This lockdown has been beneficial at least in this respect: It has bestowed upon us a generous amount of time so desperately needed for a thorough introspection on one seemingly simple, yet foundational question: who we are. It is the kind of question that sets in motion the cycle of inquiry which in turn lifts the floodgates of another question and just as essential: why we are.

Not without the guidance of a certain heavy-weight philosopher from Sorbonne, we have come to the awareness that in soul searching – in our desire to look more deeply for the facticity and purpose of our existence – we cannot be limiting ourselves to the fragments of our story that lie scattered around the dance floor. To get the whole picture we should peer well beneath the surface. This is precisely what we have done so that today we can report our discovery: The genealogy of our club Scorpios dates back to much much further than 2015 when we opened the agora. Who might have thought!

By defining ourselves as a "gathering place meant to galvanize the artistic, spiritual and social life of our community" which means, in anthropological terms, as a "ritual ground for the propagation of culture within (and beyond) our tribe", the history flies us on its imaginary wings all the way back to ancient Greece where it catapults the research to the metaphysical peak of Mountain Olympus. There we encounter its two resident and most remarkable deities: Apollo and Dionysus – both are artists, in their arts so distant as the artist of order and the artist of chaos could be; and yet they can do nothing worthwhile without each other.

This ancient myth is the foundation of Neotribalism, a theory that postulates that human beings have evolved to live in tribal society, as opposed to mass society, and thus will naturally form social networks comprising neo-tribes. As such one new tribe, dispersed throughout the world and coming together under the favorable constellations of stars, Scorpios finds and adopts this myth as a fitting prelude to its own story.

Before it settles comfortably around our ritual fire with a view to infinity, this epic story takes you from the realm of myth to the domain of real social phenomena. It guides you through a number of historic scenarios – from the "all power to the Imagination" uprising in Paris in the 60's to the current communal burns in the desert of Nevada – all important for understanding how unique are the times in which we live. The times of the tribes...

So protracted and so convoluted as it plays out, we welcome you as part of this cultural heritage.

Every age – any span of historic aeon – has its peculiar ambiance, an intellectual and spiritual atmosphere which enfolds humanity determining its modes of thinking and ways of being for a time. It is suffused with great many ideas, of all kinds. Some are solid and sturdy as marble, grounded as cornerstones in the conceptual edifice of social systems in operation. Some are as vague as mist filling up vast chambers of our dreams. Some are downright absurd – so incongruous they may easily qualify as genius master-visions, way ahead of their time. You can take the word of Einstein for it: "If at first the idea is not absurd, there is no hope for it". Ostensibly silly, these ideas require one to make a bold leap toward the transformation that they promise without much foundation.

Yet other ideas which hang in that cognitive and spiritual air of an epoch are simply mute – misunderstood, dismissed, forgotten. One finds plenty of them in the works of Michel Maffesoli, a French philosopher whose intellectual journey aims at the rediscovery of values and cultural roots, at the retrieval of bygone wisdom and the reawakening of its dormant truths. He brings to life these comatose notions and practices, sedated by modernity, invigorating them in a way that imbues them with new meanings, tailored to address important sociocultural issues of our current zeitgeist and to make a difference for our future.

It is no mere coincidence that our music program is called Rituals, our mind & body sessions are arranged as Ceremonies and some components of our menu refer to Alchemy. And it is not just ours in the global domain of club culture. The broad appeal and near universal currency of this anthropological vocab – and, most importantly, that of the ancestral lore which underpins it – is largely due to the influence of concepts emanating from The Time of the Tribes, one of Maffesoli's scholarly books published more than thirty years ago, in the late 1980s, in which the author sets out his theory of new micro-social formations.

These neo-tribes are not tribes in the traditional anthropological sense, as those populating the Amazon, each with its own language, culture and territory. Neither are they exactly social units such as our families, political parties or professional associations which have some definite meta-purpose, membership criteria, rules of conduct, and continuity. They are affinity groups of an ephemeral tenuous nature, best understood as various social games. We ambulate between these groups partaking in their activities not as functions converging toward some finality (biological reproduction, conservative revolution, or a higher payoff), but through role-playing according to our fancies and for the sake of playing itself. A neo-tribe takes shape when one signs for a meditation group session in the Inner Garden program at Scorpios, or when you check in for a week-long interactive experience at one of the theme camps comprising the Burning Man scene, in which everyone at once is both an author, actor and spectator.

As opposed to the functional units of a systemic society (where an educational system dovetails into an economic system steered by a political system), these neo-tribes constitute the network of empathetic sociality and have indefinite parameters and loose inter-connectivity. They come into being and maintain their presence not on the force of reasonable motive, but on the energies of instinctive attraction. Their composition is amorphous. What they lack in focus, structure, organization and coordination is compensated with an abundance of enthusiasm and sheer joy of participation. Your feeling serves as the criterion for choosing one tribe over another. How you feel is also the ultimate measure of the quality of exchanges within these tribes – the basis for deciding whether these interactions should be pursued, as well as the degree to which they should be abated or intensified. These neo-tribes – hubs in the network of empathetic sociality – are compact but numerous. They are nomadic, dispersed, open-ended, apolitical, unofficial, anti-authoritarian, aesthetically organized, empathetically intertwined; all antithetical to the centralized hierarchical social totalities feeding and prospering on religious and political dogmas, which in the end divide more than unite.

Although internally very loose and transient, these neo-tribes do gain and maintain a certain degree of coherence. The neo-tribal bonds are based on no utilitarian considerations (business interests, professional networking, etc.,) or some meta-ideologies (national destiny, racial imperatives, gender agenda, emancipation of the humankind, etc.,) but rooted in deeply personal and very particular experiences, distinct sentiments, discrete passions... Or even by virtue of just happening to be "in the right place at the right time" in the company of strangers, as when gathering by chance around a ritual fire in the jungle, sitting through an Ayahuasca ceremony and seeing the rest of the world melting away.

The accent in this form of organization is placed on what unites, rather than what divides. The rigidity of the individual self-image mellows out with the boundaries separating one from another dissolving into a mutual awareness that we are only links in the great chain of being, parts of the macrocosm in which everyone and everything have their perfect place. The relations become tactile and focused on the moment. The time of the tribes is a phase in which aesthetic and holistic thinking comes to the fore replacing the analytic, pragmatic and instrumental model of modernity with its institutions losing the ability to unify society or even solve its most pressing and basic problems.

Maffesoli's preliminary research for the volume, which commenced in the 1970s, brought the philosopher to the realization that with the system of ethical values, the framework of interpersonal relations, the operations of bureaucratic machinery and the power structures of modernity in deep decline, as they had been since around the 1950s, we would soon have to find ways to reconstitute our social world, to make it function more in accord with natural processes. We would, perhaps, embrace our nostalgia for the days gone by and look for guidance to organizational principles of the distant past and the lifestyles of peripheral cultures. The age of postmodernity would thus be the era of Neotribalism – if not entirely, then at least in some important respect.

Nothing comes from nothing. Both as an optics for observation of the current social phenomena and as a prism for imagining the world anew, the theory of Neotribalism is predicated on the view that the project of modernity is over. Indeed, it has been quite a long time since this grand enterprise was conceived, way back in the 17th century, and heralded as the age of pure reason, infinite progress and total order. Given our global milieu, material conditions, technological settings, subjective experiences, the way we make love and war today, we cannot pretend that we share much in the way of the modernist outlook and aspire as much to the normative ideals formulated in the wake of the Renaissance which in its many aspects was just an extension of the Middle Ages.

Some sociologists, Maffesoli included, trace the epochal shift from modernity to postmodernity to as early as the 1950s (a good few decades before the term postmodernism gained common currency within the academy and wide purchase across various cultural fields) pointing out a number of signs of the new times.

One such sign was architecture moving away from orthogonality and strict functionality of buildings – a sign indicative of a more aesthetic conception of the world. Coming to the fore, it was the kind of aesthetics which was now much more experimental and humanly playful in spirit, assuming the plurality of diverse forms, or what is called citations. The buildings now could, to much acclaim, be part classic and part vernacular in style; be rooted in the local traditions and to the same degree incorporate elements of indigenous cultures from afar. Suffice it to note in passing that Scorpios is one such example of architecture that keeps postmodernity and postmodernism in focus as its plural – and as much neotribal – character is expressed through multiple citations to the local Cycladic as well as distant African and Asian sources.

Another hint of the epochal transformation was the May 1968 student uprising in Paris, an iconic symbol of counter-cultural vitality, one of the first outbursts of "merriment in the chamber" and one of the most consequential events. It also most clearly exemplifies the notion of subterranean centrality, which is key to understanding Neotribalism as an alternative to the institutional forms of social organization.

This notion reflects skepticism as to the centrality of the state in the domain of social life. Formal institutions cannot be seen as the primary arenas for the development and implementation of social policies. It is based on the argument that these institutions are run by the elites, which are unrepresentative, out of touch and self-serving; they are slow and largely unresponsive to social demands. Societies are much more complex organisms than the diagrams, charts, graphs and plans drawn by bureaucrats; and the relations within them are much more intricate than the schemata upon which the institutional machinery operates. Most of these high-level institutions are bland simulacra producing nothing but media spectacles, as pointed out by Guy Debord: the grand galas of power, pantomimes of politics, carnivals of justice...

Even when these institutional forms cannot be dismissed as utterly useless, their sphere of influence is limited, covering just the tip of the floating social mass, and their effect, regardless how loud it may be, is only skin-deep. Much of what is taking place in societies, what glues them together internally (like no abstract reason or formal institution can do) is happening outside their sphere and very much despite their ceaseless methodical workings. It is the subterranean domain of informal and erratic sociality that assures the perdurability of life in society. Think of this underground centrality as a dynamic network of nodes of real-time activity, face-to-face interactivity, tactile connectivity, organic attachment and identification. It is a motley and cacophonous circuit with manifold vectors of endless communication – its richness is impossible to rationally comprehend and less so to administer. This buzzing and blooming subterranean sociality at work in the deepest layers of any society bestows, like the subconscious/unconscious part of the mind, strength, vitality, and effervescence to social life. Compared to the institutional matrix, this enormous subdomain is more participatory and more responsive and hence deemed more legitimate as the center of authority. This "conservatory of the popular savoir-vivre" does not allow itself to be seen except in certain paroxysmic situations.

As far as the theory of new tribes is concerned, the significance of the student rebellion lies in the paradox that the 1960s was the period of peace and prosperity in France and that the rioters were mostly fine well-adjusted youths attending prestigious schools and coming from nice bourgeois families – all perfectly set for a bright future, as one might think. Although the rebels could not quite articulate their interests, grievances and demands, their resolute and energetic stance against the establishment, hurling rocks at the police and being tear-gassed, clubbed, and jailed in return – for weeks on end – was sufficient evidence to conclude that the project of modernity was on fire, the cathedral of reason, progress and order was burning down and no bits of furniture in it could be saved.

It was suddenly all too clear that the stock of ideological treasures was depleted and the bourgeois norms of the past had lost their hold on the future. The new generation no longer recognized the modernist values and norms as guiding light for new life. They were now opting for creativity instead of work, the present instead of deferral, imagination instead of reason, expression instead of decorum, effervescence instead of stability, peculiarity instead of normalcy, vitality instead of power, integrity instead of prestige, for generosity as a new form of solidarity, for new ways of being-together…

The breakaway from modernity – from all its fixed pyramidal arrangements and orderly operations as well as from the totalizing, homogenizing and normalizing discourses which upheld these fixities and regularities as the most rational configurations ensuring the most optimal outcomes – was especially desperate in the matrix of economic life. It was also the most problematic escape.

It was a desperate resolve on many counts. Given the efficiency of modern production methods requiring highly specialized and machine-like labor, the youth of the new era – with their values shifted from work to creativity – were hardly the cohort to fulfill the requirements of that robotic scenario. Returning from the barricades to become the cogs in the wheels was the least of their grandiose ambitions. It could not have been otherwise for students of Michel Foucaut, Gill Deleuze and other postmodernist philosophers who held enormous sway over the hearts and minds of the new generation.

The new generation was more inclined to keep their identities fluid, plural, cross-cutting, relative, situational, ever-expanding, transcending the logic of the unitary or the binary (white vs. black, etc). They would have rather opted for everything, than something; or for remaining an ever open question to themselves and others. They would certainly have not settled for some pre-given category and ascribed role – marital status, class, gender, ethnicity, profession, job title... They would have rather been Nothing – as empty, centripetal and implosive as the void of Zen.

This new attitude explains why in the theory of postmodern tribes the very concept of identity – one's being this or that once and for all – is dismissed as an obsolete modernist construct. Neotribalism replaces this dead-end concept of unitary unambiguous identity with the open-end notion of polysemantic polyphonic persona which can most aptly be described as guise.

In the neo-tribal context, the "who I am" question is no longer essential. The "who you are" answer no longer conveys "deep" truths. You are now a matter of style. Detached from the major ideologies which engender homogenization and standardization of individuality, your deindividualized personality is a perpetual masquerade. Your life is an ongoing art performance calibrated for an open variety of aesthetic effects. Your persona is simply the amalgam of numerous theatrical roles. Neo-tribes offer empathic support for those who literally "wear many hats", who are always eager to try on new masks, strange clothes and deviant self-presentations, thus being infinitely different persons.

For the new generation, escaping modernity was a troubled endeavor, since back then postmodernity had not yet matured in all its vital facets – there were no tribal scenes or niches to withdraw into, no spaces promising existential sustainability.

There were only two options in the 1960s – Liberalism and Socialism – which, from the standpoint of Neotribalism and in economic terms, were neither opposites nor genuine alternatives. These colossal metanarrative models shared essentially the same conception of the world: to standardize, economize, mass-produce, and mass-consume – and both were already beginning to fracture under the weight of their own logic. Both modernities were already breaking apart, but not enough to open cracks wide enough to seed and cultivate new forms of sociality – no ground to cradle aesthetic relationships or neo‑tribes whose memberships rest on emotional pacts (not to be confused with contracts reeking of rubber‑stamp ink).

A handful of such communities, scattered and fragile, could not provide a true escape. Only a myriad – a dense constellation of tribes – could sustain the endless migration that keeps identity fluid, preventing it from being locked and ossified in one or a few. Without this multiplicity, the infinite lines of flight comprising a continent of separate existence, the promise of endless identity transformation collapses back into the very rigidity it sought to overcome. It took decades for Neotribalism to mature and emerge as a radically unique social phenomenon of the postmodern times, of all times: the times of the tribes.

Having traced the rise of neo‑tribes as fluid, aesthetic communities born from the decline of modernity’s rigid structures, it becomes clear that this movement is not emerging in a vacuum. Rather, it draws upon deep cultural memories, mythic archetypes, and historical precedents that continue to shape its form.

The foundation of Neotribalism is anything but a blank slate. Its tenets are deeply rooted in the cultural tradition which stretches – through Nietzsche, among other monumental philosophers – all the way back to ancient Greek mysticism. Neotribalism is grounded in the enduring tension between the rational and the instinctual, emerging as a new sociological paradigm built upon this age‑old binary opposition personified by two great mythic figures: Apollo, who embodies the power of the conscious mind, and Dionysus, who represents the psychodynamic forces of the unconscious.

This tension is not at all a negative one – not in the sense of one element negating the other. Rather, it is compensatory and restorative: each side balances the opposite momentum, generating a wealth of intensities and synthesizing a cultural entity that is dialectically complete and profoundly vigorous – whether this duality operates within a single individual or across an entire civilization.

After all, Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus, the ruler of all the gods on Mount Olympus. Apollo is the god of discipline, rational thinking, instrumental reasoning, sober calculation, detailed planning, and meticulous order; Dionysus, by contrast, is the deity of intoxication, revelry, ecstasy, and chaos—but also of the inspiration and enthusiasm without which nothing worthwhile in culture can be accomplished, poetry has no charm, and all art sinks to the level of drudgery.

It should be noted in passing that in Maffesoli’s reinterpretation of this classical dichotomy, Apollo is replaced by Prometheus, who – in positive opposition to Dionysus – symbolizes the same rational and constructive tendencies as Apollo. The distinction is crucial: Prometheus is not a god, but a titan whose name literally means ‘foresight’. Celebrated for his intelligence, he sees humans not as helpless creatures, but as beings who can themselves create, innovate, and rise. His act of stealing fire from the gods and passing it to humanity was a profound gesture of trust in human potential. By exchanging the divine Apollo for Prometheus, Maffesoli suggests that the project of modernity (with its faith in practical reason, technological progress, and social order) is not absolute, but contingent upon human enterprise. Maffesoli thus strips rationality of its divine sanction, exposing it as a creation of human ambition and inventiveness rather than cosmic decree.

Setting these interpretive nuances aside, where the Apollonian principle disciplines and delineates, the Dionysian principle expands and unites. The god of many joys and transgressions, Dionysus speaks directly to the multitudes, stirring common emotions and primal urges. His call is more persuasive, more absorbing, and ultimately more powerful in shaping and sustaining human communities. Today, there is no need to invoke mysticism: science itself confirms that human behavior – especially collective behavior driven by peer influence and social contagion – is governed far more by emotion than by reason. Though reason is exalted as humanity’s highest faculty, modern neuroscience reveals that when logic clashes with desire, desire almost invariably prevails.

While certain schools of thought – especially those shaped by modernism – champion Apollonian values, neotribalism, as a postmodern vision, raises Dionysus high upon its banner. The god of rapture, emblem of pleasures lived in the immediacy of the present, becomes a liberator when life – over‑planned, over‑managed, excessively controlled – slips into stagnation and decay. The god of many faces, embodiment of versatility, Dionysus arrives to shatter the shackles imposed by Apollonian rationality. He descends to restore vitality when existence risks losing its ecstatic dimension, becoming too methodical, coherent, predictable, and one‑dimensional. He appears as a savior when the flow of being hardens into rigid structures – mechanical, utilitarian, coercive – each antithetical to free‑form flourishing. Within Dionysus burns the theia mania, the “divine madness” that ignites spiritual vision and fuels artistic pursuits.

The forces that balance one’s inner life are the selfsame energies that organize and sustain the collective sphere. One may go further to suggest that human society is held together not so much by well‑structured and reasoned social contracts with fine print, but by raw Dionysian energy. Without this underlying surge, communal existence ceases to be a living organism and deteriorates into sterile bureaucracy or mere utilitarian exchange. It is precisely through shared passion and ecstatic participation that the social fabric retains its fluidity, ensuring that society regenerates rather than decays.

This inspiration manifests across a vast spectrum of human gatherings: from religious rituals and popular carnivals to micropolitical stances and local social movements. All of these exemplify affective communities – neotribes organized around various forms of aesthetic ethics where, in contrast to the rigid ethics of cognition, individuals discern the good through shared feeling and lived experience.

It is this spirit that animated the ancient mysteries of Greece and Rome – such as the Roman Bacchanalia – where wine (consecrated as the embodiment of the living god), rhythm, and dance dissolved social constraints and personal inhibitions. Through these trance-inducing rites, human beings were liberated from artificial order, re-rooted in the limitless cosmological whole from which all existence flows.

One finds much of this spirit today in the Nevada desert during the famed annual burns dedicated to art and community – events where aesthetics and ethics are celebrated in equal measure, and where social distinctions between people dissolve in the process. At a certain point, participants abandon themselves to emotions that run deeper than the ego‑reactions of ill‑conditioned individualism: feelings of openness, inclusion, and prosociality. In this primordial state of consciousness, they act to benefit one another – helping, sharing, donating, co‑operating, and volunteering – and in so doing, they elevate their gathering to the status of ritual.

Despite the diversity of their circumstances and the plurality of their characters in the everyday world, the burners become one: a tribe, a neo‑tribe, a social configuration that transcends individualism both in theory and in praxis. Here, Dionysian energy reveals itself as the binding force of community, dissolving rigid boundaries and regenerating society through ecstatic participation.

Aesthetics is the hallmark of postmodernity and thus one of the most distinctive features of neotribalism. In the age of tribes, aesthetics overwrites the fixation on politics, which in modern times had served as the axis mundi around which the social world was arranged. The politics of modernity were characterized by the primacy of political and economic structures, entrenched hierarchies, class conflicts, nationalisms with their monumental kingpins, belligerent mass mentalities fertilized by mass media, and the disenchantment of the world – the loss of sacred and metaphysical intuitions.

By contrast, aesthetics as the new organizing principle should be understood in its etymological sense: as shared emotional experience, the bedrock of community and the underpinning of postmodern tribes. Though small and transient, these tribes proliferate as countless interlinked subcultural organisms, multiplying horizontally in all directions. They are subterranean, decentralized, and rhizomatic – expansive networks of resonance and affect – utterly unlike the visible, coherent, and fully integrated mass movements of the past.

Here, the Dionysian spirit reigns: communities are bound not by contracts or rational programs but by intensity, rhythm, and shared passion. Neotribalism thrives precisely because it replaces the monumental rigidity of modern politics with fluid, aesthetic ethics – where belonging is felt, not reasoned, and where the sacred returns in the form of collective ecstasy.

In this new apolitical, principally aesthetic atmosphere of neotribalism, the distinction between pouvoir and puissance becomes crucial, revealing much about the origin and development of neo‑tribes. The first, pouvoir, refers to the power of institutional politics – authority exercised by ruling elites, party leaders, or any podium of command. It is power from above, codified, centralized, and external.

The second, puissance, alludes – borrowing Henri Bergson’s term – to élan vital, the inherent energy of the people. In Creative Evolution, Bergson describes this vital impetus, sometimes translated as the impulse of life, as a hypothetical explanation for the self‑organization and spontaneous morphogenesis of living things. It is the principle of growth, evolution, and creative unfolding.

Yet within the theory of neo‑tribes, puissance acquires a meaning far richer than biological metaphor. It signifies the raw, affective energy that binds communities together – the Dionysian surge of shared passion, rhythm, and resonance. Unlike pouvoir, which imposes order from above, puissance wells up from below, from the collective body itself. It is the force that dissolves rigid boundaries, blurs distinctions, and animates the horizontal, rhizomatic networks of postmodern tribes.

Thus, while pouvoir sustains institutions, puissance sustains life. It is the vital current that ensures neotribalism remains fluid, decentralized, and regenerative, a living organism rather than a mechanical structure.

Puissance is a collective effervescence generated in everyday encounters wherever conviviality is present – whether in a pub, a gym, on a journey, at an illegal rave, at a football match, in a self‑growth therapy session, within a coworking space, or even while shopping. This form of power originates and accumulates in contexts where emotional bonds are formed and reinforced. It arises when people come together for the sheer pleasure of being together. One feels it in the air when sociality becomes an end in itself – encounters through which a group seeks to establish and sustain its togetherness.

Puissance is the product of cooperation. It gives each person, and everyone collectively, the sense of expanded potentiality. In a sense, it is a subconscious energy, intensifying during religious rituals as much as during raves at Fusion. It is palpable – you can feel it on your skin, goosebumps spreading across the body. It is an energy that refills the tanks and fuels the engines yearning for release from routine and the demands of mechanistic life.

The myriad informal instances of being‑together – these are the moments where sociality emerges. This is a form of sociality in which wealth, social position, erudition, fame, exceptional capabilities, and merits play little or no role. What matters is the shared resonance, the Dionysian surge of collective joy, through which individuals dissolve into a tribe, a neo‑tribe, sustained by the raw power of conviviality.

This is the kind of sociality that thrives on the premises of aesthetic ethics – the art of living that emphasizes getting along and getting by, reinforcing solidarity within tribes and facilitating sympathetic human‑to‑human interactions in a wider social world still largely locked in modernity. Puissance here is not institutional authority but a form of power born of pure interpersonal impulsivity, a subtle yet potent energy that softly potentiates radical social change.

It is the collective effervescence that arises when conviviality becomes the organizing principle, when people gather not for contracts or hierarchies but for resonance and shared presence. In this sense, puissance produces meaning far beyond the pragmatic: it is the subconscious current that fuels cooperation, dissolves boundaries, and opens the possibility of new communal forms. It is both fragile and transformative, a power that does not dominate but animates, ensuring that the neo‑tribes of postmodernity remain fluid, regenerative, and alive.

Neotribalism postulates that human beings have evolved to live in tribal society rather than mass society, and thus will naturally form social networks comprising neo‑tribes – much like those who abandon civilization to join indigenous communities, to become Kawahiva, Palawawn, Ayoreo, or Yanomami. Evidence for this claim can be found in Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, a book that asks what tribal societies can teach us about ourselves as natural and social beings, and about the meaning of life.

One of the stories Junger recounts is that of soldiers returning from the trenches of man‑made hell to the safety, convenience, and comfort of private homes, only to discover that something essential is missing. This missing element is immaterial yet supremely vital. Its absence swells quickly, pressing upon them until it explodes like a bomb: many, unable to sublimate the loss, fall into despair, some even taking their own lives, while others reenlist, drawn back into the mud and blood of battlefields. It is not bloodlust or obsession with geopolitical agendas that calls them back – it is the tribe that is missing, and their tribal nature that summons them.

Tribal life, with its deeply personal and immensely intimate bonds, exerts an almost gravitational pull on us who inhabit artificial, impersonal, atomized, and superficial worlds. The center of that gravity lies deep in our evolutionary past, in our communal nature as a species. To live tribally is to live in resonance, in solidarity, in shared meaning – a way of being that modernity has obscured but not erased.

There are further accounts of this tribal pull in the stories of Europeans settling in America. Benjamin Franklin lamented in his letters that settlers were constantly fleeing to the Indians, choosing to live in their tribes, emulate their way of life, worship their deities, and fight alongside them. Thousands escaped in this direction, while the opposite movement – the Indians coming to the settlers’ towns to become Europeans – hardly ever occurred. Immigration seemed always to flow from the civilized to the tribal. A ‘redskin’ child raised among the ‘paleface’ settlers, taught their language and customs, ‘civilized’ in every way, would eventually run away.

The evidence tells us something profound about human nature. Captives who were ‘liberated’ from the tribes and returned to their European homes were almost impossible to retain. Franklin lamented: “Though ransomed by their friends and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.” Settlers sometimes had to literally tie defectors down to keep them at home. One French émigré, Hector de Crèvecoeur, tried to comprehend this gravitational pull of tribal life: “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.” In his vague supposition, Crèvecoeur was onto something sharp.

Sebastian Junger, in Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, cites the testimony of Mary Jemison, captured at fifteen by the Seneca. When a search party arrived to rescue her, she hid from her supposed saviors. Her explanation was simple: “No people can live more happy than the Indians did in times of peace. Their lives were a continual round of pleasures.”

These accounts reveal the magnetic force of tribal life: its intimacy, solidarity, and immediacy exert a pull stronger than the comforts of civilization. What is missing in the civilized world is immaterial yet vital – the ecstatic bond of belonging, the Dionysian resonance of community. It is this force that makes tribal life not merely an alternative, but a return to something deeply inscribed in our nature.

Although in many ways they are very different social facts, neo‑tribes do share certain fundamental characteristics with indigenous tribes – each if only to an extent. What glues such collectives together from within, and what makes them robust as social units, is their size. Membership in a small community means that all action – even thought‑processes revealed through behavior – are open to scrutiny. Overly selfish, transgressive, or destructive conduct is confronted, corrected, or discouraged on the spot, with other members resorting to ridicule, shunning, or expulsion of the culprits. In the wider world, by contrast, one can get away with almost anything – its cutting‑edge surveillance and total control systems notwithstanding.

Traditional anthropological tribes are closed systems, their membership ascriptive. A tribe is a collaborative way of combating adversity, which is never in short supply in the jungle. You do not choose but inherit your tribal affiliation – through kinship and place of origin – both of which define your rights and obligations. Membership is not a matter of identity but the very condition of survival: rejection or expulsion means perishing in the outer wilds of nature or in the doleful chambers of civilization. The eternal structure of these tribes may even include the spirits of ancestors and kin yet to be born.

Postmodern neo‑tribes, by contrast, are open, fluid, and contingent. Participation drifts, boundaries are porous, and there are no formalized criteria or commitments to fixed beliefs. A neo‑tribe may pursue an external goal, but such purposefulness is secondary and often exhausts itself quickly. What is crucial is the energy expended in engendering, nurturing, and constituting the group as such. Neo‑tribes are formats of being‑together without grand agendas or fixed direction. Sociality for the sake of sociality – this is their essence.

In this status, neo‑tribes effuse a certain affective warmth, that is, puissance. This warmth allows for the loss of self in the group, for the ecstatic attitude, the sense of collective effervescence, immanent transcendence, and shared sentiment. It is this Dionysian surge of resonance that constitutes the true social bond, binding individuals into a living organism rather than a mechanical structure.

“As Bergson observed, ‘The human mind is so constructed that it cannot begin to understand the new until it has done everything in its power to relate it to the old.’ It is true that one may easily relate neotribalism to earlier subcultures such as mod, goth, or punk. These subcultures are, in essence, neo‑tribes – though by now somewhat fossilized. They were exhibitionistic, too much in the face, while neo‑tribes are instead formats of collective disappearance. Off‑stage, off‑center, off‑radar is where things truly happen, and where they truly count. Away is the proper habitat of neo‑tribes. Neither subversive nor conformist, neotribalism is, as Antonio Melechi keenly described in The Ecstasy of Disappearance, a ‘holiday from everyday life and everyday self.’

Neo‑tribes distinguish themselves from other social groups by their fascination with style and image, by their celebration of multiplicity, difference, and contrast. This fascination finds its most obvious expression in designs of appearance and manners of behavior. Given the general trend toward the aestheticization of experience, fashion becomes a particularly strong indicator and the main engine of this trend. Yet in the neotribal paradigm, the question is not how fashion relates to individuality, nor to what degree it fosters individualism, nor how fashion as language promotes a narrative of the self. Nor is it about fashion serving some abstract ideal – fashion for fashion’s sake.

Neotribalism concerns itself primarily with the affectual aspects of fashion. The central question is to what extent style facilitates the feeling of togetherness, how one’s peculiarities contribute to the emotional palette of the tribe. It is an affective sociality whose sole raison d’être is the moment of losing oneself into the ‘social divine’ – the vortex of aesthetic solidarity, the Dionysian surge of collective effervescence. Here, fashion is not a marker of individuality but a medium of communion, dissolving the self into the ecstatic warmth of the group.

Perhaps the most telling example of fashion calibrated for affective sociality is the amalgam of styles filtering through the admittance criteria of the famed Studio 54 – the door policy introduced by Steve Rubell and intended to create a perfect blend of guests inside, essentially a tribe for his nightly party. "It is like mixing a salad," he explained, "or casting a play." Whether guests were dressed festively, radiated good energy, were known as dancers, socialites, or celebrities, everyone in line was expected to bring something to the collective table – and not just anything.

Neotribalism does not preclude individuality – clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, and other devices of fashion remain expressive – but it prioritizes the establishment of wider identificatory ties. It enhances the theatricality of rituals, focusing on the social body as a whole. In this way, neotribalism augments the theatricality of everyday life itself. It fosters new ways of being‑together, offering liberation from the narrowly defined self and communion with the collective body. It multiplies connections and reinforces cohesion, though without obsessing over structure or permanence.

Neotribalism draws together diverse micro‑cultural practices and movements: Afro‑Brazilian possession cults, New Age circles, hacker hideouts, co‑living communities, temperance societies, swinger clubs, eco‑settlements, festival camps, fan‑clubs, colab economy initiatives, community gardens, participatory theaters, clicktivist farms, cooking jams, consumer groups, clans, secret societies, bands, gangs… Each is an expression of successive or overlapping feelings of belonging. One is a member, one is accepted, one participates. One is one of us.
This is the essence of neotribalism: not the assertion of individuality against the group, but the ecstatic dissolution of individuality into the group – the vortex of aesthetic solidarity, the Dionysian warmth of puissance.

Primordial Harmony Collective, Union of Improbable Being, Golden Outcome Summit, League of Divine Brotherhood, Sorority of Inner Vastness, Mystic Solidarity Movement, Association of Reborn Daughters, Seminars on Silent Litany, Saintly Champion Fellowship, Boundless Cell Partnership, Enlightened Neophytes Network, Sanctuary for Globetrotting Vagabonds, Washable Tattoo Consortium, Generous Plea Alliance, Convoluted Void Convivium, Custom Conundrum Community…

These names almost suggest what to do with your life – on weekends as recreational engagements or even full‑time as professions of your own invention. All these tribes are fictions, randomly generated online. Yet rest assured: for every prospective ‘Abyssal Love Coalition’ there is already a ‘Family of Love Community’ in the registry; for every ‘Temple of Transcendental Empathy’ there is a ‘Union for the Enhancement of Mankind’; for every ‘Shrine of Concealed Immensity’ there is an ‘Order of the Solar Temple.’

We live in the times of tribes...