by Erik Davis
By grounding the locus of spiritual authority in the self, the Gnostics also threatened to erode the rock of authority that the institutional structure of the Roman Church rested upon. It was partly to control such ideological truancy that the Church invented the whole notion of “heresy”—the perversion or subversion of orthodox truth, a concept that trickles down to us today in the notion of thought crime. In this sense, the Gnostics were accused of a literally outlaw spirituality, a challenge to conventional rule that at its most extreme led to antinomians like the Carpocratians, who apparently took it upon themselves personally to “despise and transgress all laws” fashioned by the (false) biblical Creator God. According to their enemies, the Carpocratians were particularly fond of swapping sexual partners, foreshadowing the “free love” of so many latter-day utopian collectives and liberatory countercultures.
By the dawn of the early medieval period, the Church had basically stamped out the embers of old school Gnosticism. But Gnostic ideas and imagery did not disappear from Western thought and experience, although we should now leave the uppercase G in the dustbin. Various heretical strains of Manichaean dualism and spiritual anarchy flared up throughout Christian history, and even orthodox Christianity, with its violent hatred of Saracens, witches, Jews, and Satanists, often behaved in a more Manichaean fashion than it might care to admit. Gnosticism’s elite Platonic dreams of transcendent liberty and self-divinization also streamed into Europe’s esoteric, hermetic, and alchemical underground, which etched its archetypes far more deeply into the technological unconscious than may at first appear.
As with all archetypes, the mythic patterns associated with gnosis are ambiguous, multivalent, and contradictory. Today’s techgnostics find themselves, consciously or not, surrounded by a complex set of ideas and images: transcendence through technology, a thirst for the ecstasy of information, a drive to engineer and perfect the incorporeal spark of the self. As we will see in later chapters, techgnostic myth also resurrects the dark figures of the demiurge and his archons, who reemerge in the popular imagination as those vast technocratic cabals who deploy ersatz spectacles, surveillance technologies, and an invisible calculus of media manipulation in order to control society and keep individuals asleep. These imaginings can lead into the black holes of paranoia, but given how often twentieth-century history has justified such fears, a certain gnostic distrust of worldly powers remains a healthy component of any contemporary worldview. So we should not be Manichaean about the gnostic impulse that manifests itself in modern technoculture. Techgnosis is the esoteric side of the postwar world’s new “information self,” and like all such secret psychologies, its faces are carved with both shadows and light.
IV
Techgnosis, American-Style
The American self is a gnostic self, because it believes, on a deep and abiding level, that authenticity arises from independence, an independence that is at once natural, sovereign, and solitary. When Thomas Jefferson wrote that he had “sworn on the altar of God Almighty eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the minds of men,” he was articulating the structure of feeling and belief that informs the American self. This structure was enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and though these documents are secular and political, their rhetoric does not derive solely from Enlightenment notions about the inalienable rights of man. America’s political embrace of the modern individual was also motivated by the land’s curious spiritual temperament—a temperament that, in its quest to discover a motive ground outside of governments and established religious institutions, appears to be the very antithesis of religion as we usually conceive it.
We should take seriously Harold Bloom’s willfully heretical argument that the “American Religion” is not Christian, at least in the way that Europe was Christian, but is, rather, Gnostic. Whether finding his evidence in Mormonism, the Baptist Church, or the poetry of Emerson, Bloom describes the core of the American religion as the unshakable conviction that there is something in the self that precedes creation, and that, for all our Whitmanesque desire to merge with groups, we can never fully trust external social institutions to care for the aboriginal freedom of this solitary spark, with its “personal relationship” to nature or a gnostic Jesus. In a crucial passage, Bloom writes that the American religion
does not believe or trust, it knows, though it wants always to know yet more. The American Religion manifests itself as an information anxiety, but that seems to me a better definition of nearly all religion than the attempts to see faith as a compulsive neurosis, or as a drug. It is neither obsessive nor intoxicating to ask, “Where were we?” and “Where are we journeying?”; or best of all, “What makes us free?” The American Religion always has asked “What makes us free?”; but political freedom has little to do with that question.1
There is a great deal of value in this passage, especially in the unexpected light Bloom throws on the strangely American coupling of information and freedom that will beckon us throughout this chapter. But as we’ll see, this gnostic consciousness, itself a frazzled patchwork of worldviews and contrasting camps, does not cleave to the clear divide Bloom draws between politics and spirit. While the political structures of the United States cannot encompass or satisfy the American self’s will to freedom, the cornerstone of these structures was laid on gnostic soil.
There has always been an esoteric undercurrent to the United States. As Peter Lamborn Wilson has shown, prerevolutionary America was flush with wandering alchemists, neopagan backsliders, and antinomian ranters. Within the occult imagination of some European colonialists, America’s virgin land merged with the prima materia of the alchemists, the unformed chunk of primal chaos that forms the seed of the philosopher’s stone and the potential foundation of a New Jerusalem. According to the contemporary gnostic writer Stephan Hoeller, this undercurrent gave rise to “Hermetic America,” a national spiritual temperament that opposes the dominant religious narrative of Puritan America—that dour, God-fearing tale of witch hunters, prudes, and workaholics we all know so well. According to Hoeller, a number of the Founding Fathers explicitly intended the country to serve as a hermetic vessel, “an alchemical alembic in which the human soul could grow and transform with little or no interference from state, society, or religious establishments.”2
To get a quick taste of hermetic America, simply take a dollar bill, flip it over, and try to stare down the glowing eye that tops the pyramid of the great seal. Like the Byzantine icons of Eastern Orthodoxy, which can catalyze a flash of beatitude in the eyes of their viewers, so can this decidedly weird symbol of the novus ordo seclorum (a New Order of Things) conjure up the secret architecture of power tucked beneath the bright and shiny pragmatism of the United States’ federal government. And this architecture’s name is Freemasonry.
Freemasonry was (and is) a vaguely esoteric network of elite male societies whose various lodges played a crucial role in the development of modern Europe as well as the birth of the United States. Before the War of Independence, Masonic lodges formed perhaps the principal “intercolonial network” for revolutionary leaders; these societies also allowed the explosive ideas cranked out by European Enlightenment intellectuals like Locke, Hume, and Voltaire to trickle down through the ranks. Nearly every American general that rassled with the redcoats was a Mason, as was nearly every signator of the Declaration of Independence and nearly every major contributor to the Constitution. John Adams, George Washington, and Benjamin Franklin were all Masons (the jury is still out on Thomas Jefferson). Like Franklin, Washington was a particularly passionate and active Mason, a onetime Grand Master who was inaugurated as president decked out in full Masonic regalia.
Long a topic of febrile speculation, Freemasonry is hardly the insidious leviathan envisioned by some conspiracy buffs. On one level, Masonic lodges simply functioned as the old boy networks of the Age of Reason, institutions where ambitious men would gather in order to propagate and hatch revolutionary new
notions about reason, science, and the proper construction of civil society. The God they worshipped was the “Great Architect,” a distant demiurge whose hand was glimpsed, not in scripture, but in the new revelations of natural science. But even as lodge members helped to imagine and construct our secular world, with its anticlerical embrace of science, technology, and individual liberties, Masonic societies also served as the main channel whereby the ideas and psychology of gnostic occultism flowed into the heart of modernity. For the freethinking men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Freemasonry offered a social structure that bridged rationalism and esoteric mysticism, folding Enlightenment ideals and Deistic science into a ritualistic and deeply hermetic solar cult.
Though redolent with Rosicrucian rumors and tales of Templar knights, the symbols and rituals of “the Craft” principally derive from the traditions and guild structure of medieval stonemasons, whose practical lore was spiritualized by seventeenth-century English aristocrats into “speculative,” or mystical, Masonry. By tracing its origins to Hiram Abiff, the architect of Solomon’s Temple, Masons placed the image of the hermetic engineer at the heart of their mythological worldview. Budding lodge members were required to master an elaborate hierarchical system of secret hand signs, ritual tools, esoteric doctrines, and gnostic dramas of self-illumination. As they clamored up this Neoplatonic (and rather corporate) pyramid of grades and degrees, their rising status indicated the increasing, almost geometrical perfection of their souls. Developing themselves into Masonic “sons of light,” these self-illuminated ones transmuted the gnostic impulse from a mystical dream into a systematic social technology of Enlightenment.
Freemasonry based its cosmology on a new image of nature, one that combined old esoteric notions of cosmic order with the new empirical understanding of natural law. Like many scientists of the day, Masons subscribed to the philosophy of Deism, which held that God retired from his creation after constructing the vast machinery of the physical world, leaving men to tinker and improve the cosmic contraption on their own. As Hoeller writes of Deists, “theirs was the Alien God of the Hermeticists and Gnostics, also known at times as Deus Absconditus, ‘the God who has gone away.’ ”3 Though Masons worshipped their Great Architect as the Christian God, this absent engineer, whose creation is clearly less than perfect, also resembles the demiurge of Gnostic myth, whose flawed designs could be overcome only by human smarts.
With their perfectionist Prometheanism, Masonic lodges thus brought what the historian David Noble calls the “religion of technology” into the modern secular age. Noble traces the religion of technology to medieval monks who came to believe that human beings and societies can be brought into a paradisal state of Edenic perfection through the proper exploitation of the “useful arts.” Translated into secular terms, which are still very much with us, this millennialist mythology holds that technological and scientific men have a duty to understand, conquer, and tweak the world of nature for the sake of human salvation, both spiritual and practical. As Noble shows, Masons played a disproportionate role in the construction of scientific culture. Lodge members basically founded the Royal Society, the first modern scientific institution, and the generally recognized leader of speculative Freemasonry, John Theophilus Desaguliers, was also an avid natural philosopher and engineer who experimented with electricity, invented the planetarium, and investigated steam power. In England, France, and America, Masons organized scientific lectures, hyped the useful arts, and pushed forward the new encyclopedias and their “diffusion of the light of knowledge.” Through the development and dissemination of the technical arts and sciences, Masons believed that they were helping to build utopia.
As Noble shows, Masons also participated heavily in constructing the educational institutions that gave birth to the modern engineer. “Through Freemasonry, the apostles of the religion of technology passed their practical project of redemption on to the engineers, the new spiritual men, who subsequently forged their own millenarian myths, exclusive associations, and rites of passage.”4 In America, this technological evangelism was principally carried forward by Benjamin Franklin, an indefatigable promoter of science and technology and the onetime Grand Master of the French Loge des Neuf Soeurs. Like countless later American Masons, including Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the astronauts John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin, Franklin put into practice America’s cult of the technological sublime. As the American religious scholar Catherine Albanese argues in her discussion of American Masonry, “if any genuinely new popular religion arose in New World America, it was a nature religion of radical empiricism, with the aim of that religion to conflate spirit and matter and, in the process, turn human beings into gods.”5
Albanese argues that America’s self-deifying nature religion was not based solely on empirical knowledge or Romanticism or Masonic politics; it also turned on the metaphysical notion of “natural” liberty, a notion that identified the essential freedom of the individual with the supposedly uncultivated wilderness of the New World. “Nature, in American nature religion, is a reference point with which to think history,” Albanese writes. “Its sacrality masks—and often quite explicitly reveals—a passionate concern for place and mastery in society.”6 That is, nature’s aboriginal freedom from human society in turn becomes a basis for a new understanding of society, one that emphasizes the naturally endowed sovereignty of the individual and his pursuits. This imaginative and political relationship to the prima materia of virgin territory also helps explain America’s almost mystical obsession with the frontier, an obsession that, as we will see, plays directly into the early mythology of the Internet.
The American frontier is one of the great mythic mindscapes of the modern world. An El Dorado of literally golden opportunity, the Western territories were also a landscape of the solitary soul, virtual spaces where the American self could remake and rediscover its longed-for origins. The frontier was a liminal zone beyond the mundane boundaries of civil society, with its archons of politicians, lawyers, and established religious institutions. In the nineteenth century, the myth of the frontier was inscribed into the national consciousness with a fetishistic force that could barely conceal the tremendous violence and exploitation that marked actual Western expansion. Pulp novels, newspapers, and Wild West shows trumpeted the heroism and self-sufficiency of pioneers, gunslingers, and mountain men; at the same time, the Mormons, a visionary and hermetic cult steeped in gnostic dreams of self-divinization, reimagined the harsh and monumental landscape of the Southwest as a Biblical desert where covenants could be restored and a new purchase made on a fallen world. The rhetoric of the frontier became an indelible component of America’s peculiarly stubborn optimism, its worship of the free self and free enterprise, its utopian imagination and its incandescent greed.
When the geographic frontier closed at the end of the nineteenth century, America was forced to sublimate its obsession with wilderness. In the popular culture of the twentieth century, the West’s sacred fusion of freedom, self-sufficiency, and wide-open spaces would infect everything from the Boy Scouts to NASA to the ecology movement. But the most influential purveyor of the frontier myth was Hollywood, which churned out westerns at a mind-boggling clip for well over half a century. Into the dream medium of celluloid was etched America’s supreme archetype of the free individual: the cowboy, a violent hybrid of Arthurian knight and ascetic nomad who stands apart from social laws in order to tame the wilderness within and without, and who thus tastes a kind of freedom and self-understanding that the communities he makes way for will never comprehend.
In the 1980s, with a former Hollywood wrangler ensconced in the Oval Office, the cowboy reappeared in a most unlikely terrain: the disembodied “space” of computer networks. When William Gibson chose to dub his cyberspace jockeys “cowboys” in 1984’s Neuromancer, he intuited the psychological dynamism that would come to fuel the real culture of early cyberspace, a culture that, at the time his book was written, was still in the mounta
in man and fur trapper phase. Even by the early 1990s, the Internet was still a lawless place of sorts, and the rollicking experimental anarchy of its social structures, technical triumphs, and heretical conversations—as well as those of its sister bulletin boards—is now the stuff of fading legend. Of course, a computer network composed of abstract dataflows, wires, Unix servers, and file-transfer protocols can hardly be considered an actual “space” at all. But spatial metaphors inevitably emerged, lending the medium an imaginary dimension that paradoxically made it more real. Perhaps the first person to apply Gibson’s word cyberspace to actual digital networks was the digital pundit John Perry Barlow, a Grateful Dead lyricist and denizen of the WELL, the Bay Area’s legendary electronic bulletin board. An ex-rancher from Wyoming, Barlow also played a role in propagating one of the first and most important mythic images to drape cyberspace: the frontier. Though the ensuing dominance of the “digital frontier” metaphor had as much to do with lazy journalists as with network proselytizers, it can nonetheless be traced to America’s libertarian imagination, with its primal identification of wilderness and freedom. Given the independent-minded, mostly white male Americans who were probing the technical and social possibilities of networked computers—not to mention the gold rush flashbacks already hitting the Bay Area’s blossoming computer industry—the “digital frontier” emerged from America’s technological unconscious with all the predictability of a high-noon shoot-out.
