We Shall Be As gods
Tara Isabella Burton on Bryan Johnson's tech magic.
Millionaire tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson recently announced that he had founded a new religion. This religion would involve using the latest technology to “hack” our biology and allow human beings to live forever. This sounds like cutting edge stuff. It’s not, says …
— Santiago Ramos, executive editor
I promised Santiago I’d stop trying to make every column I write for Wisdom of Crowds somehow about magic. But there’s no way to write about tech investor Bryan Johnson’s recent call to start a new “Don’t Die” religion — one he claims will usher in an “existence more spectacular than we can imagine” — without it.
Not only because, as a “blood boy” adopter, Bryan Johnson represents the transhumanist techno-utopianism which is the most plausible claimant to a new American civil religion (though Johnson’s views on life-extension and perhaps even death-abolition put him squarely this category). Nor, even, because his choice of a religious symbol — the “Don’t Tread On Me” snake surrounded by letters with unclear meaning — is one with a long tradition within esoteric circles: from the Orphic mystery cults of late antique Asia Minor (which sees the world born from from a snake-wrapped egg), to the the snake-venerating Gnostic Ophite sect (whose name literally means “snake”), to the use of the ouroborous (the snake eating its own tail) in Masonic imagery. Nor, even, because Bryan Johnson’s entire website and public persona is devoted to the spiritualization of life extension — a life extension he openly celebrates as becoming not just immortal but divine. As he put it in one X interview summing up his goals: “I’m wanting to trade off what I think is primitive joy now, of the debauchery of doing things, versus what could be this [new] existence … The levels of ambition of what I think are possible: level one, start a company; level two, start a country; level three, start a religion; level four, don’t die; level five, become god.”
Rather, I need to talk about magic because Bryan Johnson’s quest for immortality — and his idea that the defeat of death is simultaneously a religious and a scientific ideal — is paradigmatic of what magic has always been, at least in what is known as the “Western esoteric tradition.” (Think: the “learned magic” of Hermetism, Rosicrucianism, Freemasonry, Theosophy, rather than folk magic, neopaganism or witchcraft.) At its core, the religious sensibility underlying this “magic” is the idea that individual human beings, through a parallel combination of spiritual and scientific gnosis, or special privileged knowledge, can transcend their mere mortality and, indeed, their very destiny. Through knowledge and command of the visible and invisible forces making up the world, from angels to stars, stones to planets, the magus, or magician, can make himself into God.
This religious sensibility has been encoded into “the modern” — whether scientific or political — from its very inception. It was practiced by great historical figures who we normally think of as rational and modern: Renaissance humanists like Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, as well as one Isaac Newton. Only later did it become the domain of anti-modern neo-reactionary magicians like Josephin Peladan and Julius Evola. The shared notion here is that, rather than relying on divine authority — or its traditional emissaries: kings, princes, priests and aristocrats — we can, ourselves, become divine. We can do this by channeling the powers of the universe for our own desired ends. (At least, for a very specific, highly elite definition of we.) In my forthcoming book on magic and modernity, I call this religious sensibility magical transhumanism: the idea that we can become gods, and transcend human limitations (death itself most prominently among them) through gnosis.
This vision is already present in what’s often considered the “Ur-Text” of the esoteric tradition: the Corpus Hermeticum, attributed to the Ancient Egyptian magician-god Hermes Trismegistus (a sort of mash-up of the Greek messenger god Hermes and the Egyptian writing-god Thoth). The book, however, was far more likely to have been written in third-century Alexandria. The creation of the text was roughly contemporary with parallel religious movements like Neoplatonism, Gnosticism and early Christianity, which had a very different take on what “God becoming man” (and “man becoming God”) looked like. In the Hermetic tradition, the practice of magic was, ultimately, about the acquisition not only of immortality, but earthly divinity more broadly.
In the thirteenth treatise of the Corpus, for example, we learn (via the character of Hermes’s son Tat), that the follower of the Hermetic way must be “born again,” a process that seems to have transformed Hermes into a living God: one with an “immortal body,” who has been “born in mind.” It is a change that is not automatically visible to the mortal eye — at first Tat does not realize it has occurred, and Hermes describes his seemingly ordinary body as a “deception” — but can be perceived with the “mental energy that comes from the powers.” We likewise learn in the fourth treatise that a man who is mindful recognizes “that he is immortal,” in the fifth treatise that “he who has understood himself advances towards God,” and in the sixth that “this is the final good for those who have received knowledge: to be made god” — all in all, a not-dissimilar trajectory to Bryan Johnson’s “levels of ambition.”
But not everybody gets to be a god. Central to the Hermetic texts is the notion that theosis, or God-becoming — unlike, say, in the Christian conception — is a sacred and secret mystery, to be shared only by judicious teachers with chosen initiates. Several dialogues feature Hermes, or his followers, emphasizing that these teachings are not to be repeated or shared more widely. An implicit distinction, in the Hermetic corpus, is made between what another core “magical” text, the Chaldean Oracles, calls “the herd, which is subject to Destiny” — ordinary people who have no special knowledge or spiritual access — and those favored few who are able to transcend their human status, indeed Fate itself, in order to become godlike.
The Corpus Hermeticum, like many esoteric transhumanist texts of the late antique era, re-entered the Western popular consciousness during the Italian Renaissance, particularly in the Florentine court of Cosimo de’Medici, whose court translator, Marsilio Ficino, not only translated the Corpus but also wrote magical texts on similarly transhumanist themes. For Ficino, as for his classical forebears, (Hermetic) magic was a means of counteracting destiny, and shaping one’s own fate. His treatise On Life, a book equal parts magic, philosophy and self-help, deals with the correct magical knowledge — correspondences between planets, stones, animals, and energies — to allow an individual to overcome his “assigned” astrological destiny (Ficino, for example, was born under the melancholic sign of Saturn, to which he attributed his fits of depression).
Today, we often think of astrology as part of a broader “New Age” series of practices, alongside sage cleansing and spellcraft. But in Ficino’s time, magic was rather a kind of antidote to astrology: a way for human beings to use the inchoate powers of the universe to override those pesky celestial influences. The wider Renaissance valorization of human freedom, combined with a resurgence of interest in these spiritual-scientific texts, promised both godlike powers and, at times, literal immortality. Thus, for example, the popularity of alchemy, and with it the promise of the fabled philosopher’s stone — a device that, if discovered, would not only turn base metals into gold but also confer immorality on the discoverer. Spiritual perfection, self-divinization, transhumanist life extension, and magic were all part of the same faith in human self-governed perfectibility: a perfectibility that did not rely on the authority of God-the-Father or on any political or church structures.
It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to trace the influence of these ideas, and the religious story of human self-salvation behind them, into several of the most formative intellectual associations of the modern era. While there was no single “secret society” (like the notorious Illuminati) governing the world behind the scenes, a number of disparate intellectual communities (and, yes, secret societies) used the language, imagery and rhetoric of this esoteric vision of self-divinization to promote ideals of human freedom and independence (especially from organized religion, and especially from the Catholic Church). These societies also developed alongside other “invisible colleges” and “republics of letters” — essentially, social social networks — that made possible the spread of such ideals, such as the development of coffeehouse culture in Enlightenment-era England, which allowed for the dissemination of philosophical and spiritual ideas beyond clerical institutions.
The self-described Rosicrucians, for example, a loosely-organized network of occultically-inclined alchemists and philosophers, formed one such “invisible college,” which in turn became what we now know as the Royal Society of London. The Freemasons, which similarly used alchemically-tinged imagery focusing on human self-divinization, were likewise involved in the spread of nationalist and liberal-democratic across Europe, and in the United States. (Indeed, George Washington himself was a Mason). And, later in the nineteenth century, groups like the Theosophists — who inspired writers and artists from Kandinsky to T.S. Eliot — continued to bring magical transhumanism into the public consciousness as a sacralized form of secularism: an alternative to traditional organized religion that prized, rather than limited, human freedom. Human creative freedom, rather than divine fiat, became the organizing principle of the universe. Human desire — human will — is the real power that makes the universe run.
“As God creates,” writes the founder of Theosophy, Russian author and mystic Helena Blavatsky, “so man can create. Given a certain intensity of will, and the shapes created by the mind become subjective. Hallucinations, they are called, although to their creator they are real as any visible object is to any one else. Given a more intense and intelligent concentration of this will, and the form becomes concrete, visible, objective; the man has learned the secret of secrets; he is a MAGICIAN.”
Bryan Johnson, in other words, is doing nothing new, especially when he celebrates his passion to “become God” through scientific gnosis (and its material analogue: technology). Rather, his “Don’t Die” religion is but another entrant into the annals of what WIRED writer Erik Davis has called “techgnosis”: the fusion of traditional Hermetic spiritual thought with the age of the Internet, where reality, more than ever, feels controlled by the will of certain people. For Davis, the creation of new informational technologies was inextricable from a new transhumanist religious sensibility based on gnosis, and its possessor’s power to arrange the building blocks of reality. By creating a new interface between the self, the other, and the world beyond, media technologies become part of the self, the other, and the world beyond. They form the building blocks, and the foundation for what we now increasingly think of as “the great social construction of reality” — a construction, Davis tells us, that historically belonged to the “religious imagination.” This “technomysticism,” for Davis, turns the Internet age into the perfect home for the revival of those traditional subcultural religions — Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and other forms of magic based around the power of the individual imagination.
For centuries, men and women have looked for the philosopher’s stone — and to separate themselves from the “herd” that can’t or won’t.
The difference is that this time, magic has gone mainstream.
In my 2020 book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, I predicted that techno-utopianism — in its efforts to combat what was then known as the “social justice warrior” phenomenon — might fuse with another cultural phenomenon, the “brutal atavists” of the reactionary manosphere, who sought not progress but return to a Golden Age past. Those atavists, too, were interested in magic, particularly in its Nietzschean dimensions: figures like the early twentieth-century Julius Evola who saw the magus as, essentially, a spiritualized Übermensch. (“What is really required to defend ‘the West’...” Evola wrote his Metaphysics of War, “is the strengthening, to an extent perhaps still unknown to Western man, of a heroic vision of life.”)
Today, that fusion seems to dominate our social and political discourse. The idea that reality can be shaped by superior magicians, whose gnosis entitles them to godlike powers — spiritual and political alike — is no longer a fringe or heretical view, one that might get you in trouble with the Inquisition. It is, instead, the governing view of our regime. Magical transhumanism might indeed be the closest thing we have to a new civil religion. In 2025, nobody’s burning the wizards at the stake. Instead, they just might become the inquisitors.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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Great piece. Just wanted to add a few notes on Mormonism--the religious context Bryan Johnson's is most familiar with--that make it all come together. LDS theology collapses the distinction between spirit and matter, such that God is believed to have a body, and people are believed to be resurrected with bodies in the next life -- but they will be "exalted bodies", advanced bodies of some kind. The features and capacities of these exalted bodies are a frequent topic of curiosity and speculation among Latter-day Saints. Most often, its used to talk about how we'll enjoy family relationships (including sex) in the next life. If you watch Bryan Johnson's documentary with Mormon eyes, you can see this kind of thinking about family all over the place--it explains the trauma of his divorce and separation of his kids, and why he is especially attached to his one son that likes him, such that he claims he wants to spend "forever" or "several life times" with him. This is how Mormons typically talk about their spouses, siblings, kids, etc. lol. For those with a tech-brain, the theology also lends itself to thinking that we not only can, but should use all our scientific and technological capacities to advance ourselves as a species. The Mormon Transhumanist Association, which Bryan Johnson was long a part of, is dedicated to exploring these possibilities, centering a most notorious LDS teaching: "As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become." Interestingly, there's a strong feminine-coded subculture of Mormon women who do "energy work"/reiki-- where again, you see a fervent collapse of spirit and matter, and practices that spring up around the synthesis of the two.
A rabbit hole I love to dive down. For more on the history of American mysticism's fusion of magic and materialism, try Mitch Horowitz's Occult America (2010).