Nomad Codes

the homogeneous cultural world you share with your fellows. The gods and nature spirits that you are bound to determine your sense of place in the cosmos and even your role in society. Frequently, through omen or dream or clan membership, these entities claim you. You have little choice in the matter. They are ultimately in control.
    Astrology is our civilization’s most animated expression of these ancient polytheistic relationships of necessity and fate. Reflecting an arguably evolutionary drift away from the immediate world of sensuous forms towards the literal heights of abstraction, the gods of astrology ascend and take up residence in the pinpoint mysteries that wander among the constellations of the fixed stars. The ouroboros slithers up into the zodiac, recreating on a cosmic scale the polytheistic networks that surround humanity and determine the life of the individual. You’re born into a certain cosmic arrangement of planets, and that particular constellation of forces determines to a greater or lesser degree your personality, your role in society, and the shape of your life. If Saturn rules over your natal chart, to some degree you are his slave.
    Then the Gnostics appear with their anti-astrological rants against the star-demons that rule the zodiac along with the rest of the visible cosmos. The wheel of the heavens becomes, in their view, a great machinery of dark fate controlled by lower powers. But they also offer an esoteric escape route: gnosis, which seems to combine the experience of direct mystical knowledge with useful information about the structure of reality. With Gnostic knowledge, one can escape the clutches of the archons upon death, or learn how to manipulate them through magic while alive. The star-demons no longer have total control.
    Within a heavily astrological climate, this is a powerfully libertarian notion, one which Christianity to a degree shared. (In addition to breaking the bonds of the pagan gods, Jesus was said by Paul to replace the law which dominated the Pentateuch with a new dispensation of forgiveness and grace.) Embedded within Gnosticism’s almost maniacal hostility to the ecosystem, then, is a passionate if somewhat paranoid cry for freedom, a refusal of servitude to the necessity of matter. Gnostics were, in essence, antinomian—against the law. The Gnostic condemnation of the world was not simply schizoid asceticism, nor a histrionic form of ressentiment , Nietzsche’s penetrating characterization of Christianity’s “slave morality.” Gnosticism also represents a particularly intense form of resistance to the powers that bind—in the self, in the body, in human society.
    By imagining the world as a trap, Gnosticism creates a space to step back and critique the dominant situation, a space of visionary alienation that reveals the cracks in the surface of apparent reality. It’s as if you were lazily strolling through an Edenic garden and suddenly discover that there are surveillance cameras hidden in the flowers and that the blue sky is actually a painted dome. The distrust of nature and matter grows from the distrust of the body of perception. The Gnostic chooses to wake up rather than deepen the dream, and the dream is a world without end.

THE CORPORATION OF HEAVEN AND THE CARNIVAL OF EARTH

    Once, during a weekend course on the Kabbalah taught by Warren Kenton, the group was led through a guided visualization of holy Jerusalem. As we moved through the city, Kenton was also symbolically leading us through the ten sephirot on the Tree of Life, one of the most powerful “ladders” of esoteric thought and experience. We began outside the walls of the city, with the trees and shepherds, the “simple people” of Malkuth. Climbing through the city, we eventually passed a barracks that housed the soldiers who protected the city, and that corresponded to Geburah, or Severity.
    Immediately, my imagination coughed up unbidden images of Israeli troops firing at Palestinian kids armed with handfuls of rocks. At that moment, I could no longer travel through Kenton’s symbolically holistic Jerusalem, because I realized that the desire to literalize that symbolism partly inspires or at least justifies the intolerance of many reactionary and fundamentalist Israelis. The sparkling city of our imagination was splattered with the mud of history.
    Most students of Kabbalah are probably too sophisticated to attempt to submit the relative world we actually live in to