Nomad Codes

because he is always flowing through the cracks of fate. Eshu expresses the spiritual principle of connection , the copulation or conjunctio between being and world, and the pandemonium and chicanery of this exchange. That he is a “street god” with stratagems and feral lusts only shows that in the West African tradition, spiritual principles are most actualized when they’re brought into the fabric of daily life, of the recognizably human network of money and sex, power and information.

SNAKES & LADDERS

    In an era when everything breaks down and everything comes together, spiritual explorers find themselves in a vast and tangled forest. Myths and metaphors, practices and words of wisdom form crisscrossing paths that multiply in all directions. In many ways, this eclectic and fragmentary zone defines our moment of religious experience. Perhaps the question is less which path you find yourself on—what religious philosophy or spiritual technology you’re remaking yourself with—but how you move through the space itself. How do you engage its polymorphous shapes, the density of its data, the absence of traditional clues? With rigid, one-pointed determination? Loose eclecticism? Craziness?
    In my own tentative drift, I’ve come to identify two contrasting modes of spiritual movement, two pervasive styles or religious impulses. On the one hand, there is the desire to establish an intense, deeply wedded connection with the imaginative matrix of the natural world; on the other, a desire to overcome desire, to ascend towards virtual light, to escape the demands of matter and wake up to a new order of knowledge and being.
    The tension between these impulses takes many forms, replicating across many levels of scale: gnosis and nature, masculine and feminine, transcendence and immanence, evolution and eternal return, sky gods and chthonic spirits, monotheism and polytheism, unity and multiplicity, soul and body, spirit and soul. But though they certainly bleed into one another, and may ultimately meet in the bosom of the Ultimate, I distrust any easy attempt to shove them under one holistic roof. It’s too simple to paper over their real differences by appealing to the supposed unity of mystical experience or the clichéd notion that various religious languages describe the same truth from different perspectives. What if the truth itself is multiple?
    Nor can the dynamic tension between these modes simply be subsumed into a larger dialectic of spiritual progression. Such a view already aligns itself on the side of unity and hierarchy, imagining an abstract evolutionary drive towards ultimate oneness. As James Hillman writes, “the polytheistic alternative does not set up conflicting opposites between beast and Bethlehem, between chaos and unity; it permits the coexistence of the psychic fragments and gives them patterns in the imagination ...” [1] The shaman does not climb a ladder of binary oppositions towards a glowing monad. The jungle does not grow dialectically.
    Today, a rising tide of environmentalists, Neopagans, and traditional peoples from around the globe are calling on us, not to mitigate, but to reject the philosophical and spiritual paradigm of the West. They point out that monotheism’s mythic episteme, and its underlying dualisms of body/soul and man/nature, have helped produce devastating effects on the earth and the human spirit. Even mainstream Christianity and Judaism are now wrestling with a Green Goddess unleashed in their folds.
    At the same time, science edges closer to its gnostic promises of material transcendence—off-world space colonies, synthetic virtual realities, life extension, and the preservation of human consciousness in the deathless body of machines. Are such technologies symptoms of a deeply spiritual intuition, or of an arrogant and deadly rift with nature made long ago? Those who reject humanity’s drive towards incorporeal light and instead attempt to embrace the ancient fertility gods and their collective web of life face another problem—do the angels of light, at least in their modern guise, become the new demons? For despite their punch, many eco-spiritual critiques often boil down into simplified attacks on Christianity and its ascetic undertow. I’d like to suggest instead that the impulse to transcend—the Neoplatonist’s ascent through the spheres, the Gnostic’s sudden awakening, the desert monk’s rejection of the élan vital —is not simply a