How does our fascination with technology intersect with the religious imagination? InTechGnosis—a cult classic now updated and reissued with a new afterword—Erik Davis argues that while the realms of the digital and the spiritual may seem worlds apart, esoteric and religious impulses have in fact always permeated (and sometimes inspired) technological communication. Davis uncovers startling connections between such seemingly disparate topics as electricity and alchemy; online roleplaying games and religious and occult practices; virtual reality and gnostic mythology; programming languages and Kabbalah. The final chapters address the apocalyptic dreams that haunt technology, providing vital historical context as well as new ways to think about a future defined by the mutant intermingling of mind and machine, nightmare and fantasy.
Author(s): Erik Davis
Series: Five Star Fiction
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Year: 2015
Language: English
City: Berkeley, California
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Foreword by Eugene Thacker
Note to the Reader
Introduction (1998): Crossed Wires
I. Imagining Technologies
II. The Alchemical Fire
III. The Gnostic Infonaut
IV. Techgnosis, American-Style
V. The Spiritual Cyborg
VI. A Most Enchanting Machine
VII. Cyberspace: The Virtual Craft
VIII. The Alien Call
IX. Datapocalypse
X. Third Mind from the Sun
XI. The Path Is a Network
Afterword (2004)
Afterword 2.0 (2015)
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
