I had an interesting conversation the other day with a member of my writing critique group. We were discussing the society of my book The Third Way and its sequel, tentatively entitled To Be a Queen. This society, called the Babapupa Reserve, is situated about two hundred years in the future around the year 2200. They have technology but are not a strongly technological society. Because they are a quasi-isolated group, they have the opportunity to choose the levels of technology they allow into their society. Thus, they use electronics for business, but prefer to interact with each other in a more personal, face-to-face manner.
They are also a society with a mystical-religious system that allows them to interact with non-human spirits, the Orisha. The question was, could a society have those two characteristics: advanced technology and magic?
My friend shared the common thought that technology and magic don’t mix in real life (RL) and thus shouldn’t be mixed in a fictional world. I want to disagree with that basic premise by exploring the contemporary intersection of technology and magic.
In 1979, Margo Adler, the granddaughter of the renowned psychiatrist Alfred Adler and a reporter of National Public Radio who died in 2014, published a fascinating survey of the religious experiences, beliefs, and practices of people who called themselves neopagans. Her book was entitled Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess-Worshippers, and Other Pagans in America. I own a copy of the revised and expanded edition published in 1986. There have been several later editions, the latest 2006. At almost 675 pages, this book is still accepted as the most detailed analysis of contemporary Paganism.
In the summer of 1985 Ms. Adler distributed a questionnaire at various pagan festivals and through the journal Panegyria. Included in the questionnaire were standard questions about the respondents’ occupation. Ms. Adler notes, “As Gordon Melton noted in his 1980 survey of Neo-Paganism, ‘while Pagans seem to the casual observer to be “counter-culture” types, they are, in fact, basically white-collar, middle-class professionals.’ Their job profiles are pretty unusual, with an amazingly high percentage in computer, scientific, and technical fields.” The most popular occupation among her respondents was computer programmer, system’s analyst, or software developer at 21%. The next closest was student (either college or graduate) at 16% (446).
When she asked the more open-ended question, “what percentage of people in the Pagan community work with computers and what, if any, relationship exists between a Pagan or [witch] Craft philosophy and an interest in computers” the answers ranged from none, computers are inimical to Paganism, to “those who were convinced that 80 percent of the Pagan community actively used computers (447).” She goes on to analyze these answers and I would encourage anyone interested in the relationship between technology and magic to explore her analysis further.
I would guess that if someone replicated Ms. Adler’s questionnaire today, the number of people who actively used computers, including cell phones, in both their mundane and spiritual would be higher than 80%. Thus, I don’t think it is beyond possibility that a future society might use some forms of technology while still engaging in a magical spiritual practice. I will be exploring the intersection between these two ways of interacting with the world in a future book but for now, I intend to let the people of Babapupa Reserve have both some forms of both technology and magic.
What do you think? Can advanced technological societies also have access to magic or other forms of the supernatural? Have you read The Third Way? Did the intersection of technology and magic bother you? Why?
