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This chapter demonstrates that festival attendees at Coachella, Earthdance, Burning Man, and other such youth festivals experience spirituality as they at once resist the market economy and accommodate to it. Spiritual identity is produced in the struggle with and against individuals’ consumer identity, an attempt to escape the economic practices of capitalism and also to adapt them. The spirituality of these festivals is not experienced as a separate sphere from economic transactions, then, the chapter argues, but, rather, as something antagonistically related to and also dependent on markets. The economic and the spiritual are critically interlocked.

The medieval foliate head has proven to be a powerful icon in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the US and UK, not only of human interdependence with non-human nature but also of sexual and racial boundary crossings among humans. This decorative motif known popularly as the Green Man – a human head made of leaves, or with vegetation sprouting from it – was almost ubiquitous in English and Western European church sculpture from the late eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. These aesthetically intricate, affectively intense images represent bodies that are strange mixtures, weird amalgams: they picture intimate trans-species relations. Drawing on recent theories of queer inhumanism, this chapter analyses uptakes of foliate head imagery in festivals (including Burning Man), sexual subcultures (the Radical Faeries), and literature (Randolph Stow’s Girl Green as Elderflower), focusing particularly on traumatic postcolonial contexts out of which new queer worlds are imagined.

This chapter argues that there are nontheistic religions in the West whose claims are compatible with naturalism. Many are religions of energy. This energy is ultimate, optimizing, impersonal, and natural. Although it cannot be worshiped, it can be aroused, directed, and shaped. The energy religions thus involve tools and techniques for the therapeutic application of the ultimate energy to the self. They are technologies of the self. In this chapter, attention is focused on four new types of energy religion. These include the religions of consciousness (e.g., the New Stoicism, Westernized Buddhism); the religions of vision (involving the ethical use of entheogens); the religions of dance (e.g., religious raves); and the religions of beauty (e.g., Burning Man).

“I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,” exclaimed the British polymath Charles Babbage to his colleague John Herschel one day in 1821, as they worked together to correct a batch of mathematical tables riddled with errors. With that outburst, according to his memoirs, Babbage envisioned the first computer. The machine he conceived was colossal, a cogwheel behemoth comprising twenty-five thousand parts, planned to measure seven feet long and to weigh fifteen tons. The British government invested ￡17,500 in it—the cost of twenty-two new locomotives—yet after eleven years of hard labor Babbage’s unfinished difference engine was abandoned. But what if construction had succeeded? That’s the question sci-fi writers William Gibson and Bruce Sterling asked a century and a half later, their answer serving as the premise of The Difference Engine, a novel in which the information age overtakes Victorian England. As a work of speculative fiction the book was a deep meditation on the interdependence of technology and society, destined to have an intellectual impact nearly as significant as Gibson’s breakthrough Neuromancer, in which he introduced the idea of cyberspace. Also like Neuromancer, arguably the first cyberpunk novel, The Difference Engine was to spawn a vast subculture. Steampunk, as the cult was dubbed, was actually named several years before The Difference Engine was published, in a 1987 letter to the genre magazine Locus, penned by the sci-fi writer K. W. Jeter. “Personally, I think Victorian fantasies are going to be the next big thing, as long as we can come up with a fitting collective term,” he wrote. “Something based on the appropriate technology of that era; like ‘steampunks,’ perhaps.” James P. Blaylock, another writer of these “Victorian fantasies,” seconded Jeter’s suggestion in the following issue, and the subgenre was sufficiently established by the time The Difference Engine was published in 1990 that the Locus editors decreed it “ not steampunk, because it is a work of hard sf.”