Technology and the esoteric?

I was wondering if anyone had recommendations for media where technology interacts with the occult/magical or is integrated to take advantage of it. Doesn't necessarily have to be computer tech though that's my primary interest. Examples of what I'm interested in > Serial Experiments Lain I'm assuming you already watched it if you're lurking here. > Shin Megami Tensei Series of JRPG games by Atlus that started with a kid creating a demon summoning program. This gets less emphasis later on from what I've seen, but Soul Hackers (the original) has a hacker group and a networking company in the plot's main focus. > Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura RPG by Troika Games that takes place during the industrial revolution. Magic runs in opposition to the laws technology's built on so they don't play well together. Very well written game in other regards as well. I'm asking here because I feel like this is a specific niche.

>SMT shame the series is becoming a generic jrpg fest with each new entry. [spoiler]is kaneko even alive?[/spoiler]

Yugioh franchise as a whole, ive read manga, watched duel monsters and Gx, played the ps1 game forbidden memories. It pretty much mixes game technology with esoteric stuff i even heard yugioh 5d has cyberpunk stuff but havent watchef that one yet

>Shin Megami Tensei Many of the games in the series use a computer program in order to summon demons. Off the top of my head there's DDS Megami Tensei (The first game on the Famicom), then Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2 on the Super Famicom, Devil summoner 1 and 2 on the saturn and then there's SMT Strange Journey and Devil Survivor on the Nintendo DS. >Soul Hackers (the original) has a hacker group and a networking company in the plot's main focus. Not only that but you get a computer that looks like a gun and the plot involves a corporation manufacturing demonic computer chips that harvest people's souls. This is one of the coolest games I've ever played, it's a shame it gets no recognition.

If you watch the lawnmower man(1991?) real closely you might notice some interesting things, i havent had the time to look at them closer tho. Im sure theres lots others but i dont remember any particular ones off hand.

This vid is meant to be generated from an AI just saying stuff like a god. https://youtu.be/qDZJk7l8A7I

>>9755 Yeah SMT V was probably not the best for me to start with. Still a cool series. >>9756 In universe weren't the cards adapted from an old Egyptian card game or something? >>9757 I'll definitely need to check out all of these entries, thanks.

>The Laundry Files It's a book series by Charles Stross in which magic is done through computers. I've never read it, but have seen it being recommended more than once.

It doesn't get more occult than this to be honest

I personally feel that part of the appeal of Neon Genesis Evangelion is its technoreligious imagery, plot points, and overall style.

This is a newer digital entity dungeon crawler http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=6FBC24DA6FE540FCA07AA1731EC41457 still working my way through it but it's basically a fore-runner for SMT IRL

>>10525 >technoreligious imagery, plot points, and overall style Yeah, that's what made me fall in love with it. Makes me wonder if there is any more technoreligious type stuff out there? I've always been obsessed with both ancient philosophy and religion and sci fi, cyberpunk and biopunk and its rare to see then combined like that. Looking back on it, Evangelion hasn't really aged well though.

I would probably reccomend the RPG Mage: The Ascension. I still haven't read the main rule book but I know the concept and I personally believe there's a lot truth in that fictional universe. I wish I had friends to play it. Maybe I'm already playing it and I don't know...

>>9754 You'd probably get a kick out of The Zero Theorem. It's by Terry Gilliam, stars Christoph Waltz, and the whole film is more or less a tragic gnostic excursion by /r9k/.

>>10527 >Angel's egg - Christian iconography >Ergo Proxy - Christian iconography >Speed grapher - Psychic mystery >Ugly Swans - Psychic mystery/scifi >Eden: It's an endless world! - Post cyberpunk/Gnosticism >Instant bullet - Edgy, involves akashic records >Noir - Ancient prophecy + hitwoman mystery

>>9754 Here's a video and website that are both all about technomancy: Technomancy 101: https://technomancy101.com/ https://youtu.be/lDvZJkiVXT4

>>9754 >Arcane A beautifully animated and surprisingly well-written series which revolves around the discovery of magic gemstones that kickstart a technological revolution. The twist is that these gemstones can also open gateways to a nightmarish alternate dimension, the true nature of which has yet to be explored in the show. Ignore the fact that it's based on a soykafty piece of Chinese spyware masquerading as a video game and go in with an open mind. >Cruelty Squad Easily one of my favourite games of the decade so far. A deliberately awful-looking game that takes cyberpunk and biopunk themes and mixes them with Gnosticism. If /x/ made a game, it would probably look something like this. >Perturbator I'm guessing you probably weren't thinking of music when you made this thread, but most of Perturbator's work mixes cyberpunk and occult themes to create visions of the future that are as intriguing as they are terrifying.

>>10533 Watched it a while ago, and although the aesthetics were very appealing, I seriously feel I didn't get even close to half of it. Dunno if the tragic plot line made it incomprehensible to me, because I'm not used to seeing them in typical "gnostic" stories (that is, realizing the falsity of reality (mundane reality vs superordinate, "extra-world"), meeting your soul (usually in the guise of a woman), who "saves" you (the redeeming kiss, like in the Matrix), and somehow "overcoming" your bodily limitations by attaining god consciousness or something like that). So, he rejected the soul, his "call to a hero's journey" was a grand delusion (and the trope was even explicitly ridiculed/treated with cynical irony by "Bob") and he was exploited by something of a Demiurge to prove that there is no salvation - a fate to which the protagonist more or less submits by seemingly letting the Void consume him and send him to a fantasy land, where the sun ("world soul"?) literally sets on him. If that's all there was, that was truly vile.

>>10585 Not everyone makes the decision to accept themselves spiritually and they dive into the world or nothingness (in an oblivion; non-integration sort of way). It happens all the time. While it may be unpleasant for some to see or witness, it's worth having it depicted dramatically, as is the point with any film or piece of art using a visual medium.

>>10587 True, but it was still a somewhat sickening thing to behold. On the upside, after the initial reactions I went through a fleeting moment of rebellious outburst, as a response to the feelings of fear, I think, which is often times the more overwhelming emotion in comparison to "attraction" or inspiration; so I think the movie succeeded in conveying its message and arousing the kind of feelings it had intended. But that still doesn't necessarily mean I have to like it, now does it :D?

Does AI art count? There is a level of uncanny valley that makes this kind of art unsettling…..,..

Nobody mentioned Warhammer 40k? Technology is essentially a religion: tech-priest enginseers pray to the Machine Spirit of ancient war machines in order to activate them.

>>10533 It's interesting, and it's definitely a Gilliam movie. Not one of his best I'd say. Absurdism and escape to fantasy are definitely big themes for him (I mean, just look at Brazil) so if you're expecting it to be a gnostic work you'll be sorely disappointed. >>10919 Warhammer is all style, little substance.

Such thing was kinda represented in Project .hack. This is a bit of a cheat, since the series itself is a fantasy world inside a computer game, the "bugs" of which are reflected in the real world (players interact with The World using virtual reality helmets and a gamepad. It was created by the German programmer Harald Hoerwick, who developed the first version of the game - "Fragment" to create a virtual daughter Aura. Due to problems with the servers, some The World players fall into a coma). Thus, you can call it a kind of intersection of fantasy and cyberpunk. However, although it is not openly stated, almost everything in this franchise symbolizes something mythological or occult, even mobs. At the same time, everything intersects both between biblical references and the internal mythology of the "game world", and some of the messages of the characters that they send you in the DM create a terrifying effect of a live presence, which is kind of what I experienced when watching Lain. Somehow briefly I could describe it as the great-grandfather of SAO with much more developed lore and a lot of occult symbolism. Highly recommend first 4 games.

Unironically the old DOOM (or new, but I prefer the original) games might be what you're looking for. No game blends sci-fi and the occult quite as well that I've found.

>>10965 return to castle wolfenstein really took the idea and ran with it

Literally Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It's like half of the show. Technology vs the occult, magic-enhanced tech, demons on the internet, cybernetic zombie super-soldiers, internet techno pagans and so on, It's very, very 90s.

>>9754 The Occult Institute of Technology Kinda difficult to find any current info on them online. https://www.religiousforums.com/threads/the-occult-institute-of-technology.96955/ https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=185178175231250&id=178555039226897 The FB page is the guy who created OIT intially I think.

If you're into VR games Boneworks/SL0's stuff has strong themes of this. The software itself isn't FOSS, but they do support modding communities at least. Bonelab (the sequel) plays with the same themes, but has more of a modder/speedrunner community kind of feel to it. And all their games like to do 4th wall stuff (not comedy 4th wall stuff but like part-of-the-plot 4th wall stuff). So if you like that sort of thing you'll like it, if you think that's gimmicky then oh well. They also have some of the best vr-physics and IK that I've ever had the pleasure of using.

>>11194 Personally, I greatly enjoyed the original boneworks, but I am very disappointed about them never expanding on it in bonelabs (instead its a glorified tutorial), and instead focusing on modding for the sequel. Haven't exactly seen anything in bonelabs modding scene that would capture the same feelings for me as did the original.

The warhammer 40k mechanicus combines esotericism and technology to such an extent its more mysticist than technological.

>>11289 To be more accurate, any technology advenced enough look like magic for thoses who don't undertand it and society have devolved to the point that nobody understand the tech anymore, pretty much like in an apple store. So they see the tech as magic, the entire machine thing as a God and the procedures as a dogma to follow without devience to please the machine God. Pretty much like an Apple store. And for the neat part: it's science fiction, with tech so advenced it look like machic to us, so some fan mistakenly take the advanced tech for magic, making the machine God cult alive in real world.

>>11289 Warhammer is fuarrrking garbage

>>10965 There is nothing occult in Doom. Eventually Doom 3 had a bit of it if you take into account the premise of humans dabbling in hidden evil powers, secretly at first, before the entire situation blows up and what started as seances in UAC offices ends with literal gates linking Hell and Mars.

bumping one of the classic threads >9757 >Not only that but you get a computer that looks like a gun and the plot involves a corporation manufacturing demonic computer chips that harvest people's souls i'm going to play it just because it's such a good metaphor for today lol

>>9754 Full Metal Alchemist according to My Anime List

>>9754 not a recommendation of media but a web site that lets you create cybernetic sigils

>>12266 forgot to add image and link to the site T-T sigils dot occult dot codes is the site It doesn't stop getting discarded as flood

>>9754 What do those symbols mean? Magic is about emotion and is female-coded. Technology is about logic and is male-coded.

>>10534 >Ergo Proxy Also full of gnostic themes

>>12653 >Magic is about emotion and is female-coded. Technology is about logic and is male-coded. And our goal is to reintegrate the two. Baphomet is not an entity, but a symbol, the unification of male and female, beast and human.

there's a few things ive picked up over the years regarding this. unfortunately i am yet to find my holy grail: a programming manual or even a paradigm which uses the abstract principles of an occult paradigm, such as alchemy, to structure itself. I am aware of the Alchemy programming language which puts all inputs and outputs in alchemical terms in a pseudo-chemist manner: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Alchemy I am also aware of this book, that i have just briefly skimmed, which attempts to draw connections between programming and alchemy. It's called "alchemy of programming" and it is not good, primarily reading as an novice's introduction to alchemy with virtually zero attention given to programming. Then there is technomancy101.com , which is primarily about using the scratch programming language to do magickal things like divination, sigil making, evocation, etc. it describes several basic ideas in magick and how they might be done with computer programs. what is perhaps most interesting about the text is the amount of citation it makes to other computer and magickal literature. all of this stuff feels like it only scratches the surface, however. It has primarily made me slightly disappointed: magick and programming are much closer together in my eyes. After all, the illustrations used in SICP, for instance, or how the perl programming language was created by a religious studies nerd - Larry Wall - who re-used the concept of sigils from BASIC. as much of the internet ran (and probably still does run) on perl, this is very important to methere has always been a corner of sorts about computer science that seemed to feel what computer scientists were doing was magic. this feels evident from the fringes mentioned to the older stuff like the CCRU and Xa'Turing, but even seems present in classic texts like the jargon file. >>>12653 >technology is about logic and is male coded sadie plant would like a word with you https://monoskop.org/images/1/13/Plant_Sadie_1995_The_Future_Looms_Weaving_Women_and_Cybernetics.pdf

>>12689 oh wait, didn't notice this was on /vis/. for OP you should check out the game spacechem. Zachtronix is an excellent game developer in general, another noteworthy game of his is shenzhen I/O which is probably the most sophisticated coding game ive played as its an "american expat to shenzhen hardware dev" simulator that teaches a portion of the exact skillset you'll need to do that IRL - circuit design, hardware-level programming, etc. another coding game ive enjoyably played is called hack 'n' slash where you learn to code with lua to fix the virtual world you're doing an RPG adventure in. Some more obvious ones aeshetically would be final fantasy whos setting and aesthetic are about the synthesis of magic and tech, often getting into their roles to make of its worlds a metaphor for society as a whole. or Metal Gear Solid which regularly incorporates a variety of esoteric themes into an over-the-top story about paramilitaries and global geopolitics. or the Science Adventure franchise, which includes Steins;Gate which was adapted to a popular anime or Chaos;Head, etc. I've started playing Steins;Gate and its very cute, and easy to look past the seemingly cliche setup of its main characters being told from the position of the male protagonist seemingly intended for a male audience. Then there is my personal favorite, .hack//sign which is an anime and game franchise from the early 2000s about a virtual world and the magic of it, it is basically the first 'trapped-in-virtual-world type media from 2001 and it is way better than say, sword art online and even log horizon. like >>10944 i highly recommend it. other mentions ITT that i liked were ergo proxy and DOOM.

Thundarr the Barbarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thundarr_the_Barbarian Thundarr the Barbarian is an American post-apocalyptic animated series, created by Steve Gerber and produced by Ruby-Spears Productions. The series ran for two seasons on ABC from October 4, 1980, to October 31, 1981.

>>9754 Look in to Shadow Hearts, jrpg for the ps2, lots of gods and taoist stuff, and Baroque (only the sega saturn version) maybe

Gate 2: The Trespassers (1990) Ghostbusters (1984) The Manitou (1978) The Chosen (1977) Event Horizon (1997) From Beyond (1986) Beyond Lemuria (Video 2007) Phantasm (1979) The Ghost Busters (TV Series 1975) Computer Ghosts (TV Movie 1988) Kate Bush: Experiment IV (Music Video 1986) Accumulator 1 (1994) The Video Dead (Video 1987) Shocker (1989) The Quiet Earth (1985) Carnacki the Ghost Finder https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10832 From Beyond https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/fb.aspx Answer https://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html Doom Quake Laser Ghost Fatal Frame There was a point and click game, SCaV3NG3R, that was the precursor to the tabletop game Enter the Shadowside, where you hacked your phone so you could see ghosts using its camera.

>>12689 You should look at Terry A. Davis' TempleOS Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero Theory https://archive.org/details/twz_20200405 Sean T. Cook's Worm++ programming language and Love Shack and Love Bug OS https://www.youtube.com/user/Flash0213 https://www.pdf-archive.com/2017/07/03/loveshack-os/ https://www.youtube.com/@shawncook7272

>>12689 I've written a compiler / designed a language you could say is "inspired by" alchemy, but I'd say alchemy is always what is being performed when we program. I've been working to bridge the gap between human programming languages and alchemy, as I believe this would enable human beings to produce software easier. I am working on a paper, and then I want to work on a book. When i publish the paper or give up I will publish what I have and post a link here - the paper won't make mention, not ONE PEEP about the esoteric so don't look forward to that. The esoteric nature of my motivation / inspiration won't be made public until maybe the book. At my level of understanding, meaning is form projected onto a plane. Our conventional programming languages serve as a plane, and we project programs as forms onto it. Our conventional programming languages "stiffle alchemy" in subtle ways, that im not capable of naming succinctly with the appropriate alchemical jargon. The gist is that we cannot transform programs to programs so easily, there are extra steps in between that are a result of "rigidness" of the "connection points" at the call sites. My solution is to use attribute grammar as a means of abstraction alongside "functions". We create deep embeddings with these grammars that synthesize shallow embedding expressions in code when recognizing some arbitrary DSL at the call site. SO to bring it 'full circle' ;), conventional programming languages function as a virtual plane on which we project forms and create meaning (programs). As they serve this role of "plane", they're static and unchanging. It's THE FORM that we change to change the meaning of our program. This is inappropriate, and causing problems. We need to be able to perform alchemy on both the form AND THE PLANE. Again, at present we perform alchemy on the form, and perform more alchemy on the form to account for the lack of alchemy we're performing on the plane. this is precisely the shallow embedding of some domain semantics. My language allows performing alchemy on both sides of the meaning we're trying to construct, which comes with several benefits, all of which are documented as the benefits of "deep embeddings". I replied because you said a programming paradigm that uses occult / esoteric principles to structure itself would be "the holy grail". I believe I have that, and I've demonstrated it. Hopefully someone else enjoys it~

Anime these days are using a lot of 3DCG now.

Hey bro, what a coincidence, I've been working for years on a screenplay for a movie related to this, technology and the occult combining in a somewhat magical way, like a kind of new plane of existence. Inspired by Lain, of course, but also by a lot of other media from the '90s and 2000s and the general feeling the art from that era gave. Any recommendations on what I should study to give it a more religious and occult focus rather than just the technical aspects?

>>9754 I always been curious about Soul Hackers and the "hacker" part is so weak, the plot pretty standard and simple. The only thing about hack is only two moments of the game and the possibility of put programs in your portable "deck". And the second part not looks much better...

Oh I remember one, Pony Island . Yeah is a silly name, but you are inside an arcade ... programed by Satan. Is a three hour long game but pretty intense and funny. https://store.steampowered.com/app/405640/Pony_Island/

https://web.archive.org/web/20251229153343/https://si9net.neocities.org/OtisAtariBackup A lot of modern technology in the realm of 'biohacking' , like umwelt modification or telemedicine, can be considered so advanced that it can be confused with being something magical. Defenses against this are probably most practically just improving your overall health and neurochemistry (Ray Peat is helpful for neurochemistry), tonic/phasic dopamine balance, sensory gating strength, sleep, exercise, not scrolling social media algos.

>>13117 this is the paper, i'm giving up. the main idea is to abstract code into attribute grammar rules like functions, after you write functions. with or without metalinguistic subroutines, when you are abstracting code into subroutines you are creating a new language, one that's a subset of all semantically correct programs in the programming language you're using. the idea is to shrink this relationship down to the call site. idk i thought it was a good idea. you don't have to try very hard programming with a language like this to program in a way and thus participate with some programming paradigm that's predicated in the "alchemy" of the information of the user into into machine behavior or members of a concrete set etc idk.

There is Kairo (Pulse in english) from Kiyoshi Kurosawa. It's not that focused on tech, but it's a great movie non the less, and the merge between the occult and the "mystcism" of the earlie internet makes for such a great mix.

I frequently dream about things before seeing them on my phone. Something something magnetic fields unconscious soul extension

check out the CCRU's writings http://ccru.net/index.htm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetic_Culture_Research_Unit

>>13298 I'm not in a mood to look into that now, but working with embeddings is very enjoyable in functional languages like haskell and mls and that kind of stuff. You can encode the function abstraction and application as cases of algebraic datatype and reflect on them however you want in eval. Very simple and fun stuff like data Term t = Lit t | Fn (t -> Term t) | Apply (Term t) (Term t) eval :: Term t -> Maybe t eval (Lit x) = Just x eval (Fn _) = Nothing eval (Apply (Fn f) x) = eval (f (eval x)) ... And there are many ways to do the Fn (t -> Term t) part which have their pros and cons, but having this host-language-level function within your Term type is basically the key idea behind embeddings I believe.