TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  Certainly Hermes would approve of the Internet, a mercurial network of far-flung messages that functions as a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Accessed through the domestic threshold of PCs or the portals of mobile devices, the Net opens up a technological liminal zone that swamps the self with new paths of possibility. Indeed, the mythic attraction of the Net turns on some of the very same qualities associated with the youthful trickster: speed, profit, innovative interconnection, the overturning of established orders. Of course, the old notion of the Internet as an “information superhighway” is also “mythic” in the more modern and critical sense of the term: a strategic distortion, a mirage, a social lie. The utopian rhetoric of the Internet paves over a host of troubling issues: the hidden machinations of the new corporate media powers, the potentially atomizing effects of the screen on social and psychological life, and the bedeviling issue of access, as communication technologies hardwire the widening global gap between rich and poor. But Hermes prepares us for such dangers, because the merchant of messages traffics with deception: he lies and steals, and his magic wand closes human eyes forever, drawing us into the deep sleep of forgetting.

  Hermes embodies the mythos of the information age not just because he is the lord of communication, but because he is also a mastermind of techne, the Greek word that means the art of craft. Brown points out that in Homer’s tongue, the word for “trickiness” is identical to the one for “technical skill”—such as the skill that Hephaestus displays when he forges Achilles’s magic shield. Hermes thus unveils an image of technology, not only as useful handmaiden, but as trickster.

  For all its everyday efficacy, technology stands on shifting ground, giving us at once more and less than its spectacular powers first suggest. Brown insists that Hermes’s trickery is not merely a rational device but an expression of magical power. The god’s magic is ambiguous because we cannot clearly distinguish the clever ruse from the savvy manipulation of some unseen natural fact. With such hermetic ambiguity in mind, we might say that technology too is a spell and a trick, a device that crafts the real by exploiting the hidden laws of nature and human perception alike.

  The Divine Engineer

  Hermes the messenger helps us glimpse the powerful archetypal connections among magic, tricks, and technology. But the god does not bloom into a genuine Promethean technomage until he heads south, across the wine-dark sea, to Egypt. Here, in the centuries before the birth of Jesus, the religious imagination of the Hellenistic world crossbred Hermes with the Egyptian scribal god Thoth to create one of the great matinee idols of esoteric lore: Hermes Trismegistus. A thoroughly fabricated figure, the “Thrice-Great” Hermes was nonetheless considered to be a historical person well into the age of reason, an error that had considerable consequences, as we shall see. For Hermes Trismegistus does not just capture the ancient world’s technological enthusiasm; he also comes down to us as one of the leading lights of the Western mystical tradition, a tradition whose psychospiritual impulses and alchemical images will haunt this book as they have haunted Western dreams.

  To appreciate Trismegistus, this golden, hybrid god-man, we need to take a snapshot of Egypt in the age of antiquity. In particular, we need to turn our historical imaginations to the great cosmopolis of Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great at the mouth of the Nile. With its sophisticated arts and sciences, enormous ethnic and religious diversity, and deeply polyglot culture, Alexandria resonates with our contemporary urban culture like no other city of the ancient world. It is a sister city across time. Under the relatively enlightened despotism of the Ptolemys, a Macedonian dynasty that began ruling Egypt in the fourth century BCE, the city of Alexandria became the scientific and technological capital of the Hellenistic world. Ptolemy II oversaw the construction of the massive Pharos lighthouse, the redigging of the ancient Suez Canal, and the establishment of a university whose famous library attempted to collect and systematize the whole of human knowledge for the first time in history. With the king’s agents scattered across the known world digging up scrolls on every possible subject, the library eventually contained half a million volumes. According to Galen, one of the Ptolemys was such an information maniac that he would simply confiscate any books found on docked ships in the harbor, keep the ones the library needed, and compensate their hapless owners with copies on cheap papyrus. He even took out an interlibrary loan from Athens, borrowing the works of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus and then forfeiting his deposit rather than return the originals.

  Athens may have been the home of the poets and philosophers, but during its heyday, Alexandria was home to the makers. Ctesibius built singing statues, pumps, and the world’s first keyboard instrument, while Philo of Byzantium constructed war machines and automated “magic theaters.” And in the first century following the birth of Jesus, when the library had long declined and Roman rule could barely constrain the city’s religious and political upheavals, Heron hit the scene. Known as mechanikos, the Machine Man, Heron invented the world’s first steam engine, developed some sophisticated surveying tools, and crafted handy gizmos like a self-trimming oil lamp. Heron’s clever inventions were particularly notable for their incorporation of the sorts of self-regulating feedback control systems that form the bedrock of cybernetics; like today’s toilets, his “Inexhaustible Goblet” regulated its own level with a floating mechanism. But what really stirred Heron’s soul were novelties: pneumatic gadgets, automata, and magic theaters, one of which rolled itself before the audience on its own power, cranked through a miniature three-dimensional performance, and then made its own exit. Another staged a Dionysian mystery rite with Apollonian precision: flames leapt, thunder crashed, and miniature female bacchantes whirled madly around the wine god on a pulley-driven turntable.

  There was nothing particularly sacrilegious about Heron automating the sorts of cult rituals so popular in his day. For centuries, the statues in Egyptian temples had been outfitted with nodding heads and long tubes that could produce the illusion of talking gods. Heron simply took religious technology a step further, engineering “divine signs” for temples: singing birds, invisible trumpet blasts, and mirrors that conjured spooks. He invented an automatic door opener triggered whenever the temple priest lit a fire. Some gadgets just saved the priests time, such as a slot machine that dispensed ritual cleansing water, described in Heron’s Automata under the irresistible title of “Sacrificial Vessel That Flows Only When Money Is Introduced.” But most of his gadgets were wondrous rather than useful—magical machines that paradoxically eroded the cultural authority of the very rational know-how that stimulated their design in the first place. In his book The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprague de Camp goes so far as to lay some blame on Heron for “the great wave of supernaturalism that finally killed Roman science.”8

  Still, Roman science must itself take some of the blame for the supernatural riot of astrology, Oriental cults, and strange machines that attended the slow decline of the empire. As the historian of technology Robert Brumbaugh put it, since the Romans “had already created an objective, impersonal mechanized environment … we would expect mechanical ingenuity to move toward amusement, surprise, and escape.”9 And, by extension, toward the kind of popular religious experiences that the Machine Man helped engineer. Heron was not just some cynical Oz propping up decadent priests; he was designing popular spectacles designed to catalyze ecstasy and wonder, classical analogs of the EDM festivals or theme parks of our time. Taking Brumbaugh’s comment to heart, it might be said that we too live in a time when an impersonal mechanized environment and a rising tide of ecstatic technologies are helping to erode the authority of reason and spark a resurgence of supernatural desires and apocalyptic fears. With such contemporary parallels definitely in mind, the great classical scholar E. R. Dodds dubbed the final centuries of the Roman Empire “an Age of Anxiety,” arguing that the regimented and mechanical efficiency of the empire could no longer bottle up the chaos growing inside the souls of its subjects a
nd outside its civic walls.

  As the authority of Greek rationalism waned, people began fretting over the perennial existential questions: what was the purpose of life, the value of the body, the fate of the earth, the future of civilization? Traditional answers tasted stale, and the power of the old prophets and Rome’s state religion sputtered in the face of new (or renewed) religious forces trickling in from the margins of the empire—astrology, Oriental cults, Christianity, apocalyptic prophecies. Alexandria was ground zero for this almost desperately exuberant period of religious reinvention; during Heron’s time, the city’s religious climate rivaled the ecumenical fusions, eclectic hybrids, and manic pop cults of our own day. Hellenic Neoplatonism intermingled with Egyptian sorcery, Christianity won its first converts, and pagan philosophers swapped apocalypses with Jewish mystics. Gnostic rumors were whispered in the wings, and even a handful of Buddhist monks dropped some dharma into the stew.

  But it was the mystery cults centered around gods like Isis and Mithras that broke all attendance records with their promise of esoteric information and ecstatic revelation. These cults possessed many of the same selling points that have lured modern Western seekers to the East: exoticism, a promise of spiritual experience rather than dogma, and an opportunity for religious reinvention in a time of cultural dissolution. This longing for spiritual experience was coupled with an equally familiar eclecticism: the Gnostic heretic Carpocrates was reported to worship images of Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Christ, and Saint Paul, while the emperor Alexander Severus kept statues of Abraham, Orpheus, Christ, and Apollonius of Tyana in his personal shrine. Dodds cuts to the anxious heart of this spiritual smorgasbord in terms that many globe-trotting seekers today might second: “There were too many cults, too many mysteries, too many philosophies of life to choose from: you could pile one religious insurance on another, yet not feel safe.”10

  Within Alexandria’s hothouse religious atmosphere, the gods were constantly being remixed and retooled. Terra-cotta figures from the time show Egyptian deities cavorting in Greek togas, while Alexandria’s powerful patron god Serapis was a hybrid from the very foundations of the city, a combination of the Egyptian bull-god Apis, Osiris, Zeus, Pluto, and the physician god Asclepius. This is the eclectic spirit of recombinant religion that led to the fusion of the Greek Hermes with the Egyptian god Thoth, the ibis-headed “hypomnematographer,” or secretary to the gods, who ruled over two of the most powerful and mysterious technologies in Egypt: magic and hieroglyphs. Out of this crossbreed emerged Hermes Trismegistus.

  Unlike both Thoth and Hermes, Trismegistus was not considered a god but a human being, a great wisdom figure who lived at the golden dawn of history. Along with his command of sacred knowledge, Trismegistus also served as a culture hero, a kind of Egyptian Prometheus. Hecataeus of Abdera identified him as the inventor of writing, music, and games, while Artapanus insisted that Trismegistus taught the Egyptians about water pumps and war machines as well as showing them how to lift stones with cranes. In the Picatrix, a medieval Arabic tome that contains a welter of occult materials, we find a powerful image of Trismegistus that strikes such a strangely familiar chord that it is worth quoting at length:

  Hermes was the first who constructed images by means of which he knew how to regulate the Nile against the motion of the moon. This man also built a temple to the Sun, and he knew how to hide himself from all so that no one could see him, although he was within it. It was he, too, who in the east of Egypt constructed a City twelve miles long within which he constructed a castle which had four gates in each of its four parts. On the eastern gate he placed the form of an Eagle; on the western gate, the form of a Bull; on the southern gate, the form of a Lion, and on the northern gate he constructed the form of a Dog. Into these images he introduced spirits which spoke with voices, nor could anyone enter the gates of the City except by their permission.… Around the circumference of the City he placed engraved images and ordered them in such a manner that by their virtue the inhabitants were made virtuous and with-drawn from all wickedness and harm.11

  So much of the twentieth century is anticipated in this description. For the modern technocratic state, there is no symbol more empowering than the regulation and exploitation of rivers. Here Trismegistus achieves this goal, not with brute machines but with a symbolic technology: magical images that tap the hidden currents of the cosmos. But Trismegistus’s technologies aren’t just magical; they are also utopian. The very intelligence of their design and placement instills goodness within his city’s inhabitants, while also protecting them from the dark side of human passions.

  The vision of an engineered utopia will return in a variety of guises throughout this book, because technological development in the West has often been driven, and embraced, by the utopian imagination. Pagan utopias like the one in the Picatrix would inspire the rational utopias concocted by European thinkers from the Renaissance onward, utopias that would in turn influence the construction of the modern world. But the most important mythic blueprint for future techno-utopians would remain the New Jerusalem, the adamantine hypercity that descends from the apocalyptic skies at the end of the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. As a futuristic image of heaven on earth, the New Jerusalem would directly inspire the secular offspring of Christianity’s millennialist drive: the myth of progress, which holds that through the ministrations of reason, science, and technology, we can perfect ourselves and our societies.

  The Picatrix reminds us that utopian thought is technological from the beginning. Trismegistus’s magic kingdom is a perfectly designed cybernetic environment, whose feedback mechanisms automatically amplify human virtue even as they dampen human wickedness. As such, the city also anticipates the modern calculus of control that the social critics of the Frankfurt School dubbed “instrumental reason,” a calculus of domination that organizes society according to technical manipulation. At its worst, this logic of social engineering leads to the totalitarian state, with its cold logic of indoctrination, security, and control. The Trismegistus we meet in the Picatrix is a vision of the magus as Big Brother: hiding in his panoptic surveillance tower, Hermes controls the gates to his city while extending his power through commanding images that dominate the urban landscape like the hulking statues of Soviet realism or the talking automata of Disneyland. Of course, Trismegistus’s aims are no more nefarious than were Heron’s when he helped Egyptian priests technologize the supernatural. Most of us would like to live in a more peaceful, virtuous, and wondrous world. But as we will see throughout this book, the magical idea that engineering will create such a world is an ominous and tricky dream, though it seems a mighty difficult dream to shake.

  Inscribing the Mind

  Though Hermes Trismegistus was renowned for his engineering prowess, the sage’s technowizardry also extended into the more incorporeal realms of the human mind. In Plato’s Phaedrus, for instance, Socrates tells a fascinating little tale about Thoth, the Egyptian god of magic and invention who would mutate in the Alexandrian mind into Trismegistus. According to Socrates, one day Thoth approached King Thamus with an offer of a brand-new techne: writing. By giving the gift of writing to the king, Thoth hoped to pass on its wonders to all of the Egyptian people, and he promised Thamus that the new invention would not only augment memory but amplify wisdom as well. Thamus carefully considered the matter, weighing the pros and cons of this major communications upgrade. Finally, the king rejected the gift, saying that his people would be better off without the new device. And reading between the lines of the story, it’s clear that Socrates and Plato agree.

  Before we consider the king’s gripes, let it be said as frankly as possible: writing is a machine. Over aeons, human beings have invented widely different systems of visually encoding language and thought, and these various pictograms, ideograms, and alphabets have been inscribed and reproduced using a wide variety of secondary inventions—ink, papyrus, parchment, bound codices, woodblocks, mechanical printing presses, bill
boards, photocopying machines, and electronic computer screens. The material history of writing is an utterly technological tale.

  Though writing has become the most commonplace of information technologies, it remains in many ways the most magical. Brought into focus by properly educated eyes, artificial glyphs scrawled onto the surface of objects leap unbidden into the mind, bringing with them sounds, meanings, and data. In fact, it is very difficult to gaze intentionally upon a page of script written in a known language and not automatically begin reading it. The ecophilosopher David Abram notes that, just as a Zuni elder might focus her eyes upon a cactus and hear the succulent begin to speak, so do we hear voices pouring out of our printed alphabets. “This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone.”12 We forget this mystery for the same reason we forget that writing is a technology: we have so thoroughly absorbed this machine into the gray sponge of our brains that it is extremely tough to figure out where writing stops and the mind itself starts. As Walter Ong notes in Orality and Literacy, “More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness.”13