Techgnosis [Resources]

Going to resurrect this thread with some good Erik Davis articles:

Magic, Memory, and the Angels of Information

...For things do not work the same through the liquid crystal looking-glass, with its codes, hypertexts, simulated spaces, labyrinthine network architectures, baroque "metaphors," colossal encyclopedias of memory. Inevitably, information theory mutates into an information praxis: how does one move through this space? What are its possible logics, cartographies, entities, connections? In constructing environments that mediate between brains and information space, computer interface designers are already grappling with the phantasmic apparatus of the imagination, for these are questions for the dreaming mind as much as the analytic one...
 
Psychedelic, Shamanic, and Magickal Themes in Video Game Culture

Psychedelic Filmmaker and comic creator Alejandro Jodorowsky believes that all symbols contained in art exist to remind us of our own potential in shamanic and spiritual mastery. [[ii]] Julius Evola's idea of parahistory was that myth represents metaphysical knowledge and that there were spiritual symbols latent in ancient civilizations to remind us of what we've lost. In this way, all narrative also functions as a form of healing shamanic psychotherapy.

Like most of my generation, my first vivid interaction with artistic imagination mostly included slamming my digits at the tender age of 5 to the frantic chiptune glitch dance of the amanita muscaria influenced Super Mario. This endlessly fun plastic-hyperspace intersection of the game world still remains an instant reminder of how easy it is to forge the neuro-chemical pathways of the active imagination, in conjunction with our innate birthright of interdimensional astral travel. [[iii]]
 
How Erik Davis invented networked mysticism: Profiling the Cali technopagan thinker behind the ideas of outsiders from Genesis P Orridge to Oneohtrix Point Never

"Dig deep into the world of cultural esoterica and you’re bound to find someone who’s dug there before. That’s particularly true of the cults of California and the mysticism of the global online, where Erik Davis has long laid claim. Cali-born and raised, the self-proclaimed “participant anthropologist” has been exploring the world of the weird since the 90s, in the process becoming a cult idol himself. Respected by many, virtually unknown by most, Davis is a journalist, academic and writer whose ‘multiperspectival’ mind generated The Visionary State and Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. One, a coffee table book of essays and photos documenting the subcultures and belief systems rife in the west coast region where he still lives. The other, a classic media studies text, published in 1998 and evolved into a much-referenced, oft-updated website, techgnosis.com, investigating media, information transfer and conceptual engineering from a standpoint of universal human obsession...."
 
A Globe, Clothing Itself with a Brain

He has inspired Al Gore and Mario Cuomo. Cyberbard John Perry Barlow finds him richly prescient. Nobel laureate Christian de Duve claims his vision helps us find meaning in the cosmos. Even Marshall McLuhan cited his "lyrical testimony" when formulating his emerging global-village vision. Whom is this eclectic group celebrating? An obscure Jesuit priest and paleontologist named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose quirky philosophy points, oddly, right into cyberspace...

...Teilhard imagined a stage of evolution characterized by a complex membrane of information enveloping the globe and fueled by human consciousness. It sounds a little off-the-wall, until you think about the Net, that vast electronic web encircling the Earth, running point to point through a nervelike constellation of wires. We live in an intertwined world of telephone lines, wireless satellite-based transmissions, and dedicated computer circuits that allow us to travel electronically from Des Moines to Delhi in the blink of an eye.

Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived. He believed this vast thinking membrane would ultimately coalesce into "the living unity of a single tissue" containing our collective thoughts and experiences. In his magnum opus, The Phenomenon of Man, Teilhard wrote, "Is this not like some great body which is being born - with its limbs, its nervous system, its perceptive organs, its memory - the body in fact of that great living Thing which had to come to fulfill the ambitions aroused in the reflective being by the newly acquired consciousness?"

eta: more quotes ->

His picture of the noosphere as a thinking membrane covering the planet was almost biological - it was a globe clothing itself with a brain. Teilhard wrote that the noosphere "results from the combined action of two curvatures - the roundness of the earth and the cosmic convergence of the mind."

Marshall McLuhan was drawn to the concept of the noosphere. Teilhard's description of this electromagnetic phenomenon became a touchstone for McLuhan's theories of the global "electric culture." In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan quotes Teilhard: "What, in fact, do we see happening in the modern paroxysm? It has been stated over and over again. Through the discovery yesterday of the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, the physical influence of each man, formerly restricted to a few miles, now extends to hundreds of leagues or more. Better still: thanks to the prodigious biological event represented by the discovery of electromagnetic waves, each individual finds himself henceforth (actively and passively) simultaneously present, over land and sea, in every corner of the earth." This simultaneous quality, McLuhan believed, "provides our lives again with a tribal base." But this time around, the tribe comes together on a global playing field.
 
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Virtual afterlives will transform humanity - Aeon Magazine

Not 100% sure about this immortality via uploaded brains, but it's an interesting article. Lanier offers a critique relating to this uploaded brain idea:

The End of Human Specialness

This shift in human culture is borne by software designs, and is driven by a new sort of "nerd" religion based around a core belief that a global brain is not only emerging but will replace humanity. It is often claimed, in the vicinity of institutions like Silicon Valley's Singularity University, that the giant global computer will upload the contents of human brains to grant them everlasting life in the computing cloud.
https://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Human-Specialness/124124/
There is right now a lot of talk about whether to believe in God or not, but I suspect that religious arguments are gradually incorporating coded debates about whether to even believe in people anymore.
https://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Human-Specialness/124124/
 
The Imaginal Within The Cosmos: The Noosphere and Artificial Intelligence

...The noosphere, the "thinking layer of the earth," would be a mega-synthesis of all the thinking elements of the earth forcing an entree into the realm of the super-human. Aside from his religious interpretations, Teilhard believed that the noosphere would lead to the next step in evolution, beyond the human, to the super-human: the Omega Point.

Fifty years ago ideas about such things as the noosphere were considered esoteric. These ideas challenged the heart perhaps, but realistically such thoughts seemed very remote from reality. But not for Teilhard! He marveled at the establishment of vast research enterprises in the West following the second World War. He foresaw the swelling of conglomerate intelligence. And even in the early 1950s, just before he died, Teilhard noted the importance of the computer as a helpmate towards the establishment of the noosphere.

The computer was little more than a concept when Teilhard realized its potential implications for the noosphere. Now the possibility of a planetary intelligence seems perhaps more within grasp, because of the computer. Today there are thousands of interlinking computer networks representing all the domains of the planet. Not only are academic researchers and scientists connected, but creative minds of every stripe are connected as well by the computer. There is a growing expectation that the enhancement of computer sophistication and capability points toward the eventuality of a global brain. Yet, something more seems to be required than the linkage of computers as we know them. Indeed, something is looming on the horizon! Almost as if emerging out of an evolutionary destiny, there is the advent of artificial intelligence (AI)....
 
Trickster at the Crossroads: West Africa's God of Messages, Sex and Deceit

A study of the relationship between technical communication and the West Africa's trickster god of messages, sex and deceit.
..

...As Robert Pelton writes in his excellent book, The Trickster in West Africa (the source of many of these tales), the Fon are "dazzled by [Legba's] metaphysically fancy footwork because they know that the pathways of new order that he opens always skirt the edges of chaos."[6] The creator of plots, the player of many instruments, the trickster Legba always risks unleashing a Pandora's box of powers. But it is only in risking such chaos that novelty is continually reborn, and the community is imagined to interact dynamically, rather than by some rigid structure. The potential for dynamic chaos is the metaphysical heart of the Trickster. There is a Yoruba prayer that goes:

Eshu, do not undo me,
Do not falsify the words of my mouth
Do not misguide the movements of my feet.
You who translate yesterday's words
Into novel utterances,
Do not undo me.[7]

Eshu can transform the past into "novel utterances" because he knows that the power of ambiguity and the multiplicity of perspectives can change the fixed into the free. New connections always create a new world, and Eshu/Legba puts creative chaos in the heart of tradition and shows what advantages can be taken of it. As Pelton states, this god "finds in all biological, social, and metaphysical walls doorways into a larger universe."[8]...
 
In Beautiful Dreams - Nurturing narratives and the forgotten potentials of digital culture

Those who entered the digital world in the late 80’s and early 90’s were introduced to a nearly unfathomable host of possibilities for media and creativity. DVD’s offered the potential for integrative experiences that tracked user preferences and allowed for multiple story formats which changed with each viewing based on previous use, virtual reality models held the possibility for turning these experiences fully immersive, cell phones and wireless technology promised an unthought of openness to it all, and the internet allowed everyone to dream of a fully connected, creative global conversation that synchronized each aspect into a beautifully coordinated whole. Looking back on the hopes held for digital culture in light of growing concerns over surveillance, advertising, neuromarketing and the like one might wonder what happened to turn the dream into a lousy cold war sitcom.
 
Here's info on the book itself:

In the early 1990s, I became totally fascinated with the fantastic ideas that coursed through much of the budding cyberculture, from virtual reality shamans to Extropian transcendentalists to ravers and technopagans and cyberspace mythologists. The more I looked into the cultural history of media technology, however, the more I discovered strange pockets of mystical technoculture, and my book explores those largely unacknowledged stories and influences.

Ranging from the printing press to the telegraph, from radio to the Internet, TechGnosis peels away the utilitarian shell of technology to reveal the mystical and millennialist expectations that permeate the history of technology, and especially information technology. The book shows how the religious imagination, far from disappearing in our supposedly secular age, continues to feed the utopian dreams, apocalyptic visions, digital phantasms, and alien obsessions that populate today's "technological unconscious." In turn, TechGnosis also shows how the language and ideas of the information society have shaped and even transformed many aspects of contemporary spirituality. In the end, the book gestures towards a vision of "the network path": a global, pluralistic perspective capable of grappling with some of the forces that are currently tearing us apart: spirit and science, modernity and nihilism, technology and the human.

TechGnosis was tough to write, but I think it's a blast to read.
 
A 90s retrospective about technopaganism. Not sure how much of this is still around:

Technopagans: May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace

Magic is the science of the imagination, the art of engineering consciousness and discovering the virtual forces that connect the body-mind with the physical world. And technopagans suspect that these occult Old Ways can provide some handy tools and tactics in our dizzying digital environment of intelligent agents, visual databases, and online MUDs and MOOs.

"Both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination," Pesce says as he sips java at a crêperie in San Francisco's Mission district. "Both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs."

In a sense, humanity has always lived within imaginative interfaces - at least from the moment the first Paleolithic grunt looked at a mountain or a beast and saw a god peering back. Over the millennia, alchemists, Kabbalists, and esoteric Christians developed a rich storehouse of mental tools, visual dataspaces, and virtual maps. It's no accident that these "hermetic" arts are named for Hermes, the Greek trickster god of messages and information. One clearly relevant hermetic technique is the art of memory, first used by ancient orators and rediscovered by magicians and Jesuits during the Renaissance. In this mnemonic technique, you construct a clearly defined building within your imagination and then place information behind an array of colorful symbolic icons - by then "walking through" your interior world, you can recover a storehouse of knowledge.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus gives perhaps the most famous hermetic maxim: "As above, so below." According to this ancient Egyptian notion, the cosmos is a vast and resonating web of living symbolic correspondences between humans and earth and heaven. And as Pesce points out, this maxim also points to a dynamite way to manipulate data space. "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."

Besides whatever technical inspiration they can draw from magical lore, technopagans are driven by an even more basic desire: to honor technology as part of the circle of human life, a life that for Pagans is already divine. Pagans refuse to draw sharp boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and their religion is a frank celebration of the total flux of experience: sex, death, comic books, compilers. Even the goofier rites of technopaganism (and there are plenty) represent a passionate attempt to influence the course of our digital future - and human evolution. "Computers are simply mirrors," Pesce says. "There's nothing in them that we didn't put there. If computers are viewed as evil and dehumanizing, then we made them that way. I think computers can be as sacred as we are, because they can embody our communication with each other and with the entities - the divine parts of ourselves - that we invoke in that space."

If you hang around the San Francisco Bay area or the Internet fringe for long, you'll hear loads of loopy talk about computers and consciousness. Because the issues of interface design, network psychology, and virtual reality are so open-ended and novel, the people who hack this conceptual edge often sound as much like science fiction acidheads as they do sober programmers. In this vague realm of gurus and visionaries, technopagan ideas about "myth" and "magic" often signify dangerously murky waters.
 
Sixth-Level Digital Dharma: Seeing Deeper, Seeing Wider

In my book, Digital Dharma, I look at the seven core spiritual communications challenges encoded by the different technologies of the Infosphere, and relate them to the "stages of consciousness" described by the world's esoteric traditions, the work of philosophers such as Ken Wilber, and the "spiral dynamics" model of Don Beck, Christopher Cowan, and Claire Graves. This excerpt looks at our current fascination with "coded reality," and connects it to the work of the esoteric third eye (at the sixth chakra) and the technologies of digital compression.
 
little gods and little heroes: Hyperreal Ethics in god games and Online Gaming

Media critics, notably Jean Baudrillard, have suggested that the environment of simulations are to be defined as something "more real than the real," or, in his terms, "hyperreal." If hyperrealities are indeed the way that we can define the environment of multimedia technologies like video games, what sorts of ethical considerations should exist in a place that gamers conceive as "more real than the real"? This essay considers what ethical considerations are worth contemplating as gamers begin to take on the roles of gods and heroes in multiplayer video games. The little gods and heroes whose identities gamers have begun to assume have evolved through a long history and experience of single player games. By examining this evolution it becomes clear how these single player experiences have helped to shape how gamers have come to see themselves in relation to the monsters and other non-player characters that they encounter in these games. The perceptions of a long-standing gaming culture continue to define encounters with these "others" that are a part of these gaming worlds as non-ethical –- the player may do as they will. So, how might ethics play themselves out in gaming worlds in which it is no longer pixels driven by limited artificial intelligence that these little gods and little heroes must contend with, but other players hidden somewhere behind the screen? In his discussion of such, Williams interrogates the efficacy Baudrillard and other media theorists hold on the virtual world of gaming in the twenty-first century as well as the deep interaction of real and virtual life.
 
Erik Davis - Prestigious Demons I, II, III

'Note: the following is the first of three sections of an essay I wrote last fall as part of my graduate work. As such it is a different genre of writing than most of the pieces that appear on this site. But they remain techgnostic...'

http://www.techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2011-01-25-0857-0.txt&printable=1
Prestigious Demons I: The Case of the Disappearing Cock

First part of a think-piece on the history of demonic apparitions.


Employing some jerky scholastic machinery, Kramer initially lays out arguments for the actual physical removal of the member. These include the shameful role the genitals played in the fall of man; the natural shapes that Pharaoh’s magicians were able to conjure; and the evil angel who, with God’s permission, turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt that “can still be seen, as is reported.”[ii] To counter these straw men, or salt women, Kramer invokes one of the most important—and often forgotten—aspects of traditional demonology: that the devil, unlike God, is categorically denied the ability to enact truly miraculous transformations of material bodies, and that therefore he works within the context of natural law. Kramer cites the firm conviction of Augustine, and later Aquinas, that the devil cannot, in reality, change humans into beasts, which leads Kramer to conclude that, in reference to the penis, “he cannot take away that which contributes to the reality of the human body.”[iii] By denying the devil miraculous powers, however, demonologists only deepened his connection with illusion and trickery. “Having attacked him ontologically with one argument,” says Stuart Clark, “Thomistic theologians gave him epistemological assistance with another.”[iv] So while demonic castration must be only apparent, that appearance nonetheless marks the world through the epistemological problems this (apparent) lost of reality breed—problems that are already apparent in Kramer’s discussion of where, exactly, the illusion “takes place.”

Prestigious Demons 2 Hail the Simulacrum (Pagan idols and Deleuze)


Even with the demons deep in the background, Athanasius stages the phantasmic oscillation between the deceptive appearance—the image that calls for worshipping—and a naturalistic account of the mechanism or techne that mobilizes the appearance. Most patristic accounts of this antinomy, of course, also introduce the agency of demons, and it is the introduction of the demons that arguably destabilizes the opposition, since the demons can do their work, depending on the context, on both “sides” of the appearance: its visible surface and/or its underlying mechanism. In discussing the transformations wrought by Circe in The Odyssey, and other similar metamorphoses, Augustine insists on the party line: while demons cannot create real substances, they can manipulate phantasms. In one curious passage, he goes so far to suggest that such apparitions may not only fool the bewitched but may pass through the world on their own accord. But elsewhere Augustine applies the rhetoric of suspicion as well; when discussing mythological “reports” that Diomedes’ companions were transformed into birds, he argues that it was more likely that the fowl were “slyly substituted” for the men—a jugglery (praestigiea) that “could not be difficult for demons if permitted by the judgment of God.”[ix] In an operation that will repeat itself throughout demonological theory, the category of praestigea manages to integrate and modulate the spectrum of skepticism, serving to both naturalize extraordinary appearances as products of non-supernatural trickery while simultaneously keeping those tricks in the hands of demonic agents.

Prestigious Demons 3: Presto! (Stage magic and demonic apparitions.)

The Dionysian machine serves as a fit image for the transformations that demonic appearances undergo during the early modern period, when a growing culture of skepticism, an obsession with “secrets of nature,” and a market surge in technical innovation paved the way for the emergence of properly scientific thought. One place to locate this transformation is in Giambattista della Porta’s Magiae naturalis (1558), a pivotal compendium of lore that sought to establish natural magic as a legitimate empirical science. Largely devoid of theoretical speculation, the tome mostly consists of recipes, wonders, tricks, and experiments in medicine, horticulture, mechanics, crafts, and other “secrets of nature.”http://www.techgnosis.com/chunkshow-single.php?chunk=chunkfrom-2011-05-01-1549-0.txt#_edn1 In the second edition of the work, Della Porta devotes an entire book, “De catopticricis imaginibus,” to optical illusiones produced through the manipulation of mirrors. Though Della Porta is not interested in epistemology, these techniques and devices nonetheless extend the sort of cunning deployed by the craftsmen of simulacra in The Sophist. Stuart Clark notes that Della Porta has a particular enthusiasm for one particular effect: the “hanging image,” a reflection that stumps the spectator’s ability to discover either the original object or the technical means that produce the reflection. Clark notes that the hanging image, which sounds similar to the famous effect known as Pepper’s ghost, was itself “more alleged than real.” But what is important is the role this effect plays in Della Porta’s technical imagination.
 
Can Monasteries be a Model for Reclaiming Tech Culture for Good?

As tech achieves its Constantinian apotheosis, old religious tropes seem to offer a return to lost purity, a desert in which to flee, the stark opposite of Silicon Valley. A bonneted “Amish Futurist” began appearing at tech conferences, asking the luminaries about ultimate meaning, as if she came from a world without the Internet. Ariana Huffington cashed in with her mobile app, GPS for the Soul.
 
A little retro but still interesting IMO:

It's a Mud, Mud, Mud, Mud World - Exploring Online Reality


In our media-primed brains, the phrase "virtual reality" triggers off images of Robocop helmets, studded gloves, and 3D Nintendo. VR is seen as the scuba gear for the seas of simulation, a purely technological means of tricking the central nervous system into inhabiting a digitally concocted space.

But some netheads are coming to suspect that MUDs—which, depending on whom you talk to, stands for either Multi-User Dimension or Multi-User Dungeon—have already incarnated the spirit, if not the letter, of VR. Called into being by variety of different programming languages with greasy-kid-stuff names like MUD, MUCK, MUSH, and MOO, MUDs have sprouted up mostly on university computers hooked to the Internet. But no matter what their underlying code, these environments allow folks to simultaneously log on from any computer on the net, construct virtual characters, and then explore and even extend the landscape....
 
Homesick?

...The experience was convincing enough to make me a little dizzy at times, and I was genuinely startled when someone abruptly appeared right "next to" me.

Even now, far more sophisticated VR gizmos are available, and naturally the technology will only get more realistic and affordable. It's not much of a stretch to assume that within ten years, and maybe much sooner, nearly everyone will be spending a certain part of his day plugged into an uncannily real virtual world.

All this has led my Facebook friend Ian, who occasionally comments here, to suggest that this trend represents, in part, an attempt to recreate the Summerland experience. I think he just might be right...

....Summerland was a term coined by 19th century Spiritualists to designate the earthlike plane of spiritual reality to which most people gravitate shortly after they have died. Created out of the collective memories of the deceased, it feels as solid and real as physical reality does to the living. But unlike the earth plane, the Summerland environment is more directly under the control of consciousness, and some of its features can be creatively altered by an effort of imagination and will.

Because people at a similar level of spiritual development tend to flock together, Summerland is largely free of the conflicts and frictions that plague us on earth. And because it is a product of consciousness, it is an idealized environment - butterflies, but no mosquitoes; flowers, but no weeds.

If those of us who are currently alive retain any memory of a pre-birth existence, we may find ourselves unconsciously yearning for Summerland. This gnawing homesickness could be the basis of the persistent theme of paradise lost that resonates throughout world mythology. It may be why children, especially, are drawn to stories about magical kingdoms and happy endings. It may also be why some people become sad, even tearful, at the sight of a beautiful sunset or a scenic vista.

And it may help explain our urge to lose ourselves in a wondrous world of color and light, where nothing bad can happen to us no matter what adventures we embark on. For over a century, movies and television have exerted a hypnotic influence on millions of people (there's a reason Hollywood has been styled the Dream Factory); more recently, the entertainment experience has become interactive in the form of increasingly realistic first-person video games; and now VR is poised to take us to a whole new level of immersion in an unreal reality...
 
Neon Tribes – Ecstatic Highs, Techno-Trance and Digital Gnostics

The neon tribes of the digital age are seeking alternative spiritual streams. There is something inherently magical about our technologies of connection and communication, which are now lending their hand to our unfolding cultural topographies...

...The now famous Goa trance music scene grew out of the all-night music parties on the beaches of Goa, India, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. At the time, imported music, on tapes and MIDIS, were sampled by resident ‘hippie’ DJs, as well as visiting DJs. This scene was first below the radar until it became globally known in the nineteen-nineties, by which time it attracted trance enthusiasts the world over. The early Goa crowd were often called ‘cyber hippies’ for their infusion of tech-music sounds and equipment (synthesizer and electronic sounds, and mixing desks), combined with Eastern mysticism and psychedelic culture. Goa Gil, an American-born musician who was one of the early Goa trance DJs, described his role by saying ‘I’m basically just using this whole party situation as a medium to do magic, to remake the tribal pagan ritual for the twenty-first century.’13 Goa Gil, through the trance-haze of his mind, is sharp enough to recognize exactly where this sacred music-fest is located – a magical ‘tribal pagan ritual for the twenty-first century.’ Similarly, another Goa trance musician, Raja Ram, when quizzed by Erik Davis, responded with – ‘You have to become a neuronaut to understand this music. We’ve gone from flint-rock to the moon landing in a few thousand years, and now we’re on the edge of the world opened up with information machines. This is a new inner space we’re exploring.’14 The Goa scene was clearly a physical proximity for exploring the inner space through a merging of machine technology with electronic beats and swirls – the perfect collusion for the sacred vibe to be seeded. It marked a journey of modernity from the ecstatic religious dervish dancing of India to the interstellar trance beats of a cyber-tech-trance imported influx from the western shores...

Digital Gnostics

As I touched upon earlier, the late 20th century saw an explosion in countercultural spirituality. As part of the emerging experimental playscape there arose an assortment of techniques, from kundalini-catalyzing yoga to psychedelic pseudo-shamanic head trips. A plethora of new ‘spiritual/sacred techniques’ filled the consumerist seeker’s shopping basket – what Mircea Eliade, a Romanian historian of religion, referred to as ‘techniques of ecstasy.’ These techniques later began to combine with the new ‘machine vocabulary’ to produce such systems as meta-programming the human bio-machine(Timothy Leary, Robert Anton Wilson). In a similar way, noted scientist John C. Lilly referred to his system as Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. This new affinity for digitally inspired transcendence marked the arrival of a ‘sacred mechanics’ that merged the machine with the sacred. It seemed to be no mere accident that many of the spiritual advocates who venerated the old codes of the sacred were now embracing the new programs offered by technology.

A high percentage of self-confessed modern pagans, or neo-pagans, when surveyed by reporter and fellow pagan Margot Adler – in her work Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America– were found to be involved in computer and technology fields. Modern pagans were also, it seemed, adept video gamers. The stream had flowed from the witches circles of old to the new digital spaces of sorcery in virtual circles. There is little doubt that a digital culture exists that thrives on neo-paganism and a mix of the magical and the mystical. A thorough survey of this eclectic space was eloquently expounded by Erik Davis in his classic work Techgnosis: myth, magic and mysticism in the age of information (1998). The spirit now appears to be infusing our playful pastimes in the virtual domain. You could wander through an excess of video games now on the market and many of them would convey Gnostic or sacred-spiritual themes. Apart from the obvious Matrix video games (Enter the Matrix, Matrix Online), there are the Final Fantasyfranchise, the Xenogears and Xenosago series, Ghost in the Shell: First Assault, and countless others that are beyond the scope of this brief foray. The notion of self-transcendence in a reality-construct is ideally suited to the format of the digital-virtual world of video-gaming. As Davis notes, ‘Gnosticism creates a space to step back and critique the dominant situation, a space of visionary alienation that reveals the cracks in the surface of apparent reality.’16 Video gaming puts the gamer in the centre of this ‘apparent reality’ and from which they are challenged to explore, prevail, attain, and ascend. Gamers participate with their realities – they are not simply observers. This elevates the partnership into the transcendent realm of play. Both our physical external reality and our gaming realities are closely entwined in a fortuitous web. The latest in scientific research – our quantum sciences where perceived reality is ‘collapsed into being’ from observation – reveal a gnostic tinge to what we consider to be reality. In the virtual gaming worlds our gods are challenged, and often found to be lacking – they are the Gnostic demiurges that try to throw a veil over our understanding. These demiurges are like the never-seen game designer, whose design plans are carefully and creatively hidden within the game-play. To reveal the plans of the designer/creator could potentially spoil the game – or create a short-cut to its end goal and destiny. Gamers keep a close attention upon the signs and clues in the game in the hope of figuring out the in-built road map; similar to how kabbalists sought the secret hidden in knowable patterns of numbers and letters. Our digital topographies ‘are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment.’17
 
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