Nomad Codes

want to lord over nature, but immerse myself in its tides and rhythms, form alliances with its elemental powers rather than enslave them. I look forward to physical reincarnation—I have no desire to leave the Wheel. What others see as a trap, I embrace as a mysterious celebration that knits beauty and love with suffering and death. I acknowledge my own Promethean urges, but I recognize that Prometheus is only one of many gods with claims on my being.
    In the place of a static, top-down corporation, the Neopagan imagination conjures a carnival, a horizontal zone of becoming, a loose gathering in the field. The carnival swirls with energy and chaotic erotic connections. One feral group holds a hand-fasting over here, while some wanderers are selling stuff over there, and behind the distant bushes you expect people are making love. Through the dust, faces emerge and disappear, some wearing animal masks. People become beasts while the gods become human. There are no devils, just tricksters and their traps.
    The carnival creates its own hierarchies of course, but they tend to be nested hierarchies, folded within the fractal properties of the field itself. Inner circles form and compete with other inner circles, wizard wars with witch. But the flavor has changed—rather than fixed forms, these dynamic relationships are self-emergent properties. The center is always decentered. As a formally polytheistic space, the carnival fragments and distributes the power that the ladder concentrated into one supreme point. Nature speaks again, in a thousand networked tongues.
    In addition, there is no desire to leave the field. The carnival embodies immanence, the spiritual intensity of in-your-face multiplicity. There is nowhere to go. James Hillman uses precisely the image of “peaks and vales” to distinguish between the drive towards spiritual transcendence (peak experience, detachment, unity) and the rich fragmentary and animistic world of the soul and the polytheistic imagination. [2] From the Neopagan perspective, the chilly peaks in the background do not call as heartily as they do to solitary climbers with their urge to transcend the fray. As one Druid I know put it, “People are always saying how all paths lead to the same mountain top. But why climb the mountain in the first place, when you can explore the valleys?” That’s the snake hissing in your ear.

SHARDS OF THE DIAMOND MATRIX (A LUDIBRIUM )

    In January of 1994, while attempting to scrounge up my first assignment for Wired , I visited a Tibetan Buddhist monastery located in the Indian state of Karnataka. Along with their usual tasks, the young monks at Sera Mey were inputting rare and crumbling woodblock sutras into cheap XT computers. Under the auspices of the Asian Classics Input Project, mountains of this digital dharma eventually found its way onto freely distributed CD-ROMs and the Internet.
    One evening, after the monks served me a bowl of noodles and beef my vegetarian self choked down out of politeness, an older monk sidled up to the table. Furtively he reached into his maroon robes and handed me a thick, dog-eared notebook, wrapped in a pair of sweat socks. He made sure I secured the book in my satchel, but when I asked what was going on, he only smiled, bowed, and walked quickly from the dining hall.
    I unwrapped the package late that night. The words “Open the Folds!!” were scrawled on the notebook cover, which gave off a faint odor of opium. The sticky, yellowing pages were covered with a minute, seemingly impenetrable scrawl. Like a printed circuit or a magical grimoire, the indecipherable density of these bug doodles signified . When I returned to the States, a microscope confirmed my suspicions: the scrawl was a text, written in English, and employing a curious variant of the arcane Chinese art of microscopic calligraphy.
    The author himself turned out to be no less arcane, though in a manner far closer to home. His name was Lance Daybreak, and a subsequent call to a Southern California pop historian corroborated his claim to be one of the first surfers to hang around the Santa Monica pier in the late 1940s. All Daybreak’s assertions about his stateside activities checked out. After getting his B.A. in archeology from UCLA in under two years, he did a long stint as a merchant seaman and treasure hunter. In 1965, he enrolled at Stanford, where he was working on a thesis that combined Maturana’s cybernetics with Nagarjuna’s