Anthropologist José Gabriel Pereira Bastos explains money from an anthropological and psychoanalytical point of view, relating it to a symbolic kind of organisation centring on the power of the Father, as he is celebrated in rituals of communities in which magical thinking prevails. From there it is possible to turn not only to Freud but also to anthropology to understand money and its original, archetypical function, in the light of trans-historical laws, taboos and bans.