Money originated in religious rituals connected to ancestor worship.

Evidence

Thousands of years ago, money originated in religious rituals as consecrated tokens with immortal connotations. The sacred value of the exchange was its primary purpose. In ancient Greece, families held communal feasts in honor of their heroic ancestors. The families believed that ancestors had the character and power of immortal gods and could thus provide protection, advice, and direction for their living progeny. So the living relatives sacrificed bulls (the word “capital” comes from “cattle”) and roasted them on spits. Then they distributed the pieces of meat to everyone in attendance, withholding only the “surplus,” a piece left on the spit to be “consumed” by the fire as an offering to the heroic ancestors. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 433

Categorization

• DEFINE: Ties the etymology of ‘capital’ to cattle sacrificed in ancestor feasts — origin of the term.
• SHARE: Send to the economics-fascinated friend who loves etymologies — the ‘capital = cattle’ link plus the ritual origin.
• CANDY: Lightly fun: the word ‘capital’ descends from bulls roasted to honor dead ancestors.
• XREF: connects to: Religious prostitution originally encoded fertility magic before sliding into venality — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 191