Introduction

The introduction discusses the purpose of the volume and draws attention to its explorative, incomplete nature. It argues the centrality of technology, divinisation and subversion for our contemporary world by bringing them uniquely in relation to each other and thus elucidating some of the modalities through which they contribute to our destruction. It makes the case that we all live inside subversion and that a main cause behind this is the modern technological project understood as a divinization practice. Far from being simply a neutral, secular or scientific activity, the editors connect technology and modern science with the obscure traditions of alchemy and hermeticism. Behind the technological mirage lies the age-old attempt to acquire divine powers. The essential issue here is grasping the ways in which the technological project creates unreality through mimicry, crisis, the appeal to the void, the breaking of the human soul, and finally reanimation or the soul’s forceful re-integration into artificial constructs. While being a cross-disciplinary effort, the editors of the volume propose a political anthropological approach entailing three aspects: the use of anthropological concepts developed in modernity that do not reify the circular, ideological and apologetic interpretations of the modern world - among such concepts being liminality, imitation, trickster, mask, gift relations, participation and schismogenesis; the reliance on classical philosophical anthropology; and the incorporation of insights from some of the main spiritual traditions of mankind. The introduction closes with the presentation of the contributors’ chapters.