TRANSCRIPT

Season 1, Episode 2 - Ancient Technomages

HEATHER FREEMAN: Hey guys, it's Heather. Just a heads up, the second half of this episode contains discussion of an individual's suicide risk. Please take care while listening.

My friend Zelda is a magical practitioner, and we're walking through a ritual script over video conferencing software. We're each in front of our own computers, Zelda and her little Jerusalem bedroom with her Tarot cards behind her, and me in my home office. We met back in September to do a ritual to get Zelda’s stalled-out dating life back on track.

ZELDA: Okay, so you're handing the kerosene.

HEATHER: I am digitally …  I am invoking digital kerosene and handing it to…

ZELDA: …and I'm holding it, and I intone: 

Fire, fire, burning bright, like a candle in the night.
Come and join us in our flight, lend us your eternal light. 

HEATHER: We don't literally have any kerosene or fire on hand, and we don't need it for the spell, so we're hamming it up and having a good time.

We're performing the Ritual of the Blessed Motherboard from the Internet Book of Shadows. This particular magic is pretty irreverent, making profane things sacred, so there's a lot of humor in it. But it's serious play: Zelda deserves a great girlfriend.

ZELDA: Warm the maiden with your flame, I call you in the goddess’s name. And now, I pour the kerosene into the firewood.

HEATHER: Very liberally, our digital…

ZELDA: …very liberally, the digital fire … is on fire.

HEATHER: And then lighting the fire with matches to make...

ZELDA: …exactly, like, more fire! 

HEATHER: I met Zelda on a Discord server during the 2020 lockdown. She was, and still is, in Jerusalem, while I'm in the United States. And over three years later, we're good friends and frequently check in on each other. 

I want to note, this episode was recorded on October 13th, and Israel is now at war. Zelda is okay, but I worry for her safety, and this recording reminds me of our friendship.

HEATHER: And then I hand over a bowl of earth. 

ZELDA: Okay. And, I intone: 

Elemental earth, I beckon thee, with us in this circle be.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, a firm foundation is a must.

HEATHER: So then, I hand Zelda — the digital ashtray and cigarettes. And I also light it for her ‘cause I'm consider like that.

ZELDA: Thank you, thank you.

HEATHER: And then you can hear her taking a long drag of this imaginal digital cigarette….

ZELDA: Ha! 

HEATHER: Contemporary magical practitioners today do many different things: they cast magic circles, perform spells and rituals, and observe the Sabbats, which are seasonal holidays. And this is mostly done in the physical world with diverse materials, including incense, candles, salt, ritual tools, and more. But a lot of people also perform magic rituals online, and people have been doing it for decades –  people just like Zelda and me.

ZELDA:  I don't know what we've summoned, but I'm here for it!

HEATHER: I mean, I just – I'm so glad I'm not single anymore, oh my god!

HEATHER: I'm Heather Freeman, and this is Magic in the United States. 

In today's episode, Ancient Technomages, we'll learn about the pagans and magical practitioners who found each other online in the early days of the internet, and how these individuals shared magical knowledge – and lifelong friendships – with practitioners all over the world. 

We'll be right back.

[BREAK] 

HEATHER: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman. 

Digital communication of the late ‘70s through early ‘90s was a bubbling cauldron of data, modems, and dial-up phone lines. And so, of course, witches, pagans, and occultists were involved in the stirring. 

Although public and private industries were definitely important to the development of the internet as we know it today, it was the Digitech hobbyists who really innovated how community could form and function online. 

The online world they were operating in looked really different from today.

KEVIN DRISCOLL: If you ask anybody on the street where the internet came from, most people can tell you a little bit about it, like a partial story…. 

HEATHER: Kevin Driscoll is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia where he teaches and researches the history of computing and the internet.

KEVIN: And it might be something about ARPANET or like the U.S. military, or it might be something about Silicon Valley and, like, startups and things like that. And over time, the dominance of the standard story about where the internet came from has so fully eclipsed this grassroots story that it has pushed down people's own sense of their contributions to this history.

So occasionally people would say like, “Well, you know, I ran this little BBS in a little town. And what is that in the big scheme of things?” 

Bulletin Board Systems. They're also called BBSes, as Kevin said, and they're the digital location where this story takes place. They were run from home computers out of garages and home offices all over the United States from the 1970s to the 1990s. 

KEVIN: So a Bulletin Board System really started as a computerization of the community bulletin board, like the kind you still see in the foyer of the library or a school where people post notes on the board.

HEATHER: And so a computerized version of that bulletin board would be like a bulletin board people can access at any time of the day or night and read the messages that are there or leave a message for somebody else. 

And the way they did it was really clever, which was rather than build a new network, it was to adapt an existing network that, by the late 1970s, was really widespread – and that's the telephone network. 

So, let me paint a picture of what this actually looked like. Come visit teenage me in 1990. 

I'd get home from school, and power up my dad's PC (he was basically a software engineer, so he had a computer at home). Like many middle-class Americans, our home had one landline phone. It was beige with a long, tangled-up cord, connected to the wall through a jack. 

To call my friend Danny's BBS, I'd unplug the phone from the wall and plug in the modem, which was a small black box, also connected to my dad's computer. And, yes, this meant that nobody else could use the phone (so I tried to do this before my parents got home). Then my modem would call up Danny's modem. When they connected, the most magical part happened: 

The two modems would begin converting data to sound that could travel over the phone lines. As Kevin put it, our modems would sing to each other, sending data. 

That data would get translated to the landing page of Danny's BBS in chunky green text on a black screen. I’d then use my beige mouse –  a lot of tech was beige in the nineties – to click on the links and read and post messages, a little like sub-Reddit threads on Reddit. 

But I'd log off and end the call when I was done since nobody else could visit the BBS until I freed up the line. (Plus, my parents might be expecting a call.) 

This might sound archaic, but in the early nineties, this was pretty advanced technology. Because computers were extremely expensive back then, very few Americans had them, and even fewer got online. But those who did either ran or visited BBSes. Yet going to those BBSes – which were basically websites only one person could visit at a time – was something people all over the country were doing. And the cybernauts who met and collaborated over this primordial soup of the internet included pagans and occultists.

NISABA MERRIWEATHER: So it was the old 2400 baud modem back then, and that was the state-of-the-art technology when I got started... 

HEATHER: This is Nisaba Merriweather. Nisaba lives in Australia, where she used these BBSes to communicate with pagans and magical practitioners in several countries, including the United States.

NISABA: …And your computer would sit in front of you making all sorts of very strange sounds, and you'd connect to your nearest BBS, which was a system that someone else kept running 24-hours a day for your convenience.

You have to be admitted by password and all the rest of it. And then you'd be faced with all sorts of wonderful things, whatever they chose to put on the system. There was a messaging service, which kind of was the primitive e-mail or SMS of its time, there were inter-BBS games, environmental discussion areas, occult discussion areas.

HEATHER: And it was these occult and pagan discussion areas that drew those early 1980s witches and pagans, for very good reason. If you were a lone witch in the early eighties, looking to meet others, posting a notice on your library's physical bulletin board probably wasn't an option. 

That's because the Satanic Panic was raging, a widespread moral panic in the United States about what were ultimately unfounded dangers of satanic rituals and worship". The U.S. was primed for a moral panic at that time for a lot of reasons, including rising tensions between the religious right and some social movements of the 1970s. (It's a big topic and we'll get into it in a future episode.) But this Satanic Panic resulted in innocent people charged with sexual abuse and murder, and it was dangerous for pagans and occultists to be ‘out of the broom closet’, lest they get swept up in the frenzy.

But hold up. Let's take a beat and do some term definition so you know what I mean by "pagan" and "occultist". 

“Pagan” is a huge umbrella category, including many diverse groups. Pagans, sometimes called neopagans or contemporary pagans, generally maintain a polytheistic religious practice, often connected to nature, and many focus on pre-Christian religious practices from Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Not all pagans practice magic, but for some groups under the pagan umbrella, such as Wiccans, magical practice and religious practice are synonymous. Other pagans practice magic but really think about it separately from their religious identities. 

But these are all culturally marginal communities and since they share overlapping interests, they often 'hang out' in similar cultural spaces, especially online. 

“Occult” simply means “hidden”, and for those who practice magic, this word sometimes best illustrates their magical and spiritual explorations of the invisible world, of spirits, and of attempts to enact physical change through control of these invisible forces.

These digital pagans and occultists used BBSes for everything from sharing spells and rituals to sharing recipes and humor. Some tried practicing magic together, long distance. These could be separate physical rituals happening at the same time, or ritual texts exchanged back and forth, or even magical training.

As computers got more affordable, and Bulletin Board Systems became more common, more Americans began to use them, including more pagans and occultists. Kevin Driscoll again.

KEVIN: And from the mid-1980s on, Bulletin Board Systems become an accessible form of alternative media for a whole range of people who were not especially interested in computers. Like, they're not there for the bits and bytes, they're there for the people and for the information and for the community. And so these bulletin board systems really started to proliferate by the late 1980s and to diversify in terms of the conversations and information you might encounter on a bulletin board.

HEATHER: After the break, we'll learn about the early online communities of pagans and occultists who performed the very first online rituals and spells, and how this collaborative magic forged many lifelong friendships. 

[BREAK]

HEATHER: This is Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

Richard Kaczynski lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has many different spiritual and magical practices. And for years, Richard was a System Operator of an occult-focused BBS. 

RICHARD KACZYNSKI: The wonderful thing about the Bulletin Board Systems was that it did allow that connection to other people of like mind and similar interests, literally around the world.

By the time I was a SysOp, I was already 10 or 15 years into my own journey and I saw my role as kind of facilitating that for other people. The conversations were great because you would have all sorts of folks from all sorts of walks of life, different levels of experience, people you could ask questions of, people who knew what they were talking about could answer, people who didn't know what they were talking about could answer… 

So it was a lot of fun and a lot of heartache too. It was not uncommon for the system to crash. It would start the computer making this, S-O-S noise, and I would dutifully drag myself out of bed and restart the system and make sure it was working, and then try and get back to sleep again.

HEATHER: Being a SysOp was an act of love for their communities. They would download data – often at great expense – and have to dedicate a phone line to the BBS full-time. But many SysOps told me it was worth it. BBSes provided a many-to-many communication system that could reach individuals across vast distances within a few hours or days. 

RICHARD: My Bulletin Board System was called The Magic Bus. I thought that was kind of a fun play on words for, you know, a computer bus. And there was also, a system called 93 Net, which was related to specifically Thelema. 

HEATHER: Thelema is a spiritual philosophy and new religious movement introduced by Aleister Crowley in the early 1900s. Magick – which Crowley spelled with a ‘k’ to distinguish it from stage magic – is an important practice for many Thelemites, including Richard, and adherents are directed to find and follow their True Will, which Richard explains:

RICHARD: In the phrase that's often quoted by Crowley, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” it's something that people often mistake as saying, do whatever you want to do, but it's actually quite the opposite. It's this laser-focused, everything that you do is toward becoming your ideal self. 

HEATHER: There were networked hubs that connected different BBSes, and one was especially well-known to pagans and occultists who were online: PODSnet. 

The Pagan and Occult Distribution Systems network, or PODSnet, was started by J. Brad Hicks in the 1980s. This network spanned a handful of countries, including the United States. Over in Australia, Nisaba Merriweather ran a BBS that connected to PODSnet.

NISABA: PODS was where all the best stuff was. In Australia, PODSnet was picked up by a guy initially with a 2400 board modem, then a 9600, then a 1440 as the technology improved.

He rang America every night (at the expensive phone rates we had back then) and downloaded for an hour. So he must have been a friggin billionaire. And he'd sit it on his BBS and then all of us, including me when I had a BBS of my own, would ring his BBS when it suited us, and pick up the mail package and distribute them throughout Australia.

HEATHER: Back in the 1980s PODSnet users shared tons of information with one another, from homegrown rituals and spells to, well, copyrighted texts. 

These materials were eventually collated into the Riders of the Crystal Wind Book of Shadows. As users added to this collection, it grew and also changed names, from the PODSnet Book of Shadows to the Internet Book of Shadows. 

Ashleigh McSidhe is a retired civil servant and was a user of PODSnet in the 1980s. She told me about the book’s origin. 

ASHLEIGH MCSIDHE: And it's a massive, five- or six-volume collection of rituals, lore, mythology that were collected mainly by Paul Seymour, who's now deceased. He was a SysOp in the PODSnet system. And he put it together for his coven’s use and his training, but he shared it out to everybody on those networks and copies of it got uploaded to all of the internet archives early on. You still find copies of it. 

HEATHER: This text doesn't just represent one branch of magic: It has tons of different spells, rituals, and theologies from many different people who shared these practices online. 

That ritual my friend Zelda and I were doing at the beginning of the episode? That's from The Internet Book of Shadows, too. The ritual is Discordian, which is a modern religion and philosophy invented in 1957 by two high school friends. Discordianism focuses on the worship of Eris, a goddess of chaos as they understood her. It's an irreverent practice, full of humor and absurdism. 

And The Internet Book of Shadows — a text that might well be the world's largest book of shadows  — was a gold mine for these early online practitioners. 

Gregory Grieve is a Professor and Head of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and studies digital religion, and he cut his academic teeth studying pagan groups and online rituals in that era.

GREGORY GRIEVE: If you imagine yourself, like, back in the late 1980s and you're a pagan in some small town somewhere, this was like amazing for a lot of people because suddenly they had access to all this content. 

HEATHER: That's kind of how people learned about paganism back then. They would just kind of trade things. These digitalized books of shadow really changed the environment for a lot of people. These magical practitioners shared information online, but they also experimented with online rituals. 

GREGORY: I came in with the bias that for a ceremony to be authentic, it needed to have presence, you need it to be in the same room, in the same space with the people for it to work. I was just surprised to see anybody using this new media at all for anything other than just pure communication.

When I started to study it, I saw that my surprise was not really warranted, because I found a bunch of people in the early sixties doing rituals on the phone together. So it's not completely new.

HEATHER: Remember my Discordian ritual with Zelda? These early telephone rituals are pretty much the same, minus video. They were synchronous, with practitioners communicating with each other at the same time. 

Now, Zelda and I could've just texted each other the ritual. I text her my line, then she texts me hers. And so on. No sound, no video, but texting today is fast.

Now imagine Zelda and I are texting the ritual, but we each only check those messages once a day, doing normal life things while we're waiting for the other person to respond. That's kind of how these asynchronous BBS rituals happened.

GREGORY: I think I may have caught the first online ceremony and it was an invocation of a circle of a sacred grove on this pagan usernet, and it followed very closely the traditional forms of pagan invocations of circles with an invocation, a focusing of the will, and then a separation of it.

It was all textual. And it was also all asynchronous. And so it would be like you would leave a note up there and then someone would answer it. More like Reddit or something, you know, Reddit is actually a similar structure. 

HEATHER: And similar to Reddit, pagans and occultists from all over the world were learning from each other on these BBSs. This sharing, learning, and practicing magic led to a sense of community and friendship. And some of these friendships became lifelong. Ashleigh McSidhe again.

ASHLEIGH: You met everyone from every walk of life. You met doctors, you met lawyers, you met rocket scientists, you met civil servants, librarians, farmers – everyone. The thing we had in common was we were looking for others. 

It was just, it was your community backyard. Sit around the fire pit and chew, whatever. It was good times. And you got to meet people and you called them friends because they were. I met people in the BBS days that I'm still friends with. Two live in Colorado Springs, some live in Kentucky, some live in Florida, some live in Australia.

And you developed real and long-lasting friendships. I recently reconnected with a friend in Australia that I had met on the BBSes that I'd lost contact with. And it was such a pleasure just to re-meet them. 

NISABA: It washed away nationality: they weren't Americans, they weren't Australians. 

HEATHER: That friend in Australia? That was Nisabah Merriweather.

NISABA: They were just humans. In my core group of inner circle people, it washed away this sense of separation, I suppose. 

The first time I got physically rung up by someone on the phone and heard an American accent, it came almost as a shock. I mean, I knew she was an American, but it came as a shock that she had the accent, because in my head, you guys all sound like me.

When I started embedding myself in the whole PODSnet culture and communicating with these people on a daily basis and forming real and lasting friendships, and there are people who I still haven't physically met that I have loved for decades. And I started meeting people all over the place, many of whom I'm still in touch with now, which is just lovely, like, 35-year friendships.

HEATHER: Thirty-five years is a long time. And several practitioners mentioned that older online friends had passed away in the last couple of years. They were bittersweet: they were glad for the friendship, but also sad for the loss. Richard Kaczynski had just lost his friend Bill Heidrick shortly before we spoke. 

RICHARD: Bill Heidrick was just enormously influential in the online community. He, like, virtually single-handedly transcribed first editions of Crowley's works and just put them out there for the public in text files. Most anything that you might see out there of Crowley's works is probably based on this work that Bill Heydrich himself had done. 

But he was also just this omnipresent figure online. You could email him or find him on these message boards, and he was always very responsive. His presence was enormous, and as is his loss. So, um, I was very glad to have had the opportunity…. not meet him in real life, but to have interactions with him virtually.

HEATHER: These BBS friendships forged a sense of community that went back to their shared interests: Magic. 

People practice magic for lots and lots of reasons, and sometimes those reasons are for the community itself. Gregory Grieve told me how these BBS communities helped and supported one another: Sometimes, in their darkest moments.

GREGORY: The people online seemed to have fairly strong emotional connections with each other, and in the ceremony that I witnessed, one of the people got on there and was basically saying that he was going to take his own life.

And the community rallied together and they created this egg of energy, which they then sent to him, and according to the text, he felt as if they had basically saved his life through this sending of metaphysical energy over the line to him.

What fascinated me at the time was they were all over the world. They were in New Zealand, they were in Texas, in Germany. And so what I found fascinating was that even though they were separate, they were able to form a community.

And of course, at this time, we're all like, of course they can do that because we've all done that. But at the time it was a radically new, innovative way of using this new media And so I think neopaganism and how it used magic in this new space really changed how everybody thinks of this space.

ZELDA: We thank the Four Directions for standing by our side,

HEATHER: We thank the elementals, and their power all allied,

HEATHER: Doing this ritual with Zelda, I feel like the magical and technological descendant of those who ran BBSes back in the 1980s.

ZELDA: To celebrate our status, anointed CompuPagans of Sin,

HEATHER: Let joyful inhibition be released and the Saturnalia begin. Wait, what?!

ZELDA: That, yeah! 

HEATHER: Zelda and I are finishing up our Discordian ritual from The Internet Book of Shadows. We've summoned the goddess who will hopefully juice up Zelda's love life, and now we're bidding the spirits farewell. Like Zelda and myself, there are many digital wizards, technomages, and cyberwitches exploring these technologies for sorceress ends to this day. And they're not just performing the Ritual of the Blessed Motherboard: they're innovating their own magics. And there's a lot going on. 

There are some contemporary practitioners who are understandably skeptical of digital magic. Yet those who are doing it say: “Don't knock it till you've tried it.” 

But that's its own story, and we'll save that for another download. 

HEATHER: All right, big hugs. I love you. I miss you and, um, yeah, we'll talk again soon with wine and Artemis and stuff.

ZELDA: All right. 

ZELDA:/HEATHER: Love you, sweetie. Bye. 

HEATHER: Next week on Magic in the United States we'll learn why Pennsylvania Dutch powwower Nelson Rehmeyer was brutally murdered in his home; how the trial of his killers became a media circus that nearly destroyed powwow; and how this uniquely American folk healing tradition managed to survive – and is now thriving  – around the world to this day. 

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill and the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Suleman. The executive producer for PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The show’s music is from APM music and Epidemic sound. And our project managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. Thanks to advisers Chaz Clifton, Daniel Harms, and Meg Whalen. Thanks to guests Kevin Driscoll, Gregory Grieve, Richard Kaczynski, Ashleigh McSidhe, Nisaba Merriweather, and special thanks and care to Zelda. Additional, thanks to Professor Douglas Cowan and all the practitioners who shared their BBS stories with me. This production was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wherever you are in the United States: the East, the West, the North, or the South, remember that magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman, and I'll see you at the crossroads.