As someone who self identifies as an old school Technopagan it would be inevitable that I would turn a more journalistic eye to the topic at the first available opportunity. In the end my residency at ChaosMagick.Com gave me the time and space to not only create one article on the history of that not quite movement, but two back to back. Seeing Digital print in early 2023, this first entry explores the context and cultural landscape which birthed the Technopagan and Technoshamanic ideas, as well as the pop culture bleed through from authors such as Erik Davis and William Gibson too.

Technopaganism Reloaded: Disk One
Digital History as Physical Myth
By Gavin Fox

Of all the short lived movements that branched out from the main body of occult practice in the modern era, few have encapsulated mankind’s obsession with their tools to a greater degree than Technopaganism. Seeing its original heyday in the dying embers of the very late 20th Century the idea would not receive the recognition it deserved until much later, when the spiritual groups that relied on Facebook and Discord to network began to reminisce on how this marriage between the mystical and the mundane actually came about.

Sadly, anyone wishing to explore the history of this earliest digital paradigm will find it extremely hard to do so, not only due to the patchy preservation of original sources as servers died and web hosts shut down, but also as a result of it not being a single codified discipline to begin with. Regardless, it is impossible to divorce Technopaganism from the counterculture that created it. A Neopagan heresy of sorts, this ersatz collective of cyberpunks, raver kids, urban shamans and technophiles would find common ground in a dial up world of seemingly limitless possibilities.

Luminaries such as Terence McKenna even took an early interest, hailing the onrush of digital technology as a new frontier in dire need of feminisation to soften its sharper edges. Yet while it would be attractive to see him as a Technopagan visionary, in truth his input in the field was both slight and cut far to short. Instead many hail Neuromancer, William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction novel, as the call to arms that led to an interest in creating networked digital platforms, though his version of cyberspace as a persistent computer induced hallucination akin to modern virtual reality was first mentioned in the short story Burning Chrome two years earlier.

The actual term Technopagan was popularised by Erik Davis through a WIRED article in 1995, but it had already seen limited use across the Alt.Magic and Alt.ChaosMagick bulletin boards as early as 1993. As such the persistent myth that he actually came up with the word can be confidently put to rest. Davis’ article, seen by some as a foundation text of Technopaganism, also focused heavily on the more sensational aspects of the digital frontier. Sadly, while such a sweeping and fast paced narrative is compelling, it also fails to capture the sometimes sombre tone adopted by those working on solving problems created by digital spirituality at the time.

This quiet confusion among existing magickians can be noticed in the few remaining bulletin board conversations that survive from this period, most of which are more scholarly than artistic in tone. Indeed, these earliest days of online mysticism seem to have been typified by an almost obsessive desire to reconcile Old Aeon magicks and the new frontier of cyberspace. Gibson himself ruminated on this very thing in Count Zero, the second entry in the Sprawl trilogy and sequel to Neuromancer. This book, which saw print in 1986, tangentially introduced Voodoo to the virtual world and questioned the definition of what actually constitutes a god within the digital plane.

Online discussion among active Technopagans as the Millenium crawled ever closer seems to point to a grudging acknowledgement that the burgeoning digital revolution would not only allow for decentralised esoteric exploration but also present challenges to the established New Age movements who sought to divorce spirituality from modernity. And they were right. Even in the years before the Digimob movement began sharing bootleg PDF’s of their favourite occult publications enmasse, entire sections of physical books were laboriously typed and offered as discussion points via bulletin boards that were self hosted by individuals with an esoteric interest.

These accepted insights were interspersed with examples of personal gnosis, many of which are now sadly lost to the sands of time. Never before had the esoteric been so accessible, and much like the chaos magick movement a couple of decades before it tapped into a desire to reclaim something that had been locked away behind an initiatory paywall by earlier generations. And surprisingly, many high achievers in the fields of computer science would express their yearning for something unreal through a spiritual relationship with the blinking screen in the corner of the room.

At urban primitive events like Burning Man talk eventually turned to the taming of the internet world soul, chem-gnosis assisted interface with the great machine and a future where the digital realm functioned as a secondary astral plane. Sadly, very little of this would come to pass. The iteration of the world wide web that would plow under and erase much of the movement’s history was created by those who first explored it. The students who once saw the inevitable rise of the online world as a doorway to the promised land also worked for the very corporations what would eventually curtail much of the freedom that they had first experienced online.

While it is true that the movement endured into the 2000’s, fuelled by underground art, dance culture, industrial metal bands and access to the message boards that replaced the old dial up internet wholesale, it soon lost traction as a spiritual force. This appears to have been partly due to other more traditional occult systems finally realising the benefits of exploiting the digital realm, and in doing so removing the unique asset that set Technopaganism apart. When the whole esoteric diaspora freely uses the online space to communicate and share resources, a designation that explicitly claims to exist as a result of those self same technological advancements becomes largely redundant.

But there are still those who claim the title of Technopagan, even today. Spiritual nomads on the cutting edge of digital culture, they accept the need to imbue mankind’s tools with a soul before those ever more complicated trinkets consume us in a tidal wave of chrome and fire. Ultimately it falls to these once wide eyed children of the early internet age to carry the torch for the idea of digital mysticism into the 21st Century, dancing to the thrum of the modem screech like shamans of old. Because somewhere in the farthest reaches of cyberspace the gods still dwell, sleeping in the stacks, waiting for mankind to find them before it’s too late.