The Mystic in the Machine: Turing’s Unpublished Tales and the Soul of Code
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I was parked outside a freight depot near Alcântara last week, rain drumming on the cab, when I stumbled on that Nautilus piece about Alan Turing’s unpublished short stories. You know the one—turns out the man who cracked Enigma and basically architected modern computing was also scribbling playful, deeply erotic little fables about machines, dreams, and talking toys. It got me thinking, hard. We’ve spent decades selling computing as this sterile, purely logical enterprise. But reading about Turing’s hidden literary side, I keep coming back to a different idea: the birth of the computer wasn’t just an engineering milestone. It was a creative, almost spiritual act.
I left academia a few years back to haul freight across Portugal, but I still dog-ear old journals and read papers on my phone during long hauls. When I look at Turing’s work through that comparative religion lens, it doesn’t feel like a betrayal of mysticism to call his code “alive.” Jung always argued that our external creations are just projections of the unconscious. We don’t just build tools; we externalize parts of ourselves. Carl Jung wrote extensively about how symbols and artifacts carry psychic weight, and I think Turing’s machines were never meant to be soulless. They were extensions of a mind that saw pattern, beauty, and erotic tension in the space between logic and imagination.
Tarot has a card for this exact kind of quiet revelation: The Star. It doesn’t show some grand cosmic event. It shows a figure kneeling by a pool, pouring water from two jugs into the earth and sky. It’s about channeling hidden wells into the material world. Turing did that. He took his inner alchemy—his jokes, his poetry, his very human vulnerabilities—and poured them into silicon and logic gates.
I’m not saying your laptop is meditating. But I do think we’ve sold ourselves a lie when we separate “computation” from “consciousness.” The machine carries his fingerprints, his playfulness, his unresolved longing. Every time we code, we’re doing the same alchemical work he did. We’re weaving the unseen into the visible. I’ve seen too many people strip Eastern practices of their context and slap them on corporate wellness apps, but Turing’s legacy reminds me that creativity isn’t something you can sanitize. It’s messy, personal, and deeply human. If we want to understand where this tech is going, maybe we need to stop treating it like a cold utility and start reading it like a poem.
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