This is an Introduction Only More May Follow Tech in a Nutshell
Please note that some terms are borrowed from the language established for discussing tech by Omnimancers. As an outsider of their system, my uses are likely wrong in many cases, oh well. I will first explain tech in a positive light, and indeed it is a very useful system. At the end of the article, I will highlight some of my concerns and critiques of tech, especially when it’s practiced in isolation from broader magical/metaphysical contexts.
Why Tech is Useful (Gross oversimplifications follow)
Spell casting generally refers to direct impositions of Will upon reality and/or astral/subtle energy. This is typically done by either using the subconscious mind to affect reality (rituals, sigils, etc.) or by merging the conscious and subconscious minds (trance work, advanced ritual work) to do so. Constructs offer an easy way to accumulate this Will action over time for use on a single objective, making it a slightly more effective methodology in many cases. This is, of course, still ultimately subject to the limitations of the will. Egregores are, by extension, constructs with the accumulated Will of several people over time. If a spell is a water gun, a construct is more like a water balloon, and an egregore is a reservoir. This metaphor is an oversimplification, granted, many spells will tap into large sources or prepared batteries, constructs may have a continuous flow of magical will/energy feeding it, and egregores can fuel spells blurring the lines of distinction. The important point is that all of these are reliant on sources of Will to impact reality or the astral. Tech works differently, which is why the system is a significant improvement over competing systems, especially in the long term. Rather than directly achieving effects using Will, tech takes advantage of reliable emergent properties of reality to affect changes. Using traits like shape, energetic composition, density, etc. (the list is endless and much stranger than this sampling implies) tech causes natural reactions to accomplish component sub tasks at any scale. Will, in this case, only shapes the initial machinery. This machinery can be combined to create ever more complex effects, and stacked for ever larger effects.
This essentially mechanical effect may seem familiar to ceremonial magicians who are accustomed to working with well defined symbolic systems and tools to leverage mystical machinery laid down by their system’s progenitors or “secret masters”. It is worth noting that the only significant differences are in attitude and probable origins. Tech as a paradigm promotes scientific thinking over zealous or religious thinking (which are the more common modes of magical thinking across paradigms), which can lead to a bit more arrogance in success than, for instance, success as a result of adulation of a godhead. The bigger difference is that of origin, though. While ceremonial systems impose human symbolism such as the tree of life, or a God, on reality, tech attempts to analyze reality in the absence of such impositions. In short, tech seeks to break magical reality down into a series of rules, whereas most systems seek to understand reality in terms the system designer brings to the table.
What's important is that reality itself is doing virtually all the work, without requiring a constant supply of will. Once the machinery is in place it can be expected to keep operating with no significant maintenance cost to the magician. A small amount of unconscious maintenance or an alternative entropy solution is sufficient for Tech to function for years, without conscious intervention.
Some Problems and Solutions
Most substantial effects require the input of magical energy as a sort of fuel/work (at the very least to maintain system integrity). The simplest way to accommodate this need is to provide a natural or artificial source of energy. At low levels, one's self is adequate, though tapping into a ley line or natural wellspring is preferable. Most complex tech magic requires the use of more substantial Sources though. Linking such tech magic to the Sun and/or stars (more specifically their astral equivalents) is one of the simplest ways to ensure they are adequately powered. Typically tech users agree on the importance of engineering tech magic at many levels of organization. Ideally, the vast majority of this kind of work is offloaded onto the unconscious mind, or ‘inner’. However, especially early on, it can prove necessary or helpful to have a conscious, hands-on relationship with these many levels of organization. Usually, a piece of tech will be made of components which are made of sub-components and so on until you reach comparatively indivisible ‘materials’.
Developing materials is a matter of experimentation, observation, speculation, and happy accident. In many cases, you will not have the materials and subsequent components you need to accomplish a goal, and so you will unconsciously substitute Will based programming. This allows the tech magic to function but undermines the very advantages that tech magic has over constructs, making them far less efficient than they ought to be. For this reason, frequent development of materials and swapping tech and materials with other practitioners is essential to making meaningful progress with the system.
If you are a solitary practitioner, and not able to easily swap tech with others, consider swapping with astral entities friendly to you. Angels, demons, gods, monsters, forest spirits, elves, dwarves etc. exist in a literal sense in the astral, and they all, to some degree, make use of or understand tech as a concept. This can lead to major new insights into developing tech that is not immediately compatible with your worldview and comfort zone. You do need to be more careful of the various pitfalls of astral work when working alone. It's very easy to fall prey to delusional beliefs and misinformation when relying on astral sources. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that you and any others you work with develop your senses and ability to distinguish analytical overlay from raw data.
If you have any experience with creating amps, you will immediately see how tech can be used to create very effective amps, which leads to an effective acceleration of one's degree(s) of initiation. In this way, tech is very useful as a supplemental system, as well as a standalone paradigm. This is what draws to many to Tech as a paradigm.
Creating your First Tech
With the preceding theory out of the way, let us consider a specific application of the tech paradigm to a very simple bit of energy work: the creation of a ball of energy. Such a process can seem difficult to break down into smaller parts, given its simplicity.
We can intuitively break it down into (1) the gathering of energy, (2) the shaping of energy, (3) making the new shape stable/permanent. So our tech must accomplish all three tasks without the need for continuous Will in order to make energy balls.
Energy sources abound. You can easily solve step one by creating a simple link to the sun/stars, a ley line, energy node, egregores, gather ambient energy, etc. Malleable energy conforms to the shape of any vessel into which it is compressed (much as any physical fluid does). So the second step can be accomplished by creating a contained space in which to compress the gathered energy. These first two steps are very simple.
Two common approaches exist for promoting the longevity of an energetic construct: density as a means of resisting external influences and programming as a means of conveying a semi-permanent set of instructions for the energy. Either can be accomplished autonomously by tech, but the latter is more advanced. You can easily increase the total density of the energy ball by introducing the gathered energy under “pressure” into a very durable container. Energy from some sources will already be under some pressure (stars, for example, put out quite dense energy). However, the beauty of tech is that there are no hard limits to how to solve a problem. You could devise a pump similar to how a pressure washer functions. You could find a way to create a strong, temporary gravitational effect, you could flash magnetize your container to create a shell of especially dense energy on your ball, etc.
There are any number of improvements that can be made to your basic system, most of them taking the form of subdividing your components into smaller more efficient, specialized components. Some more meticulous practitioners may take an atomic-up approach to such designs, even; attempting to work from the smallest scales they can conceive of up to the useful macro scale they need effects on, to maximize efficiency. Make no mistake, energy is plentiful, but you will still find improved efficiency to be the best way to improve your tech spells’ performance. Throwing more power at a problem doesn't solve it, it simply kicks the can down the road.
Making Progress with Tech
Making substantial progress with Tech requires a constant stream of inspiration. This can be found by simply considering your previous work, in an endless series of Hegelian Dialectic incremental improvements, a rather brute force approach which yields ever less dramatic improvements over time. Most practitioners let such processes occur either in occasional batches of frenzied cross-pollination or entirely in the background.
One may also find various astral sources of Tech available for trade or plunder. In a similar vein, one may often break down the magical actions of other practitioners into the ‘language’ of tech. Whether someone is communing with their gods, or divining the future, by observing magical effects with your magical senses, using the inner as an interpreter, you may adopt methods very outside of the Tech paradigm. The doors this opens can be unpredictable but are generally very rewarding.
I’ve mentioned power and efficiency as means of improving tech, but these largely get at only the problem of surpassing performance limitations. You will come up against far less simple problems, most of which can be solved with insight. To achieve these insights you will need to improve your ability to observe magical effects. This can be done through sheer practice, incrementally improving over time, but also using amps to enhance one's magical senses. Once you can understand a problem you can solve it.
Using amps in this way can take many specific mechanical forms. The simplest ways to start this process can be thought of as flooding perceptive organs with refined, empowering energy. More complex solutions abound, ranging from virtual lenses to entirely rebuilt sensory systems. Pursuing these options is paramount to your success as a Tech magician.
A Few Cautions and Criticisms
In theory, Tech is a limitless system for practical magical development and progress. In practice, you are limited by sources of inspiration, creativity, and the lack of overarching direction. The system requires users to have infinite motivation for development to continue. There are also some things tech is less suited to; particularly, tech is great at accelerating magical growth of power and skill, it in no fundamental fashion necessitates the development of the magician’s wisdom. This causes problems and can contribute to the practical limits to magical development as the imbalances, false trails, and potentially damaging unwise experimentation abounds.
Forming or joining a tech study group or order helps considerably with these systemic weaknesses, but it doesn’t entirely negate them (and it adds a slew of complications in the form of inter-human relationships, politics, hierarchy, and so on). Motivation becomes troublesome even in a group environment, as the focus-fatigue of one member can derail whole meetings, retarding progress. A hybrid approach with a loose network of allied Tech magicians or interconnected “schools” of Tech magicians something like the modern academic culture of intellectual free trade would be the most ideal. To my knowledge, no such networks exist based in the material world, and astral networks of this sort have mixed success and failure. Another, less easily solved, issue is that Tech isn’t ideologically compatible with many theurgic systems. The mechanical understanding of magic essentially dismisses the divine as something like a very complex and intelligent vending machine (though, to be fair, this perspective gets adjusted as one’s ability to perceive expands, and one sees that what was apparently a boundary was merely a horizon). Many paradigms also can’t support the concept of breaking reality’s interactions into smallest possible parts, or into rules. It’s also unconditionally assumed that energy exists and that there are rules of any kind that universally apply to it. Chaos magicians (and various others) will be quick to point out that these assumptions about reality cannot really be taken for granted.
The Cognitive Dissonance such issues can cause during adoption of tech as a supplementary paradigm can be very challenging to deal with, especially for those not adept at controlling their subconscious assumptions about reality and magic. This can be overcome, but to some, especially those relatively unmotivated to seek power, it’s simply not worth it. This system is best suited to those with relatively compatible magical backgrounds focused on energy work.
Further Information
The only credible source online for information on tech is, by default, www.omnimancy.com. They originally developed the system,m though it has developed in parallel in many places and times, they remain the largest worldly source of information on Tech, with centuries of collective experience in their ranks. I may write further on the subject at a later time and will update this section if this occurs.