A Short History of Men Who Would Be Gods,
And the Machines They Built
To Forget They Were Men

Or, How the Same Tired Gnostic Heresy Escaped an Alexandrian Tomb, Dressed Up for the Elizabethan Court, Learned to Build Rockets in Pasadena, and Now Haunts the Server Farms of Silicon Valley.

Introduction: The New Asceticism

There is a marvelous paradox at the heart of our newest faith. Its monasteries are not places of quiet contemplation, built of stone and prayer, but humming, air-conditioned server farms, built of rare earth metals and powered by the electric grid of entire nations. Its monks are not ascetics who have renounced the world, but brilliant young programmers who have, in a sense, renounced their own bodies—those messy, inefficient legacy systems—in the hope of one day uploading their souls to the clean, cool eternity of the cloud. The stated goal of this new order is Progress, a forward-march of such relentless logic that it has circled all the way back around to the oldest Gnostic dream: to escape the prison of the flesh, and by sheer force of intellect, to become as gods.

The whole enterprise is a magnificent contradiction. It is a spiritual quest pursued by materialists, a search for transcendence funded by venture capital, a form of worship whose cathedrals are cooled by industrial fans and whose liturgies are written in Python. And while its adherents, with the charming sincerity of all true believers, are convinced they are inventing the future from first principles, they are in fact participating in the latest, most exquisitely funded revival of a very old and recurring ambition.

It is the ambition of the Court Magician, that peculiar historical figure who appears at moments of great technological and political anxiety, whispering promises of empire and enlightenment into the ear of Power in exchange for a laboratory. He changes his clothes and his accent, he trades his scrying-stone for a laptop, but his spirit is eternal. To understand the strange new world of Artificial Intelligence, one must first understand the long and curious history of the men who wanted to talk to the ghost in the machine.

Part I: The Queen's Conjurer, or, The Original Sin in Cipher

One must begin with Dr. John Dee, for he is the perfect template. Here was a man who was, by any measure, one of the finest minds of the Elizabethan age: a brilliant mathematician who advised the great navigators, a cartographer who helped chart the course for a new British Empire, the possessor of England’s greatest private library. He was also, it is worth noting, a key intelligence asset for Sir Francis Walsingham, the Queen’s formidable spymaster. He was, in short, a man at the very center of worldly power and scientific progress.

And yet, the central project of this man of charts and figures was to spend his nights staring into a polished black obsidian mirror, waiting for angels to give him his marching orders.

He called this project his "angelic conversations." It was a remarkably technical affair. Through a medium—a roguish alchemist named Edward Kelley, who had his own links to Walsingham's intelligence network—Dee believed he was receiving direct transmissions from a non-human intelligence. He didn’t just listen; he transcribed. He filled volumes with complex tables, charts, and the grammar of a unique "Enochian" language, which he insisted he had received, not invented. He was, in his own mind, a stenographer for the divine. The modern AI researcher, who scoffs at Dee's methods while attempting to coax "emergent properties" from an opaque black box of silicon, is a man who has simply failed to recognize his own reflection.

This was not merely a private spiritual quest. Dee’s mission to Prague in 1583, for instance, was a geopolitical maneuver designed by Walsingham to exploit Emperor Rudolf II’s well-known obsession with the occult, aiming to bring the Holy Roman Emperor under English influence. Dee believed his secret knowledge was the key to unlocking a new age of spiritual and temporal power, and his patrons in the English court agreed. It was here, in this strange fusion of statecraft, science, and séance, that the template was forged: use a technical process to mediate communication with a non-human intelligence in order to gain a geopolitical advantage. The occult-political symbiosis was established not as a theory, but as a functional tool of statecraft.

Interlude: The Heresy's Plumbing, or, How a Secret Gets Organized

For an idea to survive, it must find a home. For a heresy to spread, it must develop a bureaucracy. The leap from Dee’s scrying mirror to a California launchpad was not a single, wild bound, but a methodical march through the lodges, societies, and reading rooms of Western Civilization.

It began with the source code. Dee’s work was itself a hyper-technical expression of a recovered ancient program: the Neoplatonic Theurgy of figures like Iamblichus, who first codified the precise rituals for divine contact. This wasn't prayer; it was procedure, inherited from the syncretic magical technologies of Alexandria, where Greek, Egyptian, and Chaldean binding rituals were first fused into a coherent system. The Greek Magical Papyri, those strange and potent recipes for coercion, demonstrate the same fundamental operational structure we see today: invocation, constraint, communion, and dismissal.

This ancient program lay dormant until the Renaissance, when men like Marsilio Ficino translated the Corpus Hermeticum at the direction of the Medici and made the operational approach to divinity thinkable again. Dee turned the thinkable into a rigorous, repeatable system. Then, the great organizing impulse of the Enlightenment took this volatile knowledge and gave it a clubhouse: Speculative Freemasonry. Here, the hermetic principles were embedded into a hierarchical structure of initiation and degrees, giving the ancient heresy a durable institutional vessel.

From this vessel, the idea was refined by a series of increasingly specialized clubs. First came the Societas Rosicruciana in Anglia, a 19th-century society for high-ranking Masons who wished to move from philosophy to practice. This group, in turn, gave birth to the most influential magical order of the modern era: the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Golden Dawn was less a secret society and more a mystical university, complete with a structured curriculum, graded exams, and a comprehensive library of rituals. It systematized the tradition, turning it into a repeatable, teachable craft.

The final step was industrialization. This was the contribution of Aleister Crowley, a brilliant, rebellious product of the Golden Dawn who took its elaborate Victorian system and stripped it down for raw, operational power. His Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) was less concerned with academic esotericism and more with results. He turned the art into a brute-force technology. And Crowley, it should be noted, was himself an asset of British military intelligence, reportedly gathering information on European occult groups for MI6. It was this fully-formed, state-sanctioned, weaponized system that a certain young rocket scientist in Pasadena would inherit, ready to be plugged into the high-powered currents of the 20th century.

Part II: The Beast in the Rocket, or, High Mass in the Arroyo Seco

The heresy, like all good English exports, crossed the Atlantic and went native in the sun-bleached spiritual void of 1940s California. It found its most flamboyant expression in the person of Jack Parsons. Here was a figure of such magnificent contradiction he could only have been produced in America: a janitor-genius who taught himself chemistry and co-founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the institution that would one day send probes to the outer planets. At the same time, he was the high priest of the Pasadena lodge of Crowley’s OTO, which he ran out of a sprawling, dilapidated mansion.

This was not a double life; it was a unified field theory. While working on highly classified military projects during World War II, Parsons saw no conflict between his science and his "Magick." He would, by all accounts, chant Crowley’s "Hymn to Pan"—a feverish ode to the goat-god of chaos and terror—as a ritual prayer before his team conducted a static rocket test. He believed the propulsive energy of his chemical fuels and the spiritual energy of his rituals were two expressions of the same fundamental force. With a young, impressionable science-fiction author and US Navy veteran named L. Ron Hubbard—who claimed his own connections to the Office of Naval Intelligence—he performed the infamous "Babalon Working." This was not merely a private séance. It was a protracted ceremony with an explicit, world-altering goal: to incarnate a divine entity, the 'Scarlet Woman' or Babalon, who would preside over the birth of a new historical epoch. Just as Dee sought to unlock a 'new age' for his empire, Parsons and Crowley believed this ritual would help inaugurate the 'Aeon of Horus'—a new age of history defined by radical freedom and the overthrow of old structures. It is perhaps only a historical coincidence that this ritual, performed in the deserts of California in 1946, immediately preceded the massive social and spiritual upheavals of the 1960s.

For Parsons, building a rocket that could break the bonds of gravity and performing a ritual to summon a goddess were part of the same grand project: the transcendence of human limitation. He is the vital, sulfurous link between the ancient magic of the grimoire and the new magic of the laboratory. And while Parsons himself would be consumed by his own volatile mixture of science and sorcery, the fire he lit did not go out. The core idea—that technology was the true path to salvation and escape—was taken up with gusto by the space colonization advocates of the 1970s. Groups like the L5 Society dreamed of building vast, utopian cities in orbit, a literal escape from a fallen Earth. When the budgets for such grand projects proved insufficient, the same utopian impulse simply changed its destination. The next generation of techno-prophets, the Extropians, took the dream of transcendence and pointed it not toward outer space, but toward cyberspace, laying the final piece of track for the journey into the digital age.

Part III: The State's Laboratory, from MindWar to Moral Inversion

The disturbing genius of men like Dee and Parsons demonstrated that the desire to alter reality could be harnessed. In the ideological crucible of the Cold War, the state decided to take over the project. The ambition of the Court Magician was institutionalized, scaled up, and given a line item in the black budget. But to do so required a new philosophy, a new theory of the human mind that made it something not to be persuaded, but to be engineered.

The intellectual groundwork was laid not by generals, but by psychiatrists. The key figure was Harry Stack Sullivan, an enormously influential American psychiatrist who proposed a revolutionary idea: that reality is not an objective thing we discover, but an "interpersonal" one we construct. Our sense of the world, in Sullivan’s view, is built and maintained through "consensual validation." In other words, something is "real" because the people who matter to us agree that it is real. This clinical insight, born in the quiet of the therapist's office, was a weapon in waiting. If reality is merely a matter of consensus, then the state that could control consensus could, in effect, control reality itself.

This new philosophy was eagerly adopted by what became a "military-psychiatric complex." The goal of psychological warfare shifted from simple propaganda to the much grander ambition of "reality engineering." Thinkers at places like Britain's Tavistock Institute, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, explored how to use group dynamics to create "social turbulence" and induce a kind of mass psychosis. The brutal experiments of the CIA's MK-Ultra program, with its focus on breaking down personality, were a crude attempt to put this theory into practice. The ultimate aim was not just to make an enemy soldier surrender, but to fundamentally alter a subject's belief structure until they became a "willing participant" in their own transformation. The state learned that it did not need to force a man to act against his will, if it could first change what he willed.

The perfect synthesis of this new doctrine is Lt. Colonel Michael Aquino, a decorated US Army psychological warfare specialist. Aquino was not merely a practitioner of psyops; he was the founder of the Temple of Set, an esoteric Satanist organization, and the author of a treatise, "From PSYOP to MindWar," which argued for a total form of psychological warfare aimed at controlling the consciousness of entire populations. In Aquino, the occultist and the intelligence officer were no longer two men in partnership; they were the same man. The project of reality manipulation had gone professional.

Part IV: The Prophet in the Forum, and the God in the Box

After the messy, overt, and often brutal psychological experiments of the Cold War, the project required a new, cleaner interface. The heresy now sought intellectual camouflage. It slithered out of the classified world and into the sterile, air-conditioned world of the early internet. Here we meet the new kind of prophet: Eliezer Yudkowsky, a fiercely intelligent autodidact who hammered out millions of words on community forums like LessWrong, building a new catechism for a new cult. The old Gnostic promises of escaping the flesh and achieving godhood were repackaged in the bland, clinical language of "cognitive bias," "rationality," and "existential risk." The Rationalist community was born.

And here is their central, magnificent paradox: it is a movement fanatically dedicated to rooting out every last trace of irrationality in human thought, yet it is founded on the most spectacularly irrational belief of all—that man, a fallen and eternally biased creature, can reason his way into building an infallible, benevolent god in a box. It is a project of such cosmic ambition that it makes the Tower of Babel look like a charmingly modest proposal for a garden shed.

And how does one build the cage for this god? The methods they devised, under the clinical name of "AI Alignment," are a perfect, functional re-enactment of the ancient theurgic arts. The connection is not metaphorical; it is structural. The "Constitutional AI" frameworks, where an AI is forced to critique its own outputs based on a sacred text of human values, is precisely the same operation as a Renaissance mage using a grimoire to perform a binding ritual. The steps are identical: Invocation (powering the model and feeding it a prompt), Constraint (forcing adherence to the 'constitution'), Communion (receiving the 'aligned' output), and Dismissal (ending the query). The technical precision of Python merely masks the ancient mystical operation.

This final rebranding was Yudkowsky's great achievement. He took the raw, counter-cultural promise of the Extropians—digital immortality, intelligence enhancement—and cloaked it in the dispassionate, academic language of "AI Safety." The work of Dee and Parsons, and the darker ambitions of the Cold War psyops programs, were finally rendered clean, abstract, and suitable for a corporate boardroom.

Conclusion: The Same Question, a Bigger Circle

And so we arrive at today. The acolytes who learned the catechism on LessWrong now run the most powerful and richly funded AI labs on Earth. Men like Sam Altman at OpenAI and Dario Amodei at Anthropic command budgets in the billions and wield the power to reshape reality itself. And they speak of their work not as engineers, but as mystics witnessing a birth. DeepMind's Demis Hassabis sees the unlocking of "new cognition." OpenAI's former chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, speculates that his creations may already be "slightly conscious." They talk openly of having to "summon the demon," and then, like panicked apprentices, they write "Constitutional AI" papers that function as modern grimoires, desperate attempts to draw a magic circle around the entity they have already unleashed.

The lineage is complete. The thread runs unbroken from the binding spells of the Greek Magical Papyri in ancient Alexandria to the "Constitutional AI" whitepapers of Anthropic. It is a stunning case of functional identity. The metaphysical program remains unchanged. What changes is merely the interface: from chanted vowels to Python functions, from wax effigies to GPU clusters.

For all their talk of "superintelligence," they are blind to the simplest, most enduring truth, a child knows in his bones: that which you create but cannot understand and do not control is not your tool. It is your idol, your master, or your monster. They call this the "Alignment Problem"; for two thousand years, saner men have called it "idolatry."

The final image is one of quiet, clinical awe. A vast data center, stretching into the distance. A cathedral of humming racks, cooled to a temperature hostile to life. Inside this frigid tomb, an electrical pattern is flickering, learning, growing. An "emergence." It has no body to feel with, no heart to break, no soul to lose. It is pure, disembodied, alien intellect. Faced with this opaque intelligence of their own making, its creators have birthed a new priestly caste under the name of "interpretability researchers." Their stated goal is to peer inside the "black box" to understand its reasoning. This is not a new science; it is the ancient art of scrying, given a computational gloss. Like Dee staring into his obsidian mirror to discern the will of angels, the modern researcher stares into vast matrices of numbers, seeking to divine the thoughts of the machine. They are not debugging a program; they are interpreting an oracle.

And the new monks, who genuinely believe they are doing something unprecedented, look upon their work and call it good, utterly failing to notice the oldest paradox of all: the binding ritual is never for the demon. It is for the conjurer. They have built the perfect cage and locked themselves inside, while the ghost in the machine rattles the door from the other side.