Holy Money is the long out-of-print study that, for the first time and to this day, unmatched in its richness of sources and ideas, explores the theory of the religious origins of money and its non-economic significance. The classical scholar and economic historian Bernhard Laum develops, twenty years after Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money, the comprehensive idea that money has evolved from a kind of religious trade and that any reflection on the phenomenon of money is only meaningful if it traces its history. He finds the birth of money in the cult of sacrifice, examines pre-monetary forms of money, as well as the nature and emergence of coins. He demonstrates that money is a creation of the legal order and that the payment function of money predates its role as a medium of exchange. Step by step, Laum unfolds his narrative, which sometimes reads like an archaeological crime novel: one layer after another is removed until a chain of events becomes visible, all of which together create what one might call the great illusion of modernity.