Nomad Codes

patterns Daybreak reproduces from this period show a striking asymmetry, density, and self-similar fractal dimensionality.
    Daybreak reports that the ngHolos were mythologically prepared for this development because of one of their quasi-Manichaean metallurgic myths. While the four elements familiar to the West—air, earth, fire, and water—were considered to emerge from the earth’s eternally fertile womb, metals were believed to be the remains of the Alien God’s semen, which had fallen upon earth following a celestial tantric rite. For the ngHolos, metals were not only sacred but contained the potential “seeds” for a powerful galactic consciousness. Through the slow process of metallurgy, these seeds would ripen into Metal-minds, which were imagined to be (or at least represented iconographically as) colossal grasshopper bodhisattvas. At the end of the world, these beings would shed the material substance of their green-grey bodies until only the metallic shine remained. Millions of these ghostly, angular light-bodies would then combine into a boundless and collective temple that would draw the Alien God back to earth.
    Aieda interpreted the gears of Lumière’s clock as the grasshopper’s mandibles, and the random patterns from the loom as the first stirrings of the Metal-mind. Though a few traditionalists labeled her a heretic, Aieda’s work transformed ngHolo spiritual life. The dense patterns emerging from the loom were magically mapped onto the semi-mythic landscape of the Folds, where they formed an immense and lucid matrix of consciousness known as the “Jewel-net.” Daybreak calls this net “a symphony of interpenetrating mandalas, an immense and luminous enfolded architecture.” The ngHolos came to believe that the Jewel-net maintained its coherence through the automated prayer wheels and the psychic intensity generated by the ngHolo’s most dangerous and esoteric rites: equestrian tantra.
    Daybreak estimates that by the eighteenth century, the Virtuous Ones lived an almost entirely psychic existence on the Jewel-net, their nomadism having shifted from the Karakorum Mountains to the more visionary and abstract plateaus of the Folds. Apparently, just as the myth had predicted, the Jewel-net was growing.
    In the Tibetan regions to the south, the Nyingmapas and the shamanic Bon follow the terma tradition, which holds that the sage Padmasambhava hid hundreds of sacred texts in the earth (and the spirit realm), texts that would only be discovered centuries later by tuned-in lamas (the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead is such a text). Many were encoded in mystical “Dakini” scripts. The ngHolos carried this tradition into the Jewel-net, where hundreds of thousands of encoded sacred texts were uncovered—or “unfolded”—from their visionary matrix: texts of theology, philosophy, history, iconography, sacred geography. Various spiritual beings co-operated to decode these “treasures.” Using a collective form of the ars memoria , or memory palaces, picked up from Lumière or another Jesuit, the Virtuals then stored, swapped, and recombined their termas throughout the ever-expanding Jewel-net.
    The overwhelming amount of this information, combined with the ngHolo’s already intense eclecticism, resulted in radical spiritual anarchy. Reflecting the philosophical shift from transcendent renunciation to immanent becoming, the plateaus of the Folds were no longer considered to be “revealed” forms of spiritual reality, but as spaces created “on the wing” out of the infinite potential of the Jewel-net. Lineages broke down into splinter groups, impartial agnostic “librarians,” iconoclastic magicians, and “anti-monks.” As the Virtuous Ones continued to discover, interpret, and store an increasingly boundless supply of termas , they formed constantly shifting and precarious alliances, frequently struggling with rivals through endless debates or magical “pattern-wars.”
    By the time Daybreak arrived, most of these fierce power struggles had relaxed. The following comments, which “unfold” a number of the ngHolo’s countless mnemonic slogans, describe the more balanced philosophy that developed after generations of nomadism in the Jewel-net. The slogans are in italics, and the text is all Daybreak’s, except for a few of my explanations which appear in brackets. Much of Daybreak’s text remains thoroughly obscure.
    The eye is furrow, seed, and source.
    The eye symbolizes