The Pantheon of Cyberspace

Although the dictionary definition of "pagan" simplply describes someone who is neither Jewish, Christian, nor Mos lem, a more practical working definition might encompass a religious philosophy of immanence—that the divine is present in all creation, but in manifold forms. Thus the Roman hearth belonged to Vesta, the threshold to Janus, and the power of communication to Mercury, each representing a specific domain of influence, and each with separate rites and rituals. We think of these god-forms and their underlying philosophical expressions as the product of unsophisticated, prescientific minds, but on closer examination. nothing could be further from the truth. The Romans Ukely did not believe in the physical reafity of their pantheon, but rather, found in them a convenience, a way to manage the complexity of a magical universe, a filter between the undifferentiated unity of an immanent reality and the exigencies of each day. Vesta, for instance, came to represent a set of qualities associated with the household, as typified in the hearth, so a conscious focus on Vesta—through prayers, offerings, and sacrifices—would do much to strengthen the vill, a magical relation between public acts and personal reality that says more about ancient psychology than about ancient religion. The techniques of pagan practice, principally psychological in nature, allowed the ancients to apoach an unspeakably complex world in manageable, )ite-sized pieces, which would become the specific vehicle personal change. Though this activity may have been an unconscious one for the bulk obf the Empire's citizizenry, the ^nt magical texts of the Alexandrian Greeks prov^ve that. within esoteric circles, all of this was well understood.

A similar state of affairs exists in cyberspace today; most people are willing to confront the 'bots, mailing lists, avatars. and sundry other denizens of the virtual world as real entities, possessing their own interior natures, but a few—in particular, those pioneers—recognize that these synthetic projections are conveniences of the mind, and wholly under the mind's control. The esoteric secret of cyberspace is that it is utterly composed of Blake's "mind forg'd manacles," that we are prisoners of our own design, and, for the few who realize this, the opportunity of freedom beckons.