The First Temptation of Christ
The alchemical dreams of the 16th Century never died, they were pushed into the background by the triumph of secularism and modern science.
We in the 20th Century are totally at home with the realities of electro-magnetic fields, we don't see what an occult thing it must have been to the people of the 19th Century when James Clerk Maxwell and Helmholtz discovered them in the 1870's.
The 19th Century had just risen to the place where people conceived of everything mechanically, hard objects whizzing through space with force, angular momentum, and the conservation of energy. And then came Maxwell and Helmholtz saying un-scientific things like "there is a diffuse, invisible vibratory medium that extends throughout all of space", a once occult vocabulary now formalized by the mathematical equations for magnetic radiation. So the occult side of it instantly dropped away from us.
This is how you take the magic out of something: you stride to the blackboard and write a tensor equation of the 3rd degree so that these fields become something very mundane, equations that can be used for radio and television to sell things.
It took someone like Marshall McLuhan to point out that the Christian program for the entry of God into history reaches The Intercession of the Holy Ghost once Marconi throws the switch.
The electrical web of noetic information and the instantaneous transformation of the global Logos indicates that we are in the age of the Holy Spirit.
Terence McKenna, 1992
