Magical Code and Coded Magic: The Persistence of Occult Ideas in Modern Gaming and Computing
Kevin LaGrandeur
2013-10-26 00:00:00
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[Note: this paper, presented at the Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, on October 3, 2013, is a short excerpt from my book, Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves (Routledge, 2013). Copyrighted. All rights reserved.]



Coding is the primary tool of modern scientists and gamers who try to make digital artifacts, and coded incantations that derive from occult knowledge are the first methods that Renaissance scientists resorted to when trying to create and control their artificial servants and intelligent artifacts.



The reason that magical spells that derive from occult knowledge were the first methods that Renaissance occult scientists resorted to when trying to create and control their artificial servants (examples of which include the golem, the homunculus, and various talking brass heads and proto-robots) is because the belief in spells was part of a general belief among humanists and occultists in the power of words to effect changes in nature. This principle stemmed from their idea that humans in the Garden of Eden had spoken the original language that God had used to create the world, and that it was recoverable and usable by humans again under the proper circumstances. The rediscovery of this Adamic language would allow human access to the same creative power and control of nature that God possesses, especially since Adam, it was believed, had perfect knowledge of all nature in the Garden of Eden.



James Bono, who details this connection in his book on early modern science and medicine, explains the connection between that special language and nature this way: “The notion lying behind such belief—which we might call that of a ‘Platonic (or Neoplatonic) linguistics’…would claim that language can, and indeed should, reflect in an intrinsic and essential manner the very nature of the things it names. Such a view of [this special] language…underlined the power that lay hidden in the proper understanding and use of the true names of things in nature” (The Word of God and the Languages of Man 32). This belief in a secret language that could control nature and that was buried in the Biblical past is one of the chief reasons that reading scripture was seen by Christian Cabalists as a means of discovering codes that could directly effect change in the natural world. “Biblical exegesis was,” according to Hakan Hakansson, a “form of linguistic practice that served as a source of natural knowledge” (62). Similarly, the “book of nature” helped reveal the codes that God used to control the world. “To ‘read’ the Book of Nature was to uncover the underlying ‘meaning’—the Word—of which every natural phenomenon was a divinely instituted ‘sign’” (62). In essence, nature, the Bible, and science were linked to one another as an elaborate series of living metaphors.



This sort of expression of universal physical laws via metaphorical correspondence is not a cultural phenomenon isolated to the early modern period. It pervades all eras of science, including modern science. As Bono points out in an article, metaphors “ground complex scientific texts and discourses in other social, political, religious, or ‘cultural’ texts and discourses” (“Science, Discourse, and Literature” 61). Though of course the scientific bases of their systems of metaphors are different, the metaphors of our time and of the pre-empirical era bear some broad consistencies with one another. Modern scientists see the cosmos working in terms of the relationships described by quantum physics, as opposed to the system of natural “correspondences” and signatures understood by early modern natural philosophers. Yet the scientists of the two eras often see the universe as a giant networked system. In the sixteenth century and before, scientists referred to a system of cosmic influences between astronomical bodies, organic bodies, such as humans, and certain material objects, such as minerals. This is why amulets made of certain gems were thought to aid health.



In a similar vein, some modern scientists, such as Konrad Zuse, Ed Fredkin,1 and Stephen Wolfram, believe that the whole universe operates like a giant computer network, with influences that extend throughout all its parts. Their ideas are based on the concept of what is called cellular automata, which are algorithms that operate according to a few simple rules that determine the state of a space of specified dimensions, called a cell. Their idea is that our universe is essentially one of these cells in a giant system of other cells, or universes, which are interconnected and affect each others’ statuses and conditions. The older, pre-empirical cosmic metaphor is based on corporeal terminology, whereas the modern one is based on that of computer technology, but they both express things in terms of networks or webs in which elements form interactive feedback loops. Even modern physics, which explains cosmic mechanisms, does not describe the way the universe works so much as our expression of the way it works and, consequently, much of the non-mathematical language used by physicists consists of metaphors that are cross-linked to other metaphors grounded in cultural contexts and discourses. Indeed, the mathematics that modern physics uses to express physical relationships can be considered a series of numerical metaphors that describe processes.



More particular parallels exist between the metaphors that are integral to the cultures of computer scientists and early modern occult scientists. Both depend on understanding a secret language, both rely on personal illumination available in books, and both belong to societies of initiates which are seen by the rest of society as wielding their esoteric knowledge to do wonders (sometimes dubious wonders). These parallels are evident in some of the terminology used by modern computer science. Just as magic has its daemons and intelligent agents, controlled by wizards, so does computer science. In modern computer terminology, a daemon is a program that runs behind other programs in order to make things happen; a wizard is the term for a person who creates and controls virtual online environments, such as those used in online gaming; and intelligent agents, which are small, self-operating programs that can replicate, learn, and evolve, are numerous, online.



One type of intelligent online agent, the “bot,” has come to resemble the pernicious demons that pervade occult sciences. Bots (as many of you probably know), are small computer programs that are comprised of coded algorithms, and are initialized by other codes sent to them by the human who owns them. Somewhat like computer viruses, these small, intelligent agents can act independently and can self-replicate. They are capable of forming huge swarms which can distribute themselves among numerous computers. All that is necessary is that these computers be unprotected and have an “always on” broadband Internet connection. When first developed in the late 1990s, they were used to automate such things as searches and bidding in online auctions, but they have recently been refashioned by criminals and spammers to form distributed networks that can automatically create torrents of spam or launch attacks on other systems (Berinato 171–179). Since their programming code is capable of evolving on its own, they pose the same problem that a Renaissance wizard’s distributed servant network of demons does: they hold the potential to break free of the programmer’s intentions and create unexpected consequences.



An important form of coded language parallel to programming language for science in the early modern period was the incantation, the kind of code that alchemists and other occultists used in order to help compel nature to do their bidding. We can see an example of this in the story from that period: Doctor Faustus. In that story, this language took two forms, compulsive and supplicative, and Faustus clearly uses both kinds of codes in his incantations. He tries to command the devil to appear to him, but when there is a delay, he gets impatient and switches to supplicative code: that is, code designed to give his soul to the devil in return for what he wants. Roger Bacon and Prospero also use such codes in the respective plays, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and The Tempest. Although we do not directly witness their use of incantations, as we do with Faustus, their utterance of such codes is implicit in the dialogue of the two plays in which these men figure. Some of Bacon’s spells, specifically those which use the secret names of God, echo the Cabalistic codes used to animate the golem. Near the end of the play, for instance, he says to his colleague Friar Bungay that “the hours” he has “spent in pyromantic spells,” included,



The wresting of the holy name of God,



As Sother, Eloim, and Adonai,



Alpha, Manoth, and Tetragrammaton…



(13.92–94)



Furthermore, it is spells or codes of these kinds that are responsible for the talking brass android he is creating, as he reminds his assistant Miles when he states,



With seven years’ tossing nigromantic charms,



Poring upon dark Hecat’s principles,



I have fram’d out a monstrous head of brass…



(10.15–17)



The bodiless head that Greene’s Friar Bacon tries to animate is an apt symbol of the mysterious power of recondite natural knowledge that is reified by a coded language. Bacon’s knowledge of nature’s secrets is manifested as a prosthetic projection, a tool that allows him extraordinary control over nature, and this, in turn, springs from his ability to organize words in a particular, programmatic, forceful way.



Likewise, in The Tempest, Prospero depends on magical codes available to him in his books (in addition to some rhetoric, as I argue in my book) to harness natural powers and to create and control his magical network. We can see references to this at the end of Act 3, Scene 1 when Prospero says in a concluding aside that he will refer to his book in order to “perform much business” before “supper-time” (95–97), and also in the next scene when Caliban insists,



Remember



First to possess his books, for without them



He’s but a sot as I am, nor hath not



One spirit to command—they all do hate him



As rootedly as I. Burn but his books.



(3.2.86–90)



The marshaling of esoteric knowledge to use recondite codes recorded in obscure texts is common not only to the android makers of the early modern era, but, as such phenomena as bots, robots, and any other kind of intelligent technology demonstrates, also to those of the modern era who work, in fiction or in fact, with intelligent artifacts. Bacon’s artificial servant, the talking brass head, is an artifact that merges, or more precisely embodies, natural forces and a special form of power inherent in symbolic language. The brass head is a materialization of the power of natural forces and of certain human traits—the power to make decisions and to perform “work” upon an environment—that have been harnessed and catalyzed by the special, formulaic words of the wizard. Similarly, modern computer wizards use the information inherent in symbolic, programming language—their own form of incantations—to program systems that embody impressive aspects of human cognitive capabilities and, often, formidable physical power, such as is built into robots and Artificial Intelligence.



In sum, science in both eras runs on encoded metaphors understood and applied by adepts who spend years and much intellectual capital in mastering them. This coded correspondence between words and reality goes beyond metaphor in the realm of artificial servants in both the modern and early modern periods. In the case of the sixteenth century legends of the golem, for instance, the Cabalistic combinations of the Hebrew alphabet and the various secret names of God that its creator chanted literally made flesh out of earth. Similarly, the special codes comprised of algorithmic combinations of words, numbers, and symbols that today’s computer specialists type into their machines actually weave together the fabric of virtual worlds and creatures like bots and, in some modern systems theory and in the world of science fiction, have the potential to create full-fledged human simulacra, such as the robots in Asimov’s I, Robot.



The recondite and, indeed, Cabalistic nature of both of these disciplines, operating in their rarified ways, is similar enough that what Frank Borchart says of early modern occult science could also be said of modern cybernetics, if one replaces the words “magic,” “incantation,” and “talisman” in the following quotation with “programming,” “code,” and “program”: “the symbolic language of magic—as rich and evocative as it may have been for a very few highly literate and learned searchers—was completely untranslatable for broader, popular understanding. Worse yet, every attempt at translation or successful plagiarism resulted in precisely the kind of misuse the initiate dreaded.” That is, opening the secrets of these sciences to the uninitiated or to amateurs raised the possibility “that a mistaken incantation or a flawed talisman would not just produce disappointing results but might actually summon the wrong force, a horrible demon instead of a benevolent sprite” (Borchardt 75–76).



References



Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. New York: Gnome Press, 1950.



Berinato, Scott. “Attack of the Bots.” Wired Magazine Nov. 2006: 171–179. Print.



Bono, James J. “Science, Discourse, and Literature: The Role/Rule of Metaphor in Science.”



Literature and Science: Theory and Practice. Ed. Stuart Peterfreund. Boston:



Northeastern UP, 1990. 59–89. Print.



———. The Word of God and the Languages of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early



Modern Science and Medicine. U of Wisconsin P, 1995. Print.



Borchardt, Frank L. “The Magus as Renaissance Man.” Sixteenth Century Journal 21.1 (1990):



57–76. Print.



Greene, Robert. The Honorable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Ed. Daniel Seltzer.



Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1963. Print.



Hakansson, Hakan. Seeing the Word: John Dee and Renaissance Occultism. Ugglan: Lunds



Universitet, 2001. Print.



Kermode, Frank, ed. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare. By William Shakespeare.



Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1958. Print.



Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, 2002. Print.



Wright, Robert. Three Scientists and Their Gods. Times Books, 1988. Print.



Zuse, Konrad. Calculating Space. MIT Technical Translation AZT-70-164-GEMIT. MIT



(Proj. MAC), 02139, 1970. Print.




1 Fredkin’s theories, which he developed in the early 1980’s, are discussed in Robert Wright, Three Scientists and Their Gods 1-110.