Contemporary technologically advanced societies appear to have actualized magic. Humans living in these cultures harness energies that were once the providence of sorcerers: they can fly, communicate instantly, cure ailments and employ complex instruments to do their bidding. Certainly, the origins of the sciences that have produced modern technologies lie deep in the occult arts. A direct lineage leads from biology, chemistry and physics into the dark recesses of alchemy and its emphasis on classification and precise measurement. Moreover, as any student of shamanism or dabbler in Medieval grimoires may observe, magic (like science) is primarily about organising information. The technology of the shaman or the sorcerer may be metaphorical and concerned with harnessing fantasized energy, but the end-goal of transforming matter and energy is the same. The shamanic conception of an animistic universe, governed by magical forces has merely become the modern conception of a mechanical universe governed by mathematics.

The language of modern computing contains many references to deep magic, wizards, remote method invocations, and the summoning of daemons. Like sorcerer’s familiars, the Net teems with actors, agents, demons (independent software objects that are invoked into action). The digital revolution appears, therefore, to have emerged from far darker and dirtier origins than engineering's clean rooms. “Computers were always invocational, and invocation to artifacts long predates computers” remarks technological historian Chris Chesher. Working with a direct set of commands (or invocations), programming languages, moreover, owe greater debts to magic than the merely metaphorical. Recognizing the work of Renaissance alchemist Raymond Lull as the "secret origin" of computing, the German philosopher and techno-pioneer Werner Künzel translated Lull’s Ars Magna into the programming language COBOL. Lull’s complex mnemonic devices for memorizing spells also directly anticipated the world’s first computing device, Charles Babbage's difference engine.

While laying the foundations of modern science, Enlightenment figureheads such as Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon continued to dabble in the occult. Newton’s extensive alchemical treatises remain largely unpublished but his goal of ‘baptising ’ magic and yoking it to the ideal of progress has been successfully realized. 200 years after the official refutation of all scientific foundations in the hermetic arts, the alchemical ideal of transmuting the elements was finally achieved by the particle physicists and atomists of the 20^th century.

Aside from a direct lineage of techniques and methods, modern science and technology has a psychological kinship to magic. In Civilisation and its Discontents, Freud argued that modern technology was merely a rationalized version of the arcane arts.  Instead of displacing magic, he argued, science had merely commandeered it. Just like sorcery, noted Freud, science fulfills a very basic human need for physical mastery. For philosopher Martin Heidegger, the only difference was that modern technology was far more arrogant and destructive than its magical predecessors. Whereas magic involved direct participation in an interconnected and living cosmos, Heidegger described science and technology as denying any relationship of equality between humans and their environment. Science, he stated, presented the earth as an inanimate reserve of resources, available on demand.

Literally wielding the power to call things up at will, the average industrialized human commandeers godly powers over the plants, animals and minerals of planet earth. Yet, despite the ‘everyday’ nature of technology, its occult-like technicalities are known to only a handful of specialists. No one in today’s world really understands the mechanics of electricity, let-alone the inner workings of cellphones, computers, televisions, and other commonplace technological items. Nevertheless, we readily expect these ‘powers’ to be available on a whim. Magic, at least, commandeered respect. Technology, if anything, seems to encourage the opposite. Even our high-tech priesthood seems to have forgotten the extreme care and sensitivity with which the alchemists and other magicians once conducted their experiments. The simple cornerstone of folk-magic “whatever you do comes back to you thrice” has long-since been dismissed. Nevertheless, every technological action has long-term penalties and the environmental costs of our proliferating technological indulgences remain largely unchecked.

Scientists routinely dismiss magical systems of knowledge and are reluctant to acknowledge or even engage with the ‘archaic’ practices that constitute the ancestry of technology.  Resultantly, anything outside the carefully constructed and highly specialised truths of techno-science has routinely been dismissed as subjective, superstitious and suspect. Nevertheless, acknowledging the magical origins of science may prove helpful in imagining the real ways in which ultramodern economies and technological systems access and convert what they have long denied and rejected. On a deeper level, acknowledging the correspondences between magic and technology may, perhaps, encourage us to be more wary of the consequences of our actions.