Nomad Codes

No matter how much you allegorize Klingons, as Russkies or black nationalists or creatures from the id, they are compelling because they retain a certain nomadic volatility—what the zine Katra calls “outliness.”
    The Karizan Klingons who gathered in the Ramada Inn are even more iconoclastic than most Trekkers, and their ritual conjures meanings only hinted at on the screen. Like Greene, most of the members of the club are Neopagans, part of a small but thriving tribe of folks who have concocted an earthy, polytheistic religion out of nature worship, boho sensibilities, the recovery of the Goddess, and the Wiccan revival cobbled together by Gerald Gardner and other British witches in the mid-1900s.
    The Karizans are not alone in their heathen fandom—while Neopagans groove to lunar cycles and the ancient wheel of the seasons, and conjure forth archaic pantheons within a decidedly pre-Enlightenment aesthetic, a significant chunk of this magical community are also serious sci-fi fans. Both fans and witches share a very concrete sense of the power of the imagination, seen not as an elite realm restricted to “artists” (or TV producers) but as a vital phantasmic faculty that links the realms of fantasy with the here and now. Most of us lose this vigorous sense of imagination when we age, but both fans and Neopagans learn to recover it, feed it, manifest it. There are more differences between fandom and Neopaganism than similarities, and even the Karizans insisted that the Tera’daq ritual was a “show-piece”—not a real Neopagan ritual but a way to play with their magical leanings within the Trek mythos. But by performing their spiritual sensibilities in the trappings of a TV show, the Karizans also revived the oldest derivation of the word “fan:” fanaticus , a devotee of the ancient mystery cults.

    Panayiotis K. Venetis enters the Ramada room where the Karizans take their breaks from working security. “It’s a cluster fuck out there,” he says, plopping down. Bearded and built like the Norse thunder god whose hammer he wears around neck, Venetis radiates an intelligent and heroic charisma. As K‘Thor, leader of the Karizans, many considered him a power-mad demagogue before he staged his own ouster.
    “It’s no coincidence that a lot of people who are first-generation immigrants are kinda schizophrenic and get into subcultures,” says Venetis, who grew up attending Greek parochial school and hearing the tales of the heroes of old. “You’re receiving contradictory feelings between your upbringing and the culture you’re transplanted in, which is giving you a whole new set of messages. So you gotta wend your way through that and not go crazy.”
    Attending the Bronx High School of Science, Venetis became aware of Neopaganism. “It seemed to be something invented rather than something that survived from antiquity. So I figured I might as well invent my own worship.” While working as a rehabilitation counselor in City Hospital, he decided to form a Neopagan group that would mix European lore with the precepts of warriorhood he had been gleaning from his martial arts practice. “I had been exposed to role-playing, so I wanted to use that as a way of experiencing the mythology a little more directly than just reading or writing it.”
    Finding that Norse mythology was alien to most of his group, he decided to use more familiar aliens instead. “At that time, the movies were portraying the Klingons in a very Viking manner, as independent raiders with a warrior culture, so it was very easy to adapt that to the mythical structure I was working on.”
    When Venetis and his crew started going to cons in character, they stirred up a lot of controversy. “We were Neopagan so we brought a lot of Neopagan elements. It was theatrics, but a lot of people here are born-again Christians and we used to freak them out.” Rumors of sex orgies and blood sacrifice began circulating, so the Karizans began weaving together the most outrageous tales in their zine The Void Warrior and then admitting to them. “We deny nothing” was their battle cry.

    In The Practice of Everyday Life , the French theorist Michel de Certeau describes the tactics used by popular readers as poaching. Excluded from the meanings legislated by critics or academics, “readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of