24AR29-15

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AR 29:15 - Postmodernism fails the logic test, again

In this issue:

OCCULTISM - its allure: 'lies, (in the promise)'

Apologia Report 29:15 (1,656)
April 11, 2024

OCCULTISM

With "Of Memes and Magick" (Aeon, Dec 14 '23), Tara Isabella Burton <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-T-I-Burton> is once again a woman with something to say and continues in saying it well. Here she provides us with a 4,500+ word overview of occult history and an up-to-date conclusion.

   Burton's introduction notes that "Throughout the wider wellness and spirituality subcultures of social media, 'manifesting' - the art, science and magic of attracting positive energy into your life through internal focus and meditation, and harnessing that energy to achieve material results - is part and parcel of a well-regulated spiritual and personal life. It's as ubiquitous as yoga or meditation might have been a decade ago. ...

   "It's possible, of course, to read 'manifesting' as yet another vaguely spiritual wellness trend, up there with sage cleansing or lighting votive candles with Ruth Bader Ginsburg's face on them. But to do so would be to ignore the increasingly visible intersection of occult and magical practices and internet subcultures. ...

   "Sometimes it seems like the whole internet is full of would-be magicians. 'WitchTok' and other Left-occult phenomena ... have popularised the esoteric among young, largely progressive members of Gen Z. ... Even the firmly sceptical, such as the Rationalists - Silicon Valley-based members of tech-adjacent subcultures like the Effective Altruism community - have gone, well, a little woo. ... As organised religion continues to decline in Western nations, interest in the spooky and the spiritual has only increased. Today, witches might be one of the fastest-growing religious groups in the United States. ...

   "The story of modernity and, in particular, the story of the quixotic founders of our early internet (equal parts hacker swagger and utopian hippy counterculture) is inextricable from the story of the development and proliferation of the Western esoteric tradition and its transformation...." 

   Burton clarifies that "magic, as I mean it here [applied intermittently both with and without the 'k' ending of her title onward], and as it has been understood within the history of the Western esoteric tradition, means something related to, yet distinct.... It refers to a series of attempts to understand, and harness, the workings of the otherwise unknowable universe for our personal desired ends, outside of the safely hierarchical confines of traditional organised religion."

   Burton begins by discussing "the Renaissance humanists onwards," but then goes back to the ancient Greeks. Her perspective "differs from the Dan Brown vision <www.tinyurl.com/AR-on-Dan-Brown> of history, where a shadowy cabal of Freemasons (or Illuminati) secretly moves the gears of history. Rather, I'm suggesting that the once-transgressive ideology underpinning the Western esoteric tradition - that our purpose as humans is to become as close to divine as possible - has become an implicit assumption of modern life. At the extreme reaches of Silicon Valley culture, it's an explicit assumption.

   "Earlier this year, the tech titan and Braintree founder Bryan Johnson, who made headlines for his multimillion-dollar quest for life extension, boasted on Twitter of his status as a new Messiah. 'I am not a tech tycoon or biohacker,' he wrote, 'I am playing for societal scale philosophical transformation, competing for the status and authority of Jesus, Satan, Budda [sic], and similar.' ...

   "In the Renaissance, a controversial humanist scholar named Giovanni Pico della Mirandola penned his Oration on the Dignity of Man. ...

   "Pico's writing can be read as a particularly extreme example of Renaissance humanism, as part of a general trend of early modern writing that emphasised human freedom and creative power....

   "But to understand Pico better, we must look at the texts that influenced him most: a mysterious compendium of writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum, or the Hermetica. Pseudonymously written in the first few centuries CE, likely in the philosophical melting pot of Hellenistic Alexandria, the 17-part Corpus Hermeticum purports to be the writings of a mysterious demigod....

   "Blending philosophy, scripture, natural science, alchemy, astrology and magic, the Hermetica as a whole represents a distinctive vision of human transcendence. The mysterious Hermes Trismegistus is a self-made god: a mage with near-divine control over both the scientific and magical worlds - they are, in the Hermetica, the same world. ...

   "Central to Hermetic thought was the tenet: 'As above, so below.' Everything is connected, from the movement of the stars and the planets to the internal workings of an insect. Understanding these secret connections, and harnessing them, was the key to a successful magician's art. ... The mage saw things, and connections, that ordinary or uninitiated people could not.

   "Supposedly lost for centuries, the Corpus Hermeticum was 'rediscovered' in the 15th century, when another Renaissance humanist (and occultist) Marsilio Ficino discovered a manuscript in the library of his patron, Cosimo de' Medici, and translated it into Latin. Its humanistic vision - its transhumanistic vision! - was enormously influential not just on Pico and Ficino, but on the Renaissance intellectual project as a whole. ... Scientific progress was thus bound up with spiritual development - a development predicated, in opposition to the authoritarian Catholic Church, on the notion of making manifest one's own desired purpose. ...

   "Hermetic ideas diffused across a range of movements in the early modern period. ... Hermeticism's tendrils could also be felt in the rise of 'speculative' Freemasonry, which swept the guild structure, rhetoric and imagery of medieval masons into the 'free-thinking' world of the 18th century to create a ritualistic structure at once distinctly anticlerical and thoroughly religious. ...

   "It would be a mistake to think of Hermeticism as a codified religion: with a clear and consistent set of tenets and membership criteria. ... What these movements shared was a faith in human self-transcendence as the highest spiritual good. ... Politically as well as theologically, their 'priestcraft' set them against the Christian ecclesiastical establishment.

   "In this, early modern occultists were not unlike today's peddlers of meme magic: claiming a populist stance against the elite 'cathedrals' of academic and journalistic establishments, while affirming the distinctly esoteric ideal of the lone genius (or elite cabal) capable of seeing what the 'sheeple' cannot. Today's meme magicians likewise claim access to the hidden forces underpinning the global order, which they seek to harness for their own ends. ...

   "In the 19th and early 20th centuries, transhumanist magic began to focus less on knowledge of the world, natural or otherwise, and more narrowly on the power and control of the mage himself. ...

   "In what is perhaps [Aleister] Crowley's most powerful successor ideology, the 'chaos magick' that grew out of the 1970s London punk scene, we can find the most obvious genesis of modern internet culture. ...

   "As the occult historian Gary Lachman writes in Dark Star Rising (2018), his account of magical tendencies in modern internet culture: 'for chaos magick the idea of "truth" or "facts" is anathema.' Whoever shapes the perception of others, in order to get what they desire, is practising magic. ...

   "Enter our internet pioneers. Steeped in mid-20th-century counterculture, the futurists, technologists and inventors who would come to shape Silicon Valley culture shared with their Hermetic forebears an optimistic vision of human self-transcendence through technology. ...

   "In an article for Wired magazine in 1995, Erik Davis chronicled one ritual, performed by Mark Pesce - the founder of the early programming language known as VRML (virtual reality modelling language) - during an event that was equal parts technopagan ritual and scientific summit. ...

   "In the 1990s, the Extropian transhumanist Max More hailed the internet as an evolutionary portal. ... (More was explicit about the occult genesis of the Extropian movement, exhorting readers to praise Lucifer as a self-divinising rebel against a hierarchical creator-God.) ... Later waves of transhumanists include the philosopher David Pearce, whose World Transhumanist Association (later Humanity+) openly pursued 'eternal life'. In an interview in 2007, Pearce said that, in order to do so, 'we'll need to rewrite our bug-ridden genetic code and become god-like.'

   "The internet has absorbed some of its techno-utopian luminaries' foundational ideas to the extent that they are practically built-in. ...

   "In the modern internet, desire is the secret undercurrent shaping our new reality. ... Unencumbered by our bodies, or communities, we live in a miasma of yearning, willingly succumbing to an increasingly palpable form of spellcraft practised by the digital magi who profit from our attention. ...

   "Charged with the collective energy of each subsequent re-Tweet or repost, memes seep into our subconscious and influence what we think, how we act and who we vote for. ...

   "We are all caught up in the cult of Hermes, or Prometheus, or Lucifer, in which the secret truth revealed by transgression is that truth is only ever a fiction of fools: reality is only ever what you can make people believe. ... Reanimating esoteric ideas of self-divinisation, and harnessing 'energy' to 'manifest' reality by attending to and valorising our own desires, they insist that what we want makes us who we are.

   "The spiritualised space of the internet has made magicians of us all in the service of becoming our best selves.

   "As such, modern internet culture seems more indebted to Crowley's nihilism than to the promise of Hermes Trismegistus. ... You might say the 'meme magicians' have won. They have revealed, at last, the dark heart at the centre of Pico's seemingly optimistic vision of humanity....

   "Scottish witches of the 18th century had a word for this: glamour - appearing to others the way we wish to be, so we might impress upon them that which we wish to impress. By 2019, the concept of glamour magick was sufficiently mainstream for Teen Vogue to publish a guide to the practice, extolling teenage girls to 'be a better you'. But, in 2023, we're all doing 'glamour magick' - intentionally or not."

   Burton concludes: "As more and more of our online lives play out on platforms owned or controlled by billionaires convinced of their own divinity, we may find ourselves less mages than fodder for other magicians' wills. More troublingly, many of us don't seem to mind - or, if we do, we don't mind quite enough to disenchant ourselves. We just keep pressing, playing, Liking and sharing. ... The lure of the internet lies in the promise that this click, this article, this purchase will at last result in the final consummation we crave. We will be seen, paid attention to, and perhaps even loved, in just the way we wish to be. It is a promise as palpable as Eve's apple." <www.tinyurl.com/yck8uj63>

   "How good is the promise?" Who is even asking this today? Burton assists with the important reminder that with the occult, historical accuracy is typically unsupported by common assumption. After all, how often in cultural history has the most popular lie won a competitive following? What did we expect would manifest itself once fiction became the grand story in a world without absolutes? Behold, postmodernism has failed the logic test once again. 

POSTSCRIPT, Apr 20 '24: Compare with <www.tinyurl.com/R-C-Butterfield>

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