by Erik Davis
As the historian Frances Yates shows in her classic book The Art of Memory, the magical and mystical potentials of these premodern psychic architectures were thoroughly exploited by our old friends the Renaissance hermeticists. Though magicians had an obvious attraction to creative internal imagery, a more religious reason for their embrace of the art lay in the eleventh treatise of the Corpus Hermeticum. In the text, the divine character known as Mind informs Hermes Trismegistus that “you must think of god in this way, as having everything—the cosmos, himself, [the] universe—like thoughts within himself. Thus, unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god.”16 For Renaissance intellectuals like Giulio Camillo, Giordano Bruno, and the later Robert Fludd, the implications were clear: the magus must build himself a divine and encyclopedic memory. As the historian Peter French explains, “by inscribing a representation of the universe within his own mens [higher mind], man can ascend and unite with God.”17 And what better technology of representation than the art of memory?
After all, your typical aspiring mage was already up to his eyeballs in data. Striving to grok the occult networks that bound together the World Soul, hermeticists hoarded a stunning amount of information: angelic names, astrological deities, and numerological correspondences; ciphers, signs, and sigils; lists of herbs, metals, and incense. Renaissance tomes like Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy are as packed with charts and lists and instructions as any O’Reilly bible. When it came to spatially organizing this welter of material along the lines of the ars memoria, the Renaissance mages turned to the heavens themselves, or more specifically, to the astrological high-rise of Neoplatonic and medieval cosmology. This cosmic map became the macrocosmic “palace” that housed the microcosmic encyclopedia of the world, organized by various hieroglyphic icons that ruled different facets of human knowledge. Though hardly a rigorous taxonomy, this system of symbolic correspondences did possess a certain economy. Regarding such hermetic glyphs, Mark Pesce noted that “You can manipulate a whole bunch of things with one symbol, dragging in a whole idea space with one icon. It’s like a nice compression algorithm.”18 As such, the icons utilized by the mages of the ars memoria broke down the distinction between literal and figurative. Like the allegedly magical hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians, these mnemonic cues both signified and manifested the power they represented; by manipulating sigils and images associated with Venus or Mars, the magus was not just manipulating representations, but trafficking with the forces themselves. Similarly, the icons of hypertext or the World Wide Web simultaneously function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality. As Jay David Bolter notes in Writing Space, “Electronic writing is more like hieroglyphs than it is like pure alphabetic writing.”19
This may help explain why the esoteric domains of the World Wide Web are stuffed with sites devoted to Giulio Camillo, whose elaborate wooden memory theaters, encrusted with hermetic images and icons, became the talk of the town in the sixteenth century. But the most sophisticated Renaissance memory hacker was Giordano Bruno, best known for ending his days as Vatican kindling, a “martyr to science” whose heretical advocacy of Copernicanism was actually motivated by his enthusiasm for pagan sun worship. Believing that the astral forces that govern the outer world also operate within, and can be reproduced there to operate “a magico-mechanical memory,” Bruno created data-dense memory charts based on a complex Egyptian iconography of star-beings. These fantastic daemons, who should not be confused with Christian demons, were not only “active” and “striking” mnemonic icons, but also living spiritual entities—the intelligent agents of Bruno’s universe of knowledge. Bruno also introduced movement into his system through the use of revolving gears of abstract symbols superficially similar to diagrams of symbolic logic. These secret decoder rings derived from the ars combinatoria of the thirteenth-century Catalan mystic Ramon Llull, who believed that his logical wheels could automatically demonstrate the divine attributes of God.
It’s hardly surprising that Yates, writing in the 1960s, saw a “curiously close” link between Bruno’s magico-mechanical memory systems—with their “appalling complexity”—and the “mind machines” discussed in the press, and we can understand the poetic logic that led a German philosopher named Werner Klinzel to translate Llull’s art into the computer language COBOL. For Bolter, the connection between the scientist and the Renaissance magus makes sense, for both operators “share the feeling that memory is the key to human knowledge and therefore to human control of the world.”20 Bolter points out that the memory devices of Bruno and others not only reflected the world of sense perceptions but also the “true” metaphysical structure of the cosmos; moreover, the manipulation of this hidden structure would itself open up all the realms of humanly accessible knowledge. So too, Bolter argues, does the computer specialist believe that his computer reflects the true logical structure of the universe, a structure of information and computation that also provides for ultimate control.
So while the technical specs and blueprints of the ars memoria dimly anticipate the possible architectures of cyberspace, they even more profoundly reflect the desire we share with the Renaissance hermeticists: to know the world and its information by capturing it in a virtual representation we can manipulate. The Renaissance might even be defined as a revolution in point of view: the discovery of the compass, the invention of perspective drawing, the leap forward in the science of mapmaking, and the mass production of printed images. But these technical developments only indicate a deeper mutation in the human subject: the Renaissance man whose eyes roved far and wide, who explored and mastered what he saw, and whose maps and gadgets helped him dominate the material spaces of the earth. Even though the Internet is unlikely to achieve any sort of cartographic coherence, it and the myriad offline databases exploiting new visualization tools remain driven by the hermeticist’s desire to master an associational field of icons and data, a mnemonic space where “information is power” and a planet’s worth of knowledge is only a click away.
In the Similitude of a Dream
Given all the news feeds, sports stats, and lulz available on the Internet, all this talk of wizards and memory palaces may seem a trifle dramatic. But chimeras do inhabit digital space, and to get a good glimpse of them, all you have to do is consider the salivating hellhounds, deep-space cruisers, and legions of marauding zombies that hold sway in the world of computer games. In many ways, games are to digital technology what porno videos were to the VCR: the “killer app” (or application) that, by stimulating gargantuan desires, creates a mass consumer market for a new media technology. Tablets and game consoles suck hordes of children into computer codespace for the first time in their lives, providing escapist pleasures and modes of self-definition that comic books and TV shows cannot hope to beat. At the same time, parents fritter away the night running games on machines purchased, they would most likely say, for far more sensible purposes. All told, computer games are a multi-billion-dollar industry whose hit products have the capacity to severely addict their users.
Why make some digital games so compulsive? However demanding the strategic challenges of such games are, the pleasures of higher cortical function alone cannot account for their addictive power. In fact, some of the most popular games seem to reach right down to the lizard brain, catalyzing an intense fixation physiologically comparable to a trance state. The Texans behind the phenomenally successful and exuberantly bloody first-person shooters Doom and Quake were definitely on the right track when they named their company Id—the most primitive character in the Freudian triumvirate of id, ego, and superego. The id is the monstrous unconscious tyke that the good doctor believed our egos must constantly wrestle with in order for civilization to stand. Freud argued that we can never experience the id directly (nor would we want to). But we can track its muddy footprints through slips of the tongue, neurotic compulsions, and dreams, which Freud saw as internal dramas that simulta
neously fulfilled and masked the inchoate drives of the unconscious.
The concept of the id has increasingly come under attack, but it continues to inspire the digital entertainment industry. “Psychologists say inside every 18- to 35-year-old male, there lies a potential psychotic killer,” states an old ad for the Philips games Nihilist and Battle Slayer. “Can he come out to play?” Though computer games are not dreams in any real sense, many a game is both constructed and consumed as what The Pilgrim’s Progress author John Bunyan might call a “similitude of a dream.” Like fantasy literature or visionary art, a good number of games seek to meet the logic of dreams halfway, to attach their surreal images, stark terrors, and otherworldly air of possibility onto compelling narratives or, at the very least, compulsive goals. Sega’s 1996 Nights made a racing game out of the archetypal dream experience of flying, while The Dark Eye exploited the morbid hypnagogic tales of Edgar Allan Poe. The CD-ROM game Myst achieved blockbuster status not because of its somewhat dorky puzzles, but because of its haunting dreamworld imagery of deserted islands, magical books, and baroque machines. It’s no wonder that hard-core gamers often report that their screen obsessions seep into REM sleep.
Through networked gameplay, more people are able to share the same simulated dreamscapes at the same time. Massive multiplayer games have colonized the Internet, while companies like Battletech attract folks to theme park–style simulation centers where teams of players, each encased in individual cockpit pods, attempt to kill each other inside a shared virtual world. The “Freudian” interpretation of computer games as an escape valve for the antisocial id cannot really encompass this suddenly social imaginary world (though it certainly helps explain the actions of some of its participants). Perhaps it’s better to take a lesson from the mystics and esoteric psychologists of the ages, for whom the id was not a narcissistic cul-de-sac but a treacherous gateway into the collective planes of the inner worlds. Following the path laid down by earlier Magellans of the mind, Carl Jung tracked the id into an archetypal world of images and godforms that he believed drew its sap from the most ancient roots of the human mind. Jung named this twilight zone the collective unconscious, though a more evocative and satisfying term was offered up by the Sufi scholar Henry Corbin, who spoke of the mundus imaginalis, or imaginal world.
Perhaps what we are building in the name of escapist entertainment are the shared symbols and archetypal landscapes of a tawdry technological mundus imaginalis. The boss characters and evil creatures who must be conquered to advance levels are the faint echoes of the threshold-dwellers and Keepers of the Gates that shamans and Gnostics had to conquer in their mystic peregrinations of the other worlds. Though it’s dangerous to add another drop of hype to an industry that rivals Hollywood for commercial crassness and creative sloth, the game designer Brian Moriarty may not have been entirely fatuous when he told a Computer Game Developers Conference that “spiritual experiences are, in fact, our business.”21 For all the kick-fighters, F-l6s, and football gridirons you find, anyone can see that the digital imaginary is chock-full of images drawn from the depths of myth, cult, and popular religion.
And of all the mythic cosmologies that have been retooled for computer play, none can approach the hackneyed majesty of heroic fantasy, the neomedieval genre of strapping swordsmen, bearded wizards, gloating goblins, and D-cup princesses most pungently known as sword and sorcery. Achieving a kind of archetypal quality through the brute repetition of its own clichés alone, the genre has defined the imagery, landscapes, and violent conflicts of countless role-playing adventure games, online and off. It also informs the in-jokes, jargon, and even psychology of many computer hackers and hard-core Internet honchos (Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s history of the Net, for example, is called Where Wizards Stay Up Late). It’s not too much to say that the phantasms of the Dark Ages form the imaginary bedrock of cyberspace.
As such, sword and sorcery is just one more example of the neomedieval tapestries that hang in the halls of postmodern civilization. In his essay “Living in the New Middle Ages,” Umberto Eco links this curious cultural resonance to a number of shared historical conditions—the rise of cultural tribalism, the insecurities that accompany a collapse of a Great Pax, and the “total lack of distinction between aesthetic objects and mechanical objects.”22 One could also add the increasingly feudal nature of an economy divided between the gated, privately patrolled citadels of the rich and the legions of men and women who strive for corporate peonage or the nomadic pickings of a “freelance” life. Eco also argues that both the medieval era and our own are dominated by the visual communication of images. Elites live in a world of texts and logic, while a less literate mass culture is immersed in a propagandistic sea of images distributed through universal—or “catholic”—communication nets. Eco compares the Gothic cathedral to a comic book in stone, its stained-glass windows to a TV screen flashing Christian advertisements. No doubt Eco would have been amused by a widely distributed 1994 Internet “press release” that announced that Microsoft had acquired the Catholic Church.
Of course, the “Middle Ages” of sword and sorcery has a lot more to do with pulp fiction than with ten centuries of European serfdom lodged between marauding Visigoths and the Black Death. But as Eco points out, the West has been fantasizing about the Middle Ages ever since we thrust ourselves out of its misty womb at the dawn of the Renaissance. In the sixteenth century, Spenser and Cervantes revisited the landscape of chivalry for their own (very different) literary ends; in the midst of the Age of Reason, Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto sparked the craze for Gothic romance, a medievalist genre whose blanched melancholy, brooding spooks, and misty landscapes persist today in horror and science fiction. The Romantics constructed a number of different Middle Ages as bulwarks against the smoke and fury of industrialism, from the leafy odes of Keats and Shelley to the blood-pounding ring cycles of Richard Wagner to the fantasy novels of the socialist reformer William Morris. At the same time, these fictions were also carrying on dialogues with real medieval literature, which was rife with the sorts of miraculous events and magical forces that presumably haunted medieval perception. Despite all their theological product placements, medieval tales often took place in a succulent paganish landscape inherited from Celtic literature, a phantasmagoric realm of spells and sprites and talking trees known at least from Spenser’s time as Fairy.
In the twentieth-first century, the realm of Fairy persists in young adult lit, cable TV shows, and the treacherous Forest of Pulp that makes up the market for contemporary fantasy fiction. And it is in this hackneyed wood that one finds the literary source of digital medievalism: Robert E. Howard, a hard-drinking Texan who spent the 1930s cranking out brutal and necromantic page-turners for pulp magazines like Weird Tales. By far his most famous and vivid yarns starred Conan of Cimmeria, a sword-wielding barbarian who lumbered through a cruel landscape of serpent queens and ruined temples. Though a case could be made for Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard probably earns the credit—or blame—for the creation of sword and sorcery, and his adolescent spirit of bloodthirsty symbolic release lives on in countless computer games today. But Howard’s visceral tales probably would have passed from popular memory were it not for the tremendously popular and vastly different work of J. R. R. Tolkien, a mild-mannered Oxford medievalist and staunch Roman Catholic whose The Lord of the Rings takes place inside one of the most completely realized worlds in the history of fantastic literature. Tolkien fleshed out his imaginary land of Middle-Earth with its own songs, folklore, and languages; a rigorous social ecology of elves, orcs, humans, and hobbits; and an exquisitely crafted topography. Tolkien’s work proved the point he himself made in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” A great author of fantasy “makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside.”23
Like designers of virtual worlds today, Tolkien knew that succe
ssful secondary worlds were not wild flights of fancy, but products of creative method and potent technology—what Tolkien described as an “elvish craft” capable of suspending the disbelief of “both designer and spectator.” Tolkien described this art as a land of magic, but a magic “at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.”24 Like Jacques Ellul, Tolkien deplored the twentieth century’s ugly and vaguely satanic technologies, and his fallen sorcerer Sauron, who forges the rings of power in the volcanic Mount Doom, can be read as a Promethean magus of technique, an idea carried through in Peter Jackson’s version of the series. But though Tolkien had little taste for the modern world, the modern world loved him. The Lord of the Rings became a blockbuster hit in the 1960s, spurring a literary (and subliterary) boom in fantasy and science fiction—genres that were gobbled up by, among others, the creative computer geeks growing up in the shadows of the mainframe. Tolkien’s imagery also saturated a counterculture that desperately wanted to bring its own magical perceptions to life. Some Berkeley-based science-fiction fans formed the Society for Creative Anachronism to theatrically recreate the Middle Ages, while religious misfits across the land began dabbling with the druid rituals and Celtic mythology then sprouting into the American Pagan revival. The Lord of the Rings didn’t just make you want to escape into another world; it made you want to build your own.
Allegorical Machines
Tolkien died in 1973, the same year that two Midwesterners named Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson forged the next link in the chain mail of the technopagan imaginary. Gygax and Arneson were ravenous fans of historically rigorous Avalon Hill strategy games like Gettysburg and Stalingrad, war games played with hexagonal field maps, miniature playing pieces, and byzantine rules meant to simulate the claustrophobic conditions of battle. For a lark, the duo decided to revamp a medieval combat game by introducing fantasy elements that owed as much to Conan the Barbarian as to Frodo the hobbit. The resulting hybrid was the notorious Dungeons & Dragons, better known to its devotees as D&D.
