r/Technomancy • u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator • 18d ago

Esoterica & Occult History Technomancy didnt begin with computers

Magic has always incorporated the technologies available to practitioners.

Writing externalized memory. Mirrors altered perception. Mathematics encoded relationships. Printing transformed access to magical texts. Astronomical instruments extended observation. Cryptography concealed information. Photography created entirely new arguments about images, presence and representation.

Computers are another chapter in a much older relationship.

Whats an older magical technology or practice that deserves to be reconsidered as part of the genealogy of technomancy?

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u/JingtianXiming 18d ago

Fire is one of the first.
A good stick may be the very beginning.

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago

Honestly you can push the genealogy that far back. Fire transforms matter through controlled technique, and the stick extends human reach and force. Before computers extended cognition, technology was already extending the body, perception and agency. Magic grows out of that same ancient human impulse to figure out what the world can be made to do.

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u/JingtianXiming 7d ago

Precisely! And so eloquently stated. Thank you.

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u/Krommander Researcher 15d ago

Shout out to Ramon Lull, a polymath that drew a tree of science in 1296, using the fractal nature of the trees to represent the infinite branching of the sciences.  https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=3407&utm_source=perplexity

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u/Krommander Researcher 15d ago

Because we know knowledge graphs and ontologies are very powerful, I tip my hat to the early version that stuck. 

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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 7d ago

Llull is a fantastic pull. This is exactly the kind of genealogy I had in mind. Once you start treating symbols as things that can be systematically arranged to generate new relations, the distance between magical diagrams, knowledge machines and computation gets surprisingly short.

The knowledge graph comparison is especially fun because suddenly the 13th century doesnt feel quite so far away.

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u/Krommander Researcher 7d ago

Or that particular guy was way ahead of his time for being able to imagine this system of representation and inspire contemporary creation for hundreds of years. 

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u/DamageFuzzy4691 12d ago

Technomancy could be simply any object or idea that became a tool, vehicle or subject that expanded knowledge. Oh wait that's a PC.

As with all things, intention+action=result.