TechGnosis

by Erik Davis

  King Thamus decided that his subjects were better off without this particular transformation. Anticipating Marshall McLuhan’s notion that new technologies amputate as much as they amplify, Thamus realized that writing would actually destroy memory by making it dependent on external marks; comparing the memories of people today with the great bards of yore, one is hard-pressed to disagree. More important, Thamus feared that writing would erode the oral context of education and learning, allowing knowledge to escape from the teacher-student relationship and pass into the hands of the unprepared. Consumers of books would then ape the wise, presenting a superficial counterfeit of knowledge rather than the real deal.

  There is no little irony in Plato’s tacit support of Thamus, and not just because you can probably find a copy of the Phaedrus in the philosophy section of your local bookstore. As a number of scholars have shown, Plato’s very philosophy—whose architecture in some distant sense still frames the Western mind, and which inspires much of the mystical lore we will encounter in this book—was the product of a mind that had already been thoroughly restructured by the technology of writing. And not just any technology of writing. Plato’s mind was marked by the alphabet, the most powerful of all scribal hacks.

  The alphabet did not arise in a void. At the time it was invented, around 1500 BCE, humans had been living with different forms of writing for millennia. Indeed, if we expand the semiotic notion that human thought is born amid signs inscribed in space, then it might be said that writing arose at the very moment we might reasonably call the minds of our small hairy ancestors “human.” In such a scenario, however, early humans weren’t the first ones chiseling inscriptions. Nature unfolded the first text, a flowing scroll of birdflight and bone and pawprint, animated and mapped with sense. As the human imagination flowered, we began to make what we saw, drawing pictures of discrete objects and patterns on caves and rock walls. These images were virtual traces of the world that everywhere swallowed us up, and eventually these traces grew into picture writing, the cartoon ancestors of hieroglyphs.

  Not all of humanity’s earliest working symbols were sensual reflections of the surrounding visual world. The naturalistic images created by Paleolithic people were often paired with highly abstract designs and glyphs. Around 20,000 years ago, when humans first started crafting bulbous goddess figurines, curious wands also began popping up in southern Europe. Made of bone or antler horn, these batons were etched with sets of simple lines or dot-like pits. Though the etchings on these artifacts were never considered writing, they seemed to represent a discrete digital system of encoding data. Eventually someone dug up a baton that confirmed such suspicions: The bone’s sixty-mark notation functioned as a lunar calendar, covering a period of seven and a half months. Though the batons were crafted at a time when our minds were presumably immersed in the animist matrix of enchanted nature, they also represent the growing ability to abstract, symbolize, and dissect the flux of the world. These moonbones may be our first information technology.

  The first true writing was itself packed with data. Around six thousand years ago, simple pictograms appeared on temple records in Mesopotamia. These pictorial glyphs mimicked the things that priests wanted to keep track of—basically commodities like cows and sacks of grain. In the third millennium BCE, Sumerians took to using clay tablets and reed styluses for such scribblings, with the result that their writing dispensed with curved lines and became far more abstract in appearance. At the same time, parallel writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphs remained visually tied to the sensual world and were filled with images of beasts and plants and river flow. Partly for these reasons, Egyptian writing retained a large measure of the animist magic of archaic perception. Like many ancient peoples, the Egyptians believed that a name captured the essence of a thing, but they also held that such supernatural power lived in the inscriptions themselves—that spelling was, in fact, a spell. One ancient text tells us that the high priest of Setne Khamwas once dissolved one of Thoth’s occult texts in a bit of beer and then drank the brew to receive the god’s wisdom.

  Though early writing was powerful enough to encode elaborate myths, its representational capacity did not extend to human vocal sounds—these marks were mute, like highway signs or religious icons today. But in Mesopotamia and Egypt, picture writing gradually became mixed up with phonetic signs: signs that denote the sounds of spoken language, rather than simply words, ideas, or things. The writing machine began to simulate human talk. Finally, in the fifteenth century BCE, a few centuries before Moses hightailed it out of Egypt, a Semitic people living in the south Sinai made one of the most genuinely revolutionary breakthroughs in the history of media, one that pushed the writing machines envelope of phonetic capture and visual abstraction to a new plateau of power and control. They invented the alphabet.

  With a small handful of letters, the alphabet arrested the evanescent flux of spoken language, although initially it could only represent the sounds of consonants. The alphabet was an eminently practical code. Besides being easy to learn, it enabled the same set of letters to capture different spoken languages. The Phoenician traders who plied the eastern Mediterranean knew a handy device when they saw one, and they spread these garrulous marks across the ancient world like a virus. In the eighth century BCE, Phoenician ships brought the alphabet to Greece.

  The infection progressed slowly, and it wasn’t until Plato’s time that the alphabet began to saturate elite society. Born in 428 BCE, the philosopher was among the first generations of young boys who were systematically taught to read. He was also destined to conjure up one of the top-selling metaphysical notions of all time, a notion that irrevocably marked the rationalism, religion, and mysticism of the Western world: the theory of the forms. Plato held that another world exists beyond the realm of temporal flux and gross matter that we perceive with our senses. This otherworld is a pure and timeless realm of perfect ideas; the sensual things we perceive around us are only faded Xeroxes of these ideal forms. In his famous allegory, Plato wrote that we are like people chained in a cave with our backs to the fire. We cannot see the true objects whose shadows are cast on the wall before us; instead we become entranced with their flickering, insubstantial reflections. The philosopher’s goal is to turn away from these fetching simulacra and to live and think in accordance with the intelligible realm of the forms, a realm of genuine knowledge that reveals itself through reason.

  In Preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A. Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed itself to Plato through the alphabet. Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word video, has a visual connotation. Havelock argues that Platonic forms were conceived as analogies to visible forms, not just the perfect shapes of geometry, but the visible forms of the alphabet. Like letters, Platonic ideas were immobile, isolated, and devoid of warmth and secondary qualities; they seem to transcend the world at hand. As Abram observes, “The letters, and the written words that they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seem to hover, as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension.”14 Abram also points out that the Greek alphabet was the first writing machine to capture vowels as well as consonants, thus completing the technological colonization of the spoken world. Abstract form came to rule embodied sense. The oracular animism that once echoed through hieroglyphs died away, and the Greeks began to associate truth with what was eternal, incorporeal, and inscribed.

  Information technology may thus form the matrix of Greece’s revolutionary philosophical turn. With their minds partly reformatted by alphabetic literacy, the rationalist Greek philosophers who followed Plato were able to detach their thoughts from the flowing surfaces of the material world. Nature became an impersonal and objective domain that could be dissected and analyzed in order to yield rational and general laws based on cause-and-effect explanations. Democritus, a contemporary
of Plato, was the first to argue that the holistic tapestry of the cosmos was actually made up of discrete atoms. Not coincidentally, Democritus compared this atomic structure to the way that written words were formed from the bits of the alphabet.

  The power and knowledge unleashed by literate rationalism was extraordinary; it paved the way, however indirectly, for modern Europe’s technoscientific triumph. But like all powerful technologies, Thoth’s useful tool transformed the user as well. For once the writing machine is interiorized to some degree, it can serve as both the most abstract and most intimate of mirrors; with it (literally) in mind, the self can reflect upon itself, sharpening the scalpel of its own introspection and setting itself against the external world. As Marshall McLuhan argued, “The alphabet shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished individuals or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidian space.”15

  It wasn’t until the modern era that this sense of rational detachment and alienated reflection came to dominate and define the experience of being an individual human being—an experience that, as McLuhan and others have argued, was aided and abetted by the printing press. For Plato, literate introspection may have catalyzed something far more mystical: his revolutionary belief that an incorporeal spirit lurks within the self, and that this immortal spark of intelligence is independent of the speaking, breathing body. The psychology is understandable. Just as letters and written words hold their truths above the fleeting world of flesh, and even keep a dead man’s words alive, so may readers suspect that their own literate minds belong to a similarly timeless realm of transcendental essences.

  Plato was not the first Greek to believe that a deathless wraith sluiced through our mortal meat. Before him, both the Orphics and Pythagoreans insisted that human beings contained an incorporeal, perpetually reincarnating soul—a notion they probably picked up from archaic shamanic lore that trickled down from Scythia and Thrace. Plato was influenced by both of these mystic sects, but while the Orphics and the Pythagoreans described the soul in the slippery lingo of myth and symbol, Plato gave the idea a metaphysical and cosmological foundation, thus wedding it to his broader rationalist project. Indeed, Plato’s simultaneous embrace of rational thought and mysticism underscores one of the suspicions that guide this book: that the works of reason cannot be so easily riven from more otherworldly pursuits.

  Plato calls his intelligible soul the psyche, and it takes shape against the powerful backdrop of his metaphysical map of cosmic reality. For Plato, the planet earth is the dusty basement of a multilayered cosmological high-rise. In the penthouse suite reside the pure and perfect forms, and it is there that our rational souls are born. Once we descend the elevator into incarnation, however, this immortal essence is submerged in the slothful bags of fluid and bone we lug about planet-side. For Plato, as for the Neoplatonist mystics that followed him, the goal of the philosopher was to transcend the gravitational tug of the body in order to launch what the scholar Ioan Couliano calls the “Platonic space shuttle.” In this visionary flight, the rational spark ascends to the heavens, where it glimpses its own essential divinity amid the world of the forms—a transcendental twist on the old shamanic plunge into the belly of the earth.

  Plato’s metaphysical cosmology would come to exert an enormous influence on the Western psyche, encouraging the transmutation of the earthy soul into the invisible inwardness of the spirit. By the time of Jesus, a few hundred years after the philosopher’s death, the transcendental drive that Plato articulated in philosophical terms had already manifested itself as a peculiarly dour and increasingly offworld spiritual temperament. Gazing with homesick longing at the heavens, many seekers sought transcendental escape, the ascetic mastery of the body, or an otherworldly journey into the realms of apocalyptic vision. For the most extreme, the natural world itself came to be seen as a prison, even though Plato and most Neoplatonists embraced the earth as a “visible god” that reflected the harmony of the higher spheres. Instead, the religious self of late antiquity—at least in some of its many manifestations—found itself facing a chasm between the timeless heavens of the transcendent godhead and the demon-haunted mud puddle where our bodies copulate, sicken, and die.

  Obviously the alphabet alone cannot be blamed for this binary sense of transcendental estrangement between earth and the divine. But as the literary scholar David Porush points out, “Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods.” The written word, more an artifact of a human and mental world than an ecological or embodied one, speaks at one remove from the natural world, and thus stands against the pagan ways of those who live amid the animist powers and images of that world (the Oriental mystery cults paid notoriously scant attention to texts). Porush argues that the invention of the phonological alphabet “almost certainly made the idea of an abstract monotheistic God thinkable for the first time.”16

  Porush is not thinking about Plato here, but about the Jews, whose reliance on the abstract space of the Hebrew alphabet seems consonant with the Hebraic religious innovation of a single overseeing god whose rule of law, enshrined in the narrative and legal writings of the Torah, enforces a tribe’s sense of spiritual separation from their neighbors. That’s why God sends down inscribed tablets of instruction from the spiritual mountaintop, and why he simultaneously condemns the golden idols that stir the imaginations of the people below. Though Jewish religious life remained focused on temple sacrifices and a priestly caste for more than a millennium, sacred writings still formed a matrix of divine authority. Moreover, the Torah was, and is, treated as an almost fetishistic object of cultic reverence; to this day, Orthodox Jewish men strap tefillin—boxes containing small pieces of parchment inscribed with scripture—on their foreheads and arms during morning prayers.

  Following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when priestly sacrifices ceased and the Jews were scattered from Palestine, Hebrew texts became the central locus of religious activity. In a sense, the Torah replaced the Temple, becoming the textual architecture of the Jewish people, their virtual homeland. What Christians call the “Old Testament” was finally canonized, and the rabbis began writing down the oral Torah, which had been passed down by word of mouth for centuries as a supplement to the written Torah. The study of Torah itself became a sacred act, while the exegetical literature of the Talmud developed an immense hypertextual literature that allowed people to both regulate and debate every facet of their lives. (Modern printed editions of the Talmud anticipate hypertext technologies, embedding the text within a complex nest of cross-references, notes, commentaries, commentaries on commentaries, and links.) On the one hand, the Jews emphasized the absolute authority of a sacred piece of writing; in the second century, for example, Rabbi Ishmael commanded the scribes to be “vigilant in your occupation, for your labor is the labor of heaven. Were you to diminish or add even one letter, you would destroy the entire universe.”17 At the same time, the endless feedback loops of Talmudic commentary, with its dialectical dance between metaphor and literal command, demonstrate that the technology of the word is embedded in a changing social world and can never capture the ever-transcending spirit of the divine. Though God’s name can be written, it remains literally unpronounceable, and thus ultimately unknowable.

  The interpretive elaboration of Torah was a godsend for the Jews, for the activity was concrete enough to knit them into a community of interpretation and rootless enough to follow them everywhere they wandered. Besides naming the body of Jewish lore, the notion of Torah also served as a sacred symbol, one that exerted a profound influence on Western mysticism. According to the Sefer Yetzirah, an important mystical text written between the third and sixth centuries, the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—along with the ten Sefiroth, or number-spheres—constitute a kind of cosmic DNA cod
e. As the text proclaims, “[God] drew them, hewed them, combined them, weighed them, interchanged them, and through them produced the whole creation and everything that is destined to be created.”18 This alphabetic line of mystical thought, amplified with Neoplatonic metaphysics, would later blossom into Kabbalah. In the thirteenth century, Kabbalists like Abraham Abulafia used Hebrew letters as objects of ecstatic meditation, recombining them in their imaginations to engender alphabetic rapture, while others employed a variety of decoding techniques based on the substitution and transposition of letters to squeeze esoteric meanings from the written Torah.

  By acknowledging the mystic multiplicity of the text while emphasizing the profoundly human activity of commentary and interpretation, the Jews helped avoid the world-loathing and apocalyptic transcendentalism that often marked the other great religion of the book to emerge from the ancient world: Christianity. Arising from the religious carnival of the late Roman Empire, Christianity stood out in stark contrast to the pagan mystery cults by giving pride of place to text. Though the early Christians emphasized the verbal broadcast of the kerygma, the “good news” of redemption through Christ, they also came from Jewish roots, and they embraced the writing machine with an unprecedented passion. Even before the gospel stories of Jesus gained prominence, letters from the apostles and early Church leaders circulated widely through the budding Christian world, helping to spread the gospel while stitching together far-flung and often persecuted communities. Paul’s mission was in many ways defined by his powerful and widely disseminated correspondence, which drew part of its considerable authority from his brilliant sampling of Jewish texts. As Christianity grew, believers cranked out an astronomical number of tracts, epistles, commentaries, homilies, martyr acts, and synodical communications, and these writings were consumed with a passion and seriousness unparalleled in the pagan world. As Harry Gamble writes in Books and Readers in the Early Church, “For Christians, texts were not entertainments or dispensable luxuries, but the essential instruments of Christian life.”19