by Erik Davis
Today the fears of Debord, Adorno, and Ellul may seem musty and rather extreme, but it’s important to remember that all these writers wrote with the necromantic specter of European fascism in mind. After all, Hitler used Olympian electric spectacles, occult symbols, sophisticated propaganda, and what McLuhan called “the tribal drum of radio” to drag a thoroughly industrialized nation into a Wagnerian horror show of barbaric proportions. While our current media climate seems far too open and tumultuous for such totalitarian horrors to arise, any visions of the inherently liberating and democratic power of the information age must wrestle with the fact that only a small handful of gargantuan corporations now dominate the bulk of media traffic across the planet. Though today’s crew of spin doctors, marketeers, and corporate shills are not a particularly ideological lot, their rain dances do attempt to ensure the continued prosperity of the global business climate, often to the detriment of social, cultural, and ecological considerations. Some critics fear that we are being mesmerized by the media’s increasingly powerful and pervasive specters at the very moment that the possibilities of real change are being sacrificed on the altar of the invisible hand.
Though the boundaries between marketplace and imaginal space have always been porous, America’s culture industry has in many ways simply fused the two. Golden arches, Trump towers, Gotham cities, and Las Vegas pyramids now tower over the landscape of imaginative desire. Our collective symbols are forged in the multiplex, our archetypes trademarked, licensed, and sold. With unintended irony, Disney has dubbed its own industrial production of phantasms “imagineering”; others simply call it the corporate colonization of the unconscious. A baroque arcana of logos, brand names, and corporate sigils now pepper landscapes, goods, and our costumed bodies. A century ago, advertisements were almost exclusively textual, but today’s marketing engines now saturate the social field with hieroglyphics to an extent never seen before in human history. Unlike the figures of Egyptian lore, our mnemonic icons no longer mediate the animist powers of nature or the social magic of kings, but the power of corporate identity and the commodity fetish. Many consumers, especially young people, cling to logos as if they were clan totems; in the 1990s, some enthusiastic Nike employees went so far as to tattoo the “swoosh” on their calves and upper thighs, etching into their flesh McLuhan’s insight that the great corporations were the new tribal families.
Such tribal myths are hardly restricted to corporate culture or the logomania of fashion victims. Anthropologically speaking, many of the youth subcultures that have popped up like mushrooms across the landscape of the postwar West might well be considered tribes. Mods, rockers, hippies, punks, skinheads, street gangs, football hooligans, rap crews, and ravers—all of these grassroots subcultures use some hermetic combination of slang, music, body language, and insignia to define themselves as a tightly knit group whose unique rituals and frequently nomadic movements are set against the organized anomie of modern life. For some subcultures, the echoes of tribalism are explicitly part of the package: rainbow families mimic Native American rituals, while “modern primitives” adorn themselves with Gothic pierces, African earplugs, and Maori tattoos.
Many such subcultures can also be defined as “media tribes.” Hackers, DJ crews, and pirate radio posses bond over technology, while fan cultures actively splice up and reconfigure mass media in accordance with their own needs and desires. The enthusiastic and sometimes ecstatic musical “cults” that have formed around the Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Rastafarian reggae, heavy metal, and electronic dance music are perhaps the epitome of this process. Sometimes the term is almost literal; for thousands of American Elvis fans, the cult of the King now satisfies devotional desires that an immortal Jesus once did. Though media companies actively attempt to stimulate such profitable fanaticism, the emotions and desires themselves run deeper than advertising, and can sometimes generate an authentic quality of folk culture. Star Trek and its various spin-offs function as modern mythologies not only because Paramount’s scriptwriters dip into Joseph Campbell, but because Trekkers have lent the show resonance and depth by investing it with personal meanings, collective rituals, and a profound sense of play. Trekker conventions are not simply orgies of collector frenzy and star worship, but costumed carnivals of the postmodern imagination.
Following the work of the social historian Michel de Certeau, many cultural studies theorists describe these inventive attempts to reappropriate mass culture as “poaching.” According to de Certeau, modern poachers recognize that they cannot defeat the massive social institutions that surround them, and so they pilfer symbols, practices, and commodities on the sly, using them for their own purposes. Praising the art of poaching, de Certeau suggests that people can resist the stifling frameworks of contemporary urban civilization through the imaginative tactics they deploy in their everyday lives.
Increasingly constrained, yet less and less concerned with these vast frameworks, the individual detaches himself from them without being able to escape them and can henceforth only try to outwit them, to pull tricks on them, to rediscover, within an electronicized and computerized megalopolis, the “art” of the hunters and rural folk of earlier days.15
This art is magic, in the most broad and poetic sense of the term. But rather than the arresting magic of authoritarian social institutions, the poacher performs creative magic, a critical rebellion of the grassroots imagination against the symbolic and social frameworks of consensus reality. While arresting magicians disguise their spells as Apollonian truths, as reality pure and simple, creative magicians manifest the mischievous trickery of Hermes. They exploit the rich ambiguities of words, images, identities, commodities, and social practices in order to craft protean perspectives, to rupture business as usual, and to stir up new ways of seeing and being in a world striated with invisible grids of technocultural engineering.
Technopagans
Some of the most self-consciously creative magicians wielding spells today are found in the world of contemporary Paganism, an earthy and celebratory magical culture that attempts to reboot the rituals, myths, and gods of ancient polytheistic cultures. Pagans are far too anarchic to be lumped into a movement, and they come in many flavors—witches (they prefer Wiccans), fairies, druids, Goddess worshippers, ceremonial magicians, Discordians. They might worship trees, invoke the Horned God and the Great Goddess, toss rune stones, or dance around bonfires. But one thing that unites all Pagans is their sense of the imagination as a craft—at once an art, an instrumental practice, and a vessel for spirit.
Though some Pagans claim direct contact with hidden traditions centuries old, most trace Paganism’s modern roots to the 1940s, when a civil servant and nudist named Gerald Gardner founded a witchcraft coven in the British Isles. From that point on, Pagans have cobbled together their rituals and cosmologies from existing occult traditions, their own imaginative needs, and fragments of lore found in dusty tomes of folktales and anthropology. Pagans have self-consciously invented their religion, making up their “ancient ways” as they go along. Highly aware of their outsider status, Pagans also set themselves in opposition to what they see as the patriarchal, authoritarian, and antiecological forms of spirituality that have dominated the Christian West. Women play an enormous role in practice and worship alike, and much of the Goddess feminism that permeates the New Age and the fringes of liberal Christianity can be traced to pioneering Wiccan feminists like Z. Budapest and Starhawk. But though Pagans root through the New Age grab bag of positive thinking, healing meditations, and Gaian mysticism, they also embrace the embodied world, grounding the higher frequencies in what the Pagan writer Chas Clifton describes as “dirt and flowers, blood and running water, sex and sickness, spells and household tools.”16 With passionate and often deliberately amusing verve, they insist on the sacredness of the body and the earth, and most believe that the active cultivation of magic can build a bridge back to the enchanted, but very concrete, world that most humans lived in before the Enlightenm
ent reduced the anima mundi to a soulless machine.
In 1985, when the witch and NPR reporter Margot Adler was revising Drawing Down the Moon, her great social history of American Paganism, she conducted a survey of the community and discovered something that would surprise anyone teleported into the woolly Renaissance Faire atmosphere of your typical Pagan gathering: an “amazingly” high percentage of this willfully anachronistic bunch drew their paychecks from technical fields and the computer industry. In her 1989 study of modern witchcraft in England, the anthropologist T. M. Luhrmann also found that a significant number of her subjects were similarly involved with computers. Adler’s respondents gave many reasons for this apparently paradoxical affinity—everything from the belief that “computers are elementals in disguise” to the simple fact that the computer industry provided jobs for the kind of smart, iconoclastic, and experimental types that Paganism attracts. But one suspects that most of these “technopagans” would also get behind the science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke’s amply cited claim that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—a quip that deserves more scrutiny than it usually receives.
As a rationalist (if an often mystical one), Clarke cannot be accused of setting ICBMs and Deep Blue on the same shelf as love potions and mojo wads. What he seems to mean is that, in sociocultural terms, advanced technologies appear to be magical. For many people, condemned by lax education and uneven patterns of development to remain uninitiated into the logical world that undergirds our massive arrays of machinery, advanced technologies seem magical because they seem spontaneous and supernatural. Even among the well educated, people often know more about the warp coil converters on the USS Enterprise than they do about their CPUs or their local utility grid.
The situation is not likely to improve. In the old days, at least, you could see or even touch the latest machines as they made their way through the world, grinding up raw materials, assembling objects, blowing things up, and racing across the surface of the planet. It was easy to understand that these contraptions were mere machines, exploiting perfectly natural forces through clever arrangements of mechanical parts and guileless forces of energy. But today’s digital technologies have reached the beachhead of the incorporeal, with the smallest components on some chips shrinking below the wavelength of visible light. Microtechnologies reorganize matter on the scale of silicon grains and genetic base pairs; they invade and inhabit the body; they sculpt vibrating streams of electrons into complex invisible architectures of logic and information. Twenty years ago, you had half a chance of fixing your car; these days, with computer chips and miniature sensors scattered through the vehicle like chunks of fudge in a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, you need some serious tech just to hack the nature of a glitch. The logic of technology has become invisible—literally, occult. Without the code, you’re mystified. And nobody has all the codes anymore.
Clarke’s maxim can be interpreted more positively as well. Powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality. They allow humans to impress their dreaming wills upon the stuff of the world, reshaping it, at least in part, according to the designs of the imagination. Of course, as we integrate new technologies into the workaday world, their pixie dust settles, and their glamour—in the old fairy-lore sense of a compelling spell—disappears. New inventions are also notorious for conjuring up situations, many of them decidedly unpleasant, that nobody could possibly have imagined in advance. But the mages in the R&D labs, possessed by what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the “demon of Research,” show every sign of continuing to churn out phenomenal new technologies. Whether these machines and techniques do their tricks with digital or genetic code, they will, at the very least, produce the illusion of leading the mind ever closer to its longed-for mastery of matter. And if we remember that appearances compose our world as much as truths, then the ceaseless emergence of advanced technologies that define life in the twenty-first century may paradoxically draw us into a silicon wizard world.
Such paradoxes tantalize many a technopagan, but there are also some basic sociological reasons for the healthy number of folks that overlap computer culture and the occult fringe. One meeting ground is science fiction and fantasy fandom, a deeply imaginative subculture whose bookworm enthusiasm and geeky humor has bred many a Pagan. The Church of All Worlds, one of the more eclectic and long-lasting American magical groups (and the first to start calling themselves “Pagans”), began when some undergraduate libertarians started practicing the polygamous Martian religion described in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Many Pagans inject their public rituals or personal cosmologies with self-consciously playful references to Star Trek, Tolkien, or comic books. Such pop culture “poachings” reach their giddiest peak in the satirical Church of the SubGenius, a mock fringe religion whose goofy devotion to flying saucers, thrift store kitsch, and a pipe-smoking Ward Cleaver–like god named Bob conceal rather profound explorations of America’s magical mind.
Though many computer buffs don’t go in for this kind of stuff, allusions to science fiction and fantasy fiction have long been staples of hacker culture, and the popularity of role-playing games has, as we will see in the next chapter, unleashed occult phantasms inside the cultural circuitry of the digital age. One reason that hackers are attracted to these genres is that science-fiction and fantasy writers don’t just tell tales—they build worlds. Though SF writers generally stick closer to scientific plausibility, the creators of both genres usually try to make their scenarios ring true by establishing certain axiomatic conditions (ecology, fantastic technologies, social stratification) and then developing narratives within those parameters. Hackers and witches also take to these genres because, as Luhrmann points out, “both magic and computer science involve creating a world defined by chosen rules, and playing within their limits.”17 With a certain interpretive license, we could say that this process describes all creative religious thought, although Pagans bring a peculiar self-awareness and playful tinkering to their sacred fabrications, rarely overlooking the role of the human operator in the process.
If you visit a contemporary Pagan festival like Starwood or PantheaCon, you might see groups of suburbanites dressed like Morticia Addams and Ming the Merciless waving ceremonial knives at the moon and chanting to Pan in singsong rhymes. You might reasonably conclude that these folks had simply abandoned their heritage as modern people and reverted to the superstitions of the past. But a good number of Pagans don’t adopt premodern belief systems so much as ignore the limitations imposed by the belief systems modern people already hold. The heaviest magic users often pride themselves on their skeptical relativism, deeply questioning all appearances and truth-claims—including, to be sure, the orthodox scientific accounts of the relationship between mind and matter. The canniest Pagans proceed empirically, using their “workings” to explore the possibilities inherent in the human bodymind on a pragmatic and subjective basis. The American druid Isaac Bonewits, author of the early and influential Pagan text Real Magic, considers himself a materialist; as he told Margot Adler, “I just have a somewhat looser definition of matter than most people.”18 In constructing a premodern religion in a postmodern world, Pagans have thus learned to maneuver between technoscientific categories and imaginative practice. And they have done so in part by replacing the religious question of belief with the hands-on exploration of embodied experience and altered states of consciousness. The notorious occultist Aleister Crowley captured the essence of this imaginative pragmatism when he wrote that magic speaks of “spirits and conjurations, of gods, spheres, planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow.”19 Whatever metaphysics Pagans hold, the proof of practice remains in the pudding—and the ingredients can always be tweaked. That’s why occult shops stuff their shelves with herbs, potions, amulets, an
d ritual paraphernalia alongside countless manuals, almanacs, and ritual cookbooks. Pagans are makers.
This experimental spiritual pragmatism has made it easy for Pagans to embrace new occult technologies: sophisticated astrological software, I Ching programs, Tarot apps. More important, it has led them to reimagine “technology” as both a metaphor and a tool for ritual. In a sense, the connection was there all along; as the anthropologist Ronald Grimes points out, magical rites are performances that refer to mystical powers in a technological manner, “and must not be definitionally separated from technology.”20 In the words of Sam Webster, an accomplished ceremonial magician and a former webmaster at Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, ritual is “the principal technology for programming the human organism.” According to Webster, Pagan ritual serves as a kind of virtual theater that cultivates, or “programs,” intentions and spiritual experiences in participants. With its dramatic language of gesture, symbol, word, and scent, ritual bypasses the intellect and stimulates psychological and perceptual aspects of the self that register on a more subliminal level; by cutting a pentagram into the air or dancing a wild spiral dance, the self submits to the designs of human and cosmic powers on a more visceral plane than philosophical conceptions or sermons allow.
Orthodox and Catholic Christians also recognize the extraordinary power of ritual, but they would describe the force of liturgy as arising from the spiritual authority of tradition. By rejecting such institutional claims, Pagans instead bring the question around to intent: what do we want to achieve with this ritual program? What powers—natural, emotional, social—do we want the self to engage? As Webster noted in an email interview, the metaphor of technology allows one to think about the transformative potential of ritual without lapsing into “fuzzyminded” mysticism. “By seeing what we are doing as tech, we can avoid seeing [it] as a sacred cow, and instead criticize it with accuracy and without attachment: is it doing what we intend? If so, can we improve on it? If not, how not: change or trash.”21 Though at first it may seem as if the notion of “ritual technology” would sap rites of their psychospiritual efficacy, Paganism’s creative and experimental approach to the sacred seems to actually profit from its self-conscious instrumentality. Of course, such technological thinking also brings along the familiar sorts of problems discussed earlier; Webster notes that many magic users get caught up with “the tech” for its own sake and pay much less attention to refining their spiritual goals.
