by Erik Davis
These instruments also took an unusual technological form. During the rise of the Christian church, the vast majority of Jewish and pagan texts continued to be written on papyrus scrolls. But for reasons that are still being chewed over, Christians embraced the codex—basically the same bound and covered leaf books that became Amazon’s bread and butter. At the time, most pagans regarded the codex as nothing more than an ephemeral notebook, private and utilitarian rather than literary. Most scholars believe that Christians welcomed the new storage device for similarly practical reasons. The codex book was economical, easy to lug around from town to town, and it allowed for random access—a handy feature when you are citing scripture to prove a point in the timeworn manner of biblical exegetes.
Unlike the Torah scroll, the codex book was never explicitly worshipped as a cultic object, nor was the language of its composition—the street Greek that served as the ancient world’s lingua franca—considered the unique tongue of God. Christians were more interested in the text as a vehicle for the transmission of the Logos, God’s spoken word and transcendental plan. At the same time, the codex format helped generate a distinctly Christian sense of religious authority. Gamble argues that by binding Paul’s correspondence in one volume, which Christians began doing at an early date, letters that had been aimed at individual churches took on the universal “broadcast” quality of scripture. As the volume of sacred writings grew, the codex format stuck because it served as an excellent structure of religious authority. When the final cut of the Bible was made in the fourth century, the bound book allowed orthodox compilers to create an “official edition” that could dispense with any spurious, strange, or heretical texts—especially those that might call into question the supreme validity of the now institutionalized Roman Church.
Though more than willing to bring the illiterate into the fold, Christianity can almost be defined by the archetype of the Book: singular, universal, possessing a crisp beginning and a dynamite end. From the multimedia illuminations of medieval manuscripts to the mass market success of the Book of Common Prayer to the “literal word” preached by today’s Bible thumpers, the medium of the book has structured the Christian religious temperament, encouraging both its fetish for rule and its thirst for transcendent inwardness. Unlike the book of the Jews, with its endless nest of commentary and debate, the technology of the Christian word has more often been associated with the immediacy and presence of direct transmission, of communication in the most idealized and absolute sense of the word.
Faiths based on revealed scripture, which Muslims call the religions of the book, insist on the profound distinction between letter and spirit. But the real action may lie in the feedback loops that cross this rather mysterious divide. Reading inspires, opening up vistas of meaning and interpretation that further unfold the self, even as this freedom is ultimately limited by the horizon of the text, the reader, and history itself. Fundamentalist certitude to the contrary, working with scriptures is a tricky and open-ended process, because the machinery of text can never contain and control all its own meanings. It is no accident that the name of Hermes appears in hermeneutics, the science and methodology of scriptural interpretation—a “science” that is really more of an art. When the historian of religion Mircea Eliade complained that “we are condemned to learn about the life of the spirit and be awakened to it through books,”20 he didn’t acknowledge that this living spirit is in many ways the spirit of books. Reading cannot contain religious experience, but it can certainly catalyze it, as no less august a figure than Saint Augustine discovered on the day he finally found the Lord.
Augustine’s famous conversion experience appears in his Confessions, which is often considered to be the first true autobiography. Reading the book, one senses a quality of internal struggle and anxious self-reflection not found in other ancient writings, as if the slow alchemy of the literate self is finally coming to boil. Before his conversion, Augustine tells us, he was a passionate follower of Manichaeism, a strongly dualistic gnostic religion that pitted the world of light against the world of matter. Dissatisfied with the mediocre Manichaean intellectuals of the day, Augustine then discovered Neoplatonism, whose contemplative religion of inwardness gave him a mystical glimpse of the “changeless light” of God. Yearning for the Platonic rocket ride, Augustine nonetheless came to believe that the flesh could not be broken without the grace of the Christian God. Unfortunately, his proud and apparently rather randy self refused to submit to the ascetic yoke of Jesus, and this conflict launched the man into profound existential torment.
One day, with his “inner self” feeling like “a house divided against itself,” Augustine plopped down in the garden outside his home and had what we would now call a nervous breakdown. Weeping, he heard a child in the distance, chanting a nonsense rhyme: Tolle, lege, tolle, lege. “Take it and read, take it and read.” Taking the rhyme as a message from God, Augustine went inside and, employing a bit of textual divination popular in the ancient world, randomly opened up a copy of Paul’s Epistles, and let his eyes fall where they would: “… put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”21 Augustine snapped. He was born again, a soul freed from the urgings of nature by the fleshless message of a book. The chicken scratch of Sumerian bureaucrats had blossomed into an oracular delivery mechanism for the Word of God, one powerful enough to trigger the speck of essence within—and to prove that humble infotech may, in time, boot up the sacred self.
Humanist Hermetica
Although a detailed history of the relationship between the writing machine and the Western spirit lies outside the framework of this book, we cannot leave the ancient world without cracking open one more text: the Corpus Hermeticum. An esoteric patchwork of alchemical, astrological, and mystical writings compiled from the second to the fourth centuries CE, the Hermetica was mythically considered to be a single work composed by our old friend Hermes Trismegistus. While a distinctly Christian aroma wafts through its pages, the Hermetica remains a pagan text, one steeped in popular Platonism and marked by the offworld religious temperament of late antiquity. The book presents an image of human beings as star beings in corporeal disguise. Its various writings imply that, through a kind of alchemy of the soul, at once philosophical and mystical, the budding Hermeticist can transmute the clay of his lower nature into the golden light of gnosis, a mystic flash of luminescent knowledge that awakens the divine intelligence at the heart of the self. Alongside this transcendental mysticism, the Hermetica also embodies the mechanistic imagination of Egyptian sorcery. As Garth Fowden explains in The Egyptian Hermes, the archetypal Egyptian wizard was a kind of divine technologist; his power “was considered to be unlimited, certainly equivalent to that of the gods, once he had learned the formulae by which the divine powers that pervaded the universe could be bound and loosed.”22 The Hermetica thus presents itself as a spiritual operating manual for worlds both near and far.
The modern world owes more to the Hermetica’s mystical mixture of gnostic psychology and occult mechanics than one might suppose. The book reentered the Western imagination during the Italian bloom of Renaissance humanism, the first really modern moment in history. Working on Arabic translations of old Greek and Latin texts, scholars in the bustling, entrepreneurial city-state of Florence—the launching pad for the new intellectual era—reacquainted Europe with Greco-Roman civilization. Hermes Trismegistus still possessed a mighty reputation, one that put him on a par with the prophet Moses. So when the Florentine industrialist and multinational financier Cosimo de’ Medici finally got his hands on an Arabic copy of the Hermetica, he ordered Marsilio Ficino to stop translating Plato and get to work on the old wizard instead.
Renaissance intellectuals imbibed the Hermetica like a metaphysical ambrosia distilled from the dawn of time. When Giovanni Pico della Mirandola famously proclaimed “What a miracle is man” in his groundbreaking humanist screed Oration on the Dignity of Man, he was announcing the revo
lutionary conviction that human beings were the arbiters of their own fate. But Pico was also quoting the Hermetica word for word, refraining its alchemical dream of self-divinization for the more dynamic world then emerging from the static cosmos of the Middle Ages. Man was to be a magus, blessed with the access codes of cosmos and mind, making himself up as he went along. In the Oration, Pico quotes the Supreme Maker: “We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.”23 In this statement are the seeds of the modern world: humanity slips into the cockpit, fuels up on reason, will, and imagination, and sets off on a forward-looking flight unrestrained by religious authority or natural curbs. We are self-made mutants, the “free and proud” shapers of our own beings—and, perhaps inevitably, of the world at large.
The cosmology of the Hermetica proved irresistibly interactive to men like Pico and Ficino, encouraging an instrumentalist attitude toward a universe suffused with energy and force. The Hermetica pictured the cosmos as a living soul, a magnetic network of correspondences that linked the earth, the body, the stars, and the remote spiritual realms of the godhead. This anima mundi could be accessed and tweaked by the symbolic rituals of ceremonial magic, even by a deeply pious Christian Neoplatonist like Ficino. Employing a multimedia array of tools that included talismans, stones, gestures, and scents, mages like Ficino would invoke and redirect this resonating array of phantasms and forces. To tap the love vibe, for example, the magician would wait until the planet Venus floated into a beneficent stellar way station, at which point he would ritually deploy those objects and elements associated with his Venusian goal: copper and rose, the lamp and the loins, and talismans inscribed with the iconography of the goddess.
Contemporary psychologists like James Hillman and Thomas Moore have taken up Ficinian magic as a model for the archetypal psychology they call “soul-work.” These thinkers believe that much of the withering anomie of modern life might be overcome by a return to the enchanted but dynamic cosmos of the Renaissance Hermeticists. But the blend of humanist confidence and cosmic manipulation found in Renaissance occultism also foreshadowed the knowledge-hungry and instrumental attitude toward the world that, after a number of twists and turns, came to dominate the technoscience of modern civilization. According to Frances Yates, one of the founding historians of this hermetic current, “the Renaissance conception of an animistic universe, operated by magic, prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics.”24 As Yates points out, the figure of the Renaissance magus reinvented the modus operandi of human will. “It was now dignified and important for man to operate; it was also religious and not contrary to the will of Goal that man, the great miracle, should exert his powers.”25 Ultimately, these powers were not directed toward the mystical goal of self-divinization, but toward the creation, through technology, of the millennial kingdom that crowns the Christian myth.
Of all hermetic arts, it is alchemy that most directly anticipates modern science and its passion for material transformation. This should not be too surprising, for the fiery hieroglyphic dramas of alchemy originally drew their lore from metallurgy, one of the most powerful and mysterious technologies of the ancient world. As Eliade argues in his great study The Forge and the Crucible, metallurgists were the hacker wizards of their day, animist engineers who snatched the materials gestating in the cavernous womb of Mother Nature and sped up their organic evolution in the artificial vessel of the forge. Draped with taboos, their labor was an opus contra naturam—a work against nature, as the alchemists would later say. From this metallurgic opus derived the most stereotypical goal of the alchemist: the transmutation of coarse metals like lead into gold, a quest to create free value from worthless ore that apparently led the most profane alchemists to counterfeit coin.
The history and symbolism of alchemy is full of paradoxes and bedeviling obscurities, and we should not be surprised to find that the lord of the work was Mercurius, the god whose metallic namesake captures the quicksilver intelligence and deep ambiguity of the art itself. Like the slippery figure of Hermes, alchemy places a tremendous emphasis on polarity, on the dynamic, erotic, and highly combustible interaction—or conjunctio—of contrary elements and states of being. This propulsive ambiguity is also reflected in the question all alchemical scholars must confront as they investigate the history of the art: What were these fellows actually doing? Was the Great Work physical or spiritual, sexual or imaginal, grubby or contemplative? The language and imagery of alchemy conjure up grimy laboratories of bubbling alembics, broiling furnaces and putrefying muck, and it seems quite evident that many alchemists were occupied with practical chemical researches into the formation of gold and other metals. At the same time, the work of Carl Jung and others has clearly established that alchemy was also a language of archetypal symbolism that did its dirty work in the virtual labs of the soul.
For the mystics of alchemy, the psyche is not fixed in stone. Instead, its coarse or base qualities could be refined through psychological and perhaps physiological techniques that drew their inspiration from metallurgic lore. In China, where metal was considered a fifth element alongside earth, water, fire, and wood, this tradition of “internal alchemy” focused rather obsessively on creating the elixir of immortality. In the Islamic world and Europe, alchemists sought the famous philosopher’s stone—an ambiguous and mercurial icon that simultaneously signified a real rock, an extraordinary tincture, and the ultimate goal of transmuting stuff (including the body) into immortal spirit. Among Christian alchemists, the lapis philosophorum became associated not only with Christ the redeemer but with the salvation of the world itself—a cornerstone, as it were, of the future New Jerusalem.
Far from leading to brain-rotting superstition, the magical animism of alchemy and other hermetic arts helped spur those practices and paradigms now known as science. The hermetic worldview created men like Paracelsus, a wandering healer and alchemist of the early sixteenth century who rejected the Aristotelian medical lore the Church still embraced in favor of investigating the body itself. Now considered the origin of modern medical pharmacology, Paracelsus’s researches were embedded within a deeply magical worldview awash with spiritual agencies and millennialist dreams of human perfection. The next century brought tremendous leaps in what was then called “natural philosophy,” but from optics to astronomy to chemistry, many of these findings first crystallized in an occult crucible. Isaac Newton played a pivotal role in establishing the mechanistic view of the cosmos that overthrew Neoplatonism, dominated physics until the twentieth century, and continues to influence science’s basic orientation toward the natural world. But even as Newton publicly participated in Britain’s newly established Royal Society, which had elected reason as the sole arbiter of natural philosophy, he remained privately committed to the magical wonders of hermetic science and burned plenty of midnight oil poring over alchemical tomes.
By the close of the seventeenth century, the historical dynamic unleashed by science could only proceed by banishing the soul from the landscape of things. The art of alchemy, the supreme Western hybrid of material investigation and psychic introspection, was sliced into exoteric and esoteric wings, chemistry and the occult. Latour’s Great Divide was constructed: a sky-high conceptual wall separating the now blind and mute world of nature from the endlessly mutable world of culture and its merely human meanings. But though the technological projects of empirical science and the alchemical projects of mystical gnosis would come to seem as different as apples and orangutans, in a sense they both derive from the archetype of the hermetic magus. Couliano explains:
Historians have been wrong in concluding that magic disappeared with the advent of “quantitative science.” The latter has simply substituted itself for a part of magic while extending its dreams and its goals by means of technology. Electricity, rapid transport, radio and televisio
n, the airplane, and the computer have merely carried into effect the promises first formulated by magic, resulting from the supernatural processes of the magician: to produce light, to move instantaneously from one point in space to another, to communicate with faraway regions of space, to fly through the air, and to have an infallible memory at one’s disposal.26
Couliano reminds us that while technology has certainly hastened the horsemen of secular humanism and the rise of mechanistic ideology, it has also subliminally reawakened and fleshed out images and desires first cooked up in the alchemical beakers of hermetic mysticism. The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realization of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious, its own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super-nature, and the more intensely we probe its mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural.
II
The Alchemical Fire
Of all the forces crackling through the cosmos, electricity most embodies the spirit of modernity. Investigators first began experimenting with electricity during the Enlightenment, and within two centuries the West had largely tamed and ruled its powerful mysteries. Technologies of communication and control now utterly depend on the electrical grid, and our minds have grown quite comfortable—perhaps too much so—with the electron’s conquest of shadows, stars, and silence. Electricity feeds modernity; it is our profane illumination.