The wizards, diviners, and soothsayers of the ancient world were invited into royal courts, penned scrolls that held the keys to gnostic knowledge, and were placed at the center of ancient societies. Many of them were hired to educate the elite of their times.

As the Middle Ages closed, and the rationality project at the core of the Enlightenment really took hold of the imagination of the West, the magicians, diviners, and soothsayers were pushed to the edges of the culture (eventually to be joined there by the various religious types, but that’s another post altogether). And–to add insult to injury–their lofty claims to being able to open spiritual backdoors into a mystical world were deemed to be the irrational ravings of “humbugs,” “scammers,” “con artists,” or even “marketers.” Case in point: recall the character of the Wizard in the Wizard of Oz. He was eventually exposed as just a flim-flam dude pulling levers who couldn’t make his hot-air balloon work well enough to get back to Kansas, where he came from.

In our technological era, though, the atheist rational materialist technologists have won the day. They’ve defeated the natural world, backburnered the spiritual world, and declared, hubristically, that “we will build our own gods” by building backdoors into reality and making epistemological claims without acknowledging–or even realizing–that they’re making those claims in the first place. They continue to pursue the same gnostic path of attaining secret knowledge that their forebearers attempted through spiritual means. And of course, they all declare that they’re going to get to the same place as their forebearers–for the good of humanity–through manipulating “intelligence on silicon.”

All that lands for me like a whole lot of humbug from a bunch of flim-flam dudes at the center of the post-modern royal court of attention.