Technopagans

May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace

Erik Davis Jul 1, 1995 12:00 PM

"Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it."

-Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce is in all ways Wired. Intensely animated and severely caffeinated, with a shaved scalp and thick black glasses, he looks every bit the hip Bay Area technonerd. Having worked in communications for more than a decade, Pesce read William Gibson's breathtaking description of cyberspace as a call to arms, and he's spent the last handful of years bringing Neuromancer's consensual hallucination to life - concocting network technologies, inventing virtual reality gadgets, tweaking the World Wide Web. Long driven to hypermedia environments, the MIT dropout has now designed a way to "perceptualize the Internet" by transforming the Web into a three-dimensional realm navigable by our budding virtual bodies.

Pesce is also a technopagan, a participant in a small but vital subculture of digital savants who keep one foot in the emerging technosphere and one foot in the wild and woolly world of Paganism. Several decades old, Paganism is an anarchic, earthy, celebratory spiritual movement that attempts to reboot the magic, myths, and gods of Europe's pre-Christian people. Pagans come in many flavors - goddess-worshippers, ceremonial magicians, witches, Radical Fairies. Though hard figures are difficult to find, estimates generally peg their numbers in the US at 100,000 to 300,000. They are almost exclusively white folks drawn from bohemian and middle-class enclaves.

A startling number of Pagans work and play in technical fields, as sysops, computer programmers, and network engineers. On the surface, technopagans like Pesce embody quite a contradiction: they are Dionysian nature worshippers who embrace the Apollonian artifice of logical machines. But Pagans are also magic users, and they know that the Western magical tradition has more to give a Wired world than the occasional product name or the background material for yet another hack-and-slash game. Magic is the science of the imagination, the art of engineering consciousness and discovering the virtual forces that connect the body-mind with the physical world. And technopagans suspect that these occult Old Ways can provide some handy tools and tactics in our dizzying digital environment of intelligent agents, visual databases, and online MUDs and MOOs.

"Both cyberspace and magical space are purely manifest in the imagination," Pesce says as he sips java at a crêperie in San Francisco's Mission district. "Both spaces are entirely constructed by your thoughts and beliefs."

In a sense, humanity has always lived within imaginative interfaces - at least from the moment the first Paleolithic grunt looked at a mountain or a beast and saw a god peering back. Over the millennia, alchemists, Kabbalists, and esoteric Christians developed a rich storehouse of mental tools, visual dataspaces, and virtual maps. It's no accident that these "hermetic" arts are named for Hermes, the Greek trickster god of messages and information. One clearly relevant hermetic technique is the art of memory, first used by ancient orators and rediscovered by magicians and Jesuits during the Renaissance. In this mnemonic technique, you construct a clearly defined building within your imagination and then place information behind an array of colorful symbolic icons - by then "walking through" your interior world, you can recover a storehouse of knowledge.

The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus gives perhaps the most famous hermetic maxim: "As above, so below." According to this ancient Egyptian notion, the cosmos is a vast and resonating web of living symbolic correspondences between humans and earth and heaven. And as Pesce points out, this maxim also points to a dynamite way to manipulate data space. "You can manipulate a whole bunch of things with one symbol, dragging in a whole idea space with one icon. It's like a nice compression algorithm."

Besides whatever technical inspiration they can draw from magical lore, technopagans are driven by an even more basic desire: to honor technology as part of the circle of human life, a life that for Pagans is already divine. Pagans refuse to draw sharp boundaries between the sacred and the profane, and their religion is a frank celebration of the total flux of experience: sex, death, comic books, compilers. Even the goofier rites of technopaganism (and there are plenty) represent a passionate attempt to influence the course of our digital future - and human evolution. "Computers are simply mirrors," Pesce says. "There's nothing in them that we didn't put there. If computers are viewed as evil and dehumanizing, then we made them that way. I think computers can be as sacred as we are, because they can embody our communication with each other and with the entities - the divine parts of ourselves - that we invoke in that space."

If you hang around the San Francisco Bay area or the Internet fringe for long, you'll hear loads of loopy talk about computers and consciousness. Because the issues of interface design, network psychology, and virtual reality are so open-ended and novel, the people who hack this conceptual edge often sound as much like science fiction acidheads as they do sober programmers. In this vague realm of gurus and visionaries, technopagan ideas about "myth" and "magic" often signify dangerously murky waters.

But Pesce is no snake-vapor salesperson or glib New Ager. Sure, he spends his time practicing kundalini yoga, boning up on Aleister Crowley's Thelemic magic, and tapping away at his book Understanding Media: The End of Man, which argues that magic will play a key role in combating the virulent information memes and pathological virtual worlds that will plague the coming cyberworld. But he's also the creator of VRML, a technical standard for creating navigable, hyperlinked 3-D spaces on the World Wide Web. VRML has been endorsed by Silicon Graphics, Netscape, Digital, NEC, and other Net behemoths, and Pesce's collaborator, Tony Parisi at Intervista Software, will soon release a 3-D graphical Web browser called WorldView, which will add a crucial spatial dimension to the Web's tangled 2-D hyperspace of home pages, links, and endless URLs. As Pesce's technomagical children, WorldView and VRML may well end up catalyzing the next phase of online mutation: the construction of a true, straight-out-of-Neuromancer cyberspace on the Internet.

WorldView first popped out of the ether four years ago, when Pesce was sitting around pondering a technical conundrum: How do you know what's where in cyberspace? "In the physical world, if you want to know what's behind you, you just turn around and look," he explains. "In the virtual reality of cyberspace, you'd do the same thing. But what is the computing equipment involved in the network actually doing? How do I distribute that perceptualization so that all the components create it together and no one part is totally dominant?"

Then Pesce was struck with a vision. In his mind's eye, he saw a web, and each part of the web reflected every other part. Like any good wirehead, he began to code his numinous flash into a software algorithm so his vision could come to life. "It turns out that the appropriate methodology is very close to the computer equivalent of holography, in which every part is a fragment that represents the greater whole." Using a kind of a six-degrees-of-separation principle, Pesce invented a spatial cyberspace protocol for the Net.

It was only later that someone told him about the mythical net of Indra. According to Chinese Buddhist sages, the great Hindu god Indra holds in his possession a net stretching into infinity in all directions. A magnificent jewel is lodged in each eye of the net, and each jewel reflects the infinity of other jewels. "It's weird to have a mystical experience that's more a software algorithm than anything else," Pesce says with a grin. "But Friedrich Kekulé figured out the benzene ring when he dreamed of a snake eating its tail."

Of course, Pesce was blown away when he first saw Mosaic, NCSA's powerful World Wide Web browser. "I entered an epiphany I haven't exited yet." He saw the Web as the first emergent property of the Internet. "It's displaying all the requisite qualities - it came on very suddenly, it happened everywhere simultaneously, and it's self-organizing. I call that the Web eating the Net." Driven by the dream of an online data-storage system that's easy for humans to grok, Pesce created VRML, a "virtual reality markup language" that adds another dimension to the Web's HTML, or hypertext markup language. Bringing in Rendermorphics Ltd.'s powerful but relatively undemanding Reality Lab rendering software, Pesce and fellow magician Parisi created WorldView, which hooks onto VRML the way Mosaic interfaces with HTML. As in virtual reality, WorldView gives you the ability to wander and poke about a graphic Web site from many angles.

Pesce now spreads the word of cyberspace in conference halls and boardrooms across the land. His evangelical zeal is no accident - raised a hard-core Catholic, and infected briefly with the mighty Pentecostal Christian meme in his early 20s, Pesce has long known the gnostic fire of passionate belief. But after moving to San Francisco from New England, the contradictions between Christian fundamentalism and his homosexuality became overwhelming. At the same time, odd synchronicities kept popping up in ways that Pesce could not explain rationally. Walking down the street one day, he just stopped in his tracks. "I thought, OK, I'm going to stop fighting it. I'm a witch."

For Pesce, the Craft is nothing less than applied cybernetics. "It's understanding how the information flow works in human beings and in the world around them, and then learning enough about that flow that you can start to move in it, and move it as well." Now he's trying to move that flow online. "Without the sacred there is no differentiation in space; everything is flat and gray. If we are about to enter cyberspace, the first thing we have to do is plant the divine in it."

And so, a few days before Halloween, a small crowd of multimedia students, business folk, and Net neophytes wander into Joe's Digital Diner, a technoculture performance space located in San Francisco's Mission district. The audience has come to learn about the World Wide Web, but what they're going to get is CyberSamhain, Mark Pesce's digitally enhanced version of the ancient Celtic celebration of the dead known to the rest of us as Halloween. Of all of Paganism's seasonal festivals, Samhain (pronounced "saw-when") is the ripest time for magic. As most Pagans will tell you, it's the time when the veils between the worlds of the living and the dead are thinnest. For Pesce, Samhain is the perfect time to ritually bless WorldView as a passageway between the meat world and the electronic shadow land of the Net.

Owen Rowley, a buzz-cut fortysomething with a skull-print tie and devilish red goatee, sits before a PC, picking though a Virtual Tarot CD-ROM. Rowley's an elder in Pesce's Silver Star witchcraft coven and a former systems administrator at Autodesk. He hands out business cards to the audience as people take in the room's curious array of pumpkins, swords, and fetish-laded computer monitors. Rowley's cards read: Get Out of HELL Free. "Never know when they might come in handy," Rowley says with a wink and a grin.

To outsiders (or "mundanes," as Pagans call them), the ritual world of Pagandom can seem like a strange combination of fairy-tale poetry, high-school theatrics, and a New Age Renaissance Faire. And tonight's crowd does appear puzzled. Are these guys serious? Are they crazy? Is this art? Pagans are ultimately quite serious, but most practice their religion with a disarming humor and a willingly childlike sense of play; tonight's technopagans are no different. The ritual drummer for the evening, a wiry, freelance PC maven, walked up to me holding the read-write arm of a 20-meg hard disk. "An ancient tool of sorcery," he said in the same goofball tone you hear at comic-book conventions and college chemistry labs. Then he showed me a real magic tool, a beautiful piece of live wood he obtained from a tree shaman in Britain and which he called a "psychic screwdriver."

With the audience temporarily shuttled next door for a World Wide Web demo, Pesce gathers the crew of mostly gay men into a circle. (As Rowley says, "in the San Francisco queer community, Paganism is the default religion.") In his black sports coat, slacks, and red Converse sneakers, Pesce seems an unlikely mage. Then Rowley calls for a toast and whips out a Viking horn brimming with homemade full-moon mead.

"May the astral plane be reborn in cyberspace," proclaims a tall sysop in a robe before sipping the heady honey wine.

"Plant the Net in the Earth," says a freelance programmer, passing the horn to his left.

"And to Dr. Strange, who started it all," Rowley says, toasting the Marvel Comics character before chuckling and draining the brew.

As the crowd shuffles back into the room, Pesce nervously scratches his head. "It's time to take the training wheels off my wand," he tells me as he prepares to cast this circle.

At once temple and laboratory, Pagan circles make room for magic and the gods in the midst of mundane space time. Using a combination of ceremonial performance, ritual objects, and imagination, Pagans carve out these tightly bounded zones in both physical and psychic space. Pagan rituals vary quite a bit, but the stage is often set by invoking the four elements that the ancients believed composed all matter. Often symbolized by colored candles or statues, these four "Watchtowers" stand like imaginary sentinels in the four cardinal directions of the circle.

But tonight's Watchtowers are four 486 PCs networked through an Ethernet and linked to a SPARCstation with an Internet connection. Pesce is attempting to link old and new, and his setup points out the degree to which our society has replaced air, earth, fire, and water with silicon, plastic, wire, and glass. The four monitors face into the circle, glowing patiently in the subdued light. Each machine is running WorldView, and each screen shows a different angle on a virtual space that a crony of Pesce's concocted with 3D Studio. The ritual circle mirrors the one that Pesce will create in the room: an ornate altar stands on a silver pentagram splayed like a magic carpet over the digital abyss; four multicolored polyhedrons representing the elements hover around the circle; a fifth element, a spiked and metallic "chaos sphere," floats about like some ominous foe from Doom.

WorldView is an x-y-z-based coordinate system, and Pesce has planted this cozy virtual world at its very heart: coordinates 0,0,0. As Pesce explains to the crowd, the circle is navigable independently on each PC, and simultaneously available on the World Wide Web to anyone using WorldView. More standard Web browsers linked to the CyberSamhain site would also turn up the usual pages of text and images - in this case, invocations and various digital fetishes downloaded and hyperlinked by a handful of online Pagans scattered around the world.

Wearing a top hat, a bearded network administrator named James leads the crowd through mantras and grounding exercises. A storyteller tells a tale. Then, in walks the evening's priestess, a Russian-born artist and exotic dancer named Marina Berlin. She's buck-naked, her body painted with snakes and suns and flying eyes. "Back to the '60s" whispers a silver-haired man to my left. Stepping lightly, Berlin traces a circle along the ground as she clangs two piercing Tibetan bells together 13 times.

With a loud, sonorous voice, Pesce races around the circle, formally casting and calling those resonant archetypes known as the gods. "Welcome Maiden, Mother, Crone," he bellows in the sing-song rhymes common to Pagan chants. "To the North that is Your throne, / For we have set Your altar there, / Come to circle; now be here!"

How much Pagans believe in the lusty wine-swilling gods of yore is a complex question. Most Pagans embrace these entities with a combination of conviction and levity, superstition, psychology, and hard-core materialism. Some think the gods are as real as rocks, some remain skeptical atheists, some think the beings have no more or less actuality than Captain Kirk. Tonight's technopagans aren't taking anything too seriously, and after the spirits are assembled, Pesce announces the "the sacred bullshit hour" and hands the wand to his friend and mentor Rowley.

"Witchcraft evolved into the art of advertising," Rowley begins. "In ancient times, they didn't have TV - the venue was the ritual occurrence. Eight times a year, people would go to the top of the hill, to the festival spot, and there would be a party. They'd drink, dance in rings, and sing rhyming couplets." Today's Pagans attempt to recover that deep seasonal rhythm in the midst of a society that yokes all phenomenon to the manipulative control of man. "It's about harmonizing with the tides of time, the emergent patterns of nature. It's about learning how to surf."

Samhain's lesson is the inevitability of death in a world of flux, and so Rowley leads the assembled crowd through the Scapegoat Dance, a Celtic version of "London Bridge." A roomful of geeks, technoyuppies, and multimedia converts circle around in the monitor glow, chanting and laughing and passing beneath a cloth that Rowley and Pesce dangle over their heads like the Reaper's scythe.

As a longtime participant-observer in the Pagan community, I join in with pleasure. Trudging along, grasping some stranger's sweaty shoulder, I'm reminded of those gung-ho futurists who claim that technology will free us from the body, from nature, even from death. I realize how unbalanced such desires are. From our first to final breath, we are woven into a world without which we are nothing, and our glittering electronic nets are not separate from that ancient webwork.

In 1985, when National Public Radio reporter and witch Margot Adler was revising Drawing Down the Moon, her great social history of American Paganism, she surveyed the Pagan community and discovered that an "amazingly" high percentage of folks drew their paychecks from technical fields and from the computer industry. Respondents gave many reasons for this curious affinity - everything from "computers are elementals in disguise" to the simple fact that the computer industry provided jobs for the kind of smart, iconoclastic, and experimental folk that Paganism attracts. Pagans like to do things - to make mead, to publish zines, to wield swords during gatherings of the Society for Creative Anachronism. And many like to hack code.

But if you dig deep enough, you find more intimate correspondences between computer culture and Paganism's religion of the imagination. One link is science fiction and fantasy fandom, a world whose role playing, nerd humor, and mythic enthusiasm has bred many a Pagan. The Church of All Worlds, one of the more eclectic and long-lasting Pagan groups (and the first to start using the word pagan), began in 1961 when some undergrad libertarians got jazzed by the Martian religion described in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Today, you can find occult books at science fiction conferences and Klingon rituals at Pagan gatherings.

Science fiction and fantasy also make up the archetypal hacker canon. Since at least the '60s, countless code freaks and techies have enthusiastically participated in science fiction and fantasy fandom - it's even leaked into their jokes and jargon (the "wizards" and "demons" of Unix are only one example). When these early hackers started building virtual worlds, it's no accident they copped these realms from their favorite genres. Like software programs, the worlds of science fiction and fantasy "run" on stock elements and internally consistent rules. One of the first digital playgrounds was MIT's early Space Wars, a rocket-ship shoot-'em-up. But the Stanford AI lab's Adventure game lagged not far behind. A text-based analog of Dungeons & Dragons that anticipated today's MUDs, Adventure shows how comfortably a magical metaphor of caverns, swords, and spells fit the program's nested levels of coded puzzles.

Magic and Pagan gods fill the literature of cyberspace as well. Count Zero, the second of William Gibson's canonical trilogy, follows the fragmentation of Neuromancer's sentient artificial intelligence into the polytheistic pantheon of the Afro-Haitian loa - gods that Gibson said entered his own text with a certain serendipitous panache. "I was writing the second book and wasn't getting off on it," he told me a few years ago. "I just picked up a National Geographic and read something about voodoo, and thought, What the hell, I'll just throw these things in and see what happens. Afterward, when I read up on voodoo more, I felt I'd been really lucky. The African religious impulse lends itself to a computer world much more than anything in the West. You cut deals with your favorite deity - it's like those religions already are dealing with artificial intelligences." One book Gibson read reproduced many Haitian veves, complex magical glyphs drawn with white flour on the ritual floor. "Those things look just like printed circuits," he mused.

Gibson's synchronicity makes a lot of sense to one online Pagan I know, a longtime LambdaMOOer who named herself "legba" after one of these loa. The West African trickster Legba was carried across the Atlantic by Yoruban slaves, and along with the rest of his spiritual kin, was fused with Catholic saints and other African spirits to create the pantheons of New World religions like Cuba's Santería, Brazil's Candomblé, and Haiti's Vodun (Voodoo). Like the Greek god Hermes, Legba rules messages and gateways and tricks, and as the lord of the crossroads, he is invoked at the onset of countless rituals that continue to be performed from São Paulo to Montreal. As legba (who doesn't capitalize her handle out of respect for the loa) told me, "I chose that name because it seemed appropriate for what MOOing allows - a way to be between the worlds, with language the means of interaction. Words shape everything there, and are, at the same time, little bits of light, pure ideas, packets in no-space transferring everywhere with incredible speed. If you regard magic in the literal sense of influencing the universe according to the will of the magician, then simply being on the MOO is magic. The Net is pure Legba space."

Whether drawn from science fiction, spirituality, or TV, metaphors make cyberspace. Though Vernor Vinge's True Names has received far less attention than Neuromancer, the novella explores the implications of cyberspace metaphors in one of the great visions of online VR. Rather than Gibson's dazzling Cartesian videogame, Vinge imagined cyberspace as a low-bandwidth world of sprites, castles, and swamps that, like today's MUDs, required the imaginative participation of the users. Anticipating crypto-anarchist obsessions, the novella's heroic covens elude state control through encryption spells that cloak their doings and their "true names."

Some of Vinge's sorcerers argue that the magical imagery of covens and spells is just a more convenient way to manipulate encrypted dataspace than the rational and atomistic language of clients, files, and communications protocols. Regardless of magic's efficacy, Vinge realized that its metaphors work curiously well. And as legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke said in his 1962 Profiles of the Future, "new technology is indistinguishable from magic."

But convenience and superstition alone do not explain the powerful resonance between hermetic magic and communications technology, a resonance that we find in history, not just in science fiction (see "Cryptomancy through the Ages," page 132). Even if magic is only a metaphor, then we must remember how metaphoric computers have become. Interfaces and online avatars are working metaphors, while visualization techniques use hypothetical models and colorful imagery to squeeze information from raw data. And what is simulation but a metaphor so sharp we forget it's not a metaphor?

Then there are the images we project onto our computers. Already, many users treat their desktops as pesky, if powerful, sprites. As online agents, smart networks, and intelligent gizmos permeate the space of our everyday lives, these anthropomorphic habits will leave the Turing test in the dust. Some industry observers worry that all this popular response to computers mystifies our essentially dumb machines. But it's too late. As computers blanket the world like digital kudzo, we surround ourselves with an animated webwork of complex, powerful, and unseen forces that even the "experts" can't totally comprehend. Our technological environment may soon appear to be as strangely sentient as the caves, lakes, and forests in which the first magicians glimpsed the gods.

The alchemists, healers, and astrological astronomers of old did their science in the context of sacred imagination, a context that was stripped away by the Enlightenment's emphasis on detached rationalism. Today, in the silicon crucible of computer culture, digital denizens are once again building bridges between logic and fantasy, math and myth, the inner and the outer worlds. Technopagans, for all their New Age kitsch and bohemian brouhaha, are taking the spiritual potential of this postmodern fusion seriously. As VR designer Brenda Laurel put it in an in e-mail interview, "Pagan spirituality on the Net combines the decentralizing force that characterizes the current stage in human development, the revitalizing power of spiritual practice, and the evolutionary potential of technology. Revitalizing our use of technology through spiritual practice is an excellent way to create more of those evolutionary contexts and to unleash the alchemical power of it all."

These days, the Internet has replaced zines as the clearinghouse of contemporary heresy, and magicians are just one more thread in the Net's rainbow fringe of anarchists, Extropians, conspiracy theorists, X-Files fans, and right-wing kooks. Combing through esoteric mailing lists and Usenet groups like alt.magick.chaos and soc.religion.eastern, I kept encountering someone called Tyagi Nagasiva and his voluminous, sharp, and contentious posts on everything from Sufism to Satanism. Tyagi posted so much to alt.magick.chaos that Simon, one of the group's founders, created alt.magick.tyagi to divert the flow. He has edited a FAQ, compiled the Mage's Guide to the Internet, and helped construct Divination Web, an occult MUD. Given his e-mail address - tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com- it almost seemed as if the guy lived online, like some oracular Unix demon or digital jinni.

After I initiated an online exchange, Tyagi agreed to an interview. "You could come here to the House of Kaos, or we could meet somewhere else if you're more comfortable with that," he e-mailed me. Visions of haunted shacks and dank, moldering basements danced in my head. I pictured Tyagi as a hefty and grizzled hermit with a scruffy beard and vaguely menacing eyes.

But the 33-year-old man who greeted me in the doorway of a modest San Jose tract home was friendly, thin, and clean-shaven. Homemade monk's robes cloaked his tall frame, and the gaze from his black eyes was intense and unwavering. He gave me a welcoming hug, and then ushered me into his room.

It was like walking into a surrealist temple. Brightly colored paper covered the walls, which were pinned with raptor feathers and collages of Hindu posters and fantasy illustrations. Cards from the Secret Dakini Oracle were strung along the edge of the ceiling, along with hexagrams from the I Ching. To the north sits his altar. Along with the usual candles, herbs, and incense holders, Tyagi has added a bamboo flute, a water pipe stuffed with plants, and one of Jack Chick's Christian comic-book tracts. The altar is dedicated to Kali, the dark and devouring Hindu goddess of destruction whose statue Tyagi occasionally anoints with his lover's menstrual blood. Other figures include a Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey Mouse and a rainbow-haired troll. On the window sill lies the tail of Vlad the Impaler, a deceased cat. Near the altar sits a beat-up Apple II with a trackball that resembles a swirling blue crystal ball.

On one wall, Tyagi has posted the words Charity, Poverty, and Silence. They are reminders of monastic vows Tyagi took, vows with traditional names but his own, carefully worked out meanings. (Tyagi is an adopted name that means "one who renounces.")

"I just stopped grabbing after things," he said. "I made certain limitations and assertions on how I wanted to live and be in the world." His job as a security guard gives him just enough cash for rent, food, and dial-up time.

"For a long time, I had the desire to find the truth at all costs, or die trying," Tyagi said in a measured and quiet voice. After reading and deeply researching philosophy, mysticism, and the occult, Tyagi began cobbling together his own mythic structures, divination systems, and rituals - an eclectic spirituality well suited to the Net's culture of complex interconnection. Like many technopagans, Tyagi paid his dues behind the eight-sided die, exploring role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Call of Cthulhu. He also delved heavily into chaos magic, a rather novel development on the occult fringe that's well represented on the Net. Rather than work with traditional occult systems, chaos magicians either construct their own rules or throw them out altogether, spontaneously enacting rituals that break through fixed mental categories and evoke unknown - and often terrifying - entities and experiences.

"Using popular media is an important aspect of chaos magic," Tyagi says as he scratches the furry neck of Eris, the Doggess of Discord. "Instead of rejecting media like many Pagans, we use them as magical tools." He points out that Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, the chaotic magical organization that surrounds the industrial band Psychick TV, would practice divination with televisions tuned to display snow. "Most Pagans would get online and say, Let's get together somewhere and do a ritual. Chaos magicians would say, Let's do the ritual online."

After compiling his original Mage's Guide to the Internet - an exhaustive directory of mailing lists, ftp sites, newsgroups, and MOOs - Tyagi hooked up with Moonchilde, also known as Joseph Traub, a god of an online MUSH devoted to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series, and created an occult MUD called Divination Web (telnet bill.math.uconn.edu 9393). Originally, DivWeb presented a virtual geography of spiritual systems: a great Kabbalistic Tree of Life stood in the center of a wheel whose various spokes mapped out different astrological signs and psychological states and linked up to other realms - Celtic, shamanic, Satanic. Down one path lay an amusement park devoted to religious heresy; another direction would send you down the river of the Egyptian afterlife. But Tyagi found the layout too structured, and now you just log into the Void.

These days, Tyagi cruises the Net from four to six hours a day during the week. "Being online is part of my practice. It's kind of a hermit-like existence, like going into a cave. I'm not really connected to people. I'm just sending out messages and receiving them back."

But for MOO-oriented magicians like Tyagi, the Net is more than a place of disembodied information. "Cyberspace is a different dimension of interaction. There's a window between the person who's typing and the person who finds himself in cyberspace," Tyagi explains. "If you're familiar enough with the tool, you can project yourself into that realm. For me, I start to associate myself with the words that I'm typing. It's less like I'm putting letters onto a screen and more like there's a description of an experience and I'm having it. It's a wonderful new experiment in terms of magic and the occult, and it connects with a lot of experiments that have happened in the past."

Like some MUD users, Tyagi finds that after logging heavy time in these online realms, he interacts with the offline world as if it were an object-oriented database. "Within the physical world, there are certain subsets that are MUDs - like a book. A book is a kind of MUD - you can get into it and move around. It's a place to wander. So MUDs become a powerful metaphor to see in a personal sense how we interact with different messages. Real life is the fusion of the various MUDs. It's where all of them intersect."

For the Druids and hermetic scholars of old, the world was alive with intelligent messages: every star and stone was a signature; every beast and tree spoke its being. The cosmos was a living book where humans wandered as both readers and writers. The wise ones just read deeper, uncovering both mystical correspondences and the hands-on knowledge of experimental science.

To the thousands of network denizens who live inside MUDs and MOOs like DivWeb or LambdaMOO, this worldview is not as musty and quaint as it might seem to the rest of us. As text-based virtual worlds, MUDs are entirely constructed with language: the surface descriptions of objects, rooms, and bodies; the active script of speech and gesture; and the powerful hidden spells of programming code. Many MOOs are even devoted to specific fictional worlds, turning the works of Anne McCaffrey or J. R. R. Tolkien into living books.

For many VR designers and Net visionaries, MOOs are already fossils - primitive, low-bandwidth inklings of the great, simulated, sensory overloads of the future. But hard-core MOOers know how substantial and enchanting - not to mention addictive - their textual worlds can become, especially when they're fired up with active imagination, eroticism, and performative speech.

All those elements are important in the conjurer's art, but to explore just how much MOOs had to do with magic, I sought out my old friend legba, a longtime Pagan with a serious MOO habit. Because her usual haunt, LambdaMOO, had such heavy lag time, legba suggested we meet in Dhalgren MOO, a more intimate joint whose eerie imagery is lifted from Samuel Delaney's post-apocalyptic science fiction masterpiece.

That's how I wind up here on Dhalgren's riverbank. Across the water, the wounded city of Bellona flickers as flames consume its rotten dock front. I step onto a steel suspension bridge, edging past smashed toll booths and a few abandoned cars, then pass through cracked city streets on my way to legba's Crossroads. An old traffic light swings precariously. Along the desolate row of abandoned storefronts, I see the old Grocery Store, legba's abode. Through the large and grimy plate glass window I can see an old sign that reads: Eggs, $15.95/dozen. The foreboding metal security grate is locked.

Legba pages me from wherever she currently is: "The next fun thing is figuring out how to get into the grocery store."

Knowing legba's sense of humor, I smash the window and scramble through the frame into the derelict shop. Dozens of flickering candles scatter shadows on the yellowing walls. I smell cheese and apples, and a sweet smoke that might be sage.

Legba hugs me. "Welcome!" I step back to take a look. Legba always wears borrowed bodies, and I never know what form or gender they'll be. Now I see an assemblage: part human, part machine, part hallucination. Her mouth is lush, almost overripe against bone-white skin, and her smile reveals a row of iridescent, serrated teeth. She's wearing a long black dress with one strap slipping off a bony, white shoulder. Folded across her narrow back is one long, black wing.

I'm still totally formless here, so legba urges me to describe my virtual flesh. I become an alien anthropologist, a tall, spindly Zeta Reticuli with enormous black eyes and a vaguely quizzical demeanor. I don a long purple robe and dangle a diamond vajra pedant around my scrawny neck. Gender neutral.

Legba offers me some canned peaches. Pulling out a laser drill, I cut through the can, sniff the contents, and then suck the peaches down in a flash through a silver straw.

Once again, I'm struck at how powerfully MOOs fuse writing and performance. Stretching forth a long, bony finger, I gently touch legba's shoulder. She shivers.

"Do we bring our bodies into cyberspace?"

Legba does.

She doesn't differentiate much anymore.

"How is this possible?" I ask. "Imagination? Astral plane? The word made flesh?"

"It's more like flesh made word," legba says. "Here your nerves are uttered. There's a sense of skin on bone, of gaze and touch, of presence. It's like those ancient spaces, yes, but without the separations between earth and heaven, man and angel."

Like many of the truly creative Pagans I've met, legba is solitary, working without a coven or close ties to Paganism's boisterous community. Despite her online presence and her interest in Ifá, the West African system of divination, legba's a pretty traditional witch; she completed a Craft apprenticeship with Pagans in Ann Arbor and studied folklore and mythology in Ireland. "But I was sort of born this way," she says. "There was this voice that

I always heard and followed. I got the name for it, for her, through reading the right thing at the right time. This was the mid- to late '70s, and it was admittedly in the air again.

I went to Ireland looking for the goddess and became an atheist. Then she started looking out through my eyes. For me, it's about knowing, seeing, being inside the sentience of existence, and walking in the connections."

These connections remind me of the Crossroads legba has built here and on LambdaMOO. She nods. "For me, simultaneously being in VR and in RL [real life] is the crossroads." Of course, the Crossroads is also the mythic abode of Legba, her namesake. "Legba's the gateway," she explains. "The way between worlds, the trickster, the phallus, and the maze. He's words and their meanings, and limericks and puns, and elephant jokes and -"

She pauses. "Do you remember the AI in Count Zero who made those Cornell Boxes?" she asks. "The AI built incredible shadow boxes, assemblages of the scraps and bits and detritus of humanity, at random, but with a machine's intentionality." She catches her breath. "VR is that shadowbox. And Legba is," she pauses, "that AI's intentionality."

But then she shrugs, shyly, refusing to make any questionable claims about online gods. "I'm just an atheist anarchist who does what they tell me to do," she says, referring to what she calls the "contemporary holograms" of the gods. "It works is all."

I asked her when she first realized that MOOs "worked." She told me about the time her friend Bakunin showed her how to crawl inside a dishwasher, sit through the wash-and-rinse cycle, and come out all clean. She realized that in these virtual object-oriented spaces, things actually change their properties. "It's like alchemy," she said.

"The other experience was the first time I desired somebody, really desired them, without scent or body or touch or any of the usual clues, and they didn't even know what gender I was for sure. The usual markers become meaningless."

Like many MOOers, legba enjoys swapping genders and bodies and exploring net.sex. "Gender-fucking and morphing can be intensely magical. It's a very, very easy way of shapechanging. One of the characteristics of shamans in many cultures is that they're between genders, or doubly gendered. But more than that, morphing and net.sex can have an intensely and unsettling effect on the psyche, one that enables the ecstatic state from which Pagan magic is done."

I reach out and gingerly poke one of her sharp teeth. "The electricity of nerves," I say. "The power of language."

She grins and closes her teeth on my finger, knife-point sharp, pressing just a little, but not enough to break the skin.

"It's more than the power of language," legba responds. "It's embodiment, squishy and dizzying, all in hard and yielding words and the slippery spaces between them. It's like fucking in language."

"But," I say, "jabbering in this textual realm is a far cry from what a lot of Pagans do - slamming a drum and dancing nude around a bonfire with horns on their heads."

She grins, well aware of the paradox. As she explains, our culture already tries to rise above what Paganism finds most important (nature, earth, bodies, mother), and at first the disembodied freedom of cyberspace seems to lob us even further into artificial orbit.

"But the MOO isn't really like a parallel universe or an alternate space," legba says. "It's another aspect of the real world. The false dichotomy is to think that cyberspace and our RL bodies are really separate. That the 'astral' is somewhere else, refined and better."

I hear a call from the mother ship. "I must take my leave now."

Legba grins as well and hugs me goodbye.

I try to smile, but it's difficult because Gray aliens have such small mouths. So I bow, rub my vajra pendant, and wave. For the moment, my encounter with technopaganism is done. I've glimpsed no visions on my PowerBook, no demons on the MOO, and I have a tough time believing that the World Wide Web is the living mind of the Gaian Goddess. But even as I recall the phone lines, dial-up fees, and clacking keyboards that prop up my online experience, I can't erase the eerie sense that even now some ancient page of prophecy, penned in a crabbed and shaky hand, is being fulfilled in silicon. And then I hit @quit, and disappear into thin electronic air.

Cryptomancy through the Ages

Vernor Vinge is not the first to link spells with encrypted codes. The first books of modern cryptography were penned back in the 15th century by Johannes Trithemius, the Abbot of Würzberg. Though Trithemius was a monk, he was also a hard-core magician, and his Steganographia and Polygraphiae were simultaneously works of encryption and theurgy - the art of invoking gods and spirits. Trithemius's simple transpositional schemes were designed to control demonic entities who formed a kind of astral Internet, allowing the mage to communicate messages at a distance and to know everything that was going on in the world. Trithemius was no pagan witch - in fact, he encouraged the Church to burn them. Historians still can't decide whether Trithemius was disguising his magic as cryptography or vice versa, but the National Security Agency finds his works important enough to display them at its museum in Washington, DC.

The Renaissance magician John Dee was a secret agent for the British Crown (code named 007), and may have used his occult writings to pass on military information about the Spanish Armada during the late 16th century. Dee was also a mathematician, a geographer, an antiquarian, and the court astrologer for Queen Elizabeth.

With the largest library in England, Dee fulfilled a common hermetic pattern of information addiction and intellectual eclecticism, his interests ranging from Euclid to alchemy to mechanical birds. Using an elaborate system of theurgic magic, Dee also sought "the company and information of the Angels of God." As faithful messengers of light mediating God's omniscience, angels might be the original intelligent agents - immaterial, rational, without human emotion.

Dee's occult partner Edward Kelly would stare into the crystal surface of a "shew-stone" as Dee used his decidedly unnatural language of Enochian Calls to download data from the creatures Kelly glimpsed there. Lacking good cryptography, Dee spent much of his time interrogating the creatures to make sure they were who they claimed and not evil demons in disguise.

The Goddess in Every Woman's Machine

by Paulina Borsook

Technopaganism is the grand exception to the 85-percent-male,15-percent-female demographics of the online world.

It is one virtual community where rough parity - both in number and in power - exists between the sexes.

For starters, in the goddess-based versions of technopaganism, every incarnation of the divine can be symbolized by female personae: here there are brainiacs and artists and powermongers, in addition to the more traditional archetypes of sexpot and baby-maker and provider of harvests. Unlike the great world religions - Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism - in goddess-based spiritual practice, women can express their latent sense of potency without feeling they have to be crypto-male.

It's the fundamentals of technopaganism that have created this woman-friendly technoland. Laura Cooksey, who has a degree in computer science from the University of Kentucky and works as a programmer for the US Department of the Navy in Arlington, Virginia, says that paganism appealed to her because it "has always placed more emphasis on the female aspects of deity. There are female archetypes and role models you can relate to."

It's not that guys aren't welcome - both as fellow devotees, and, at the spiritual level, in male representations of deity. But within technopaganism there is a level playing field for women that is unimaginable on other spiritual paths where the Most-Holy-and-Potent are male. Happily enough, in paganism, says Alison Harlow, a database designer from Santa Cruz, "sexuality is sacred."

Harlow first discovered computers in 1958, when she was starved for English-language books after eloping to Latin America. She stumbled across that classic of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner's The Human Use of Human Beings. She went on to receive a master's in mathematics from Columbia University, then launched her career with IBM in 1962. She now makes her living designing health risk-assessment databases, has helped found a Neo-Pagan community in the Santa Cruz mountains, and was prominently featured in Margot Adler's seminal book on Paganism.

Susan Shaw, who does PC tech-support for Xerox Corporation in Rochester, New York, says that in the technopagan rivulets on the Net, "women almost seem to be top dog"; what's more, she adds, the level of civility is higher. This may be both a cause and effect of female-principle-honoring technopaganism. This is a practice which endorses the politeness that has been encouraged in women; men are drawn to this female world view in part because they cherish politesse. And if there are flames, as one Bay Area technopagan says, "there are equal-opportunity flame wars."

In fact, Shaw says, "men in technopaganism have to be comfortable with women in leadership roles and with serious and focused intellectual contact with women. If they're just cruising, they drop out fast."

Pagan Emma Bull, whose 1991 novel Bone Dance was nominated for both Nebula and Hugo awards says, "On the Net, you are androgynous unless you claim otherwise. Any sexuality is what you yourself have placed there - there's no gender in information-processing, and information doesn't have sex." Bull does point out, though, that the more ceremonial-magic Pagan groups tend to be more male-dominated, more hierarchical, and more "into who has juju and who doesn't."

However gender roles stack up, the bottom line for women is that technopaganism is empowering. So argues Kit Howard, who designs databases for a Midwestern pharmaceutical company; she is co-founder of the TechnoDruids Guild, an electronic support and advocacy group for the Druid community, and Chief Information Officer of ÁrnDraíocht Féin, one of the largest Druid organizations in the Pagan community. "You don't have to be stupidly feminist, and you don't need to displace men," she says. "Technopaganism creates a self-selection, where women are more activist, and men are more sympathetic."

In order to make it in the male-dominated world of technology, women often have to be the biggest logical-positivists on the block, outdoing any of the guys in syllogistic thinking and no-nonsense tough-mindedness. Technopaganism allows them to reclaim their femmie sides.

What's more, Harlow suggests, if a woman is "very left-brain, she may have to work harder" to reconnect with spiritual and intuitive sides. And if you're a woman who functions well in traditionally male societies, it can be tremendously comforting to find a path where you can explore female aspects of the universe, both physical and metaphysical, without that being considered wimpy or ineffectual.

With technopaganism, a woman technologist gets to be the girl and gets to be powerful, all at the same time.

San Francisco writer Paulina Borsook loris@well.sf.ca.us last appeared in Wired with "beverly.hills_com." She made heavy use of three different tarot decks in college.

Chamanes en plastique : les gourous 2.0 du nouveau New Age

Par Laure Coromines - Le 2 novembre 2022

Dérives sectaires, produits et services bidon, appropriation culturelle : bienvenue dans le monde des chamanes en plastique, ces gourous qui veulent absolument harmoniser vos énergies à coups d’eau de lune et de pierre de quartz.

Dans La France sous nos yeux, Jerôme Fourquet et Jean-Laurent Cassely avançaient que l'engouement pour le chamanisme et l’ésotérisme provenait principalement de l'effondrement progressif de la culture catholique. Cet effondrement laissait derrière lui un vide spirituel qui ouvrait la porte à d'autres propositions susceptibles de combler notre soif de transcendance. Aujourd'hui, ces propositions dégoulinent de partout : les influenceurs astrologie donnent des conseils pour optimiser ses investissements Bitcoin, les stars hollywoodiennes développent des produits wellness hippies, les profs de yoga se reconvertissent en sorcières, l'alimentation devient magique, le nail art devient mystique, le féminin sacré, et les réseaux expliquent aux ados qu'ils sont sûrement des êtres semi supérieurs venus d'autres univers.

Dans un rapport rendu début novembre 2022, la Mission interministérielle de vigilance et de lutte contre les dérives sectaires (Miviludes) affirme que la France fait face à « un accroissement inédit des agissements à caractère sectaire. » La hausse « significative » des saisines porterait à 4 020 leur nombre en 2021, soit une augmentation de 33,6% par rapport à l'année précédente, et de presque 50% par rapport à 2015. Les jeunes de 18 à 24 ans seraient « particulièrement vulnérables face aux gourous 2.0 qui les entraînent dans des gouffres financiers », notamment grâce à la vente de cryptomonnaies et l'usage de vente multiniveau.

Alors, qui stimulent ainsi notre besoin immémorial et inépuisable de croire en un au-delà accessible et tangible ? Les chamanes en plastiques de ce nouveau New Age. Présentation.

Qui sont les chamanes en plastique ?

Depuis le début de la pandémie, Cassandra De Berranger, 38 ans, professeur de hatha yoga dans le sud-ouest de la France, a « tout vu passer » : ceux qui sont tombés dans le conspirationnisme et ceux qui sont partis vers des pratiques plus alternatives. « Certains sont revenus à la raison, mais je vois de plus en plus de mes élèves qui virent dans des systèmes de croyance où tout se confond et se mélange... Plus l'offre est ahurissante, plus elle attire. Les gens sont en quête d'autre chose, ils s'intéressent à la spiritualité, font des recherches sur Facebook ou se rendent au Salon du Bien-Être à Toulouse. Et les pseudo-chamanes sont là, prêts à les alpaguer... »

Le terme « chamane en plastique » a été forgé dans les années 60 aux États-Unis par des militants amérindiens. À l'origine, il désignait les personnes (généralement occidentales et blanches) se faisant passer pour des guérisseurs traditionnels amérindiens ou se présentant comme des représentants officiels de la culture indigène à laquelle ils empruntaient. Aujourd'hui, le terme qualifie aussi bien les conseillers spirituels autoproclamés, que les voyants, médiums et autres pratiquants opérant sur une base frauduleuse tout en se revendiquant de la spiritualité et en cherchant à monétiser leurs services. « En bref, les chamanes en plastique s’approprient principalement l’image, le folklore autour du chamanisme, ce qui ne les empêche pas de se définir à demi-mot comme des figures divines, en contact direct avec les esprits de la Nature, véritables messagers entre les Hommes et les esprits. Selon les époques et les modes du moment, le chamane en plastique peut s’inventer des pouvoirs : il peut être à la fois guérisseur, voyant, capable de guérir les âmes... », souligne Cassandra De Berranger.

Comment les reconnaître ? Dans leur version la plus débridée, ils portent des plumes dans les cheveux façon coiffes amérindiennes, arborent des peintures vaguement ésotériques sur leur visage, aiment à raconter comment leur voyage dans le Punjab ou au cœur de l'Amazonie a transformé leur vie, et se filment en train de jouer du tam-tam dans la forêt de Compiègne. Dans leur version la plus passe-partout, les chamanes en plastique portent des tons crème et des man-buns. Ils relisent inlassablement les Accords toltèques : les 4 règles pour mieux se connaître de Miguel Ruiz et tirent les cartes à leurs amis entre deux IPA au Ground Control. Quand ils ne sont pas trop occupés à expliquer comment retrouver sa flamme jumelle ou pourquoi pierre d'opale et Ayahuasca vont vous changer la vie. En jeu derrière la mise en scène de ce mode de vie basé sur la clairvoyance et la sagesse : l’instauration d'une figure tutélaire rassurante. Et surtout, beaucoup d'argent.

Eau de lune, cristaux : la proposition des chamanes qui vous veulent du bien

L'offre de produits vendus par les néochamanes est pléthorique. Le carton de l'année, ce sont bien sûr les cristaux, ou pierres semi-précieuses, comme le jade ou le quartz. Toutes sont valorisées pour leurs propriétés spécifiques : apporter la sérénité, faciliter la prise de décision etc... En plus d'orner les tables de nuit, les pierres semi-précieuses prisées par les ados apprenties sorcières alimentent un business juteux. D'après le chercheur Eike Wenzel cité dans Süddeutsche Zeitung (article datant de 2017), le marché de l'ésotérisme générerait jusqu’à 20 milliards d’euros en Allemagne chaque année. Sur TikTok, les cristaux font aussi un carton : le #crystaltok dépasse les 5,2 milliards de vues et la #lithothérapie les 70 millions.

Parmi les articles proposés par les chamanes, d'autres objets fétiches : flûtes de pan artisanales, gongs, eau de lune, talismans et autres guides pratiques en tous genres. Mais attention, les chamanes en plastique ne vendent pas que des produits. Le gros du chiffre d’affaires se joue du côté des services et des prestations plus ou moins floues. Et parfois même de certains lieux.

Pour mieux vibrer, rendez-vous au Mont-Saint-Michel

C'est désormais autour du Mont-Saint-Michel en Normandie que pullulent les apprentis chamanes, prêts à exploiter le « taux vibratoire » de la célèbre abbaye. Par taux vibratoire, comprendre « indice de performance qui varie en fonction de l’instant de calcul et des oscillations énergétiques de l’élément mesuré » qui se nourrit aussi de « la pensée émotionnelle, la force physique, les potentialités, les faiblesses des endroits physiques. » Ce taux se mesure grâce à un pendule de radiesthésie ou au biomètre de Bovis utilisé en radiesthésie. Le procédé de détection repose sur l'idée selon laquelle les êtres vivants seraient sensibles à certaines radiations émises par différents corps. En résumé, les lieux à haute énergie vibratoire permettent de se ressourcer et d'accéder « à son inconscient pour retrouver l’amour et l’essence de l’être. » Si le principe est généralement considéré comme relevant de la pseudoscience, les prestations autour des soins énergétiques explosent depuis la pandémie.

Loris Vitry, coach en développement personnel, et Cathy Maillot, ostéopathe, expliquent en ligne avoir « tous deux développé un magnétisme (taux vibratoire) très élevé. » Pour mieux cerner leur projet, il est possible de se procurer l'ouvrage, « Communiquer avec le monde invisible », où il est rappelé que « tous les thérapeutes énergétiques, magnétiseurs guérisseurs, voyants médiums, maîtrisent l'art de la radiesthésie et donc les secrets du pendule. » Parmi les services proposés, le calcul de son « Chemin de vie » (le nombre qui révèle à chacun le chemin à prendre pour « réussir sa mission de vie », selon une méthode venue tout droit des Aztèques et des Mayas), le décryptage de son « Heure Miroir » (pour mieux comprendre les messages qu'essaient de vous transmettre vos anges gardiens, ou encore le nettoyage énergétique (pour apprendre à se purifier, soi et sa maison). Au-delà de la traditionnelle formation reiki et voyance, le duo propose encore une prestation plus étonnante, « Entreprise Sacrée », pour améliorer la performance des salariés en optimisant le profil énergétique et spirituel de chaque membre de son équipe.

Le taux vibratoire de Loris et Cathy n'est pas seulement mis au service de patients, mais aussi de particuliers enclins à devenir à leur tour néochamanes. Sur leur site, quelques conseils pour choisir son formateur magnétiseur : « Si vous maîtrisez déjà l'utilisation d'un pendule divinatoire, je vous conseille aussi de mesurer le taux vibratoire de votre formateur en magnétisme. Si son taux vibratoire est inférieur à 300 000 unités Bovis, vous pouvez passer votre chemin et chercher un autre formateur. » Vous voilà prévenus.

Formation pour devenir chamane : le MLM des néogourous ?

Quand les clients se font rares, miser sur la formation d'autres chamanes s'avère plus profitable, et Loris et Cathy ne sont pas les seuls sur le coup. Ou comment les chamanes cherchent à recruter de nouveaux chamanes, façon MLM. Avec les formations promettant l'accession au statut nébuleux de chamane, les tarifs peuvent vite grimper : compter parfois 5 500 euros pour une formation de 192 heures en présentiel (repas et hébergement non compris dans la formation) sur certains groupes Facebook. L'Institut Pierre Thirault propose de son côté 4 jours d'initiation pour 680 euros. Au programme : décoration d'intérieur, Feng Shui et géobiologie.

Le fil conducteur de ces diverses offres : un fourre-tout de disciplines mélangeant pêle-mêle Reiki (méthode de soins énergétique d'origine japonaise), peinture d'âme ( « Il s'agit d'un soin connecté et illustré, qui vous représente. Un portrait d'âme est comme un compagnon de vie. Intime et fidèle. De sa forme et ses couleurs, émanent une vibration, une énergie propre au chemin de votre âme. La main est savante, elle sait au-delà des mots, traduire et retranscrire ce qui émerge et qu'elle connaît déjà. » ), crudivorisme (pratique consistant à se nourrir exclusivement d'aliments crus) ou encore anthroposophie (courant mélangeant christianisme et religions indiennes). L'objectif de ce fatras de disciplines : permettre de satisfaire toutes les envies grâce à une offre unique.

Mais pas toujours besoin d'avoir à débourser pour sa formation. Sur le groupe Facebook L'Univers de l'occulte & des croyances païennes (Wicca, Sorcellerie, etc.), les quelques 22 000 membres, parfois enveloppés de peaux de bête ou de couvertures péruviennes, partagent astuces et PDF expliquant comment s'improviser chamane, le tout accompagné de photos de saluts au soleil et de haïkus invoquant le pouvoir de la Terre nourricière. Sur Instagram, coachs et profs de yoga agrémentent volontiers leur bio des termes chamanes ou « passeuse d'âme » (énième concept encapsulant communion avec le monde invisible et capacité à donner de l'amour) sans s'embarrasser de certifications, d'explications ou même de définition... C'est le cas de Fleur*, 36 ans. Après des études en école de commerce et des années dans le conseil, elle « lâche tout » pour partir se ressourcer deux mois à Bali. À Ubud, elle enchaîne les stages de yoga et de méditation avant de se découvrir des pouvoirs chamaniques. « L’identité chamanique a toujours fait partie de moi, mais j'ai mis des années à m'en rendre compte car j'étais comme engourdie. Aujourd'hui, je suis en phase avec mes énergies, et je veux partager ça avec les autres. Je veux leur offrir l'opportunité de faire le même voyage que moi. »

Culte au filtre pastel et dérives sectaires

« Sans forcément le vouloir ou s'en rendre compte, certains de ces chamanes vont propager leur propagande QAnon passée au filtre paillettes, note Cassandra De Berranger. Certains de mes élèves ont même lâché leur chimio, sur les conseils de leur chamane, pour se soigner à l'huile de ricin et à l'eau de lune... Mon amie Sandrine* m'a récemment expliqué devoir demander l’autorisation de son énergéticienne — qui s'est peu à peu immiscée dans sa vie et qu'elle consulte dorénavant plusieurs fois par semaine — avant de participer à une fête que j'organise. Sa chamane lui a expliqué qu'elle avait une force vibratoire exceptionnelle, et que sans s'en rendre compte, Sandrine serait amenée à nettoyer les auras des autres convives, ce qui la drainerait de ses forces et la déséquilibrerait... Il y a deux ans, mon amie aimait bien les colliers en perles et les pierres d'améthyste, mais cela s'arrêtait là. Que s'est-il passé ? »

Avant la pandémie, l'énergéticienne de Sandrine donnait dans le New Age classique. Aujourd'hui, elle a ornementé ses services d'une couche chamanique et facture 60 euros la séance de soins à distance. « Il ne faut pas oublier que les coachs en bien-être (parfois peu scrupuleux) se sont également retrouvés confinés. Eux-aussi ont été amenés à se demander : que puis-je ajouter à mon CV ? Quelle plus-value exotique puis-je développer ? », observe Cassandra. Une situation de plus en plus banale qui inquiète la magistrate Hanène Romdhane, à la tête de la Miviludes : « Ces "praticiens" n’ont qu’un seul intérêt : tirer profit financièrement des personnes en les manipulant mentalement. »

Comme d'autres de ses amies professeures de yoga, Cassandra s'alerte des dérives qu'elle observe. « Je n'arrive toujours pas à savoir si ces chamanes 2.0 sont convaincus ou simplement motivés par le gain, sans doute un savant mélange, l'éventail est large... Dans tous les cas, la relation entre chamanes et adeptes est toxique : les deux ont besoin l'un de l'autre pour alimenter leurs croyances et tenter de combler un certain vide existentiel. J'observe aussi de nombreuses situations d'emprise : comme les soins prodigués par les chamanes sont souvent holistiques, ils ont vite fait d'infiltrer différentes sphères de votre vie. »

*Le prénom a été changé

Débat : L’intelligence artificielle peut-elle accompagner les personnes en deuil ?

Publié: 6 juin 2023, 21:51 CEST

Par l'intermédiaire d'un robot conversationnel, il est désormais possible d'échanger avec l'avatar d'une personne disparue.

Le débat sur ChatGPT et les IA génératives n’en finit pas de rebondir, à travers les nouvelles applications qu’il suscite à peine quelques mois après sa mise en ligne. Un récent documentaire d’Envoyé spécial sur France 2 (27 avril 2023) présentait justement une application qui utilise GPT-3 et permet à l’utilisateur de recréer un dialogue avec des personnes disparues. « Project December (Simulate the Dead) » est sans doute un cas extrême d’usage d’un agent conversationnel issu de GPT-3 mais nous dit beaucoup du manque de repères des sociétés dites occidentales pour faciliter le deuil de manière collective et encadrée dans le temps comme l’ont fait les civilisations qui nous précèdent.

Discuter avec nos chers disparus

« Project December » permet à quiconque, pour 10 dollars, d’ouvrir un compte et de discuter avec un programme d’intelligence artificielle (breveté) qui simule les propos d’une personne décédée pour un maximum de cent échanges et une durée d’une heure. Il faut pour cela renseigner un long questionnaire qui comporte deux grandes rubriques : identité de la personne (nom, surnom, dates, lieux, professions et même nom du chien si nécessaire), traits de personnalité (décrits de façon très binaire : ex : sûr/confiant/stable vs soucieux/nerveux/perturbé) auxquelles s’ajoute un extrait de texte produit par ces personnes décédées. Le reportage d’Envoyé spécial montre ainsi un homme qui vient de perdre sa mère et qui pose chaque jour des questions à son avatar synthétique, questions qu’il n’avait pas pu lui poser avant son décès.

Pour les besoins du reportage, le créateur de l’application organise aussi, en compagnie du journaliste, un dialogue avec l’agent conversationnel au-dessus de la tombe du philosophe, poète et naturaliste américain Henry David Thoreau en utilisant une de ses citations les plus célèbres : « le gouvernement le meilleur est celui qui gouverne le moins », conforme à son idéologie libertarienne prônant toujours « moins d’état » – une idéologie qui est aussi celle de la Silicon Valley.

Questionné artificiellement via l’application sur les usages toxiques éventuels de l’outil « Project December », l’avatar simulé de Thoreau répond que toute la responsabilité repose sur l’utilisateur, comme dans le cas d’un constructeur automobile qui ne peut pas être considéré comme responsable des comportements des mauvais conducteurs.

Un mépris des processus de deuil ?

Le solutionnisme technologique nommé ainsi par le chercheur Evgeny Morozov, dans son élan disruptif, semble balayer toute pensée un tant soit peu argumentée des conséquences psychiques ou culturelles d’un tel traitement de la relation avec les morts.

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Il méprise les enjeux anthropologiques des processus de deuil et toutes les connaissances sur ce processus développées à la fois par la psychologie et par l’étude des traditions.

Si la psychanalyse considère le deuil comme un processus psychique par lequel une personne parvient à se détacher de la personne disparue et à donner du sens à cette perte, les fêtes des morts dans les traditions anciennes contribuent à un processus similaire, redonner un sens à la vie.

Prenons l’exemple de la fête des Morts au Mexique : elle dure deux jours, et consiste à visiter la tombe où reposent les défunts de la famille, à faire un repas autour d’elle, en musique. Selon les cas, une veille est organisée durant toute la nuit. À cette occasion, les cimetières sont remplis de familles, d’une grande quantité de fleurs orange et de bougies. Tout cela crée une ambiance particulièrement vivante. Les familles installent aussi provisoirement un autel à la maison avec les portraits des défunts, des fleurs, de la nourriture, des bougies, etc.

Trois dimensions sociales et psychiques ressortent de ces rituels :

1. la fête des morts – le deuil – est une invitation collective,
2. le contact recherché avec les défunts n’a rien de spiritiste, on ne pose pas de questions précises
3. la fête des morts a une durée bien délimitée.

Ces trois aspects font comprendre le soin apporté à la santé mentale individuelle et collective des sociétés. Le souvenir des morts se réalise dans un cadre de rencontres sociales et de protocoles qui aident à l’ancrage dans la vie.

Un deuil sans intermédiaire

Dans nos sociétés occidentales, le christianisme et les thérapies ont pris en charge ce processus de deuil sous des formes déjà affaiblies. Les rituels chrétiens ont tendance à s’épuiser – en 2018, 48 % des Français souhaitent une cérémonie religieuse lors de leur décès – bien que le prêtre continue à jouer un rôle d’intermédiaire-clé, même pour les non-croyants. Les thérapeutes, eux, effectuent ce travail contre rémunération, tandis que le personnel médical se retrouve en situation de gérer ces moments de deuil bien au-delà de ses fonctions.

Par contraste, l’application « Project December » ne semble pas endosser la moindre responsabilité lorsqu’elle place les personnes en situation de relation solitaire avec des conversations simulant les pensées de la personne décédée. S’il y a bien une forme de médiation – en l’occurrence, celle de l’intelligence artificielle –, celle-ci sort de tout cadre collectif, au risque d’amplifier l’espace des fantasmes.

Chacun est laissé à sa souffrance, à ses peurs, que l’agent conversationnel doit obturer ou encourager par des réponses, toujours très banales. L’usager témoignant dans le reportage d’Envoyé spécial raconte sa vie ordinaire ou exprime ses sentiments à sa mère. Il lui parle comme si elle n’était pas décédée, ce qui fait craindre à ses enfants qu’il reste enfermé dans cette « relation ».

Or, dans ces rites de passage, les mots doivent être choisis prudemment pour aider à retrouver une place, la sienne et celle de la personne décédée. C’est pour cette raison que des intermédiaires sont mobilisés dans toutes les traditions. Même si l’usager n’est pas dupe et que l’application l’encourage à s’exprimer, elle tend à éliminer les médiateurs humains, sans filet de sécurité : une façon risquée d’« ubériser » les prêtres, les chamanes et les thérapeutes…

Les nécessaires temps de silence

Dans les rites ou la thérapie du deuil, des temps de silence s’imposent. Les rituels établissent une période précise consacrée au deuil ou à la commémoration des décédés, ce qui libère la vie quotidienne de cette relation. L’IA à base de GPT-3 ne laisse jamais l’utilisateur en silence, c’est un bavard impénitent, une machine à réponses. Elle n’est pas capable d’accompagner dans une écoute profonde, mais tourne, même en boucle, pour pallier à l’absence, le vide insupportable qui est au fond le plus grand drame du deuil.

L’enfermement solitaire dans un dialogue simulé, fondé sur quelques indices réalistes en utilisant de modèles statistiques probabilistes de la langue, a quelque chose d’obscène : il amplifie encore nos tendances commercialement encouragées à vivre dans un monde du « fake », fondé sur des trames narratives articulées aux codes publicitaires.

Une fois de plus, ce sont les artefacts (les interfaces et les algorithmes) qui sont supposés combler un manque criant d’intersubjectivité, de lien social, de dynamique d’échanges authentiques. Ces objets de substitution deviennent cependant critiques dans les cas de deuils et ne devraient pas être manipulés sans précaution. Les agents conversationnels de type GPT prospèrent cependant sur l’incapacité de nos sociétés dites rationnelles à fournir des repères sur une question si fondamentale pour l’âme humaine comme le soulignait l’anthropologue Benedict Anderson.

Des applications comme Project December reflètent un laisser-faire anti-institutions que l’on rencontre dans toutes les firmes de la Silicon Valley à travers leur slogan « Rough Consensus and Running Code », expression de John Perry Barlow dans son « manifeste pour l’indépendance du cyberspace » de 1996.

Selon cette doctrine, les décisions de développement des applications, des normes, des services relèvent d’un consensus vague entre les parties prenantes et la production du code ne doit jamais s’arrêter, facilitant les innovations disruptives qui n’anticipent pas leurs conséquences sociales et culturelles.

Ce désencastrement de l’IA vis-à-vis des principes sociaux et organisationnels et sa prétention à tout refonder sur la base de la puissance de ses calculs probabilistes qui optimisent tout, se retrouvent ici dans ce jeu avec l’esprit des morts. On jongle avec les relations avec les morts comme on jongle avec les mots.

Comment réguler ce « running code » irresponsable dès lors qu’il est si aisé à reproduire et que les frontières des états ne sont en rien suffisantes pour freiner son adoption immédiate dans tous les pays, sans respect pour aucune législation existante ?

Seuls les grands ensembles institutionnels qui sont aussi des grands marchés comme l’Europe ont la puissance nécessaire pour obliger toutes ces IA et leurs applications à demander une « autorisation préalable de mise sur le marché », comme cela se fait pour la plupart des produits de l’industrie, de l’alimentation aux médicaments, en passant par l’automobile. L’IA Act en cours de validation en Europe tout comme l’administration Biden doivent prendre la mesure de ces enjeux anthropologiques dans leurs tentatives de régulation, puisque même nos relations avec les morts peuvent en être affectées, alors qu’elles sont constitutives de notre sensibilité humaine.

Auteurs :

Dominique Boullier : Professeur des universités émérite en sociologie. Chercheur au Centre d'Etudes Européennes et de Politique Comparée, Sciences Po

Rebeca Alfonso Romero : Doctorante en géographie culturelle, Sorbonne Université