Nomad Codes

the often idealized cartography of the spiritual imagination. After all, the messy multiplicity of Malkuth needs to be embraced as thoroughly as the crown of Kether—in fact, the Jewish tradition presents a particularly robust and charitable record regarding sexuality and the body. Nonetheless, the codes that issue from the ineffable flux of mystical tradition—symbols, myths, metaphysical principles—become part and parcel of that same relative world. Like any other language, spiritual language leaks and drifts into other domains. As it solidifies into history, spirituality becomes ideology, often with very specific social and political results. Arguably, the Christian belief that man is master of the earth has helped put a torch to the very planet man is supposed to steward.
    Formed into political ideologies, spiritual hierarchies can be rather pernicious. Such hierarchies often begin with the idea that reality originates from a supreme monad, which immediately creates the challenge of how to relate this singular godhead with our lived world of multiplicity and change. Instead of an immanent or pantheistic metaphysics, in which that intense unity is folded immediately into the world, spiritual hierarchies like the Tree of Life work on the cosmogenic principle of emanation. The godhead emanates increasingly “coarser” gradations of reality, which form a descending ladder of lower and lower planes. It’s the spiritual equivalent of trickle-down economics. The coarsest plane is the material earth, and the task of the aspirant is to arduously climb back up the ladder. The principle of immanence—the Kabbalist’s Shekinah, the Christian’s Logos—is, with some notable exceptions, subservient to the supreme principle.
    One of the primary architects of the metaphysical ladder was the Christian theologian Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. In The Celestial Hierarchy and The Divine Names , he helped establish the familiar Neoplatonic cosmic cartography within medieval Christian cosmology. In this picture, the cosmos becomes a series of spheres that surround the earth like an onion skin. In the celestial imagination of Pseudo-Dionysius, God rules the supreme sphere, while much of the work is performed by various ministering angels in descending degrees of power: thrones, dominions, principalities, etc. Below the angelic orders lie the astrological powers that rule the visible cosmos, and below them the elemental forces of earthly nature.
    As hermetic cartographies of spiritual and psychological forces, the Tree of Life and Pseudo-Dionysius’s celestial hierarchy are powerful and profound. But if you hold that the hermetic axiom of “as above, so below” applies to political structures as well, then these maps could easily be construed as depicting a highly authoritarian political structure that invests absolute power in a supreme sovereign. This is indeed how medieval royalty fit itself into the divine scheme. Lesser beings must take their assigned place in the social hierarchy, just as the elementals of nature are imagined as slaves or demons to be bound. But for all its visionary punch, the politics implied by this hierarchical model is one that only the most reactionary among us could stomach. Indeed, it is precisely the attraction to this notion of divine hierarchy that explains the strong right-wing current that animates certain areas of esotericism, especially in Europe.
    But what happens when parliamentary and democratic forms in turn displace the divine rule of kings? The kingdom of heaven becomes a corporation. Reading through popular spiritualist and Christian accounts of the higher planes from the late nineteenth century until today, one increasingly finds the comparison of the spirit world to a business, with God the president and various angels and astral souls his employees. As we reincarnate, we work our way up the corporate ladder. Besides maintaining a top-down power structure, now shifted from kingship to corporate capitalism, this transposition keeps the earth low beneath our feet, a degraded if not willfully exploited realm with no voice.
    Here the radical character of some contemporary Neopagan perspectives become clearer. The Neopagan, at least in my speculative myth, takes a self-conscious stand against this vast metaphysical architecture. I hate corporations, she says. I hate working for the man. Spirituality is not a business, and my allegiance is to the “lowest” rung: earth. I do not