Anti-Bodies
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Trans-humanism, the belief that through technology humans can one day ‘transcend’ the natural world and its limits, is about as far from Paganism as one can ever get. Even Christians and Atheists in the end have much more in common with the our animist ancestors than the trans-humanists.
Sometimes called “the California Ideology” because many of its most vocal converts were and are still located in Silicon Valley, trans-humanism’s modern roots can be traced back a little earlier and elsewhere, to a British biologist, Julian Huxley. He proposed that humans can transcend their own biology with technology that could accelerate their evolution, that the human species might in his words “transcend itself.”
I first encountered the idea of trans-humanism 22 years ago from a friend who worked as a coder for several of the many failed “dot.com” startups. With an evangelical zeal he explained how we not only could but also must all soon be liberated from our ‘meat bags’ and the torment of physical labor which defined the lives of all our primitive ancestors (including our parents).
The key word for him—as well as others I soon met who repeated the same utopian vision—was ‘liberation.’ Internet technology would democratize the world, reduce all hierarchy, and especially elevate those who were “cursed” at birth with biological inequalities such as disabilities and even lack of beauty. The internet would liberate us all by liberating us from our bodies, and all that was needed was for everyone to have a fast modem to arrive in this brave new world. The most fervent believers also imagined we might one day also defeat death itself, uploading our minds into computers to live forever without flesh.
Of course, capitalism did what capitalism always does, turning all their grand visions into mechanisms of profit and firing them all when their labor became too expensive. That friend who first tried to convert me to trans-humanism is now a public school teacher in a rural town, having left internet technology work altogether. Another early advocate, a roommate of mine, killed himself after years of spending all his free time playing online role-playing games: he never found the promised liberation of his body that he’d long sought. A third changed his identity after being convicted of cybercrimes. I have no idea where he is now, or whether he still believes his consciousness will live on in the cloud forever.
Trans-humanism had become for awhile the religion of the internet technology worker, but it’s never been limited to them and forms of its doctrines have dispersed throughout the consumers of the product those workers created. Social media is especially a manifestation of these doctrines, which users “uploading” their lives in images, videos, and texts into virtual personalities completely divorced from their physical existence. Who you are on the internet is often seen as an “ideal” self in both meanings of the word ideal: imagined as “better” but also “fully composed of ideas.”
The problem of course is that life is never ideal in either sense either. We are not composed only of thoughts or ideas, and our lives never seem to live up to the perfected version of ourselves which we try to display to others. The leads us to feel as if the real is somehow always an inferior aspect of our existence, that our bodies are inadequate, embarrassing, or in some cases disgusting or even evil.
Trans-humanism’s obsession with the ideal and its often intense hatred of the physical body reveals it to be rooted in much older ideas: Cartesian dualism, for example, which formalized in modern Western thinking the idea that the mind and the body are separate from each other.
Divine Sparks Imprisoned in Rotting Flesh
However, the idea that the body is somehow imperfect, flawed, or otherwise evil didn’t start with capitalism or the industrial age, but much much earlier: in Gnosticism, which took hold of both Christianity and Judaism in the first three centuries of the Western Common Era. Gnosticism is a kind of pantheism or monism, the idea that a singular God or good—or some fragment of that God or good—is in everything. It’s a pretty idea, until you dig further and realize that the God or good within Gnosticism is considered trapped in a corpse prison within the material realm.
To put this all another way, humans are relentlessly rotting carcasses of meat, blood, urine and feces walking about the earth, unaware that they are shambling jail cells for a spark of the divine. That divine spark desperately wants to be freed and re-united with its singular existence, but it cannot until its human host recognizes it is there and gives itself over (as in a kind of willing possession) to its parasitical prisoner.
Gnosticism had certain social benefits that made its belief system quite appealing. The Calvinist notion of the “elect,” in which a certain group of people are pre-destined by God towards enlightenment (or heaven) and have a duty to manifest their predetermined destiny within civilization can be traced back to Gnosticism. Gnostics were those who’d accessed secret knowledge and saw the material world as it truly was; thus, they were freed from many of the restraints of human social rules and norms. While many went the route of self-mortification (including abstinence and celibacy), others believed that whatever was done by the flesh had no bearing on the divine spark within them: thus rape, murder, and even more depraved things were completely fine.
Many, many early Christians were Gnostics, and the gospel of St. John heavily uses Gnostic concepts (especially the matter of logos, the word, in its preamble). Other church fathers (especially Paul) struggled to strike a balance between the anti-flesh beliefs of Gnosticism (which were kept around) and its antinomian or autonomous tendencies (which were not kept).
This latter part of Gnosticism is worth some attention, as it’s become popular (and wrong-headed) to see Gnosticism as a kind of early spiritual movement towards human liberation. Its anti-authoritarianism derives from the belief that a person who has become aware of their divine spark (has achieved or recognized their gnosis) need only listen to his or her inner voice (the divine) to know what is right and what is wrong. No external advice or counsel is needed, neither are laws nor social rules, because the person in gnosis now knows the true Law and the true Source.
The matter of “Source” is also worth looking at, since we see this notion recur quite often within certain recent movements around psychedelic liberation. For instance, the soon to be defunct Rebel Wisdom often uses the term, as in their explanation as to why they previously argued that Jordan Peterson was a voice for liberation but now no longer should be seen as such:
In his lectures from 2017 and 2018, there is a sense of something deeply alive in Peterson's tone and delivery. The urgency with which he is speaking is one thing, another is the way that he seems to be exploring territory in real time, even though the form is a monologue, there is an interaction with the audience that turns it into something more like a dialogue.
For me, there was a sense of a connection to a source energy that was fuelling his speech. There was something compelling about the connection between the man and his message, the way he acted out the subject matter of embodying the *logos*, the spoken truth.
In other words, Jordan Peterson was once in gnosis and no longer is because, as explained later, he has given himself back over to the flesh in the form of his addictions.
The idea that there is an inner Source which connects us to a larger and more powerful narrative of truth is Gnosticism in its most distilled form, and this notion is only half of what leads to the problems that it causes in the lives of its adherents or the societies where it thrives. The other half is the proposition that there is a singular source of truth in the first place, a belief that can only exist within a monotheistic or monist framework.
This is why Gnosticism couldn’t gain hold within the polytheist religions thriving at the same time throughout the regions where Christian and Jewish Gnosticism was born. Greek and Roman polytheism already had something that served the similar spiritual functions to Gnosticism: the mystery cult. Both Gnosticism and mystery cults offered believers a chance to experience certain ecstatic and transcendent knowledge, but there was one crucial difference. There were multiple mystery cults, because there were multiple truths and multiple “sources” (gods, spirits, ancestors, etc) to which a person could be connected. Most importantly, mysteries (like gods) were separate from each other and sometimes even conflicted, just like the truths associated with them.
This is one of the reasons why Christianity has always been plagued by gnostic ‘heresies.’ Not just the ones during the early days of the birth of the church, but also the massive revival of such movements (the Waldensians or Bogomils, the Cathars) during the middle ages, movements whose power was so formidable that the Church birthed the Inquisition to fight them. Also, the very concepts of “heresy” and “orthodoxy” were developed specifically to root out Gnostic doctrines and their sway over the faithful.
Sophia and the Cult of Reason
Seeing that much of the policing apparatus of the Church was developed to combat Gnosticism, you could be forgiven for assuming that a Pagan druid might have some degree of sympathy for that religious tendency. I don’t, however. The modern capitalist age, the technological era, the Machine, or however you want to call it was only possible because of the core tenets of Gnosticism.
Recall two of the primary beliefs of the Gnostics: that the natural realm is inherently evil and that an individual can—and must—transcend and ultimately escape it. That first belief manifested in many Age of Reason and Enlightenment ideas about science, especially Cartesian dualism, and all the attempts to sketch out and categorize the natural world into its constitutive parts (into races for humans and species for all the rest of the living world). The second belief contributed much more to the many political philosophies which arose during that time, including our concepts of the Nation State, representative Democracy, colonial governance policies, and most importantly of all our worship of Reason and the individual.
“Procession de la déesse Raison” by E. Béricourt, 18th century
The Gnostics posited a being known as Sophia (Wisdom,) who was the last emanation of the Monad or primary deity. It was because of a mistake of hers—emanating without a divine counterpart and then later creating an architect (the Demiurge) to build the physical world—that led to the ultimate imprisonment of parts of the divine within the material world. Realizing her error, she tainted his creation with fragments of the divine which would seek to return to its Source or singular unity. The only way to do that, of course, would be the final destruction of the physical realm which enchains it.
The cult of Reason which began during the Enlightenment (the French erected statues to the “goddess” of Reason during the Revolution, and many streets still bear the name “rue de la déesse”) can be seen easily as merely another Gnostic cult of Sophia. Reason lives in everyone, leads them to transcend their nature and their natural drives. Through Reason, the earth can be conquered, shaped, controlled, and made more like the paradise lost when the Demiurge ejected the first humans from Eden. Through Reason, humans can also be conquered, shaped, controlled, and one day finally freed from the imperfect or evil flesh which imprisons them.
Imperfection of course implies an attainable perfection, and this points to an important and rarely-noticed aspect of Gnosticism. Cathars who devoted themselves fully to the life of the spirit were called “Perfects.” To become Perfect, you needed to eschew all sexual activity as well as the products of it: thus milk, eggs, and meat were off limits because they came from sexual reproduction (they believed fish were spontaneously generated and they didn’t know the mechanism of plant reproduction, so they were both considered okay to eat). Sexual relations of any sort were considered evil, specifically because they resulted in more divine sparks becoming trapped in the material realm in the form of children.
Within Gnosticism, it was the sexual nature—both sexuality and sexual difference—of humans from which imperfection arose. There is a much, much older animist belief regarding spirits hidden within this framework, one seen in purity laws regarding menses and semen found in the Hebrew Torah. Animists believed the sexual fluids to be sacred and powerful substances because of their ability to create life and their role as the transmission of spirits. The early attempts by priests to turn the animist Hebrews into the monotheistic Jews required that these substances be re-considered as unclean and evil.
This cosmological shift haunts all of monotheism, but it particularly manifested in Jewish and Christian Gnosticism. Like the animists, the Gnostics saw sex and the sexual fluids as the transmission point of spirits; but rather than being a sacred and beautiful thing, the inspiriting of the flesh was rewritten as an act of great evil. The “perfect” goal of Gnosticism was to release the spirit from the enchainment of flesh forever, and thus anyone or anything that perpetuated the cycle must be stopped or destroyed.
This belief of course manifested again within Puritanism and other religious movements, but it gained more power within Enlightenment ideas regarding eugenics and political projects designed to understand, diagnose, and control the sexuality of humans. Foucault traces these latter projects quite well, but misses the religious and spiritual roots of these attempts. Eco-feminists and Marxist feminists get much closer to the point when they focus attention on how it is the reproductive capacities of women which were the primary target of these mechanisms of control.
None of them quite really get at the core of the matter, however: it is the belief in a self independent of and superior to the flesh which animates these political projects. Regardless whether we call that self a soul, or a personality, the mind, or just “the individual,” the Gnostic idea that there is some part of a human that can be perfected or at least separated from its fleshly imperfections is at the heart of all Western utopian scientific and political projects.
Of course we can see this clearly in the current belief that there is a gendered self independent of the sexed flesh, that you can “really be” something else than what the body manifests as. However, I think too much is made of this point, since it is merely a symptom of the much larger problem, that of the belief of the self independent of and superior to the body.
The internet is the ultimate dream of the Gnostics, and it is where we see this belief manifest most. We see it particularly in the way we communicate with each other as if we are not bodies reading the words of other bodies. The abstraction of typing words to be read across digital networks makes it incredibly easy to forget bodies did the typing, bodies created the words, bodies inhabited the world and shaped the thoughts which led to those words, and bodies translate received signals on a screen into embodied knowledge. I’m a body writing to other bodies; you’re a body reading the words a body called Rhyd wrote to you. There is no Rhyd without the body called Rhyd; there is no you without the body called you.
Regarding trans-humanism and its prevalence in social media, Paul Kingsnorth recently wrote:
The real issue is that a young generation of hyper-urbanised, always-on young people, increasingly divorced from nature and growing up in a psychologised, inward-looking anticulture, is being led towards the conclusion that biology is a problem to be overcome, that their body is a form of oppression…
The process by which we all got here was a very long one, and it was not only a product of modernity. Rather, it derives from an entire cosmological framework in which there is one Perfect and universal truth of existence. If there is a singular Perfect or singular Source, a singular divine towards which we all either strive or flee as fallen beings, than the physical, material, embodied world can only be seen as an inferior, imperfect creation to it. This is why formal Christianity failed to stop the Gnosticism born along with it, and why the Church later turned the full apparatus it created to root out the Gnostics next against witches.
The beliefs and practices of people (mostly women) identified as witches were completely the opposite of the beliefs and practices of the Cathars. Worshiping nature, communing with unclean spirits, engaging with delight in imperfect and profane sexual practices, and most of all continuing the belief in multiple gods and sources of truth: these were all antithetical to both Gnosticism and to the unitary authority of the Church in Europe, because both relied on a cosmological framework of a singular divine.
This is why I believe the only antidote to the current Gnostic age is a return to an embodied pluralism: one which resists all attempts to install any notion of the Perfect upon the throne of human lives. You cannot transcend human nature, because there is no human without nature and no self without a body. Such a statement isn’t a materialist negation of the spiritual, because in animism spirits are also bodies who are also part of nature. They are not trapped in the physical but actually are the physical, mistaken as immaterial in the same way we fail to see the air we breathe as a really-existing substance.
What is needed is an ecology of spirits, or rather an ecology which includes spirits rather than denies their existence. To include them and to include their needs, their desires, and their existence as bodies is of course a dangerous task, and one that will only increase the charges of “eco-fascism” against those who take up such a work. Trees have desires that are not always in line with—and are sometimes deeply opposed to—the desires of humans. It is the same with everything in the material world that the modern Gnostics—trans-humanists and otherwise—believe they must destroy in order to transcend.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. He writes at From The Forests of Arduinna and is the director of publishing for Ritona. His latest book is Being Pagan, and the course he instructs based on that book begins again 18 September, 2022.