Is Techno-Pagan a Thing?

[genderjumper]

During our conversation with eclecticwitches today, I was thinking about the tensions between colonialism, urbanity, and time. There was a time when most capital-P Pagans I knew seemed somewhat oblivious to the privileged and hegemonic approach they took to gathering practices and traditions, picking and choosing the parts they liked, and starting a practice without consulting the living, breathing practitioners of the present day. That time seems to have passed, fortunately, and people are a lot more thoughtful and respectful in how they find and engage traditions they did not inherit.

(A known struggle among immigrant communities is that migratory generations try to enforce their culture on their children while that culture has continued to develop and shift back home, leaving them to be strict about traditions and practices that are already changing elsewhere in the world. I see this with settler pagans who try to reassert ancestral traditions while those traditions may persist in a different form today.)

But there's still a bit of... pastoral nostalgia?... about it all that doesn't resonate for me. Everyone seems focused on trying to re-connect to the land, reconnect to the elements, reconnect to things lost or distorted by time, and I'm trying to connect to the here-and-now.

I've never lived in the countryside, I've been terminally online since adolescence, and building a coven over technology is less far-fetched to me than a woodland retreat or starlit meadow. All of the moments of my life where I felt magic around me have been socially and materially urban, so it makes sense to me to make more room in my practice for technological and postmodern sensibilities, not less.

I recall that a witch I dated about 15 years ago was perpetually losing things and had a knack for frying technology around her. It reminds me of the relationship I once had with time -- seemingly antagonistic, but really I was going against a resonant element instead of accepting it as a force of nature. I'd like to think my relationship with technology has only ever been as contentious as I forced it to be, either by not knowing myself and my vulnerabilities or by not knowing the tech and its vulnerabilities. Turns out we get along quite well when I align these in the same direction.

And I link this question with greater tensions such as being a settler in colonized lands. It is paternalistic and naïve to assume that giving land back to indigenous communities (for example, and BTW we should totally be doing this) would lead to no cities -- it would lead to different cities, or more likely a shift in the cities that already exist. Abandonment could still be toxic. Why not adapt? Aspiring toward balance instead of growth does not mean destroying what has been built, it means building less and repurposing what already exists. We cannot easily unmake urbanity, we can only redirect it in the future, learn from our mistakes, and adapt with more hope and forward-thinking, less capitalism and environmental antagonism.

According to my understanding of entropy and time-cycles, I don't think these particular eggs can be un-cracked. What is built in destruction is still built, and would be at least as destructive if we tried to break it all back down. So for me, at least some of my spiritual practice will need to be a recognition that technology only occludes our relationship with nature, the universe, the elements insofar as it has emerged in post-spiritual contexts, not that it is inherently anti-spiritual or even spirit-neutral. There's still magic there, I think, for those who are open to it.

The human mind wants some things to be perpetually true, even to the point of wanting to pause or reverse progress, despite the human nature of perpetual change. Accepting change so well that you can perceive and accept it is, to me, the heart of mindfulness and of time magic. So I will add to my long list of lofty spiritual goals to find ways to deepen my practice that work with technology, cityscapes, and urban living rather than against them.

Re: the title of this entry, if the term "techno-pagan" already exists and has meaningfully different connotations, I'll try to come up with something else. If it has not been developed at all, consider this me calling dibs.

Comments

[sabethea]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technopaganism Techno paganism is a thing.

And as someone whose only experience of covens has been those I’ve built online (there was a suggestion, as I recall, that we call the original “Ariadne’s coven” because it was on the web) I definitely think that technology has a place in modern day paganism.

I think as a Time Mage, you’re very inclined to work to specific times, whereas I am much more wishy-washy about it. Funnily enough,I actually retrofitted my beliefs onto practicalities: I was very “it ought to be on the day” until I ran the first coven and discovered how impossible that was in reality. Then I cast round for an acceptable reason to be okay with it, and came up with the logic that original every day pagans wouldn’t be working to the calendar dates. (And I have never admitted that before, so there you go!)

[genderjumper]

My headcanon (and I have done zero research, so let me emphasize that it is headcanon) is that shamen-type figures would monitor the important days and alert people ahead of time.

But as someone who has no trouble conceptualizing spiritual matters yet struggles to FEEL it at times, I want to align as closely to seasonal or astronomical phenomena precisely so that I will pay closer attention. This is not an absolute, but it seems to affect my enthusiasm. Unfortunately, because I don't even know the pagan calendar that well, I don't seem to feel particularly motivated toward unfamiliar events either. I'm not trying to be difficult, just thinking out loud about better/worse dynamics for me personally. I don't expect or ask others to accommodate them, just alerting folks that it affects my individual thought process and engagement.

[flamingsword]

You’ve met numb3r_5ev3n - my former roommate from Castle Anthrax? They are a chaos magician with some technopagan roots, and some of their old practices sound not unlike what you are describing, incorporating the energy that humans (and the few animals still living here) have brought to cities. That urban areas and electric inventions have their own, much faster and more Anthropocene cycles of time and energy change. Feel free to ask them about it? They mostly blog about reconstructionist magicks, but getting to talk abt weird approaches to magic is also their jam.

[genderjumper]

If they do so on DW, I will check them out, thanks!