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W On Newsstands Now
Issue 3.07 | Jul 1995
*Page 1 of 14
previous | start | next <technopagans.html?pg=2&topic=&topic_set=>
Printing? Use this <technopagans_pr.html> version *
*Technopagans*
*May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace*
/By Erik Davis/
*SEE ALSO*
Archive Category:
*Virtual Communities </wired/archive/virtual_communities/> *
*Web Development </wired/archive/web_development/> *
*Connectivity </wired/archive/connectivity/> *
/"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are
about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to dois plant the
divine in it." /
-Mark Pesce
Mark Pesce is in all ways /Wired/. Intensely animated and severely
caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every
bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for
more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description
of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of
years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life -
concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets,
tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven to hypermedia environments, the
MIT dropout has now designed a way to "perceptualize the Internet" by
transforming the Web into a three-dimensional realm navigable by our
budding virtual bodies.
Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in a small but vital
subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging
technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism.
Several decades old, Paganism is an anarchic, earthy, celebratory
spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of
Europe's pre-Christian people. Pagans come in many flavors -
goddess-worshippers, ceremonial magicians, witches, Radical Fairies.
Though hard figures are difficult to find, estimates generally peg their
numbers in the US at 100,000 to 300,000. They are almost exclusively
white folks drawn from bohemian and middle-class enclaves.
A startling number of Pagans work and play in technical fields, as
sysops, computer programmers, and network engineers. On the surface,
technopagans like Pesce embody quite a contradiction: they are Dionysian
nature worshippers who embrace the Apollonian artifice of logical
machines. But Pagans are also magic users, and they know that the
Western magical tradition has more to give a /Wired/ world than the
occasional product name or the background material for yet another
hack-and-slash game. 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 crperie 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."
------------------------------------------------------------------------
/Erik Davis /(saucer@netcom.com <mailto:"saucer@netcom.com">)/writes
about culture, technology, and the intersection of the two for the
Village Voice and other publications./;/San Francisco writer Paulina
Borsook /(loris@well.sf.ca.us <mailto:loris@well.sf.ca.us>)/last
appeared in /Wired/ with "beverly.hills_com." She made heavy use of
three different tarot decks in college. /
*Page 2 <technopagans.html?pg=2&topic=> * *>> *
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