by Erik Davis
14. Abram, Spell of the Sensuous, 112.
15. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” Playboy, March 1969, 59.
16. David Porush, “Hacking the Brainstem,” in Virtual Realities and Their Discontents, ed. Robert Markley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 124.
17. Babylonian Talmud Sotah, 20a.
18. Cited in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1946), 76.
19. Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 141.
20. Cited in Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 41.
21. Rom. 13:14.
22. Garth Fowden, The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 81.
23. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Caponigri (Chicago: Gateway Editions, 1956), 7.
24. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 224.
25. Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 156.
26. Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 104.
II. The Alchemical Fire
1. Lama Anagarika Govinda, The Way of the White Clouds (Boston: Shambhala, 1970), 107.
2. Ibid.
3. Cited in Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 93.
4. Dennis Stillings, “Introduction,” Benz, Theology of Electricity, xii.
5. Ernst Benz, The Theology of Electricity: On the Encounter and Explanation of Theology and Science in the 17th and 18th Centuries, trans. Wolfgang Taraba (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1989), 18.
6. Christopher Smart, “Jubilate Agno,” in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd ed., ed. Alexander W. Allison et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 471.
7. Benz, Theology of Electricity, 57.
8. Cited in Jonathan Cott, Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 15.
9. James Wyckoff, Franz Anton Mesmer: Between God and Devil (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1975), 37.
10. Robert C. Fuller, Mesmerism and the American Cure of Souls (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 11.
11. Ibid., 60.
12. Cited in Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Bantam, 1993), 145.
13. Archana Dongre, “Theosophy,” Hinduism Today, June 1995, www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3435.
14. William Irwin Thompson, Passages about Earth: An Explanation of the New Planetary Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 51.
15. William Irwin Thompson, Coming into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 223–24.
16. Steven Lubar, Infoculture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993), 76.
17. Ibid., 81.
18. Ibid., 86.
19. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1960; repr. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 247.
20. Ibid., 252.
21. Ruth Brandon, The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (New York: Knopf, 1983), 13.
22. Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 188.
23. Emma Hardinge Britten, Modern American Spiritualism: Or, A Twenty Years’ Record of the Communion between Earth and the World of Spirits, from 1848 to 1868 (1869; repr. Hyde Park, NY: University Books, 1970), 29.
24. R. Laurence Moore, In Search of White Crows: Spiritualism, Parapsychology, and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 100.
25. Brandon, Spiritualists, 43.
26. Roy Stemman, Spirits and Spirit Worlds (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1976), 40.
27. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 57.
28. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology—Schizophrenia—Electric Speech (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 367.
29. Ibid., 240.
30. Ibid., 250.
31. Ibid., 245.
32. Sadie Plant, Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 114.
33. Margaret Cheney, Tesla: Man Out of Time (New York: Dell, 1982), 22.
34. Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New, 100.
35. Ibid., 137.
36. F. David Peat, In Search of Nikola Tesla (Bath, UK: Ashgrove, 1983), 43.
37. Nikola Tesla, My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla, ed. Ben Johnston (Williston, VT: Hart Bros., 1982), 56.
38. Ibid., 71.
39. Ronell, Telephone Book, 259.
40. Peat, In Search of Nikola Tesla, 83.
41. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Towards a Cosmic Music: Texts by Karlheinz Stockhausen, ed. and trans. Tim Nevill (Longmead, UK: Element, 1989), 121.
III. The Gnostic Infonaut
1. June Singer, “The Evolution of the Soul,” in The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture, ed. Robert A. Segal (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 55.
2. “Gospel of the Egyptians,” The Nag Hammadi Library in English, ed. James M. Robinson, trans. Members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 205.
3. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 653.
4. Theodore Roszak, The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 14.
5. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 17.
6. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1995), 53.
7. Plotinus, The Enneads: A New, Definitive Edition with Comparisons to Other Translations on Hundreds of Key Passages, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Burdett, NY: Larson Publications/Burdett, 1992), 313–14 [IV.3.17].
8. Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, 101–102.
9. Ibid., 36.
10. Ibid., 34.
11. Ibid., 36.
12. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon, 1963), 45.
13. Brian P. Copenhaver, trans., Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation, with Notes and Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 41.
14. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 30.
15. “The Hymn of the Pearl,” in Willis Barnstone, ed., The Other Bible (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 311–12.
16. Jonas, Gnostic Religion, 77.
17. Ibid., 195.
18. Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 125.
IV. Techgnosis, American Style
1. Bloom, American Religion, 31.
2. Stephan A. Hoeller, Freedom: Alchemy for a Voluntary Society (Wheaton, IL: Quest, 1992), xv.
3. Ibid., 173.
4. David Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention (New York: Knopf, 1997), 82.
5. Catherine L. Albanese, Nature Religion in America: From the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 65.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” 199
6, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.
8. Ibid.
9. Hoeller, Freedom, 13.
10. Ibid., 226.
11. Ibid., 140.
12. Encyclopædia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “Anarchism.”
13. Hoeller, Freedom, 230.
14. Cited in Benjamin Woolley, Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality (London: Penguin, 1992), 212.
15. Hakim Bey, “The Information War,” Mediamatic 8:4 (1996), 61.
16. Ibid., 59.
17. Mark Dery, Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century (New York: Grove Press, 1996), 248.
18. Max More, “The Extropian Principles 2.5,” Extropy 11 (summer 1993), http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Cultural/Philosophy/princip.html.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ed Regis, Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 150.
22. Ibid., 176.
23. “Synopsis of the Entire System According to Augustine,” in Willis Barnstone, ed., The Other Bible (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 41.
24. William Irwin Thompson, The American Replacement of Nature: The Everyday Acts and Outrageous Evolution of Economic Life (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 123.
25. Roszak, Cult of Information, 113.
26. Jay David Bolter, Turing’s Man: Western Culture in the Computer Age (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 74.
27. Regis, Great Mambo Chicken, 153.
28. Hoeller, Freedom, 165.
V. The Spiritual Cyborg
1. “The Frontiers of Medicine,” Time Special Issue, 148:14 (Fall 1996): 29.
2. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, War and Peace in the Global Village: An Inventory of Some of the Current Spastic Situations That Could Be Eliminated by More Feedforward (New York: Bantam, 1968), 18.
3. P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949), 47.
4. Jacob Needleman, “G. I. Gurdjieff and His School,” in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, eds. Antoine Faivre and Jacob Needleman (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 359–80.
5. Ibid., 59.
6. Stewart Lamont, Religion Inc.: The Church of Scientology (London: Harrap, 1986), 28.
7. Ibid., 28.
8. Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics, and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990), 157.
9. Margery Wakefield, The Road to Xenu: Life inside Scientology (Raleigh, NC: Lulu, 2009), 212–13.
10. Lowell D. Streiker, Mind-Bending: Brainwashing, Cults, and Deprogramming in the ’80s (New York: Doubleday, 1984), 80.
11. The Lama Foundation, “Cookbook for a Sacred Life,” in Be Here Now (San Cristobal, NM: Lama Foundation, 1971), 1.
12. Cited in Douglas Rushkoff, Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1994), 67.
13. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan,” 59.
14. Alan W. Watts, Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (New York: Pantheon, 1962), Prologue.
15. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead (1964; repr. New York: Citadel Underground, 1995), 61.
16. Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 248–49.
17. Dery, Escape Velocity, 29.
18. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 476.
19. Gregory Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” Psychiatry: Journal for the Study of Interpersonal Processes 34:1 (February 1971), 1–18.
20. Tony Schwartz, What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America (New York: Bantam, 1995), 150.
21. Ibid., 154–55.
22. Fuller, Mesmerism, 87.
23. Charles T. Tart, Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), 23.
24. John C. Lilly, The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space (New York: Bantam, 1972), xv.
25. Ibid., 9.
26. Timothy Leary, Exo-Psychology: A Manual on the Use of the Human Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers (Los Angeles: Starseed/Peace Press, 1977), 104.
27. Ibid., 114.
28. Félix Guattari, “Remaking Social Practices,” in The Guattari Reader, ed. Gary Genosko (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996).
VI. A Most Enchanting Machine
1. Dery, Escape Velocity, 22.
2. Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (New York: Bantam, 1974), 16.
3. Cited in Roszak, Cult of Information, 148.
4. Dery, Escape Velocity, 33.
5. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1 (1996), 44–72.
6. Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), 127.
7. McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace, 83.
8. Walter Kirn, “Valley of the Nerds,” GQ, July 1991, 165.
9. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964), 423.
10. Cited in Florman, Existential Pleasures, 54.
11. McLuhan and Fiore, War and Peace, 25.
12. Ibid., 72.
13. Cited in William A. Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy: An Eccentric History of the Composing Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), 23.
14. Covino, Magic, Rhetoric, and Literacy, 8.
15. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), xxiv.
16. Chas Clifton, Witchcraft Today: The Modern Craft Movement (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1992).
17. T. M. Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 106.
18. Margot Adler, Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America Today (Boston: Beacon, 1986), 397.
19. Cited in Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Final Secret of the Illuminati (Phoenix: Falcon Press, 1977), 18.
20. Ronald L. Grimes, Beginnings in Ritual Studies (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982), 54.
21. Interview with the author, September 1996.
22. Interview with the author, October 1994.
23. Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 183.
VII. Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft
1. William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 51.
2. Margaret Wertheim, “The Medieval Return of Cyberspace,” in The Virtual Dimension: Architecture, Representation, and Crash Culture, ed. John Beckmann (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998).
3. Interview with the author.
4. William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (New York: Bantam, 1988), 13.
5. James Burke and Robert Ornstein, The Axemaker’s Gift: A Double-Edged History of Human Culture (New York: Grosset/Putnam, 1995), 281.
6. Ibid., 308.
7. Cited in Dery, Escape Velocity, 55.
8. Wertheim, “Medieval Return,” 57.
9. William Gibson, Count Zero (New York: Ace, 1986), 119.
10. Interview with the author, May 1989.
11. Ed Morales, “Circle of Fire,” Village Voice, March 19, 1996, 37.
12. Yates, Art of Memory, 47.
13. Robert Wright, “Tim Berners-Lee: The Man Who Invented the Web,” Time, May 19, 1997.
14. Yates, Art of Memory, 17.
15. Ibid., 2.
16. Copenhaver, Hermetica, 41.
17. Peter J. French, John Dee: The World of an Elizabethan Ma
gus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 71.
18. Erik Davis, “Technopagans,” Wired 3:7 (July 1995).
19. Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991), 60.
20. Bolter, Turing’s Man, 164.
21. Brian Moriarty, “The Point Is,” 1996, http://ludix.com/moriarty/point.html.
22. Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality: Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), 82.
23. J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine, 1966), 37.
24. Ibid., 10.
25. Gary Gygax, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook: Special Reference Work, 2nd ed. (Lake Geneva, WI: TSR, 1995), 10.
26. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (New York: Dell, 1984), 141.
27. Julian Dibbell, My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World (New York: Holt, 1998).
28. Mike Gerrard, “Interview at the End of the Universe,” 1987, http://tinyurl.com/kadteos.
29. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1980), canto 1, line 1.
30. Yates, Art of Memory, 95.
31. Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/.
32. Levy, Hackers, 141.
33. Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon &: Schuster, 1984), 80.
34. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 3.
35. Theodor Holm Nelson, “The Right Way to Think about Software Design,” in The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, ed. Brenda Laurel (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 241.
36. Alan Kay, “User Interface: A Personal View,” in Laurel, Art of Human-Computer Interface Design, 199.
37. Thompson, American Replacement of Nature, 41.
38. Vernor Vinge, True Names … and Other Dangers (New York: Baen, 1987), 81.
39. Ibid., 60.
40. Bolter, Turing’s Man, 168.
41. Julian Dibbell, “A Rape in Cyberspace,” Village Voice, December 12, 1993, 42.
42. Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 177.
VIII. The Alien Call
1. Carl Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1959), 50.
