that laws were adopted to punish these early spongers.  The English Common Law was especially helpful in this area, setting up the rights of guests and the duties of innkeepers towards their guests.  This was a problem, as there was one particularly notorious inn on the way into London whose guest room included a trap door which, when opened, deposited the guest under the inn where he would be robbed and his body tossed into the Thames.  If our guest escaped this trap, he could look forward to a shave-and-a-haircut from Sweeny Todd.

That was a CLOSE shave you wanted?

With a legal framework in place, the only thing that the hospitality industry needed next to make it even better was the automobile and --Presto! --the Motel was born.  A motel or motor-inn can be found in most American towns today.  My fondest motel memory was the motel in New Hampshire ski-country in the late 1960's.  My brother and I had our own room with a door in between my parent's room; there was a tiny refrigerator stocked with sodas and snacks; but best of all, there was a coin slot on the nightstand that, if you put a quarter in it, magic fingers would massage the stressful day of skiing right out of your body!  How cool was that!

The golden age of motels in the United States was, of course, the 1950's, and the road these great motels were on were the Mother Road, Route 66.  The space-age designs, modern exteriors and predictably good accomodations were famous the world over, almost as famous as America's wacky roadside attractions.  Dinosaur parks?  the birthplace of the guy who invented Saran Wrap?  the world's biggest ball of string?  See it all from your Chevrolet in the USA, and then pull in to the local motel for a rest, a dip in their pool, and some homemade pie from the diner across the street.

Or you could stay here and, um, see Norman's Mom?

Today's hotel experience can be anything from a student hostel with Dieter and Sven, the Techno-Twins, all the way up to the most exclusive hotel room in the entire world: inside Cinderella's Castle. At Walt Disney World, there is a room that one can't rent --one must be invited --and you would not believe all the luxury inside: a priceless glass slipper (hey, it is Cinderella's room after all!), a pool-sized tub that one can adjust the lighting-color-scheme to match your mood; priceless wood carving on the bed headboards; an amazing mosaic of Cinderella's pumpkin-coach on the floor --it just goes on and on!  Here is the link to this most exclusive of all hotel rooms:
http://www.firstcoastnews.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=82325
If you are lucky enough to ever stay in this room, a few words to the wise: don't set out any mousetraps; don't swat any small, flying creatures that might be buzzing around your head (it might be Tink!); and don't, DO  NOT  bug the concierge about seeing Cinderella and Prince Charming in person BECAUSE  THEY  ARE  FAIRY-TALES  AND  NOT  REAL.

So, have a nice stay and remember: checkout time is 10 am.

It's Just Like Money in the Bank

the View from the Podium

It's Just Like Money in the Bank

Have you heard the most disgusting news yet from the already disgusting, on-going story of fiscal and financial mismanagement?  The country of Cypress (Motto: Cypress- we can't decide if we're Greek or Turkish.  Or maybe Albanian) is reeling under the news that banks will be taking money from the savings accounts of its depositors in order to bail themselves (the banks) out for making bad loans to that shady, flash-in-the-pan, broke-on-its-ass country of Greece (Motto: Greece- we're not as slippery as we sound).  That's right, banks are stealing from their depositors to cover their financially over-extended asses.
 Puh-leeeeze!

Where's my free calendar?

All of these bankers-behaving-badly have prompted Adjunct Proff to peer into the mists of history to reveal the slightly sleazy origins of what suckers around the world still call banks (instead of, I don't know, casinos with ATM's instead of slots?) so that you, my loyal, constant, got-way-too-much-free-time-on-your-hands reader, can steer clear of their shenanigans and keep your hard won coin safe.

Way back before there were CD's paying a paltry 1.3% interest for a 10-year term, there was the town of Jericho (the one with Joshua and the walls that came a-tumblin' down, not the fake Ohio town on that SyFy Channel post-apocalyptic series).  The people there were perfectly happy --or as happy as people just 5 hours removed from a hunter-gathering economy could be --because they had no money.  At all.  And no banks.  Anywhere.  If a Jerichoan (Jerichoite?) wanted to store a little of his excess grain in town, he just brought it to the granary and trusted that the fearsome cats of Jericho would do their job in eating any and all mice that tried to steal it.  Oh, and in case the next harvest was crap, our thrifty Jerichoian (???) could schlep to the granary and withdraw enough grain to keep him in pita-bread for the duration.

Mouse: I kan haz teeney nom of wheeete?
Cat: No; I kan haz moussie, nom-nom-nom!

The Sumerians altered the above transaction slightly by inventing a religion of gods and goddesses who had wings, bird-like feet, and owned all of the extra food in the whole town because they had, and this is where it gets really funny, allowed the poor farmer to sow and reap in peace.  This in no way took into account that the rest of our Sumerian farmer's time was taken up digging irrigation ditches to bring the water to his thirsty crops because the great-and-birdy Sumerian deities couldn't be bothered to make it rain.  Pleeeeeze, every decent civilization had at least one god in charge of rain!  So, the Sumerian farmers were the first to be robbed of their excess labor, although to be fair, it was the priests and not the bankers who were doing the dirty work.

Rain would ruin my pretty feathers

However, the Sumerians do have some blame in this whole scandalous history of banking because they came up with the first ever medium of exchange, the token (a fake coin that drivers used to throw in toll-collection bins before there were electric transponders that tracked their every move for the fascist imperialist usurper governments of the Running Dogs of Capitalism)

*** Adjunct Proff has just regained control of his blog from the Chinese Army's Cyber-Attack unit.  Disregard any weird stuff that you may have just read***

These tokens were little animal or grain-shaped clay figurines that represented a certain amount of the commodity.  This was so the temple "priests" could remember just how many sheep Sumerian-so-and-so gave back to the gods from their herd in thanksgiving for... whatever the "priests" said the "gods" did for the farmer-husband and his little family farm.  This wasn't quite yet money because you couldn't trade, say, sheep for grain (the sheep-tokens would eat the grain-tokens, duuh!), so it wasn't a true medium of exchange.  THAT invention would be left to the Lydians.

No, that's Lydia the Tattooed Lady,
not the Lydians!

The Lydians were a bunch of sea-going salesmen who predated the Phoenicians, although they were later driven out of business in the eastern Mediterranean by the aggressive (read "deadly") business practices of said Phoenicians.  It was the Lydians who invented the world's very first coins in order to have a way for their customers pay for the stuff they were selling.  They took a disc of silver or gold, stamped it with the image of a fearsome lion, and just like magic, folks all over the eastern Mediterranean were practically throwing their food, cloth, dye, timber and olive oil at the nearest Lydian they could find, in the hopes that he had some coins on him they could have in exchange.  In their over-eagerness, the peoples of the eastern Med forgot that they couldn't exactly eat the coins in times of famine, but hey, coins were shiny and everybody else was using them, so the only thing they wanted more of were those cool Lydian coins.

Which brings up a small problem.  Sure, coins as a medium of exchange were a great convenience --people didn't have to pay in sheep any more, though you still had the odd rube who wanted to.  The problem was this: if someone tried to steal your sheep, you or your dog, or certainly your sheep, would notice it and stop the thief in their tracks.  But coins were smaller --an enterprising thief could quite literally pocket an entire year's work of farm production and blow it on... well, an entire year's worth of farm production.  Or hookers --they had been doing a booming business ever since the discovery of sex.  What to do?

Sure, but will she work for coins?

The first bank was probably a strongbox inside somebody's house guarded by a dog and a guy named Joey-Two-Times or Benny-the-Knuckle-Crusher.  And it probably just contained the owner's pile of coins, unless they were a person one could rely on to give one's coins back on demand.  Rich people were already making loans during Greek and Roman times.  We know this for a fact, because debtors who defaulted on their loans were enslaved by the debt holder.  This was usually only done in cases of complete, utter inability to pay, because Greek and Roman moneylenders also employed the above-mentioned Joey and Benny to "lean-on" debtors who were slow in their repayments.

It was during Greek and Roman times that temples (note the continued connection between religion and money?  Shysters know their own kind.) added the big innovation of accepting deposits and "changing" money.  This was a big deal, because temples had by then gotten out of the grain-and-livestock trade and were on an all-cash basis by the time Jesus took a nutty and drove the money-changers out of the Temple in Jerusalem.

"Get out and STAY out!  Wall Street is over there.  Jesus Chr..."

But to really, really have a bank in the modern sense of the term, we have to turn to that crazy crowd that gave the world pizza, pasta and the Maffia --and I don't mean the Americans, the Chinese or the Sicilians.  I'm talking about those paisanos, the Renaissance Italians of Florence, Genoa and Venice.  And Jews.  This is because Jews were allowed to do something Christians were not: charge interest on loans.  The Church called this practice a sin (hear THAT, B of A?!?) and since Jews were already going to Hell for being Jewish, why not use them to do the dirty work of getting rich off of loans.  

This is also where the term "bankrupt" enters into financial nomenclature. A banco was the little bench our Jewish friend would set up to do his business in the piazza of the town.  Rupto  happened when our Jewish friend's banco was smashed up-side his head when he couldn't pay his investors the promised return on their investment.  Said banco could also be smashed just for shits-and-grins around Easter, Christmas, the Feast of Our Lady of Padua, or any other Christian holiday that  reminded good Christians to beat-up on the Jews for not believing in Jesus.

Everybody but cartoonists hated the
Jews during the Renaissance

Once the Houses of De Medici and Rothschild got started, nothing besides the odd panic, bank-run, "bubble," recession or Great Depression could stop those bankers.  They added a ton of services, including paper money, bills of lading, bills of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, letters of credit, cheques, travelers  cheques, credit cards, stock margin-purchases, commodity trading, sub-prime mortgage bundling and hedge funds, just to name the top dozen money-makers --for the banks.  

Because that's exactly what banks do: make money --for their owners, which these days include a lot of non-human entities.  No, aliens haven't invaded Wall Street and the City of London (or have they?).  I'm talking about corporations, yet another creature of this viper's brood spawned by human greed.  A corporation is an artificial "person" who can own property, buy and sell property, sue and be sued in court, and rape young maidens with impunity (ok, rape is never funny, I get it, I'm sorry, won't do it again).  Actually corporations were invented in order to protect investors from those rapacious (not the same thing as rapists :-P) bankers!  How ironic is it that the banks that are "too big to fail" are all owned in whole or part by corporations?  Cosimo de Medicci is having a big laugh about that in his grave right now.

Yes, I have a huge honker,
but I'm not Jewish, you racist

Don't get me wrong: overall, I like banks.  Hell, I used to work for one in my younger days.  I especially like community credit unions, who loan money to local people and businesses with an eye more towards community betterment than towards shareholder dividends.  Remember George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life and his building & loan society?  He's MY kind of banker.

Even the big commercial banks have their uses.  Without adequate financial resources, the U.S.A. couldn't maintain its totally kick-ass, nuclear missile-loaded armed forces, which makes it suicide for a respectable country to attack us --in fact, the only successful attackers as of late were suicide-minded asshole hijackers.  Without the dough-re-mi, there wouldn't have been a man on the moon or a robot leaving the solar system.  Money, and lots of it, is needed for everything from our road infrastructure to our gas, electric and sewer networks.  Money is being used to turn nuclear energy into electricity (and toxic waste.  Don't forget the toxic waste), wind into electricity, falling water into electricity, coal into electricity, natural gas and oil into electricity so that the whole world can watch commercials on their flat-screen T.V.'s.  For banks.  Starring has-been celebs.

They pay us tons to do their commercials,
which keeps us famous.  Win-Win.

So my friendly reader, give-it-up for banks.  Maybe Jefferson was wrong when he called large concentrations of capital inherently inconsistent with individual liberty.  Maybe, just maybe, Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is doing much more than just giving us an Invisible Hand-job.  Maybe money IS good for people.  But have you ever noticed that the people who lust after money the most are the poor? --rich people treat it like a burden that needs to be locked up.  In a bank.  Where only they can fondle it.  Wow, what would Freud say about the psychosis behind today's banking industry?

Sometimes it really IS a
dick up your ass.  What?