Recently, one of my readers asked me an intriguing question. She wanted to know if the internet could be a spirit in its own right, a deity that could be worked with. She had done some work on her own and that work seemed to say yes, but she was curious about my perspective on it, so I figured i'd share it through an article.
The first time I got on the internet, it was 1995. I was in my last year of high school and I got to use a computer for the first time and access the world wide web (as it was known back then). Why do I share that with you? Because I didn't grow up with the internet. I had to adapt to it. I fortunately did so, while I was still a teenager, and to be honest I took to the internet like a fish takes to water.
Within my first year I was in chatrooms and bulletin boards meeting people from far away and getting into conversations about magic and other topics of interest. And since that time I've gotten into blogging, online gaming, social media and even online advertising. What the internet provides is so many different forms of interaction, positive and negative and its hard to imagine living without it.
But is the internet a deity, spirit, or entity?
My short, flippant answer is yes.
But I doubt you want just the short, flippant answer.
I actually think of the internet as a meta-deity of sorts, because it wouldn't exist on its own without their being other entities. What makes the internet what it is, is the content and the platforms that support that content. Some platforms come and go, but there's always some type of content being shared, in some capacity.
So sites such as Netflix, Facebook, Linkedin, and even your website contribute to the spirit of the internet and make it into a meta entity that encapsulates all the other entities that simultaneously live off of it and support it. The various websites are basically in a symbiotic relationship with the internet.
Can you work with the internet as a spirit?
I think people already do, albeit usually through specific mediums. For example, I see people sharing meme magic on Tumblr and Facebook. Those people are using the media of Tumblr and Facebook to work with the spirit of the internet. I also see people doing Gogglemancy, where they use Google as a divinatory tool.
But there's the question of can you work with the internet in and of itself as a spirit. And I suppose you can, but it seems to me that the most efficient way to do that is to use the actual sites and tools you have access to. For example if I want to work with the internet in a divinatory manner, why not use Google or Bing or some other search engine for that purpose?
The internet as a meta-entity is so integrated into the various sites that people access that you're never really not working with it. But if you don't want to restrict the way you work with the internet to the various sites you use, you might consider other mediums such as virtual reality or augmented reality or simply trying to connect with the information flow of the internet via meditation.
For myself, I'm content to use the various media of the internet as and when needed with my magical work. It's another sets of tools that can be quite helpful with your magical work.
Taylor Ellwood is a the mad scientist and magical experimenter at magical experiments. When he's not working on his latest magical experiment, Taylor is writing books on magic. The current project he is working on is the Alchemy of Life, a Grimoire of the body.
*Image courtesy of Pexels