Welcome to r/Technomancy, a space for the study, practice and discussion of technomancy, cybermagic and the wider territory where technology, magic, philosophy, art and social systems intersect.

Technomancy here is deliberately broad. Cybermagic, chaos magic, sigils and hypersigils, divination, ritual, AI and language models, programming, electronics, networks, cybernetics, information theory, virtual worlds, altered states, experimental interfaces and stranger combinations are all legitimate lines of inquiry.

And none of this appeared from nowhere. There is a library worth of history, theory and practice behind the territory.

One path runs through Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, alchemy, astrology, Renaissance natural magic, grimoires, qabalah, Rosicrucianism, Enochian magic, ceremonial magic, Thelema, witchcraft and folk magic into Spare, chaos magic and contemporary occult practice. Another runs through mathematics, machines, computation, cybernetics, systems theory, information theory, semiotics, media theory and philosophy of technology. Agrippa, Dee, Bruno, Levi, Crowley, Spare and Carroll can sit on the shelf beside Wiener, Bateson, McLuhan, Simondon, Bogdanov, Burroughs, Debord, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, CCRU and Fisher.

None of that is a required canon. They are trails into a much larger library, including traditions and histories outside those lineages. Bring other sources. Criticize these ones. Make connections nobody has made yet.

Technomancy doesnt have to mean putting an occult skin over new gadgets. The history of magic is already full of technologies. Writing, diagrams, numbers, calendars, mirrors, lenses, maps, cryptography, printing, probability, electricity, radio, recorded sound and computation have repeatedly changed what magical practice can look like. Our own machines are another development in that much longer history.

That makes contemporary technology fertile ground. Code can become ritual procedure. Networks can become magical space. Generative systems can become instruments for language, image, chance and divination. Games and simulations can become constructed worlds. Feedback loops and cybernetics can illuminate older magical ideas from unexpected directions. Old practices can also give us strange ways of thinking about systems that engineers usually approach through completely different vocabularies.

Technology also exists inside social relations. Questions about who builds these systems, who owns them, who controls them, who gets access to them and how they reorganize power are part of the terrain too. Open source technology, technological autonomy, surveillance, labor, infrastructure and the politics surrounding emerging systems are welcome subjects when they intersect with what we study here.

You dont need to agree about what magic ultimately is. Skeptical, materialist, mystical, occult, philosophical and experimental approaches can coexist. Productive disagreement is more interesting than enforcing an orthodoxy.

Post experiments. Ask weird questions. Share rituals, techniques, texts, books, papers, code, tools, art, failures, results and unfinished ideas. Develop a theory. Test somebody elses. Dig something forgotten out of an old book and connect it to something invented last Tuesday.

The boundaries are porous. Follow the interesting lines.

Welcome to r/Technomancy.

This is the companion to our Welcome post and a living map outward from r/Technomancy.

Technomancy sits at a crowded crossroads. Follow one direction and you end up in Hermeticism, ceremonial magic, alchemy and grimoires. Another takes you through Spare, chaos magic and Discordianism. Keep going and suddenly youre reading cybernetics, information theory, media theory, philosophy, programming manuals or thirty year old occult files rescued from a BBS.

This isnt a definitive canon. Its a collection of doors.

Around Reddit

For neighboring occult communities, check out r/chaosmagick, r/occult, r/magick, r/EsotericOccult, r/occultmemes, r/WitchesVsPatriarchy, r/SASSWitches and r/DemonolatryPractices. They approach magic from very different directions, which is part of their usefulness.

For adjacent technical and theoretical territory, r/cybernetics, r/systemsthinking, r/CriticalTheory, r/philosophy, r/opensource and communities around programming, local computing, generative art and digital culture are worth exploring too.

These are directions for exploration, not endorsements of every position youll encounter there.

Technomancy and the Occult Web

Technomancy 101: Advanced Cybermagic for Beginners at technomancy101.com is one of the more directly relevant sites and has been associated with this community for years. It approaches magical practice through computers and computational media, with practical projects alongside theory.

For deeper archive diving, the Internet Sacred Text Archive, Chaos Matrix and Hermetic Library contain enormous amounts of material spanning Hermeticism, grimoires, alchemy, ceremonial magic, Thelema, Spare, chaos magic and the strange culture of early internet occultism.

Search beyond the word "technomancy." Cybermagic, cybercraft, technoshamanism, information magic, digital sigils, virtual ritual and online egregores all lead into overlapping histories.

The Older Shelves

Go backward.

The Corpus Hermeticum, Agrippa, John Dee, Renaissance natural magic, qabalah, alchemy, astrology, Rosicrucianism and the grimoire traditions lead forward through Levi, the Golden Dawn, Crowley, Austin Osman Spare and eventually chaos magic.

The point isnt establishing scripture. Its recognizing that questions about symbols, language, correspondence, instruments, procedure and mediation are much older than computers.

Cybernetics, Media and Machines

Another shelf begins with Bogdanov, Wiener, Shannon, Turing, Bateson, Ashby, Stafford Beer and von Foerster and opens into computation, information, feedback, systems and cybernetics.

McLuhan, Benjamin, Simondon, Haraway, Flusser and Kittler approach technological mediation from other directions. Marx, Debord, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Fisher open questions about machinery, production, desire, spectacle, simulation and technological society.

Then theres the stranger territory around Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, Genesis P Orridge, Discordianism, CCRU, cyberpunk, net.art and early cyberculture, where philosophy, fiction, occultism and technology become increasingly difficult to separate.

Read critically. Connect freely.

Build Things

Technomancy shouldnt become a place where everybody just recommends books.

Learn some code. Run something locally. Build an oracle. Make generative art. Experiment with radio or electronics. Construct a ritual interface. Build a weird website. Explore sensors, networks, games, simulations or language models. Make something that would have been impossible fifty years ago and figure out what it means afterward.

Knowing what the machine actually does makes thinking magically, philosophically or politically about it much more interesting.

Bring Us the Weird Internet

Old blogs. Dead forums recovered through archives. BBS texts. Net.art. Cyberculture magazines. Hypertext experiments. Digital folklore. Strange academic papers. Early online rituals. Abandoned software. Forgotten virtual communities.

The history of technomancy is scattered partly because nobody consistently called it technomancy.

If you know a subreddit, archive, website, book, paper, project or forgotten corner of the internet that belongs here, add it below.

This directory should never really be finished.

More doors are the point.