Article One. Whether the Penny God Existed before the Penny Was Coined.

Skeptics say to the Penny Priestess, “Where was your god before money?” thinking they have presented an infallible argument against the penny faith. To which one may justly reply, “And where was your god before you prayed to him?”

We find our gods by grieving for what we lack, by longing for what we feel should be. It was money that introduced the evil of unluckiness. Before money, the world was harsh yet predictable and, according to the law of tooth-and-claw, just. The strong devoured the weak, but succumbed themselves to parasites and disease. Money first enabled the weak, venal, and stupid to tyrannize over the saints and artists, the poets and scientists, who, for want of money, lost the preeminence that should have been theirs by nature and reason.

Although we know him as the lord of pennies, long before the coming of the copper penny, the giver of luck dwelled already in the broken cowry shell, the splintered glass bead, the cracked cauldron—in the detritus of a money- and status-driven society.

There are those who believe that the Penny God dwells not only in devalued coinage but in all things once coveted then later despised--be it a discarded lawn chair, a chipped plate, last season’s lipstick, or an old black-and-white computer monitor--that he is the great and somewhat powerful God of Trash. For all things cycle and recycle. Just as archeologists and collectors compete for burnt scraps, pottery shards, or fractured axe heads pulled from prehistoric middens, so too our great pyramids of trash and pits of rubbish will one day be laid open by treasure seekers—perhaps curious historians pondering the colossal malfunction of a culture so wasteful, or perhaps desperate survivors scrambling for useless old stuff that can be patched or smelted or woven into useful new stuff.

The Penny Priestess has no quarrel with this theology, but she herself is not ready to join in the ascetic observances of the brotherhood of dumpster divers or the sisterhood of bag ladies. She will continue to celebrate the Penny God's mysteries by picking up his lost pennies and depositing them, reverently and gratefully, in her lucky penny jar.

Article Two. Whether It Is Self-Evident That the Penny God Exists.

According to Aquinas, “Things are said to be self-evident when the knowledge of them is naturally in us, as is obviously the case with first principles.” Is not the rule of chance a first principle—even the beginning of all things? It is likewise self-evident that luck exists. As Jean Cocteau has said, “We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” And thus also Gertrude Stein: “The deepest thing in any one is the conviction of the bad luck that follows boasting.” The Penny Priestess would add that it is, in some people, the best thing, their closest approach to a moral principle. A belief in luck teaches humility and restraint, acceptance and thankfulness. Only those who know the innocent and trusting impulse that guides the penny worshiper to bend down for a disregarded and despised penny can comprehend the blessings of the Penny God. If one judges a religion by the ethical principles it inculcates, then the penny faith is hardly the least enlightened of the world’s major and minor religions.

Article Three. Whether the Tail or Flip Side of a Found Penny Brings Bad Luck.

Many lucky pennyists adhere to the notion that only a heads-up penny brings good luck. Some, pressing this doctrine even further, maintain that a face-down penny is not of a neutral character but unlucky and to be avoided.

To which the Penny Priestess responds: This is a primitive and unenlightened penny dualism, a materialistic misapplication of Manichaeism, that is clearly contrary to the (usually) beneficent nature of our Penny Lord. Moreover, to associate ill luck or some obscure curse with the flip side of a penny betrays a sexually repressive and puritanical assumption that tails are evil because they are tails. Whereas by the two equally lucky sides of the same coin, our Penny God signifies his equal and loving approbation of all dualities—head and tail, body and soul, intellect and passion, female and male, young and old, dark and light—as complementary aspects of one divine unity and not as warring opposites.

Bad luck certainly abounds, but it is not due to the innocent copper penny. The heads-good/tails-bad doctrine is the heresy of those who are unable to appreciate that the good luck granted by a found penny, whether face up or face down, may take the form of an absence of bad luck or the mitigation of a really awful impending doom. It is impious to see a fallen penny, then forbear to take it up merely because it is face down. We may not pick and choose our fate! By natural reason alone we can perceive that this is contrary to the principles of our penny faith, which urge us to treasure small gifts and not to examine them for defects.

Article Four. Whether It Is Ever Unlucky to Pick up a Found Penny.

We have demonstrated that all found pennies, whether heads or tails up, are intrinsically lucky. It does not necessarily follow that there are no extrinsic circumstances in which picking up a found penny might be unwise, unlucky, or flat-out stupid. The consequences of retrieving a penny lying in a busy street without first looking both ways and waiting for the traffic to clear might be highly unfortunate, if the luckiness of the penny was exhausted in moderating the severity of the ensuing collision. (See also article seven on the temptation of the Penny God.) Before we dash into the traffic, or even stoop for a penny with our arms full of groceries, we should always remember the first commandment of our penny religion: don't be greedy.

Penny extremists and penny martyrs have no place in our religion. Heroic efforts to collect pennies are contrary to the fundamentals of our penny faith, which calls for us to be grateful for what we have. While it is unlucky to lose a penny to the vacuum cleaner, it may be even unluckier to empty the bag and sift through the grunge in an obsessive effort to reclaim it. Self-inflicted suffering is not rewarded in the penny religion, as it shows a disregard for blessings received. Gaining the Penny God’s favor does not require sackcloth and ashes or self-flagellation, or even more modern approaches to making oneself miserable, like doing sit-ups or eating low-fat foods. We are the Penny God’s chosen whenever we make ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of the dollar-, pound- and euro-adoring multitude by bending down to take up a despised (though undoubtedly lucky) penny.

Those who reverence the fallen penny may readily become overzealous in its pursuit—volunteering to walk the dog, get a newspaper, or go to the store for milk, eagerly scanning sidewalks and parking lots for copper treasure all along their way. But what profits you to gain an enormous jar of found pennies, if you have lost all their luckiness?

You cannot force your luck by scavenging for pennies. As in the quantum hide-and-seek that electrons play with busybody physicists, the luck of a looked-for penny will just go somewhere else (wherever no one is looking for it). Luck favors the unprepared mind, the innocent glance, the spontaneous impulse. Besides, it's cheating—a futile attempt to lift the mortal blindfold and peep at fate.

And here we find the central challenge of our penny faith (which, after all, is rather relaxed and undemanding, as religions go): to treasure the found penny but never ever to seek it.

So: why this sudden fascination with watching your own feet? Striking a nonchalant pose, you seem to be idly looking up at the clouds or at passing cars—yet your eyes suddenly dart down to a bit of disk-shaped crud stuck to the sidewalk. You were looking for pennies, weren't you? The Penny God may not be omniscient, but he's still tough to fool.

Once it is granted that a lucky penny must be found by chance, we must next ask if one therefore requires luck in order to get luck. Such a position, however logical, would entail an infinite regression of luck causing luck causing luck causing luck ....

Here the revered philosopher and saint Thomas Aquinas has again given us our direction. The Penny God is the Prime Mover and First Cause of luck. Don't worry about it. Just pick up your penny and thank the Lucky Penny God for this unlooked-for gift.

Article Six. Whether the Penny God Is Lord of the Tossed Coin as well as the Lost Coin.

As the giver of luck, it seems that the Penny God would be concerned in the outcomes of a coin toss in particular and of games of chance in general. It is certainly the case that gamblers display a strong belief in luck as a divine power. Their apparent piety may take the form of squeezing their lucky penny, or whispering to a rabbit’s foot or other lucky token, as they pray for the dice or the wheel to fall in their favor.

To which the Penny Priestess answers: All events occur either by necessity, by chance, or by luck. Luck is not chance, which is random, any more than it is necessity. Luck is a fortuitous event, that is, any fortunate occurrence that did not need to happen. A coin must fall on heads or tails; one is not more fortunate than the other, except from the self-interested perspective of an individual placing a wager.

By necessity, a coin may only fall two ways; a pair of dice can yield a mere thirty-six permutations, a poker hand can only encompass 2,598,960 combinations. In the absence of heavy-handed divine intervention, the possible outcomes are so circumscribed—the coin may briefly spin on its rim but cannot transmute into a rosebud—and so readily foreseeable, that to a god, even a not quite omniscient god, games of chance are really boring.

Every time you take a stroll, sit down to dinner, or turn the pages of a newspaper, you are bombarded by, oh, maybe a trillion quintillion googol’s worth of random events (as subatomic particles within and without you go whizzing madly about, and as you yourself perform the arbitrary motions that you falsely believe to emanate from conscious thought)—and perhaps one or two lucky ones. These lucky events are the gifts of the Penny God.

The Penny God does not patronize gamblers. It doesn’t matter what kind of coin you toss, even a found penny, the Penny God isn’t interested. However, to put a found penny in a penny slot shows a disdain for the Penny God’s favor, which is clearly hazardous.

Article Seven. Whether the Temptation of the Penny God Is a Grievous Sin or Just a Really Dumb Thing to Do.

Following once again the authority of Aquinas, “Properly speaking, to tempt is to test the person tempted.” As the saint nicely puts the issue, “The temptation of [the Penny] God consists in certain deeds, wherein the expected result is ascribed to the power of [the Penny] God alone.” Thus, stepping into a busy road in order to pick up a penny would constitute a temptation of the Penny God, if you could not be certain that the cars would stop for you were you lucky-penniless. To demand (by the making of an idle wish) of a found penny that it produce a particular lucky outcome is a temptation of the Penny God, unless you are compelled to do so by an urgent and dire need. To require, implicitly or explicitly, that a found penny prove its luckiness is manifestly a temptation of the Penny God. Are these acts of penny impiety therefore sins? No, for the Penny God does not keep score. However, they may not go unpunished. The words engraved on the Lincoln penny do not refer to the Penny God, since to trust complacently in your luck is to tempt the Penny God to practice his usual tricks on those who display greed or arrogance. In simplest terms: Don’t push your luck, or your luck will push you right back.

Article Eight. Whether the Penny Is Endowed with Luck at the Moment It Is Lost or Only When It Is Found.

As our sacred penny traditions have taught us, “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck.” This text indicates that two acts are antecedents to the succedent luckiness of the penny: the finding and the picking up. By implication, a not-found (and not-picked-up) penny is not-lucky or, more properly, not-yet-lucky.

However, we know that the luck of a found penny can only come from the person who lost the penny. Thus, to the question, “At what point does the luck enter the penny, when it is lost or when it is found?” it appears we must answer, “When it is lost.” Otherwise, pennies that had lain untouched for decades or longer—rolled under a store fixture or dropped in the cellar of an abandoned house—would have no luck at all when found if the loser of the penny were now dead and thereby already out of luck. Yet no one will propose that a long-lost penny must be devoid of luck because its luck donor is no more. Penny worshipers know in their hearts that these long-lost pennies are especially lucky, which they could not be if the luck must exit the penny loser and enter the penny finder only at the moment of the penny finding and the penny picking up.

Since the luck must come from the person who lost the penny, does it necessarily follow that the penny is endowed with luck at the moment of its loss? The Penny Priestess answers that it does not. The luck may leave the penny loser without entering the penny until the moment (if it ever arrives) that the penny is found and picked up.

We have all wondered where things go to that were right there just a minute ago—the sunglasses put down on the table, the ballpoint pen dropped between the sofa cushions. A trickster god with a tedious sense of humor, or perhaps an obsession with collecting right-hand gloves, has spirited them away. A vast lost-and-found department occupies the unseen world of spirits and shadows, filled not with our junk (which chokes the vacant lots and landfills of our known world) but with stuff still desired but mysteriously misplaced.

The Penny Priestess proposes that there exists as well a luck limbo, an antechamber to the otherworldly lost-and-found, where the forces of luck determine who will get their lost stuff back and who will not. It is in this luck limbo (limbus fortunarius) that the luck of lost pennies await the coming of their finders.

Article Nine. Whether Picking Up a Not Actually Lost Penny Is Lucky or Unlucky.

Those who fervently believe in the promise of our sacred creed, “Find a penny, pick it up, all day long you’ll have good luck,” may hardly credit it, but many penny atheists are so scornful of pennies (as worthless for the buying of stuff) that they will deliberately toss them to the ground. Given the degenerate times in which we live, it is even likely that the vast majority of found pennies were never actually lost. Since to find has to lose as its paired opposite and implies an element of chance, we ask whether a penny must have been unluckily lost in order to be luckily found.

For some penny worshipers, the innocent pleasure of coming by chance upon a fallen penny is diminished by the knowledge that it may have been roughly thrown down and trampled under foot as no better than a cigarette butt or a fast food wrapper. The Penny Priestess nonetheless maintains that a deliberately discarded penny is equivalent in luckiness to an accidentally lost penny, if not luckier. We know that, through the medium of the found penny, our benevolent Penny Lord alleviates suffering by redistributing luck more equitably. It is an offense to our faith to believe the Penny God would punish the innocent believer who dropped a penny unknowingly, while allowing arrogant infidels to fling their pennies disdainfully to the ground with no loss of luck.

The Lord our Penny God, although a trickster, is a just god. It is evident that stolen pennies cannot be lucky. The found penny must therefore be either disowned (by being discarded) or lost (unclaimed by its owner) in order to be lucky. There exists an obscure sect of penny believers who place pennies in personally meaningful locations to protect their property or to bring an aura of luckiness to their endeavors. To snatch up a presumably lost penny, only to discover that it in fact belongs to someone, is not only socially awkward but possibly quite unlucky, if the Penny God should choose to punish the act with one of his tricks or pranks. The prudent penny worshiper will refrain from gleefully pocketing pennies discovered in possibly non-random locations, such as the threshold of a friend’s house or the desk of a coworker.

Article Ten. Whether a Found Penny Is Properly or Improperly Given to Another.

Innumerable penny worshipers have based their penny observances upon the instruction contained in the venerable creed: “Find a penny, pick it up, and all day long you’ll have good luck. / Give a penny to a friend and your luck will never end.”

Setting aside its doubtful literary merit, we may question whether this doggerel couplet is divinely inspired and therefore an inerrant guide to penny worship. First, it seems overly prescriptive, for truly the Penny God does not set forth rules and dogmas for us to follow. Neither does the Penny God tempt us with everlasting bliss nor threaten us with perpetual torments, unlike some other deities. This promise of never-ending luck reveals the influence of other religions that seek to swell their crowd of worshipers by offering beyond-lifetime guarantees. Penny worshipers know that all found pennies are lucky, but not eternally so.

Interpreted through a historical-grammatical approach, this text reflects the social and economic conditions of an earlier age, when a penny actually had monetary value and so giving one away could be properly considered an act of friendship.

In our own degenerate times, when a penny is so valueless as to be thrown away by the impious, to give a penny to a friend is an imposition and thus no longer an act of friendship. If it is contrary to friendship to burden another with a valueless penny for the sake of one’s personal gain, then it is impossible to give a penny to a friend, since doing so would be a violation of the purported friendship.

Our penny creed does not stipulate that the penny to be given to a friend is the picked-up penny rather than some other penny. Could it be that we are given two distinct commandments in these two verses: First, to pick up pennies and, second, to share our material blessings with our friends? Keep the penny for yourself, but celebrate by treating your friend to lunch.

Article Eleven. Whether a Negligently Misplaced But Not Actually Lost Penny Can Be Lucky.

We know that luck itself can be neither created nor destroyed, but the same is not true for pennies. The United States Mint produces eight billion pennies a year simply to replace pennies that go out of circulation. It is obvious that those billions of missing pennies cannot all be enshrined in lucky penny jars. Many are negligently tossed into drawers or non-lucky penny jars, perhaps with the vague intention—someday, when one gets around to it—of wrapping them and taking them to the bank. These pennies are neglected but not lost and therefore not lucky.

Many penny skeptics will not trouble to take their pennies to a bank for redemption, even when they have a full shelf of penny jars and cans that actually amount to real money. Presumably, in the event of death or a move or just a thorough cleanup, these pennies are dumped in the trash. If we therefore ask, “At what point does a negligently misplaced penny become a lost penny?” it seems that we must answer, “Only when it leaves the premises or possession of the negligent person.” In the event of that person’s death (careless executors beware!), the luck that is lost is that of the last person to negligently handle the penny.

Of those billions of pennies that disappear from circulation each year, many vanish altogether—down storm drains, for example, or swept up with the trash and discarded with the rest of our litter. With all these millions of missing pennies, it is to be feared that our collective luckiness (which was always more than we merited) is slowly draining away into sewers, rivers, oceans, and landfills. These irretrievably lost pennies will not be found, not until some distant generation is scavenging, perhaps desperately, through our trash heaps of discarded stuff. They will need the luck more than we. They will also more deserve it.

Article Twelve. Whether There Be a Penny Heaven or a Penny Hell.

On this question, the poets and philosophers are in perfect accord with the divine revelations of the Penny Lord. Penny heaven or penny hell is here on earth, in what you make of your luck:

“People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.”   —Samuel Butler
“That penny farthing hell you call your mind”   —Samuel Beckett.
“Why go further and further, / Look, happiness is right here. / Learn how to grab hold of luck, / For luck is always there.”   —Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Article Thirteen. Whether the Penny God Takes the Corporeal Form of a Coin.

Some of the Penny Priestess’ admirers and novitiates have suggested that she might be the earthly incarnation of the Penny God. The Penny Priestess rejects this notion, for she is but his handmaiden. Though the Penny God dwell in the penny, he is not of the penny. It is all one to the Penny God whether you keep his holy pennies in a Qing dynasty vase or a Tupperware tub. Unlike some other gods, he has no particular policy on graven images, including those engraven on the penny. So, if you wish to worship him in an anthropomorphic guise, you may picture him as a hermaphroditic, double-headed Abe Lincoln, or alternatively, a two-headed, two-bearded Queen Elizabeth.

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