Chaos and
Gnostics and Snakes—Oh My!
gregory tm
In TechGnosis,
you write about the god Hermes and then later about Hermes Tristmegistus,
who as far as I knew was a historical person but whom you roundly state
was not at all. But I had always thought of Tristmegistus as a figure
of magic and alchemy rather than gnosticism, and I'm wondering if the
two are one in the same to you.
Erik: Well, that's a complicated question, particularly when you are talking about gnosticism all by itself. Ask one religious scholar their opinion, ask a Near Eastern scholar their opinion, and you're going to get radically different answers, generally. I willingly take advantage of this ambiguity and use the term gnosticism in a loose fashion. There is a distinction between magic and gnosticism.
The Hermetica itself is made up of many different texts which have many different kinds of universes implied in them—there's not a singular overarching worldview that's implied by the Hermetica. Some of them are very magical, they come out of this mythological, manipulative world of the magician who uses his secret knowledge of the universe in order to get things done. And on the other hand you have this kind of mystical, Platonic sphere transcending the world, which directly counters this incorporeal godhead, pulling away from the world in a kind of transcendence.
And in my mind, you can look at gnosticism as this magical transcendence, and it's that portion of gnosticism that's really important to emphasize, an otherworldly, transcendent leaving—that's what occurring now with our technologies, in the sense that we are stepping away from the material towards an incorporeal informational reality. And even though that's a kind of secular model, it's ends up producing the same kinds of feelings and consciousness associations of the other world.
"Concocting the world's first conspiracy theory, the anonymous authors behind Nag Hammadi's 'Secret Book of John' read Genesis against the grain, arguing that Eden was actually a low-rent reality fabricated by an icompetent and ignorant tyrant. In one of Gnosticism's most startling revisions, Christ, (a.k.a. the Logos) secretly enters into the garden disguised as the serpent, and thus manages to unload some redemptive knowledge on the original hoodwinked couple. The knowledge is basically what the snake promised: knowledge that wakes us up to our own divine essence, and that liberates us from the chains of ignorance. As such, the quest to know, and through knowing to become 'as gods,' becomes a leitmotif of Gnosticism." --Erik Davis, "The Gnostic InfoNaut," TechGnosis
gregory tm Reading "The Gnostic InfoNaut" made me think of gnosticism as a sort of interpretation of known events. If we're using it within a religious framework, the message is that you don't automatically fall in line with what god and his agents say about spiritual experience, but rather you make your own reality and your own ideas about religious experience.
Erik: That's one way of interpreting it. Another way of looking at it is that interpretation can in fact change it all, which is really rather significant. Many of the esoteric thinkers of the West in general and the so-called chaos magicians of today have that kind of Promethean thinking, whereby gnosticism is about discovering something within. The original writers who put together the Nag Hammadi texts considered themselves Christians—they would not have considered themselves as either heretical or underground—and considered the "facts" of Biblical reality to be open to interpretation and new ideas. Their gnosticism emphasized a more immediate relationship with god and it also had more mystical, esoteric and magical relationships with the godhead.
As mainstream Christianity came to dominate the religious Western reality, a lot of these ideas simply went underground, not so much out of safety's sake, but more because these ideas didn't have the currency they might have had outside of the dominance of the (Roman Catholic) Church. And one of the most important of these ideas that was very contrary to the dominant Christian ideas was precisely this idea that god is within us and that we have the capacity to transform ourselves into godlike beings, a kind of alchemy of the soul whereby we take our mucky selves and—through certain kinds of practices and ritual and esoteric knowledge—we can transform ourselves into something that is godlike. And that is primarily the difference between the gnostic tendency and the mainstream Christian tendency, which is always going to emphasize the humility of the self before god, and the limitations of ordinary human beings.
The Gnostics were having none of that. The way this ends up impacting technology is that technology ends up becoming the vehicle through which human beings attempt to pull themselves out of the given conditions of their lives, to lift themselves and their societies towards something utopian. So there's this desire to use technology towards creating and perfecting the world, to produce better selves, and that's really another way you see this mystical undercurrent expressing itself through technology, throughout the modern world. But it's a project, a very human project, to create a superhuman world, and a superhuman being.
In which the divine power
heats toast & plays pop songs.
gregory tm In "The Alchemical Fire," you're talking about electricity as the backbone of the communications revolution, and you quote Lama Anagarika Govinda as saying, "Do you know what electricity really is? By knowing the laws according to which it acts and by making use of them we still do not the origin or the real nature of this force, which may ultimately be the very source of life, light, and consciousness, the divine power and mover of all that exists."
Speaking about the nature of electricity, do you think that it holds some greater power than merely heating toast and sending pop songs across the globe? Or to put it more succinctly—is technology in general merely a useful metaphorical base for describing our experiences with the divine? Or as we associate these tools with power, do they in fact *become* the divine?
Erik: Well, part of what the divine is—and not *all* of what the divine is, to be sure—is the cultural stories we tell about it, our images of cosmic power and the great agents within the universe. I'm not a cultural relativist who shuts out the power of actual divinity. But a lot of the power of divinity comes down to the stories we tell, the myth-structures that organize our way of thinking. And what's happened with technology is that those myths have become technologized.
It's not just that we look to technology to find images of the spirit, which is part of what TechGnosis is about, particularly in regards to electricity, about how electricity has become a place to look for images of the spirit. We find this today in the most obvious example being within the realm of alternative healing practices, popular techniques such as yoga where we are invited to get in touch with our so-called "energy bodies," or the "vibrating fields" of the Chinese meridians. Now even though these are pre-modern ideas of how the human body works, when we come to them as modern people, the first metaphor we reach for is something like electromagnetism.
So when we start to look at the world of alternative medicine, the first metaphors we grab for are the ones that allow us to build a technological bridge between these pre-modern ideas and our modern ideals. And this thing that many of us feel, that the body has an energy to it, a field of resonance is something that can be defined by the reigning metaphorical structure of our day, i.e. science. In this respect, electricity becomes a place where we can see a reflection of our spirit.
And I think that in many ways we look to computers today as a reflection of how our minds work. This may be a very secular process, but the act of looking for mirrors or metaphors for the self in technology is still about this deeper questing self: Who are we? Why are we here? What is the nature of the world? What is the nature of our existence within it? These questions, even though you can ask them in a purely secular guise, always inevitably call up these deeper questions about what is the divine. So they become launching pads for these kinds of deeper questions.
gregory tm Also in "The Alchemical Fire," you talk a lot about ideas such as Reich's orgone field. At this point, with electricity like the wallpaper, in terms of our awareness of it, do you think that electricity has some greater untapped energy of usage by humanity that we might not be aware of? For example—could we be eating the oyster of electricity without ever realizing that the greater gift is the pearl?
Erik: I wouldn't say that I know enough about it. I'm aware of people who are pushing the boundaries of the possible with electricity and other forms of energy, both for power and for medical purposes. The dream is to get power out of the ether, or power out of quantum fluctuations in space, but I don't really have the science background to go into that kind of speculation. What I do know is that electricity and the electromagnetic spectrum, where the edge is unknown, will always be a place that we can explore in order to make new discoveries, whether that be in the scientific sense or the medical. But it's also a place where we can imagine possibilities that will always transcend the mindframe of reductionist science.
There are always these underlying dreams and myths which adhere to the electromagnetic imaginary, and if you look at popular culture you'll find these ideas recurring over and over again. When people first started to play with electricity, they thought it was the essence of the world, that it was this kind of animist force, this quintessence of matter. And those kinds of associations with electricity do carry on today and they help open up these other dimensions in terms of new technologies.