N-Power: Occultism in Pop Culture

Abstract

Alphanumeric names for products are everywhere, having become part of a widespread naming trend in the contemporary marketplace. Take one area of that marketplace as a case in point—car model names. Here we find Mercedes Benz’s E3-20, the Mazda RX-7, the Pontiac G6, the Corvette C6, the Audi A4, among many other similarly named vehicles. At one level, these naming trends, like the use of i in iPod, are designed to appeal to a new generation of customers accustomed to i-Language style (Chapter 4). But at another level, they conjure up images of mystery and the occult, similar to those evoked by the kinds of secret codes and cryptography used in pop fiction narratives, from detective stories to supernatural thrillers.

Nobody before the Pythagoreans had thought that mathematical relations held the secret of the universe. Twenty-five centuries later, Europe is still blessed and cursed with their heritage.

—Arthur Koestler (1905–83)