“God-Making: Magical Transhumanism from the Corpus Hermetica to Silicon Valley”

In this episode of For Your Consideration, we would like to offer this public lecture given by Tara Burton at the Christian Study Center on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.

We often think of transhumanism as a distinctly modern phenomenon. But the history of magic suggests that the desire to transcend our humanity -- and become gods -- through knowledge, is part of a far older religious tradition. This talk looks at the history of the Hermetic tradition -- which flourished alongside proto-orthodox Christianity and Gnosticism in Hellenized Alexandria before being rediscovered in the West during the Renaissance -- and the influence of both Hermeticism and early modern ideas on magic on the development of what we now think of as modernity.

Tara Isabella Burton is an astute interpreter of contemporary culture, particularly regarding matters of religion, media, and identity. She received a doctorate in theology from Oxford in 2017 and is currently a Visiting Fellow at George Mason University's Mercatus Center and a Visiting Research Fellow at Catholic University of America's Institutional Flourishing Lab. Burton is also the author of two books of cultural criticism, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World and Self-Made: Curating Our Image from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. She is also an accomplished novelist, having most recently published Here In Avalon.

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