A documentary project
The machines, and what the hidden traditions said about them — taught from the documents.
For as long as there have been machines, there has been a second history of them: the one written by magicians, theosophists, spiritual scientists, and — more often than either side admits — by the engineers themselves. It begins with a magus who held that no instrument works without its operator, and it reaches the present in machines that work because no one operates them. The history is half documents and half legend, and the documents are often stranger than the legends.
The oldest continuous claim in this history: the human being as a working part of the instrument. From Agrippa to the machines that work because no one is in them.
Parts II–IV, the century timeline, the cast, and the documents are in preparation.