Cyberia: Neopagan Technology

CHAPTER 11
Neopagan Technology

There is a growing spiritual subculture dedicated to channeling the beam, and it is characterized by pagan ethics, reliance on technology, and interconnectivity through vast networks. The neopagan revival incorporates ancient and modern skills in free-for-all sampling of whatever works, making no distinction between occult magic and high technology. In the words of one neopagan, “The magic of today is the technology of tomorrow. It’s all magic. It’s all technology.”

Again, it’s easiest to get a fix on the neopagan revival back in England, where the stones still resonate from the murders of over 50 million pagans throughout the Dark Ages. Fraser Clark, pater of the Zippy movement (”zen-inspired pagan professionals”), sees the current surge of pagan spirit in the cyberian subculture as the most recent battle in an ancient religious struggle. Youth culture is the only answer.

As Fraser prepares to head to work (it’s about one in afternoon) he invites me to read what he’s just typed onto his computer screen:

Ever since they managed to blackball the Hippy to death, the correct mode of Youth (as hope and conscience of the culture) has been systematically schizophrened from its historical roots. And we’re talking about roots that go back through the punks, hippies, rebels, beats, bohemians, socialists, romantics, alchemists, the shakers and the quakers, witches, heretics and, right back in the roots, pagans. Yet the human spirit still revitalized itself! We pagani (Latin for nonmilitary personnel, by the way) have been cooperating and breeding unstoppably, together with our personal gods and succubi like personal computers! Until now, just when the Roman Christian Monotheistic Mind State reaches out to grasp the whole planet by the short hairs, the Alternative Culture births itself.

Fraser has dedicated his life to the spread of pagan consciousness, specifically through the youth culture, which he sees as our last hope for planetary survival. “The system cannot be allowed to go on for another ten years or it really will destroy us all, it’s as simple as that,” Fraser tells me as we walk with his hairless dog from his house in Hampstead to Camden Lock Market. His tone is always conspiratorial, reverberating a personal paranoia left over from the sixties, and an inherited paranoia passed down through pagan history. “If we had this conversation in the thirteenth or fourteenth century, we’d be burned at the stake for it. We’d never even be able to imagine things being as good as they are now … or as bad as they are now.” Fraser brings a broad perspective to the archaic revival, helping would-be pagans to see their role in the historical struggle against the forces of monotheistic tyranny.

“The actual witch-hunts came in like waves of hysteria just like drug stories in the press do now. You know, every so often along comes a story about witches in their midst so let’s burn a few. So it came in waves. Another thing that came in waves is the plague. The black death.” I can tell that Fraser wants me to draw the parallel myself. Deep down, this man is a teacher. His theory (which has been espoused elsewhere in pagan literature) is that the sudden rises in black death can always be traced to a surge in witch killing and cat killing. The church would reward people who killed cats because they were associated with witches. The rat population would be free to increase, and more plague would spread. As he puts it, “Hysteria caused the plague.” Meanwhile, our current and potential plagues–AIDS, pollution, nuclear war–are seen to be caused by similar repression of the pagan spirit, which he seeks to revitalize in the youth culture of England, in any way possible.

To this end, Fraser has become a spokesman and advocate for the modern, urban neopagans. Like both their own ancestors and the most current mathematicians and physicists, they have abandoned organized rules of logic in favor of reality hacking–riding the waves, watching for trends, keeping an open mind, and staying connected to the flow. It’s not important whether the natural system is a forest, an interdimensional plane, a subway, or a computer network. For the neopagan, exploration itself is a kind of understanding, and the process of exploring is the meaning of life.

Interdimensional Scrolling

One urban neopagan, Green Fire, is a witch who works for Earth Girl at the Smart Drugs Lounge under Big Heart City and as a psychic for a 900-number phone service called Ultraviolet Visions. The house scene is like a self-similar hypertext adventure. Each new person is like a new screen, with its own menus and links to other screens. But they’re all somehow united in purpose and direction. As though each member of the global neopagan network goes on his own visionquests, they are all on a journey toward that great chaos attractor at the end of time.

Today, Earth Girl and other members of her Foxy Seven are busy remodeling the new basement home of the Smart Bar. Toys and trinkets are everywhere. In one corner sits a six-foot geodesic dome lined with pink fur and foam, dubbed the Space Pussy. The soft being inside, who believes he’s a direct descendant of the magical “Shee” beings, is Green Fire, an impish and androgynous twenty-something-year-old whose Peter Pan gestures belie the gravity with which he approaches his mission: to save the planet by bringing back the Shee, the ancient fairie race that originally inhabited Ireland before the planet was overrun with the “Naziish alien energy” that has been directing human activity for the past few millenia.

Green Fire believes we are fast approaching a kind of spiritual dawn. “There is more light now than ever before. Even Joe Blow now is starting to experience a little bit of magic through technology.” Green Fire is a seamless blend between the magic of the ancients and the technology of the future. “High technology and high magic are the same thing. They both use tools from inner resources and outer resources. Magic from the ancient past and technology from the future are really both one. That is how we are creating the present; we’re speeding up things, we are quickening our energies; time and space are not as rigid as they used to be; the belief system isn’t there. Those who did control it have left the plane; they have been forced out because it no longer is their time. Those of us who know how to work through time and space are using our abilities to bend time and space into a reality that will benefit people the most.”

So, like house music and its ability to “condense” time through juxtaposition of historical “bytes,” Green Fire’s witchery gives him an active role in the creation of the moment. The ancients call forward in time to the present, giving Green Fire the techniques of sorcery, while the light from the future calls back in time through computer technology.

Earth Girl joins us in the Space Pussy to make sure Green Fire is presenting himself in the best possible light. Diana, from Toon Town, follows her in. Diana has come to the Smart Lounge as an emissary of peace. The subtext never reaches the surface, but Diana’s presence is threefold: first, to understand exactly why Earth Girl left Toon Town for Big Heart City; second, to gather as many facts as possible about Heley’s competition; and third, and most apparently, to make sure everyone stays friends. No matter how stiff the competition and how hot the tempers, everyone is in this thing together. There’s only one galactic beam.

Giving the gift of vulnerability as a peace offering, Diana mentions Heley’s “bad” trip last night at Toon Town.

“He doesn’t have the tools to be traveling that far out,” Earth Girl responds in a genuinely caring tone.

No one says anything for a while. The Space Pussy, too, is silent, itself an emblem of Earth Girl’s betrayal of Toon Town and her ex-boyfriend, Heley. Diana shifts uncomfortably: Why would he leave her for me? Earth Girl, knowing she’s being stared at, fingers the lace on her flowing satin dress–a striking contrast to Diana’s tomboyish overalls and baseball cap.

Diana lights a cigarette and laughs. They all pretend the moment of silence was spent contemplating Mark’s weird Syrian Rue adventure. “He doesn’t feel bad today. He even thinks he may have touched the ability to shape-shift.

“We humans are all shape-shifters,” Green Fire comments, getting the conversation back on track. “We just need to learn to access our DNA codes. It’s very computer-oriented. We are computers; our minds are computers; our little cells are computers. We are bio-organic computers. We are crystals. We are made out of crystals. I even put powdered crystals into the smart drinks.”

Green Fire’s words seem a little hollow given the emotional reality of Diana and Earth Girl’s conflict, so the two girls leave. But despite its inability to tackle everyday, real-world strife, Green Fire’s cyber pagan cosmology beautifully demonstrates the particular eclecticism of the new spirituality. It is not an everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink grab bag of religious generalizations, but a synthesis of old and new ideas whose organization is based on a postquantum notion of time. The juxtaposition of magic and computers, shape-shifting and DNA, crystals and pharmaceuticals, is itself indicative of a time compression preceding the great leap into hyperspace, or timelessness.

But until that leap, the realities of romance and business still shape the experiences of cyberians. Diana and Earth Girl must still cope with the fact that they’re in the same business and have shared the same boyfriend. Green Fire must cope with the fact that his goddess, Earth Girl, will eventually realize the futility of her comicbook-style leadership, dissolve the Foxy Seven, and go into business for herself.

But in the Space Pussy, for the time being, all is quite well. In the safety of his cocooned emotional playground, Green Fire is free to take daring leaps into interdimensional zones that a parent, professional, or reality-based adult would not. Instead of using Heley’s psychedelics and house music, or a hacker’s home computer and modem, he practices his magic using techniques from the Celtic shamanic traditions. (Unless, of course, he just happens upon a fairie ring of mushrooms in the forest.)

He’ll begin with a purification ritual and an herbal bath, then some breathing techniques and chanting for an hour or so, which brings him into a kind of psychedelic clarity.

“Everything mundane leaves so I know I’m in the trance. I’ll cast the circle and invoke the elements. Sometimes I’ll have to do a dance to help tap in to some of the Celtic energies. Then I will begin the journey down. Now, that’s just like–that’s something close to mushrooms, LSD, or DMT.”

Green Fire’s fairie realm is also very close to the computer experience. His description of this space, his iconic presence, the way he moves through the space, as well as the hypertext quality of his experiences make it sound like a cyber space fantasy game.

“They’ll take me inside. Sometimes I feel like I’m falling or flying. Sometimes I just whoosh, and I’m there. Depends on what kind of passage it is. Then I’m there, and it’s a real place. Usually once I get there my body is still in this dimension. I’ve gone through my cells, my DNA, and I’ve opened a doorway and I’ve gone to that other dimension. So I will need to have an archetype there. It’s a dreamlike state, but it’s also very physical. This is the strange part. I can feel stuff there through that body. I can smell, I can taste, I can touch, and I can hear. My guides will be there, my totems–and they usually guide me to certain cities I need to go to.”

Just as I was guided through virtual reality by gentle Bryan Hughes, Green Fire is guided by his fairies through Celtic Cyberia. This is a virtual world! Each doorway is another screen. Each totem allows him to “load” more “worlds.” Through an archetypal virtual suit, he can see and feel his hyperdimensional reality. And, like Mark Heley in the shamanic fractal, or me in the Intel virtual reality demo program, he must prove he is a worthy interdimensional traveler. As McKenna would say, thoughts are “beheld.” As Heley would say, “bliss is a rigorous master.”

“Whatever I think becomes real. Just to even get there I have to be very clear. My emotions and my thoughts steer me. Really, instead of me moving, the place moves. I think something, and then I’m kind of like, there. So if I start feeling dark and weird, I find myself in the dark places of that land. And there are dark places.”

Things get eerie. Green Fire describes how realities “scroll” by as on a computer screen, and it’s as if he’s describing the thickest places in the “ice” in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, where a hacker/cowboy can lose his soul. Green Fire moves through the fairie matrix like a hacker through the network, from system to system, always leaving a back door open. But Green Fire is making his systems breaches without the protection of David Troup’s Bodyguard program. Instead, he must depend on his mental discipline. He’s in the ultimate designer reality, where his thoughts become what’s real, whether he likes it or not.

“It’s a discipline to keep your emotions in check–to keep certain archetypical images in my mind. I have to keep them because they’re doorways, and if I don’t have those doorways positioned correctly, they could lead me to a place that I wouldn’t want to be. It’s like a puzzle or a maze and I could get lost. Magic is a dangerous thing. There’s a new age belief that you can never get hurt; that’s not true. You can get hurt very bad. Not everybody should do magic. Even those of us who are made to do it, we fuck up quite a bit. I fuck up quite a bit.”

While a computer hacker who ventures into the wrong system might find the Secret Service knocking at his door, a witch who ventures into the wrong dimension risks psychological or spiritual damage. But just as the most aggressive cyberian hackers make sacramental use of psychedelics to augment their computer skills, adventurous witches make use of the computer net to keep informed of pagan technologies. The communications and computer networks are a self-similar extension of the pagan need for a map to hyperspace.

Green Fire’s journeys through the multidimensional “net” are also reflected in the way he conducts business through the communications net on earth. Most of his income is generated through a national psychic phone service, Ultraviolet Visions, which offers psychic readings, astrology, tarot card analysis and other psychic services through a 900 number. The office in which the psychics operate is decorated in what Earth Girl likes to call “New Delphic Revival”–twenty-two stations around a big glass table with pillars, each station corresponding to one of the twenty-two cards of the tarot’s major arcana. Of course, the billing is handled by computer through the phone company.

561 comments September 3rd, 2005