Taken from the spring 2023 issue of Dazed. You possibly can buy a replica of our latest issue here

It’s January, and I’m sitting within the smokers’ area of a south London club as a man tries to persuade me that the silver crucifix around his neck is spiritual protection against the night, which he claims is a “pagan reverse psy-op”. We’re here for gr1n, the newest in a series of experimental nights in town exploring the connection between technology and the spiritual. Ravers wearing white robes and chains encircle an electrical chair that’s positioned within the centre of the dancefloor, as they move in time to the wobbles of bass. There are wires in every single place, and a performer in head-to-toe Cyberdog dances a latest age dance because the audience watches on. “See!” says crucifix guy, pointing to the chair as proof – and I believe he actually believes it. 

Earlier that month, while the web was busy debating the intricacies of Schiaparelli’s faux-taxidermy animal heads, Rick Owens had debuted his AW23 collection at Paris Fashion Week. Inspired by ancient Egypt, he described the season’s low-slung leather pants and ab-baring capes as carrying “a whiff of sleazy 70s pseudo mysticism”. The previous season had also seen designers like Chopova Lowena, Paolo Carzana and Simone Rocha take an identical approach, drawing on the healing properties of essential oils and crystals, each core components of the new-age arcana of the Nineteen Seventies. For his cruise 2023 show, Gucci’s Alessandro Michele also turned to the arcane, staging a lunar eclipse on the celestial grounds of a Thirteenth-century castle. The gathering, he said, was his attempt “to launch the narrative of the House into the celebrities”; the fantastical garments, starry iconography and a spotlight to cosmic detail only bolstered the sense of mysticism.

From IRL fashion shows and club nights to social media and Reddit threads, individuals are tuning in and dropping out as people turn to the magical to make sense of the chaotic world around them. Sliced up and repackaged into post-ironic bytes, millennia-old ideas are being slammed, remixed and fragmented into memes and online ephemera. While some turn to ancient religions – gnostic symbols, cabbalistic charts and pagan iconography – many online posters are embracing ‘trad-cath’ aesthetics, while others are selecting to see God in the pc. Sometimes it’s a mixture. Either way, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that there’s an esoteric spiritualism within the air.

It’s not that we’re operating on a better frequency than before, although the frantic pace of knowledge might make it seem that way. Fairly, the web has created space for arcane beliefs to multiply and fester during a time of social and political upheaval. This was little doubt accelerated by two terminally online years of pandemic during which billionaires jetted off to space, the economy plummeted and other people felt betrayed by modern science and its guarantees of a greater, fairer world. During this time, private web spaces and meme channels, also often known as ‘the Dark Forest’, thrived as consensus reality evaporated, with people turning away from official news sources and towards fringe beliefs (as seen by the uptick in conspiracy theories surrounding QAnon and the Latest World Order). 

“There are all these ways [in which] the concrete sense of being somewhere has evaporated, and in these gaps run all these idealisms, mysticisms, rumours of God,” says Erik Davis, the creator of Techgnosis and High Weirdness. “Because human worldbuilding is hackable, you’ll be able to throw more weird possibilities, constructs, propositions, systems, conspiracies, and it can actually start producing the sense of one other world.” When paired with the overarching feeling that we are able to now not condense the complexities of our feelings into scientific frameworks (for instance, the death of therapy-speak) and the poor living conditions of late capitalism, this hyper-networking ends in a vibrant experimentalism, where identities are performed and mythologised. On TikTok and Instagram, users inhabit their very own realities as magical pondering or Larping acts as a portal to latest imagined worlds, while the algorithm guides our interests in mysterious ways, like a better power guiding our every move with an invisible hand. There’s a sense that material and virtual reality has broken all the way down to such an extent that all the things is post-truth, all the things is a Larp, so we turn to myth-making to fill within the blanks. 

Scrolling down my feed, I encounter a large number of spiritual beliefs condensed into UI-friendly content: sorcerous Wojaks and lion-headed serpents, pagan sigils and the numograms created by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an experimental wing of the Warwick University philosophy department mixing cybernetic theory with cyberpunk and a fascination for the occult within the late 90s. This isn’t God-talk in the normal sense, but a choose-your-own-adventure, spirituality edition. “What we’re seeing is remix culture on spiritual steroids,” agrees Davis. There’s Witchtok and latest age revivalists, neo-pagans and heaps of freaky IG pages untangling the writings of old mystery cults from ancient literature. Elsewhere, purple-pilled memes featuring cyber angels and celestial waifus with captions that read ‘god’s little soldier’. “We will now go into these esoteric texts which are available online and pull out super intense, mystic language and put it into the context of post-irony,” Davis elaborates.

“There are all these ways [in which] the concrete sense of being somewhere has evaporated, and in these gaps run all these idealisms, mysticisms, rumours of God” – Erik Davis

Inside online music circles, and particularly among the many Soundcloud rap scene, Drain Gang’s gospel spreads like hellfire across Reddit and 4chan. The Swedish group have created countless cryptic music videos, posts and lyrics that draw on esoteric mythology, and sometimes include icons, numbers and symbols resembling GTBSG, d9 and holy number 3, which play into the group’s extensive lore. Drainerdom has acquired pseudo-spiritual weight for the reason that pandemic, with fans unpicking a large number of references from gnostic mysticism to folklore, the occult and paintings by visionary Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. For its logged-on fanbase, the sermon of Bladee is greater than just an AutoTuned call to “confess your sins”: it’s scripture.

Whether people actually consider within the occult forces of r/sadboy threads, or the divine protection of 11:11 screenshots on an iPhone screen, is unclear and, for probably the most part, irrelevant. “The world sucks and young people specifically have to be really suffering with the sense of a closed-out future and the upper-crust polarisation of cash in our society, which is just gonna worsen,” says Davis. There’s an absurdity to the content which reflects the nihilism we feel, where it’s easier to post images of Jesus delivering a sermon on a mound of microplastics, or a bimbofied Stacy strutting into the Pure Land, than it’s to query the conditions that created such an environment of disassociation and unreality to start with. “If individuals are really suffering then there is usually an actual earnestness to where you switch, whether it’s astrology or the meditation pillow or a Franciscan retreat.”

However it’s also cool to see God within the machine. There’s something concerning the mixture of edgy symbology and contemporary web references that, as an aesthetic, feels based. Posting images of CCRU numograms overlaid with images of neo-chibi angels won’t actually make us any wiser, however the effect is akin to the sensation of getting read A Thousand Plateaus. That is presumably since the web itself holds an innately spiritual quality. “Should you squint hard enough, you’ll be able to start tracing these parallels between heaven and the digital, and you then can see the angelic nature of what it means to be online,” says Nate Sloan, cultural theorist and meme admin behind the Instagram account @vitruviangrimace. 

The digital realm is abstracted from reality; it’s so vast that it’s incomprehensible, which only adds to the sense of the divine. “I believe people have realised that the web works as a portal, a temple and a spot of comfort. It’s a spot where we are able to manifest how we show ourselves and act [in] the world,” says the anonymous user behind the meme account third.world.elite, who posts mock inspirational quotes overlaid with esoteric symbolism and templar crosses. It’s not surprising that loads of nu-spiritual content online has ties to 90s cyberculture: when heading the CCRU, philosopher Nick Land, who later reemerged as a distinguished fascist thinker, famously compared lines of code to spells to focus on the thought you can shape your individual reality – a sentiment that also fuelled the premise of 60s counterculture. 

“Should you squint hard enough, you’ll be able to start tracing these parallels between heaven and the digital, and you then can see the angelic nature of what it means to be online” – Nate Sloan

“Should you understand God because the sum total of human reason, a way of abstracting humans’ ability to act on its environment, and reshape itself or its environment, the web is an try and speed up and make that God come into an increasing degree of self-awareness by hyper-accelerating the minds’ abilities to speak with one another,” explains Sloan.  Schizoposting – an unfiltered approach to sharing information via unintelligible text partitions, memes and videos – promotes a similarly fast-paced and formless form of communicating, and is ubiquitous amongst these online communities, while the web’s capability to derealise and dissociate is arguably probably the most accessible strategy to reach religious ecstasy. Mix this with ketamine because the drug of selection for a generation of young people post-pandemic, and it becomes the right potion for accessing the sublime. 

But at what point does the content stop and the actual practice begin? “If it’s just meme play, there’s some extent where the rubber doesn’t hit the road,” warns Davis. “Whatever’s animating religious or spiritual practice has to have a component of actual practice together with your mind, body and spirit as you interact with the world.” Just as posting memes about touching grass isn’t similar to actually going outside and touching it, no amount of magical pondering will alter the conditions that made us need to transcend the IRL plane to start with. You have got to make the meme a reality.

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