The sacred and the profane
Originally, money was under the control of the spiritual authority as asserted by symbols and mottos covering ancient coins. Indeed, in traditional societies, all social activities had a sacred character. In these civilizations, any object could be employed as support to meditation besides its common use. Far from reducing money to a simple exchange in a purely quantitative market system, the traditional society allowed the individual to connect with a superior reality order, both spiritual and qualitative.
When the authority on money mint and circulation fell into the exclusive hands of the temporal power, the money was reduced to a simple instrument of exchange, precaution and reserves, i.e. a pure quantity subject to accumulation. This passage opened the way to the reign of numerical value marking out coins and banknotes today. A value which quickly became purely symbolic. This transformation has allowed the reduction of beings and things to simple digital data all over the world.
Nevertheless, coins and banknotes always remain carriers of representations bringing back to thousand-year-old symbols as testified by notes circulating these days, such as dollar and euro.