During the past two years, the internet seems to have taken a turn toward the occult (a term which, in its original incarnation, simply referred to concealed knowledge). The darkly conspiratorial mindset of contemporary digital culture is not entirely new, however. In this paper, I explore a set of submerged connections between California tech culture and occult traditions which date back to the early modern period. Jack Parsons, for instance, helped found the Jet Propulsion Lab at Cal Tech even as he led the West Coast branch of Aleister Crowley's Ordo Templi Orientalis in acts of ritualistic "sex magick" and attempts to summon Babylonian demons. These overlapping interests, I argue, were not atypical in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Physicists like Robert Oppenheimer immersed themselves in mysticism, while new religions like Scientology advertised their “technologies” in periodicals like Popular Mechanics. Reconnecting the occult tradition with the history of science sheds new light on the social and mental worlds of twentieth century technological change. Going forward, it might also help guide us through an uncertain future in which techniques like machine learning proceed beyond the realm of human intelligibility and become re-inscribed with the divinity (or demonology) of the occult.
