Let’s have a mind and raise flowers.

              Religion and technoscience, two complex expressions of culture, reveal themselves to be closely aligned in overlapping mutually interdependent and reflexive ways. Both can be said to deal with discerning the scope of the possible and through their various means, challenge that which is considered impossible. They both are storehouses of symbol and icon, divide and unite cultures, determine the goals, questions, and methodologies of human experience, and are creators and creations of myth. As science historian Michel Serres has stated, “The only pure myth is the idea of a science devoid of all myth.”[1] The human constructions of religion and technoscience are not coterminus but investigating both and in dialogue with each other, avenues for understanding, ethics, and human possibility are opened. As humanity is spoken of as homo faber, we are faced with considering all human experience and culture as being technological and all human outgrowths, whether piously intended and transcendently experienced are ineluctably technological. If Marshall McLuhan is correct in warning “we are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies”[2] one is led to consider what the analogous warning may be for those who engage religion uncritically. One inroad to an examination of the technoscientific and religious imaginations is phenomena of techno-mysticism, esoteric systems of control, and the history of Hermeticism. These phenomena are the subject of Erik Davis’ Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information.

            The founding figure of Hermeticism was Hermes Trismegistus, a religious figure conjured by the religious imaginations in ancient Hellenistic Egypt. Though fictive in nature, the pseudonymous writings assigned his name had very real impact in their Medieval and Renaissance ‘rediscovery’. By combining the Egyptian god of writing and crafts Thoth and the Greek god Hermes lord of techne (art and craft) and being the mercurial medium of communication; Trismegistus’ mythic figure captures much of the spirit of development that has led to the contemporary Western information age. Trimegistus represents not only to the mechanical achievements and technological esprit of ancient Alexandria, but Davis states is also “one of the leading lights of the Western Mystical tradition, a tradition whose psychospiritual impulses and alchemical images…have haunted Western dreams.”[3]

            McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ reveals that not only the modes of worship but the content of worship is radically transformed through technological development. Heron of Alexandria, known as ‘the Inventor’ or ‘Machine Man’, circa 10 CE constructed temple vending machines which he named “Sacrificial Vessel That Flows Only When Money Is Introduced” and another trinket using pulleys and gear shafts depicted a Bacchanal replete with miniature dancers, flames, and sound effects. Second Life worship gatherings, Blackberry enabled interactive sermons, and YouTube transparency in once private worship spaces are modern examples of the continuing flux of worshipping and its modes and contents.
            The relationship of religion and science can be revealed to be bound by mutual competition, polemicizing, ambiguity, and benefit. The benefits can be seen as coming from the competition of social cultural influence as each seeks its foothold in rising to the challenges both individual and cultural. Davis recalls Avital Ronell’s statement “Science acquires its staying power from a sustained struggle to keep down the demons of the supernatural with whose visions, however, it competes.”[4] The existential anxieties or spiritual complexities faced by an individual and the interdependent web of social structuring are shaped by the cultural understanding of exactly what the problems faced are. Carl Gustav Jung’s study into the secret realms of the individual’s innerspace are illustrative of the meeting ground of where esotericism and science meet, compete, and propel each other forward. Jung was a student of esoteric sciences, mystery cults, Gnosticism, Islamic mysticism, I Ching, and developed a system which was warmly accepted in mainstream academia and an established place in psychoanalysis. Jung appealed to a perennial philosophy comprised of an archetypal realm which he denoted as the ‘collective unconscious’. Davis suggests that an analogous inspection of psychic phenomenon, the human condition, and the larger macrocosmic sphere could be that of Henry Corbin, the Sufi scholar that posited the mundus imaginalis. Jung’s balance of mainstream scientific credibility and mystical sensibilities which reveal an esoteric view of the concordance of ancient religious traditions changed the landscape of both religion and science by positing a system that addressed the ‘problems’ and ‘solutions’ of humanity’s experiences. Theological anthropology and the ‘harder’ sciences of biology, sociology, and evolutionary applications are intimately linked in the dialogue of what is presented as the nature of human suffering, how to alleviate it, and the horizons of possible human freedom from suffering.

            Davis examines a moment of the magical assuming contemporary technoscientific postures and methodologies. Upon the invention of telegraph technologies, mediums, séances were given pragmatic and concrete phenomena which they identified as strengthening their magical worldview. Spiritualists at the time of Morse’s discovery were affirmed in their rejection of supernaturalism and that afterlife was best described as natural law; Morse’s discoveries and the rapping spirits of the Fox Sisters were equally natural and scientific events. As John Dee before them, Spiritualists took rigorous notation and their data collection in séances mirrored the objective language found in scientific labratories. The publication of the 1850’s Spiritual Telegraph captures the spirit of the same sacred science that of the Renaissance Cabalists, though managing with the level of cutting edge concurrent technologies. As much as spiritual religion must always struggle to be relevant, articulate their concrete ethical praxis, and negotiate their faith to the demands of secular knowledges; so too do they accept portions or applications of technologies as apologia to the veracity of their worldview.

            Technoscientific advances and the promises they make or are imagined speculatively to be heralding can reveal spiritual faddishness as what was cutting edge becomes accepted, widespread, normalized, and a new technology arises to repeat the process. One example of this is that of the quickly expanded and deflated interest in Michael Drosnin’s The Bible Code which claimed to find esoteric revelations hidden in the Hebrew scriptures using computer-powered code-breaking programs performing a similar function that of Jewish Temurah and Gematria. The Bible Code in its context, Davis finds, is associated with the interest surround the explication of DNA and the human genome project which was seen as unlocking the true hidden formula of humanity’s condition and predetermined futural outlook. Drosnin and the school of computer enabled holy code hacking had been foreseen in Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum which combined intrigue, Rosicrucianism and Kabbalah. The technology and its accompanying magical philosophy that the whole of history and future were hidden away in the scriptures only to be unlocked at the prescribed time by the computer’s eschatological application took many contemporary religionists by storm, its esoteric nature and historical tradition shrouded in occult and Kabbalah lost on many. However, it passed away largely not due to institutionalized religions’ proclamations as heresy but because the technology itself became passé. Through the same computer programs, it was revealed that any word or series of words could be plumbed from scripture and that any text, famously Mark Twain’s writings, would reveal the same ‘revelations’.

            The close relationship between religion and technoscience is deftly handled by the occult and esoteric traditions. Each new succeeding technological discovery can be grafted into a system where the arcane, esoteric, and popular technological advances can be synchronized into comprehensive systems where knowledge within a universe of corresponding macrocosm and microcosm can be absolute and where contradictions can be shelved as being illusory or imperfect understandings. Contemporary religious traditions, using Christianity as an example have shown to have more difficulty navigating the ambiguity of technoscientific progress. This can be related to a modern expression of what Davis sees as the Hephaestus mythos. Hephaestus the master craftsman has the power to create proto-cyborg women and powerful weapons but he himself is partially blinded and his limbs have become withered and crippled. With Hephaestus’ technological extension of his abilities, there is imagined a loss. Davis writes that this portrays what “both Plato and Marshall McLuhan would later insist upon: that technologies that extend our creative powers by amputating our natural ones.”[5] This myth draws a distinction of how many contemporary religious traditions feel threatened by technologies and therefore imply their transcendence and removal from its influence.

            The dynamic, complex and fluid relationship witnessed between religion and technology will continue and most likely become more intimately conflated and pronounced. As humanity continues to ask the questions of its nature and meaning, ethics, and hesitantly posits goals and teleology, the technoscientific will increasingly be involved explicitly in the questions themselves and the answers offered. If the symbol, as described by Paul Tillich has a surplus of meaning, humanity will always have not only a venturing progressive spirit, but one that will never be satisfied with concrete and absolutistic conclusions of the technoscientific. Esoteric, occult, and Hermetic traditions can serve as a guide into the future of how the spiritual strivings of individuals and cultures can positively adapt to, integrate, and give back to technoscientific advances. The esoteric traditions reveal a pattern of strong humanistic ideologies, reverence for nature, and a meta-philosophy which can find ecumenical application through the mystical complimentarity of diverse religious expression. Davis writes, “whatever social, ecological, or spiritual renewal we might hope for in the new century, it will blossom in the context of…technologies.”[6] Any investigation into religion and spirituality will have to ask hard questions of technology and vice versa. Esoteric traditions will continue to be an essential and exemplary inroad into such inquiries.