Stanislav Panin, 2024-12-01
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This semester I taught Religion, Technology, and Magic at Rice – a course that explores how these connected and contested categories have been interplaying historically. A recurring theme of this course was the double position of technology as, at the same time, a reflection of our worldviews and the inspiration for the ways in which people perceive reality. Technologies mimic nature. However, what engineers try to reproduce is never nature itself but rather a specific understanding of nature at a given moment of time within given cultural constraints. At times, new technologies can cross this constraints inspiring a worldview shift.
In this capacity, technology has a close connection to magic, which, in the same way, serves in different cultures as a practical application of worldviews embraced by these cultures. Going beyond the often quoted Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” I argue that the line between the two has always been extremely thin to begin with.
In the Middle Ages, people often envisioned the world as a book. Book, of course, is itself a kind of technology, the technology that has been especially important for cultures built around their sacred scriptures, as it is the case in Abrahamic religions. For cultures like this, it was natural to see the world as a book. Indeed, in the Bible, Psalms 19:1–2 explicitly refer to the universe as a kind of text: “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.”
In medieval Christianity, the metaphor of the book of nature was popularized by Augustine, a well-educated intellectual himself who on multiple occasions spoke about “the large book of the nature of reality” (Juurikkala, “The Two Books of God”[i], 1). In Arabic and Persian world, the occult science of lettrism that studied hidden properties of letters and words, became the epitome of science in general and the foundation for other sciences and technologies:
Lettrism, as an umbrella science, encompasses the two modes of applied occultism as a whole in its basic division into letter magic (sīmiyāʾ) on the one hand and letter divination (jafr) on the other. Letter-magical techniques include most prominently the construction of talismans (sg. ṭilasm), usually defined as devices that conjunct celestial influences with terrestrial objects in order to produce a strange (gharīb) effect according with the will (niyya, himma) of the practitioner. The engine of a talisman is typically a magic square (wafq al-aʿdād), which may be populated with letters or numbers relevant to the operation at hand; these are designed to harness the specific letter-numerical virtues of personal names, whether of humans, jinn or angels, phrases or quranic passages, or one or more of the names of God (Melvin-Koushki, “World as (Arabic) Text,”[i] 384).
According to Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, the world was created, quite literally, by means of letters of Jewish alphabet. Sepher Yetzirah, in particular, proclaims that “the twenty-two sounds and letters are the Foundation of all things” (transl. by W. W. Westcott[i]). Based on the understanding of the world as a text, Jewish scholars envisioned corresponding technologies that ranged from talismans and meditations on divine names to the creation of artificial life.
If we assume that God has created the world through words, it is only natural that the inanimate matter should be animated through the same mechanism. According to the Biblical recipe, human beings were created from the combination of dust and the living soul – “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7). Following the idea of language as a way to create anything, one would reasonably assume that using sacred words is the way to infuse the breath of life in the dust. This, in essence, what we see in the legend of a golem, a magically animated clay figure from Jewish folklore. To quote Britannica[i], in stories about golems “wise men … could bring effigies to life by means of a charm or of a combination of letters forming a sacred word or one of the names of God. The letters, written on paper, were placed in the golem’s mouth or affixed to its head. The letters’ removal deanimated the golem.”
By the seventeenth century, machines had started to play an important role in people’s daily lives. This technological change went hand-in-hand with the change in how people perceived the world, leading to the rise of mechanism, the worldview that imagined everything as a kind of mechanical device. To quote[i] the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
The mechanism of the seventeenth century, as articulated by Descartes, Gassendi, and Boyle, was not univocal but came to be associated with commitments to the unity of matter and the ultimate explicability of all change in terms of local motion and contact action. This form of mechanism emerged largely as a reaction to Aristotelian emphases on formal and final causes… . It embodied the ideals of the science: to mathematize, to find deterministic laws, to render things intelligible via assimilation to contact action.
Now, looking at the early modern technology, we will notice that the technology itself became primarily mechanical. As technology is always an imitation of nature, mechanical universe warranted mechanical technology. For instance, Leonardo da Vinci’s design of a flying machine, based on a bird, demonstrates a mechanical apparatus driven by muscule power.
The most famous – and the most radical – expression of the idea of animal as a machine appears in the works of René Descartes, who noticed[i] that the analogy between animal and machine
wil seem nothing strange to those, who knowing how many Automatas or moving Machines the industry of men can make, imploying but very few pieces, in comparison of the great abundance of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins, and all the other parts which are in the body of every Animal, will consider this body as a fabrick, which having been made by the hands of God, is incomparably better ordered, and hath more admirable motions in it then any of those which can be invented by men. And herein I particularly insisted, to make it appear, that if there were such Machines which had organs, and the exteriour figure of an Ape, or of any other unreasonable creature, we should finde no means of knowing them not to be altogether of the same nature as those Animals…
Armed with the idea of animal as a machine, scientists and engineers of the Age of Enlightenment attempted to recreate life focusing on recreation of the mechanics of body. That lead, by the end of the eighteenth century, truly marvellous results that to this day look like technological miracles, such as The Dulcimer Player[i], a music-paying human-like automaton created in 1785 by the famous German cabinet maker David Roentgen (1743–1807) that is still operational or the Peacock Clock[ii] designed by the British jeweller and inventor James Cox (c. 1723–1800) in the 1780s and eventually gifted to Catherine the Great, a Russian empress.
By the end of the eighteens century, the image of the universe had shifted from the notion of the purely mechanical universe to the perception of the universe full of invisible energies, including electricity and magnetism. In the 1780s, the Italian physician Luigi Galvani discovered that movements of muscles in dead animals can be induced by electricity thus creating a new field of bioelectricity. By the 1830s, Michael Faraday came up with the idea of electric fields and observed the connection between electricity and magnetism. In the 1870s and 80s, James Clerk Maxwell proposed modern electromagnetic theory while Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal explored the role of electric impulses in the nervous system and, eventually, described it as a network of neurons.
These developments in natural sciences inevitably affected both philosophy and technology. In philosophy, the transparent mechanical universe was now replaced by an interplay of hidden forces as appeared, among other places, in Schopenhauer’s notion of the will as the central aspect of the universe. In psychology, the notion of transparent self was superseded by variations of depth psychology introducing concepts such as subliminal self (Frederic Myers in Britain), the unconscious (Sigmund Freud in Austria), the subconscious (William James in the United States), and so on.
The fascination with electricity, when electricity appears as almost magical force, is perfectly captured in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein[i] (1818) where the titular character recalls the beginning of his story:
When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm… . As I stood at the door, on a sudden I beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as the dazzling light vanished, the oak had disappeared, and nothing remained but a blasted stump. When we visited it the next morning, we found the tree shattered in a singular manner. It was not splintered by the shock, but entirely reduced to thin ribbons of wood. I never beheld anything so utterly destroyed. Before this I was not unacquainted with the more obvious laws of electricity. On this occasion a man of great research in natural philosophy was with us, and excited by this catastrophe, he entered on the explanation of a theory which he had formed on the subject of electricity and galvanism, which was at once new and astonishing to me. All that he said threw greatly into the shade Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and Paracelsus, the lords of my imagination…
It would be wrong, however, to assume that the advance of electricity disenchanted the world or made it less magical. In Shelley’s narrative, electricity belongs to the same category as Agrippa and Paracelsus. In reality, Frankenstein, despite being a story about a mad scientist, was quickly interpreted as belonging to the same domain as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Both talked about the question of life and immortality. Both were rooted in the same centuries-long dream of conquering death. The fact that one was technically a science fiction while the other a fantasy novel did not prevent them from appearing in movie theaters together, once again highlighting how thin was the line between the two genres.
It went beyond fiction. Around the world, from North America to Japan, people were eager to interpret electricity itself in mystical and magical terms. To quote[i] Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm,
a number of mainstream European and American scientists and philosophers also thought electricity was sacred, a divine link between life and death, material and spiritual worlds. Mary Shelley’s’ Frankenstein was considered plausible by many of her science-minded peers. Even Thomas Edison, unaware of his coming afterlife as a Japanese electrical god, dabbled with a ghost machine, postulating that technology could verify the survival of personality after death.
It was in this context that the 1920s gave birth to a new vision of artificial life. This time it was neither a golem, nor an automaton but a robot, a new word coined[i] in 1920 by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. In the Čapek’s play R.U.R., robots were artificial creatures designed to replace humans for dangerous jobs, their name coming from robota, a Czech word for serfdom or unpaid labor. Just like Frankestein’s monster, who, despite being a product of technology, was quickly recognized as close to the paranormal, robots promptly acquired religious and esoteric connotations. This can be seen, for example, in rich symbolism of the 1927 German movie Metropolis where the genius engineer C. A. Rotwang develops a female robot designed as replacement for his deceased lover.
By the second half of the twentieth century, ideas about artificial life represented a combination of earlier models of magical golems and mechanical automata. In contemporary imagination, robots and cyborgs combine computer code (that is to say, language), electronic components, intricate mechanisms, and biotechnology in order to augment human beings or create artificial life forms.
By the 1980s, cyberpunk imagination of cyborgs and androids became a Hegelian synthesis to the thesis and antithesis of magic and mechanics. In contrast to Enlightenment-era fascination with automata and mechanical engineering, cyberpunks ended up being closer to medieval Kabbalists than one would imagine. As it turned out, mechanisms by themselves were insufficient to achieve the ultimate power – the power to create life – and, once again, we had to return to words, languages, and codes.
Our understanding of the universe, in this regard, made the full circle. Yet this was not simply a return to the Middle Ages. Not only mechanisms were not sufficient to recreate life without the power of language; language also requires a material substrate. Hence, even in the most gnostic imaginations where humans of the future can transmit digital copies of their consciousness into computers becoming immaterial beings inhabiting digital worlds, this seemingly immaterial existence relies on materiality of processors, RAMs, and fiber-optic cables.
Behind all these, we see the shadow of big questions: what is life, what does it mean to be alive, what does it mean to be human, and what is the self. This is probably the most important question that religions, philosophies, and sciences alike have been trying to answer throughout the history. After all, technology is our mirror. In technologies that they create people incorporate their understanding of the world, society, and themselves. The quest to the history of technology, then, is the quest to understand the human nature.
Biblical references are quoted from the New International Version[i].
1. An image from a fifteenth-century manuscript from Biblithèque de l’Institut de France, public domain.
2. A photo marked as public domain by user monstersforsale via Flickr[i].
3. A still from Metropolis (1927), directed by Fritz Lang, public domain.