Lucile Olympe Haute’s work combines spirituality, new technologies, and radical politics to advance ethical ways of being in the world. Key to her practice is that any ethical system must extend to the more-than-human worlds—including those of plants, animals, and even the bacteria that live in our bodies—on which our lives depend.
In 2017, the artist gathered together four friends who each identify as witches, even though each of them defines the term very differently. Together, they performed a ritual with the aim of finding common ground. This was the precursor to the Cyberwitches Manifesto, written two years later, which likewise aims to bring diverse constituencies of witches together around shared principles and to connect three areas that are usually considered separately: spirituality, politics, and technology. Featuring quotes from activists, hackers, and thinkers, it represents a call for living together consciously and with commitment.
ONE KNOT IN TIME THEN THE WORLD CHANGED, THEN THE MEMORY DISAPPEARED, THEN WE COULDN’T UNDERSTAND LIFE ANYMORE NEITHER FORWARD NOR BACKWARD.1)
It’s time to stop dodging; to stop fudging ourselves; to face the current changes. Not without anxiety but with determination. We live in this 21st century that use to be dreamed and is now feared.
Let’s unite our voices. We do not defend nature, we are the nature defending itself — Nature, Gaïa, neither mother nor sister, but force beyond the languages that have difficulty with the post-gender.
Let’s acknowledge that the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house. The very technologies that were reason to dream of new forms of political empowerment have turned out to be the means of surveillance and control for everybody.
It is time to leave the dualist labyrinths. But let’s not be Icarus: the Sirens are our sisters and we are too keen on the sensuality of the stones and the tenderness of the trees to give in to transhumanist pride.
Let’s connect from Earth to the Noosphere without rummaging, scratching or desecrating Gaia’s entrails anymore, without spitting in the face of Heaven and Time the deadly fumes that are mortgaging our futures.
Let’s be actual “saboteurs of big daddy mainframe”. Let’s profess technological autonomy and all forms of emancipation and empowerment.
Let’s be inspired by W.I.T.C.H., VNS Matrix, Gynepunk, Reclaiming, technoshamanism, xenofeminism, hyperstition, afrofuturism, and ancestorfuturism, without us adhering entirely to one or the other.
Let’s practice hermeticism with irony. We know that speech is the active material of magic. Let’s sometimes try this alchemy of the verb that modifies reality through words.
Our words have little hybris. They caress the daisies rather than helping to instantiate the magic. Our power is domestic and vernacular. Our sorority protects us from slipping from witch to woman of power.
Our do-it-yourself practices escape religions. We are not one but labile & evanescent.
Let’s practice this applied science of the creation of forms by energy and the direction of energy by forms.
The forms, structures, images that we manipulate will sometimes lead us out of the limits imposed by our culture. Our will, our actions, our directed energy, our choices made not once but several times: this is our magic.
Let’s invent for ourselves experimental origins and traditions. Let’s not believe in divinity, let’s connect with Her.
Let’s understand that everything is interconnected, that consciousness gives shape to reality and reality gives shape to consciousness.
Let’s use social networks to gather in spiritual and political rituals. Let’s use smartphones and tarot cards to connect to spirits.
Let’s manufacture DIY devices to listen to invisible worlds. Let’s our astral bodies travel through the cosmic plane of radio waves.
Let’s mix ancestral and invented methods to reveal the porosity of the worlds — ours, the Gods’ we no longer believe in, the free cosmogony and fictional entities’ that we create.
We are corporeal, biological, incarnate entities, but also and simultaneously: relational and informational beings.
We are entities with digital extensions. We live in a physical, technical and digital world. Let’s be hybrid entities living in an hybrid world.
Let’s take care of our bodies–hub–servers. Let our contemporary everyday technical equipment be part of our rituals.Our magic is technophile. Let’s say the words. Let’s make the gestures. Let’s manipulate the objects. Let’s summon archetypal relics. Let’s call for the emergence of egregores. Let’s seek for a fleeting energetic symbiosis. Let’s practice this art of changing consciousness at will.
Let’s be Cyberwitches.
Cyberwitches manifesto, Lucile Olympe Haute, Imbolc 2019.
1) Quote: Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key Into the Language of America.
