Morse Code, Poltergeists and Spritualism in 19th century America.

After convincing congress to plow $30,000 into his project, Morse strung up a wire between Baltimore and Washington D.C. The first official message careened along that Baltimore-D.C line in 1844, and it was a strangely oracular pronouncement. “what hath god wrought!” this bit of scripture was suggested by daughter of the U.S, commissioner of patents, though Morse himself surely concurred with the sentiment; besides being the son of a staunch evangelist, he would later transfer a good portion of his considerable fortune to churches, seminaries and missionary societies.
Still the first telegraphed message reads as mush like an anxious question as a cry of glee, and today we know the answer: What God, wrought or rather, what men wrought in their God aping mode, was the information age.
Morse’s system was not just electrical (and hence, effectively instantaneous); it was Digital. The electric current that ran along telegraph wire was itself an analogue medium, flowing in the undulating waves that every where weave the world. But by regularly breaking and re-establishing this flow with a simple switch, and by establishing a code to interpret the resulting patterns of pulses, Morse chopped the analogue dance into discrete digital units, dots and dashes that signified. But what really defines the telegraph as the as the first neural net of the information age was how rapidly it infiltrated and changed the world, especially the exuberantly industrialising United States .
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TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information Erik Davis Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

In 1848, the Fox family started hearing creepy knocks and mysterious thumpings in their humble, Hydesdale, cottage in upstate New-York. Such eerie rappings pop – up regularly within folk lore, and they are usually attributed to the poltergeists still tracked by contemporary ghost busters. But the three sisters did something unprecedented in annals of strange phenomena; they started rapping back.
To improve communication, the sisters convinced the spirit – supposedly a murdered peddler whose bones lay under their home – to respond to their queries with a simple code.. One knock for yes, two knocks for no – a spectral echo of the dots and dashes then hurling through wires across the land. The cottage in Hydesdale was the launching pad for Spiritualism, a modern quasi religion of necromantic information exchange that would grow so popular as to pose a genuine threat to mainstream Christianity. By the 1870s, there were approximately eleven million spiritualists in the United States and countless more across the globe.
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Magic is Technology’s unconscious

The powerful aura that today’s advanced technologies cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying complexity; it also derives from their literal realisation of the virtual projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is technology’s unconscious, its’ own arational spell. Our modern technological world is not nature, but augmented nature, super nature, and the more intently we probe it’s mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric of the supernatural. Pg 48 TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information Erik Davis Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Idea and Video + the Sterilisation of ideas through Platonic forms.

In preface to Plato, the scholar Eric A.Havelock argues that the realm of the forms may also have revealed it’s self to Plato through the alphabet.

Havelock points out that the etymological root of the term idea, which also gives us the word Video has a visual connotation. Havelock argues that Platonic forms were conceived as analogies to visual forms, not just the perfect shapes of geometry, but the visual forms of the alphabet. Like letters Platonic ideas were immobile, isolated, and devoid of warmth and secondary qualities; they seem to transcend the world at hand. As David Abram observes, ’the letters and the written words that they present, are not subject to the flux of growth and decay, to the perturbations and cyclical changes common to other visible things; they seems to hover as it were, in another, strangely timeless dimension.’

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TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Anceint Egypt, the essence of a thing in it’s name

”Like many ancient peoples the Egyptians believed that a name captured the essence of a thing, but they also held that such supernatural power lived in the inscriptions themselves – that spelling was, in fact a spell. ”

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TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

Introduction; TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information

‘My Topic my seem rather obscure at first, for common sense tells us that mysticism has no more in common with technology than the twilight cry of wild swans has with the clatter of Rock ‘em Sock’em robots. Historians and sociologists inform us that the west’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations and apocalyptic visions crashed on the shores of the modern age. According to this narrative, technology has helped disenchant the world, forcing the ancestral symbolic networks of old to give way to the crisp, secular game plans of economic development, sceptical enquiry and material progress. But the old phantasms and metaphysical longings did not exactly disappear. In many cases, they disguised themselves and went underground, worming their way into the cultural, psychological, and mythological motivations that form the foundation of the modern world.’

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TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)

The Social Construct and Technomysticism

By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and even in some sense the foundation, of what we now increasingly think of as ‘the social construction of reality’.
Historically the great social constructions belong to the religious imagination: the animistic world of nature magic, the ritualised social narratives of mythology., the ethical inwardness of the ‘religions of the book’, and the increasingly rationalised modern institutions of faith that followed them. These various paradigms marked the their notions and symbols in the world around them, using archetecture, language, icons, costumes, and social ritual, – and often whatever media they could get their hands on .
For reasons that cannot simply be chalked up to the desire for power and conformity, the religious imagination has an irrepressible and almost desperate urge to remake the mental world humans share by communicating itself to others. From hieroglyphs to the printed book, from radio to computer networks, the spirit has found itself inside a variety of new bottles, and each new medium has become, in a variety of contradictory ways, part of the message. When the Norse god Odin swaps an eye for the gift of the runes, or when Paul of Tarsus writes in a letter that the World of God is written in our hearts, or when New Age mediums ‘channel spiritual information‘, the ever shifting boundaries between media and the self are redrawn in technomystical terms.
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TechGnosis – Myth and Mysticism in the age of Information
Erik Davis

Serpent’s Tail; New edition edition (12 Nov 2004)