An Occult History of Computing – Further Reading & Sources

This page lists articles used in the making of the talk “An Occult History of Computing”. (See publications.)

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Sources with a ⭐ are those that I particularly enjoyed.

The PowerPoint slides are available here.

Title Slide

• Geometrical Psychology: Mathematical Models of Consciousness by the 19th-Century Psychologist Benjamin Betts – The Marginalian (the spiral)

Intro: see articles on the rise of occult practices.

General Reading

• “What is Code?” in Bloomberg (Paul Ford, 2015)
  • probably the best article ever written about programming (as a profession)
• Schemas of Uncertainty has many good articles:
  • ⭐ Algorithms as Cartomancy (Flavia Dzodan, 2019)
  • What if Technology were a Prayer? (Danae Io, interview with K Allado-McDowell)
  • The Future-Oracular: Prediction, Divination, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Emily Rosamond, ?)
• “What Kind of Sorcery Is This? - Why Code is So Often Compared to Magic” in The Atlantic (Samuel Arbesman, 2016)
• Three Thousand Years of Algorithmic Rituals: The Emergence of AI from the Computation of Space - Journal #101 (e-flux.com) (Matteo Pasquinelli, 2019)
• Coding the Digital Occult – Etic Lab (Stephanie, 2018)
• HackCurio: Decoding the Cultures of Hacking (Alex Ketchum, 2022)
  • and the associated Airtable - From Tech Wizard to Cyber Witch Gallery
• ⭐ TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Erik Davis, 2015)
  • Reflections on Erik Davis’ Techgnosis · Let’s have a mind and raise flowers. (wordpress.com)
• Magical Code and Coded Magic: The Persistence of Occult Ideas in Modern Gaming and Computing (2013)
• There’s a Ghost in my Mouse: How the Occult Informed the Dawning of the Age of the Internet (2018)
  • review of a talk
• God and the Chip: Religion and the Culture of Technology (William Stahl, 1999)
  • especially the chapter “Venerating the Black Box”
  • cites The Notion of Magic (Murray and Rosalie Wax, 1963) & The Magical World View (1962)
• “When Books Read You, a Defense of Bibliomancy” (Ed Simon, 2018)

Stuff I only browsed

• Finite of Sense and Infinite of Thought: A History of Computation, Logic and Algebra, Part I (Ron Pressler, 2018)
  • this is very good but I haven’t had the time to read it!
• Believing in Bits: Digital Media and the Supernatural (Natale & Pasulka, 2019)
  • read only extracts for citation

Works by ⭐ Frances Yates

• The Art of Ramon Lull: An Approach to It through Lull’s Theory of the Elements, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes: Vol 17, No 1-2 (1954)
• Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964)
• The Art of Memory (1966)
• Lull & Bruno (1982)

Hermes Trismegistus

• Corpus Hermeticum - Introduction to Hermes Trismegistus & Hermetic Philosophy - YouTube

Llull

• ⭐ Ramon Llull: From the Ars Magna to Artificial Intelligence (2011)
• The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull (2008)
• Computational Imaginaries: Some Further Remarks on Leibniz, Llull, and Rethinking the History of Calculating Machines (Jonathan Gray, 2018)
• What was Llull up to? · SpringerLink (2005)
• Truth Is in the Tower - Journal #84 (e-flux.com) (Francesca Hughes, 2017)
• Llull’s Art and Modern Computer Science
• Scrambling T-R-U-T-H: Rotating Letters as a Material Form of Thought (David Link, 2010)
• The Birth of the MACHINE: Raymundus Lullus and His Invention (Walter Künzel, 1996)
• Thinking Machines: Ramon Llull and the ars combinatoria (ArtLab, 2019)

Leibniz

• ⭐ “Let us Calculate!”: Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination – The Public Domain Review
• Leibniz-Bouvet Correspondence – Translation and Annotations by Alan Berkowitz and Daniel J. Cook (swarthmore.edu)
• The Traditional Square of Opposition (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Search for the Perfect Language

• ⭐ The Search for the Perfect Language (1997)
  • Example extract: Eco: The I Ching and the Binary Calculus · Samizdat (therealsamizdat.com)
• How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming Language (twobithistory.org) (2018)
• Francis van Helmont and the Alphabet of Nature – The Public Domain Review (2016)
• Solved: The Ciphers in Book III of Trithemius’s Steganographia : Jim Reeds : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Fiction

⭐ Jorge Luis Borges wrote articles and stories inspired by the things mentioned here:

• Ramón Llull’s Thinking Machine (1937)
• The Library of Babel (1941) is almost certainly inspired by Llull
• Death and the Compass (1942) possibly inspired by Bruno

⭐ Aphyr (author of Jepsen) has some excellent magic/programming stories:

• Tag: Interviews (aphyr.com)

On computerized gematria/cabbala, see the novel Unsong.

Technopagans & Cyberspace

• Cybersamhain, 1994
• “Technopagans” article in Wired (Erik Davis, 1995)
• “Magic and Cyberspace: Fusing Technology and Magical Consciousness in the Modern World” (Nevill Drury, 2014)

Metaphor

• Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980)
• The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Metaphor (Julie Moronuki, Compose Melbourne 2018)
• “Works like Magic”: Metaphor, Meaning, and the GUI in Snow Crash (Nicholas M. Kelly, 2018)
• Coding Magic (Marie LeBlanc Flanagan)

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Stuff I cut:

Jevons, Peirce, Marquand

• W. Stanley Jevons, Allan Marquand, and the origins of digital computing · Semantic Scholar
  • Marquand developed the ideas for electro-mechanical logical circuits around 1885
  • His work was rediscovered by Alonzo Church
• “Logical Machines” (Peirce, 1887)
• “A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits” (Claude Shannon, 1940)
• Charles Sanders Pierce Recognizes that Logical Operations Could be Carried Out by Electrical Switching Circuits : History of Information