by Erik Davis
The love that Pagans and other contemporary magic users have for tinkering and arcana may help explain the fact that they became one of the first religious subcultures to colonize cyberspace. These days, of course, even the most stick-in-the-mud religions have set up glowing shrines along the old information superhighway, and Net surfers can learn more than most want to know about Baha’i, Byzantine monasticism, or the Vatican library. But Pagans were online, and in force, long before the World Wide Web, and the Net continues to house a disproportionate amount of information on occult subjects. Such databases are a natural outgrowth of Pagandom’s love of lore, but for many Pagans, the computer serves more vital religious purposes than the need for bitmapped hieroglyphs or torrent files of Crowley’s pornographic poesy. Collective anarchy is the nature of Pagan community, an unstable social structure in which the loose exchange of information between far-flung and often cantankerous groups plays a binding role that dogmatic hierarchies play in orthodox religions. Decades ago, Pagans poured enormous loads of time and effort into zines like Green Egg and WomanSpirit—frequently hand-stapled, low-budget communiqués sent through the post. Needless to say, computer bulletin boards (and later websites) fit this heterodox and talkative community like a leather glove. By the late 1980s, hundreds of electronic Pagan BBSes dotted the land, boasting names like the El Segundo Spiders Web, the Fort Lauderdale Summerland, and Ritual Magick Online. The anarchic environs of the Internet, with its chat lines and newsgroups, swelled with Wiccans and druids, and Usenet’s alt.pagan and alt.magic hierarchies became flaming cauldrons of debate.
For the bulk of Pagans and magic users, online community plays second fiddle to spiritual experience. Paganism is an earth religion, after all, and its practitioners seek sacred communion on the material plane, in woods and deserts and black-lit basements, amid unguents and drums and dancing flesh. This visionary materialism is worlds away from the incorporeal signs of the Internet, and some Pagans, especially goddess-oriented Wiccans, distrust the cyberspace obsessions of technopagans, fearing that the enthusiasm for online chat and virtual reality may simply reproduce the same disembodied and ecologically bankrupt tendencies of modern civilization that Pagandom otherwise so imaginatively resists.
But the antinomian mages who occupy the darker bands of the contemporary occult spectrum have few such qualms. Among this more sorcerous and satanic crew, many of whom reject the label of “Pagan” as too vanilla, chaos magicians have come to play a vital and vocal role, and established themselves early on the Internet. A soberly irreverent antitradition, chaos magic rejects the historical symbolic systems of the occult as arbitrary constructs devoid of any intrinsic “spiritual” power. For these postmodern magicians, the naive and crunchy romanticism of Paganism’s “ancient ways” obscures the true source of magic: the mage’s own will, making itself up in the existential emptiness of an impersonal and relativistic cosmos. Chaos magicians might accept the reality of paranormal events, but they are more apt to chalk them up to “fourth-dimensional exchanges of information” or the primal instincts of the human brainstem than to gaseous specters from dead cultures. Even when they do invoke godforms, they are more likely to traffic with one of the eldritch creepies from H. P. Lovecraft’s pulp fiction than with an old ham like Pan. As you might expect, chaos magicians often dig computers—as the magickal nethead behind the classic meta-list MaGI put it, “Most Neopagans would connect [electronically] and say, let’s get together and do a ritual, while chaos magicians would say, let’s do the ritual online.”22
The chthonic forces that chaos magicians call upon may seem like little more than an occult primal scream, but such forces can be put to critical use. For members of the Temple ov Psychic Youth, a technopagan outgrowth of the British industrial musician Genesis P-Orridge’s mid-eighties group Psychic TV, the dark and convulsive energies of chaos magic are a wake-up call. Loosely echoing the fears raised by Ellul, Adorno, and other critics of modern civilization, TOPY considers mainstream society as nothing more than a totalitarian system of social control. Like de Certeau’s poachers, they try to outwit and trick the society of the spectacle, breaking its ideological spell through atavistic magic, experimental media, and darkside sexuality. Along with reclaiming their bodies through the kind of tribal tattoos and novel piercings that would later spread to the mall, TOPYites spent a lot of time communicating through alternative networks in which the information they passed around seemed less important than the manner in which it was swapped. When he still served as the movement’s ideologue, Genesis P-Orridge also put great magical weight in the cut-and-paste techniques first developed by the Beat artists William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Orridge argued that these disruptive and recombinant tactics could be deployed in music, visual media, and collage art in order to rupture social programming and consensus trance. But TOPY’s most brazenly imaginative—if rather desperate—act of media poaching was the television magic described in Orridge’s book Esoterrorist. Though deploring TV’s use as a tool of mass indoctrination, Orridge also believed that, actively engaged, the tube could be a “modern alchemical weapon,” an electromagnetic threshold into the primal goo of dreams. Some TOPYites used the TV as a scrying stone (or “crystal ball”). After tuning in to a dead channel, they would stare at the dancing static until strange patterns and images emerged.
This kind of occult pop art is an extreme example of the technopagan will to reenchant contemporary psychic tools along the lines of archaic ones. But as suggested earlier, modern electronic technologies have been enchanted to some degree all along, and technopagan magic must be seen in the larger and more ambivalent context of a widespread, if unacknowledged, technological animism. As the science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick noted in a 1972 speech:
… our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the … primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense, our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive.23
The paradox that Dick describes is considerable. With their exacting and mechanized logic, computers are in some sense the farthest outpost yet reached on the West’s technologically mediated flight from archaic animism. Along this journey, we reimagined the cosmos and ourselves through progressively more complex images of the machine: the loom, the potter’s wheel, the clock, the steam engine. Scientific reductionism banished the spirits and intelligences of premodern cosmology from our perceptions of the physical world. And yet today an electronic parody of these powers has subtly come home to roost, not in the reenchanted Gaia worshipped by the Pagans, but in the popular media and amazing mechanisms of the information age. For just as the timber conglomerates chase the last of the old ones from the ancient rain forests, our digital technologies appear to be acquiring mind.
The computer is the most animated and intelligent of machines, the most interactive, and by far the least “mechanical.” Even if we insist upon their entirely mechanical nature, these cybernetic contraptions are now so resilient and complex that they provide us with technological reflections of thought itself, and even life. This potential explains why the electronic computers of the 1950s so quickly gave rise to the notion of artificial intelligence, and why some of today’s computer scientists seriously consider the possibility of breeding life forms made of digital code. Though wisecracking AIs have yet to see the light of day, the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs—including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots—that trawl the Net, replicate themselves, perform various data-processing deeds (often on the sly), and return to their masters with information in tow—that is, if they have masters at all.
Philosophers and programmers may wrangle over the question of how “alive” these wild things really are, but the question of technological life cannot be decided solely with the analytic languag
e of neural networks, Darwinian selection, and genetic algorithms. For all its technical prowess, such language tends to disguise the fact that our sense of agency, of the presence of life and intelligence, also depends on the narratives and emotions that structure our everyday experience of the world. Though the chess grand master Garry Kasparov knew that Deep Blue was devoid of desires and intuitions, he claimed to sense a thinking opponent, a perception that did not derive from the machine’s data architecture but from his own embodied relationship with a social actor. Many computer users unconsciously treat their devices as pesky if powerful imps, an animist relationship to the machine that is often encouraged by the design of user interfaces, games, and children’s software. Millions of kids bought the Bandai Company’s Tamagotchis—digital pets that inhabited handheld calculator-like gadgets—because their feelings were engaged by a narrative construction of technological life. And if the designers of “intelligent agents” have their way, then far more explicitly lifelike digital critters will be loosed into the information jungle, bargaining for plane tickets, leading us through databases, and undoubtedly trying to make a buck from us as well.
Perhaps the phenomenon of techno-animism is nothing more than the latest upgrade from the society of the spectacle, infantilizing spells designed to crush whatever critical distance still allows some of us to question the technocapitalist domination of the world. On the other hand, a degree of animism can also be seen as a psychologically appropriate and imaginatively pragmatic response to the peculiar qualities of a deeply mediated world. We associate intelligence with what reads and writes, and nowadays everything electronic reads and writes. For technopagans, the fallout from this is clear: the postmodern world of digital simulacra is ripe for the premodern skills of the witch and magician. To be sure, the “return of magic” may be just another story to while away the postindustrial night, but it is precisely through such stories that technologies gain their character, if not their lives. In this sense, the evil AIs, sexy androids, and cuddly robots that keep popping up in comic books, video games, movies, and television are not just pop culture effluvium, but narrative figures who are helping to thicken the plots we are weaving with very real, and very spunky, technologies. Magic too is a myth, but myths shape our machines into meanings. And nowhere is this metamorphosis more evident than with the most vivid and enchanting myth that computers have yet to conjure: the myth that they can act as portals to another world, another dimension of space itself.
VII
Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft
Like Trojan horses, buzzwords carry their own secret contents, hidden histories and meanings that many of their users hardly suspect. Many people first heard the term virtual reality in the beginning of the 1990s, when a large and very clever dreadlocked gearhead named Jaron Lanier started showing off various goggles and gloves capable of launching the mind into three-dimensional worlds made of computer graphics. Hitting the mass brainstem like a rush of crack, the term rapidly took on the millennialist charge of all pop futurisms. Though the hype died down when the technology failed to deliver digital dreamtime, virtual reality remains a fundamental raison d’être of computer culture, a holy grail that keeps beckoning through the forest of tangled protocols and clunky hardware.
But virtual reality was not hatched in the hopped-up halls of Silicon Valley. Back in 1938, the French playwright, film actor, and state-declared madman Antonin Artaud dropped the phrase in one of the blazing manifestos collected in his magnum opus, The Theater and Its Double. Discussing the “mysterious identity of essence between alchemy and the theater,” Artaud argued that the theater creates a virtual reality—“la réalité virtuelle”—in which characters, objects, and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy’s visionary internal dramas. For Artaud, theater is no more about representing ordinary life than alchemy is about the chemical transmutation of lead into gold. Instead, both of these symbolic rituals should catalyze the same psychological states once produced in the “archetypal, primitive theater” of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the shamanic Orphic cults of ancient Greece. Artaud argued that, at their essential core, these ancient ritual spectacles evoked “the passionate and decisive transfusion of matter by mind”—the ultimate gnostic transmutation of reality that alchemists symbolized with the fabled philosopher’s stone.
Artaud wrote that the image of this spiritualized state of matter beckons to us from “the incandescent edges of the future,” and that it is this brass ring that powerful art and theater are constantly striving to hook. But today it is technology that restlessly plunges toward the incandescent edge of the future. As we’ll see in this chapter, the techgnostic drive does not aim solely for the disembodied cognitive augmentation of the Extropians; it also sets its sights on a more hermetic world of magical iconography, mythic masks, and otherworldly journeys. The VR gear trumpeted by Lanier provided one snapshot of such an alchemical realm, but the astral plane of technoculture had already made its appearance in, of all places, a science-fiction novel.
Written on a Hermes 2000 manual typewriter and published in the prophetic year of 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer hit the cultural cortex around the same time that personal computers invaded the home, and world financial markets launched into twenty-four-hour orbit. Though both Hollywood and recent history have made Gibson’s dystopian vision of gritty data-hustlers, cutthroat corporations, and pervasive brand names as clichéd as the trench coats and femmes fatales of the noir thrillers that Gibson drew from, the novel’s continued relevance (and resonance) can be boiled down to one single, almost religiously cited image: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination.… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.… Lines of light ranged in the non space of the mind.”1 Like all great mythic images, cyberspace suggested more than it explained, and while it concealed ironies its many enthusiasts would miss, it also provided an early conceptual handle for the emerging hyperspace of digital communication. By hinting that the “unthinkable complexity” of the world’s networks and databases could be tamed by an interactive three-dimensional map you could “jack into” through a video game deck, Gibson’s vision struck a deep chord, crystallizing the inchoate desires of everyone from hackers to journalists to psychedelic bohemians. By the end of the 1980s, cyberspace had become a cultural attractor, sucking an increasingly computerized society forward with the relentless force of a Star Wars tractor beam.
For megatrend watchers and hype masters, cyberspace came to serve as a shorthand for a variety of very different developments—virtual reality, computer games, the rapid growth of Internet traffic, and the electronic etherealization of commerce across the globe. Barlow simply defined cyberspace as the place where you are when you’re on the phone. But for others, Neuromancer’s “consensual hallucination” appeared to be something much more. In her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, the science writer Margaret Wertheim argues that by creating a space that follows the virtual laws of thought rather than the concrete laws of matter, cyberspace provides a cosmos where the psyche can once again live and breathe. “Strange though it may seem for a quintessentially twentieth-century technology, cyberspace brings the historical wheel full circle and returns us to an almost medieval position, to a two-tiered reality in which psyche and soma each have their own space of action.”2 Like novels or cinema or comic books, cyberspace gives us a place to suspend the usual scientific rules that constrain the physical reality where our bodies live. But unlike these media, cyberspace is a shared interactive environment, an electronic “soul-space” that beckons the postmodern psyche to both find and remake itself.
Many people working inside the computer industry recognized the possibilities of technological soul-space as well, including a particularly energetic computer geek named Mark Pesce. In the early 1990s, Pesce concluded that the best way to build real cyberspace was to “perceptualize the Internet.” So over the next few years, he and a few cronies cooked up VRML, a �
�virtual reality markup language” that would add a graphic third dimension to the World Wide Web’s tangled two-dimensional hypertext of pages, links, and endless URLs. For Pesce, as well as the legion of enthusiastic techheads infected by his charismatic trade show evangelism, VRML became the key to transforming the Web into a world, or rather a universe of worlds, each capable of nesting information within a kind of virtual theater: downtown Boston, a mock-up of Stonehenge, a blasted moonscape littered with Day-Glo monoliths.
Mark Pesce is also a technopagan, a goddess-worshipper, ritual magician, and occasional partaker of psychedelic sacraments. VRML was not just his day job, but a vital dimension of his occult work. As Pesce said in 1994:
Both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination. Both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs. Korzybski says that the map is not the territory. Well, in magic, the map is the territory. And the same thing is true in cyberspace. There’s nothing in that space you didn’t bring in.3
For Pesce, you don’t need to anthropomorphize computers to give them a spiritual dimension. Computers can be sacred simply because human beings are sacred. Spiritual reality does not descend from on high; it is something we discover and make for ourselves, through our symbols and rituals and communicative interaction. Because cyberspace embodies and extends our symbol-making minds, it can mediate these sacred communications with each other, as well as “with the entities—the divine parts of ourselves—that we invoke in that space.”
