Rave Culture and Religion

is referred to by some doofers as ‘candy-flipping’—a practice also associated with
mainstream raves (Saunders and Doblin 1996)—and is widely esteemed.
Interestingly, underground psychedelic psychotherapists have also recommended
pre-dosing with MDMA to enhance subsequent LSD experiences (Stolaroff 1994,
1997).

Social relations

The structural continuities found in these rituals are not arbitrary; rather, they are
present in all the cited instances because they are effective in inducing ecstasy at the
collective level. These ecstatic elements appear to orient the participants in the
various rituals toward a similar functional goal—renewed and intensified group
identification at an immediate level. This is precisely the condition that Victor
Turner (1969) referred to as communitas. Paradoxically the collective entheogenic
ceremonies also accentuate awareness of the individual self—Schaefer speaks of the
‘quest for the self’, and Fe rnandez remarks on ‘greater possibilities of the self’
accessed by Banzie—but these excursions into selfhood occur in parallel to a
reciprocal atonement (in the more archaic sense of that word) with the matrix of the
communal self. While visions also constitute a powerful form of experiential
transcendence for the individual, it is as affirmative and shared signs of community
that entheogenic ecstasies are primarily valued. Throughout the accounts we
repeatedly find references to related ideas of one-heartedness, moving as one, or
being as one, membership, and the ‘uniting of the souls’ based on shared, ecstatic
experience of the numinous, and especially in the sublime mysterium fascinans facets
of the numinous. The motif of communality has been one of the more recurrent
elements in discourses about raving (Hill 1999; Jordan 1995; Nolan 1998) and
there exists a general consensus about the centrality of experiential transcendence—
sometimes conceptualized as ‘dance-delirium’ or the ‘implosion’ or ‘disappearance’
of subjectivity among ravers (Hopkins 1996; Lyttle and Montagne 1992):

The overall impression is of losing oneself or transforming oneself through

shared, multifaceted sensation.... Here again rave rituals may be a sign of the

times, representing fascination not with forces but with metamorphosis....

Metamorphosis occurs as the self is destabilised, disembodied and ‘dispersed

across social space’.

(Hopkins 1996:15)

Occasionally parties are described in terms of the Great Mother, Gaia, or womb,
with the bass rhythm of the music being compared to the foetal heartbeat. When a
party is likened to the womb there is also the implication of a shared sibling status
between ravers, which raises a symbolic ‘incest taboo’, thus attenuating sexual
tensions and replacing them with familiarity and friendliness. Images of infants and
young children were a recurrent motif of early rave promotional fliers (Akland-Snow
et al. 1996). These figures may signify the pre-sexual, hedonistic and polymorphic

ENTHEOGENIC DANCE ECSTASIS 137