Escape Velocity

by Mark Dery

  Technopaganism also surfaces in the electro-bacchanalian urges that animate raves, where conventions are momentarily suspended in the social centrifuge whipped up by sweaty, seething dancers; punishingly loud, unrelentingly rhythmic “house” or “techno” electronic dance music; and the drug ecstasy, widely regarded as an aphrodisiac. Cultured in the British techno-hippie musical genre known as “acid house” in the summer of 1989 (dubbed the second “Summer of Love” by British journalists), the rave scene soon spread to California. In San Francisco, the traditions represented by Haight-Ashbury and Silicon Valley were intermixed by the rave phenomenon, creating what the Psychic TV frontman Genesis P-Orridge calls “hyperdelic” culture. Its sound track, says P-Orridge, is high-tech

  trance music, where people shake and spin until they reach a state of hyperventilation and psychedelic alpha-wave experience. . . . They get completely tranced-out . . . from that primal and physical excess. So there’s this whole pagan energizing thing going on as a result of this free-form dancing to this high-tech shamanism.102

  On their record Boss Drum (1992), the English techno-trance/ cyberpop duo the Shamen fashion an archaic futurism from rapped vocals, fizzing synthesizers, hyperactive drum machine, and the ruminations of Terence McKenna, whose eschatological humor goes over big with those whose neurons have been permanently cross-wired by psychoactive substances. In the song “Re: Evolution,” which features his overdubbed remarks as its vocal track, McKenna offers an illuminating reading of rave culture:

  The emphasis in . . . rave culture on physiologically compatible rhythms is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, [the realization] that sound-especially percussive sound-can actually change neurological states. Large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community . . . an end-of-the-millennium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely different direction. We’re going to arrive in the third millennium in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean . . . a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature and to ego.

  Many raves feature “chill-out” rooms where revelers exhausted by the “psychedelic alpha-wave experience” can relax, cocooned in the gauzy, billowing synthesizers of “ambient” electronic instrumental music. Much of this music exudes a technopagan aura: Ritual Ground (1993), by Solitaire, features moody instrumentals–waves of shimmering synthesizer washing over didgeridoo and ethnic percussion-with names like “Runes” and “In the Forest of Ancient Light”; Mystery School (1994) by the Ambient Temple of Imagination features a booklet covered with flying saucers, illustrations from the Crowley Thoth tarot deck, and songs whose titles-“Magickal Child,” “Thelema”–refer to Crowley’s teachings. The liner notes, which include references to magick, shamanism, and alchemy, end with the somewhat Star Trekian prediction that “humanity is destined to join the interdimensional Galactic Federation as our planet evolves to a higher level of being.”103

  Technopaganism leaves its stamp on cyber-rock and “industrial” music, too. Cyberpunx (1989), by Rodney Orpheus’s band the Cassandra Complex, is technopagan cyber-rock. On one hand, Orpheus conjures Crowley’s goatish sexuality, saturnalian revelry, and prankish sacrilege (he is, in fact, a member of a Crowleyite occult order). On the other, he evokes the human-machine interface and video game violence of cyberpunk fiction. The cover of Cyberpunx features a computer graphic depicting a Top Gun hotshot in a futuristic cockpit, his eyes hidden by the insect carapace of a virtual reality helmet; a nearby screen displays a suffering Christ crowned with thorns.

  The songs on Man-Amplified (1992) by the industrial band Clock DVA consist of minimalist blipmusic soldered together from “mechanical noises and machine language” and welded to visions of “technogeist,” the spokesman Adi Newton’s term for the anticipated moment when the computer becomes “a parapsychological instrument for the direct projection of thoughts and emotions.”104 In a sense, argues Newton, “[o]ccult technology is already with us. The computer is really a 20th century oracle we employ to forecast the future. . . . Science . . . has always [sought] to simulate the occult, gain control over nature. . . . [S]cience is now discovering what the mystics already knew.”105

  Technopaganism haunts the mainstream, as well, in the computer game Myst, which takes place in what the New York Times reporter Edward Rothstein characterizes as “a world in which ordinary objects are the magical products of an advanced technology”—a dreamscape where “archaic machines” make surreal sense in a “pastoral paradise.”106 Myst transports users to an island lush with photorealistic forests (the tree bark was digitally scanned) and lulled by the murmur of wind, water, and atmospheric music. Wandering through exquisitely detailed computer-graphic scenes-a cluster of Greek columns, a planetarium, a wood-paneled library, a spaceship out of a late-night rocket opera, all of them eerily empty-Myst players search for clues to solve a somewhat metaphysical mystery.

  Writing in the Village Voice, Erik Davis calls Myst “a metafiction that blends technology and magic, tips its hat to Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Umberto Eco.”107 Ironically, the CD-ROM game was created by two churchgoing Christians whose father is a preacher, a fact that leads Davis to make much of the game’s spiritual themes and symbolism, specifically the pivotal role played by magical books. Even so, he argues, the technology that made the game possible invites a Faustian interpretation. To Davis, the computer-graphic sorcery that enabled the creators to conjure worlds within worlds inside a computer is “a clearly demiurgic magic that heretically usurps God’s role as creator.”108

  What all of these examples–Dibbell’s nodes, TOPY’s “cybersha-manism,” P-Orridge’s “hyperdelic” raves, Newton’s vision of the computer as “a 20th-century oracle,” Myst’s seamless union of mysticism and technology-have in common is the technopagan tendency to relocate the sacred in the technosphere, to populate cyberspace with superhuman agencies. The voodoo cyber-cosmology of William Gibson’s novels is a case in point. Neuromancer, Gibson’s first, stars an outlaw hacker named Case who interfaces neurologically with cyberspace, plugging his nervous system into the global virtual reality where data is stored in the form of palpable illusions. The title is of course a pun on necromancer, a sorcerer who raises the dead; Case engages in the cyberpunk equivalent of such conjurations, effectively leaving his body to roam the otherworldly realm of cyberspace, with the computer-generated ghost of a dead hacker as his guide. As Norman Spinrad perceptively notes, Case is a near-future

  magician whose wizardry consists of directly interfacing . . . with . . . the computersphere, manipulating it imagistically (and being manipulated by it) much as more traditional shamans interact imagistically with more traditional mythic realms via drugs or trance states.109

  In Gibson’s second and third novels, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive, cyberspace is inhabited by artificial intelligence (AI) programs that have evolved into something rich and strange: a pantheon of voodoo deities known as the loa. In a technopagan variation on the scenario imagined by De Landa, the interaction of autonomous software programs has given rise to artificial entities that assume the appearances and attributes of voodoo gods. “In all the signs your kind have stored against the night,” explains an AI in Mona Lisa Overdrive, “the paradigms of voudou proved most appropriate.”110 In Count Zero, the Finn, a dealer in exotic, often contraband technologies, elaborates:

  The last seven, eight years, there’s been funny stuff out there, out on the console cowboy circuit . . . . Thrones and dominions . . . Yeah, there’s things out there. Ghosts, voices. Why not? Oceans had mermaids, all that shit, and we had a sea of silicon, see? Sure, it’s just a tailored hallucination we all agreed to have, cyberspace, but anybody who jacks in knows, fucking knows it’s a whole universe.111

  Even now, some glimpse ghosts in the machine. In his essay “Techgnosis: Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information,” Erik Davis writes, “Far beyond
Palo Alto and MIT, in the margins and on the nets, phantasms hover over the technologically mediated information processing that increasingly constitutes our experience.”112 Information, he asserts, “crackles with energy, drawing to itself mythologies, metaphysics, hints of arcane magic.”113

  For real-life technopagans, Gibson’s voodoo electronics is more than science fiction. Maxwell X. Delysid, an active TOPYite who “accepts the Internet as a spiritual tool” and is investigating “what magick can be done with it,” read Count Zero and was galvanized by the notion of voodoo spirits lurking in the Net. “[Count Zero] blew my mind,” he writes, in an E-mail interview.

  I began to think, ‘Here we have this worldwide network set up, just like [Gibson’s] cyberspace, and there very well could be loa living in the Internet >now<. What would they be like? Would they be Haitian (as in the book) or would they be more a product of the [American] culture that CREATED the Net? What would their religion be? What would their purpose be? Would they even WANT us to know that they existed? I haven’t found any, as such, yet.114

  Faint echoes of this notion are audible in popular culture: In BBS Callers Digest, a columnist describes the staticky squall emitted by a user’s computer when it connects to a BBS-the sound of digital data being converted into analog waves by the user’s modem so that it can be piped over the phone lines-as “the high electronic scream of BBS angels.”115 Stewart Brand asserts that “when you communicate through a computer, you communicate like an angel,” by which he means that participants in electronic conferences “communicate as these disembodied intelligences of great intimacy.”116 And John Perry Barlow believes that humankind’s age-old desire to inhabit the Spiritual” will be fulfilled in cyberculture. A convocation of disembodied minds who appear to each other on a BBS as screenfuls of typed conversation is “the flesh made word,” he puns.

  The growing tendency to conceive of computer-mediated interaction in spiritual as well as spatial terms revives the Teilhard de Chardinian dream of reconciling metaphysics and materialism in a science “tinged with mysticism and charged with faith.”117 It is paralleled, among techno-pagans and New Age technophiles, by the practice of couching metaphysical convictions in scientific terms, and of seeking plug-in solutions to spiritual needs.

  New Age discourse in particular is woven from scientific-sounding theories of auras, etheric energies, vibrational fields, biomagnetism, tachyon energy, and “biological electrons” (“pure, bio-available energy” supposed to exist in light).118 In the wake of seventies New Age classics such as Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu-Li Masters, which draw connections between the new physics and Eastern mysticism, the language of physics and the theoretical musings of physicists have been used to buttress New Age thought. In Bridging Science and Spirit: Common Elements in David Bohm’s Physics, the Perennial Philosophy, and Seth, Norman Friedman strikes a delicate balance between the quantum physics of Bohm-best known for his theory that the brain replicates, in microcosm, the structure of the universe–and the teachings of Seth, the channeled “energy personality essence” whose revelations about the nature of time, space, and the self-creation of reality comprise Jane Roberts’s The Seth Material.

  Furthermore, New Age dreams of self-actualization are increasingly tethered to transformational technologies such as the mind machines, smart drugs, and other “tools for the expansion of consciousness” mentioned earlier. The catalogues of New Age direct mail marketers such as Tools for Exploration (“YOUR GUIDE TO ADVENTURES IN CONSCIOUSNESS”) offer a variety of “consciousness technologies” that harness advances from “the cutting edges of neuroscience and electronics” in the service of a vision of human potential that partakes of self-help, corporate motivational psychology, and New Age mysticism.

  The copy in such catalogues keeps the reader mindful of the fact that such appliances are high-tech upgrades of pretechnological traditions. A mind machine sold in a 1993 Tools for Exploration catalogue is marketed as the “new shamanic technology,” an information-age upgrade of the hypnotic campfire and ritual drumming used in primitive cultures to induce shamanic trances: “Goggles with flickering solid-state lights provide the ‘firelight,’ and digital stereo synthesized sounds create the ‘drumming.’”119 Such a device represents the best of archaic and future worlds, it is implied, reconnecting the user to a mythic, holistic past even as it incorporates what we are told are the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience and microelectronics.

  In one of his catalogues, Terry Patten, the founder of Tools for Exploration, relates a New Age parable that neatly encapsulates the resolution of mysticism and materialism in cyberculture. After recounting how he and his wife had “sold everything: the house, the cars, the furniture” (a ritual renunciation of the secular world familiar from Christian and Eastern mysticism) and traveled extensively, he notes the psychic dislocation he experienced on returning to his former life, that of “a 3-piece suit professional”:

  My wife . . . and I had realized that, too often, we become alienated by the very technology designed to make our lives easier. So we went on to uncover a new kind of technology-one created to connect us more deeply to our bodies, minds, emotions and souls. We call it Consciousness Technology, and from this discovery, Tools For Exploration was born.120

  Patten offers a holistic vision of technology that integrates rather than alienates. In its power to repair our fractured inner selves and help us realize our “unlimited capacity for positive growth and change” (Patten), it is almost godlike. But despite its desire to make room for the sacred in the technosphere, Patten’s high-tech theology has the paradoxical effect of secularizing the Spiritual; the higher powers have dissipated into impersonal, pseudoscientific energy fields, accessible through microcircuitry. The focus, as in the human potential movement to which the “mind tech” wing of the New Age owes so much, is on the perfectible self; pilgrim’s progress has given way to personal power.

  In Mega Brain Power: Transform Your Life with Mind Machines and Brain Nutrients, Michael Hutchison elevates “Consciousness Technology” to the status of a divine agency, a saving grace capable of lifting humanity out of the human condition. “To some it may seem odd and paradoxical that machines-the synthetic, hard, material devices of this electronic temporal reality-may serve as gateways to the spirit, tools of transcendence,” writes Hutchison. “But in fact this fusion of spirituality, or the ‘inner quest,’ and science, the ‘external quest,’ is the central force of the emerging new paradigm.”121

  Of course, neopagan and New Age attempts to validate their beliefs through the use of tools, terms, and conceptual models appropriated from the scientific and technological communities are a pact with the Devil. Such a strategy reaffirms the cultural superiority of empirical science and inductive reasoning as the arbiters of what is admitted into the mainstream and what is banished to the fringes.

  But as technopaganism makes clear, there is more to this story than the desire for cultural accreditation. For those in neopagan or New Age subcultures who reject the antitechnology bias traditionally associated with such beliefs, their relationship to science and technology has less to do with a longing for legitimation and more to do with William Gibson’s maxim “THE STREET FINDS ITS OWN USES FOR THINGS.” Their willful “misuse” of scientific concepts and digital technology in the service of the spiritual, the intuitive, and the irrational parallels, to a degree, the subversions of the outlaw hacker. (Tellingly, one Tools for Exploration catalogue refers to mind machine users as “consciousness hackers.”)

  At the same time, the New Age/neopagan redirection of science and technology to wholly unscientific ends-attaining mystical states, mending the mind/body rupture, reweaving the alienated modern psyche into the fabric of the universe-speaks to the need to make New Age/neopagan beliefs relevant to a technological society whose model of reality is held together by scientific theories. Too, it mirrors the vision, handed down from Teilhard de Chardin to Hutchison, of the
holistic healing of the breach between religion and science, the sacred and the mundane.

  These impulses are at the heart of technopaganism. To inaugurate “Cybermage,” an echomail topic devoted to the relationship between technology and neopaganism, Tony Lane posted an introduction worth quoting at length:

  For too long magick has looked backward. So often I hear about “traditional” Native American this and authentic Egyptian/ Celtic/Hunan that. Sorry folks-there are very few “authentic” magickal items/rituals/practices out there. . . . Something might SEEM stronger if it is wrapped in the mystique of . . . bear clan tribal blood, blah blah blah. I have no doubt that this WAS a very powerful spell (and might still be one) for a member of the bear clan. If you are a CPA from Burbank I doubt that there is much there for you. . . . I feel there is a better way. . . . [T]he central idea of CYBERMAGE [is]: MAGICK that uses the current world is more powerful because it is more personal to the magician. In many of the magickal ancient cultures magick and science were often the same thing. Imagine if they could see what our science today can do! They would worship us as GODS. . . . If in our work we could meld science and magick we could [work] wonders. We could cure and create and build things man has never seen nor dreamed of. But first we have to turn away from the . . . traditional ways and branch out into new areas, [exploring] . . . the parallels between a magickal spell and a computer program and the possibility of having an electrical familiar.122