Brilliant Minds Chasing Ancient Demons
In my work, I’ve often been surprised to find that some software engineers I know personally, are Wiccan or pagan practitioners. And it’s not just my personal experience; there is a strong affinity between tech and magic.[1] Perhaps it is due to the influence of Margot Adler, Timothy Leary, and Stewart Brand who created a culture of openness, seeking contact with their own divinity and other consciousness. Ultimately, some tech leaders found a path that led, it seems to me, to the overt veneration of demons—while perhaps denying their reality. The anti-authoritarian, even anarchic, spirit of both paganism and cyberculture might explain the affinity.[2] And recent technological trends, such as remote work and its accompanying isolation may be accelerating the trend.
While I understand the sincere search for meaning, as a Christian I must say that anything other than belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ ultimately works against human flourishing. When we seek transcendence through fantasy, séances, or altered consciousness, we’re grasping shadows which cannot substitute for the reality God offers freely. Truth and reality are inseparable, and Christ’s entry into history is the only foundation solid enough to carry the weight of our deepest longings.
Recently I came across some work by Paul Hazard in The Crisis of the European Mind that describes the end of the seventeenth century as a time of growing discomfort with the sufficiency of reason alone. Enlightenment enthusiasm was no longer a universal feeling. This was especially acute in the pursuit of good literature. Reason dictated rigid definitions of “good literature” but when they were followed, they produced mechanized work that was at once beautiful, formulaic, and profoundly soulless.
This brought me up short. More than three hundred years later, we still embrace a reductive materialist philosophy that gets top billing in our major universities. And it is not working for us, at least at a personal level. Maybe our well-paid academics are secretly hypocrites who accept science as the final answer in public affairs while knowing it is an insufficient help for personal and pastoral concerns.
Since we believe we are on our own to make whatever meaning and sense we can of our existential struggles, many of us hold modern ideas about math and physics but ancient pagan ideas about metaphysics and meaning. To tame the wild spiritual worlds we feel we need in order to thrive, we use our reductive thinking reflex to turn religious practices, spells and witchcraft into tame psychological tools. This self-deceit about the power of demonic systems of thought is usually denied by academics, but it is embraced more overtly by a surprising number of technologists who administer sophisticated IT systems during the day but celebrate paganism without any reductiveness whatsoever.
Our postmodern context continues to see reason as our path toward progress and truth, but more of us are rejecting its validity as a tool for a life well lived. Whether by ignorance or obstinacy, we have written off the Christian worldview of the Middle Ages to dance with the gods on the green hills of the ancient Greeks and Celts. In our haste to find something, anything that seems real enough to move us, we seem to have discarded reason’s legitimate use.
Yet it is reasonable to believe that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is an actual, historical event. And this proves that the God who authored history also entered it. According to the New Testament, he asks us to accept or reject his offer of salvation. Only he can endow our lives with meaning and abiding joy, and yet we dismiss him as primitive to chase the ancient demons of primitive man. And culturally, the trend continues to grow as shown by the growth in psychic services industries, overt witchcraft in social media, and ever-growing meditation/mindfulness markets.[3] As a Christian, I cannot stay silent. Jesus Christ is a home for brilliant minds. He is truth itself—the antidote to modern disenchantment.
Robertson, Venetia. “Deus Ex Machina? Witchcraft and the Techno-World.” Literature & Aesthetics 19, no. 2 (December 2009): 279–306. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/229421272.pdf. ↩︎
Erik Davis, “TechnoPagans: May the Astral Plane Be Reborn in Cyberspace,” Wired, July 1, 1995, https://techgnosis.com/technopagans/. Davis describes paganism as “an anarchic, earthy, celebratory spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of Europe’s pre-Christian people.” ↩︎
Pan, Deanna. “‘Looking for a Little Magic’: Millennials and Gen Z Embrace Witchy, New Age Spiritualism.” Boston Globe, October 30, 2019. https://www.bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2019/10/30/millennials-and-gen-embrace-witchy-new-age-spiritualism/ojetIu5fYahXu4dxa2IF6I/story.html. ↩︎
