Anselm abducted Barnum

Anselm's classic argument for the existence of God is intriguing to our purpose, because he begins with the Primacy of the word. By beginning with the definition of God, which he defines roughly as the greatest thing imaginable, and then moving to say that it would be greater for God to exist than to not exist, therefore God exists; he is arguing that the word is more important than the facts.

He is arguing that existence is subservient to definition. Again we see Plato and his theory of forms lurking in the background. The idea that the story, the word, the archetypal template, is more true than what manifests in the physical world is an assumption that runs epidemic throughout the history of philosophy and the occult.

The magus seeks to uncover the source code of the universe and thereby reprogram the universe to the benefit of the magus. This is the implicit, sometimes explicit, goal of virtually all entertainment- all storytelling. But increasingly the world of computer science and especially video games have become obsessed with creating virtual worlds.

The Bonelands do not yield to language. Our incantations do not reprogram that cold nihilistic void outside our fictions. And so we build Shadowlands within Shadowlands. The most unbelievable part of the Matrix movies was that humans had to be tricked and imprisoned in the matrix. The truth is that the machines could have charged admission.