Rave Culture and Religion

11

Techno millennium

Dance, ecology and future primitives

Graham St John

[O]nly a mass idealistic fashion within Youth Dance Culture, swelling

up from the gene-pool itself and now planet-wide, can produce the

sufficiently colossal fractal mutation in Humanity’s lifestyle necessary

for it to survive and go on to rave among the stars.

(Fraser Clark, from The Book of RavElations)^1

Where technician meets tradition. With ancient ways and modern

means; we pilot the temple, to the land of the gods.

(Gaian Mind)^2

Throughout the 1990s, psychedelic trance accelerated the interfacing of technology,
ecology and spirituality. Psytrance became a transnational context for the growth of
a planetary ethos among youth, for the evolution of eco-spiritual commitments
expressed and performed through dance. This chapter charts these developments,
uncovering a pattern of revitalization associated with the fin de siècle—a period of
unfettered optimism fed by cyber and digital developments adopted and
championed in the cultural response to an accelerating environmental crisis. It
documents an eco-millenarian dance movement rising out of global centres and
marginal sites throughout the 1990s. The creative amalgamation of contemporary
technologies and reconstructed religiosity is shown to have manifested in the
cultural output of influential ‘altered statesmen’, and is communicated through the
rituals and epochal events of new ‘tribal’ formations emerging within a global
technospiritual youth network.
In the early 1990s, humanity, so the consensus seemed to be, had built up a
momentous head of steam. With the implosion of the Soviet Union, the emergence
of post-apartheid South Africa, and the prevalence and utility of computer-mediated
communication, David Dei, founder of Cape Town’s alternative magazine Kagenna,
observed that ‘the most important social manifestation in the history of humanity’ was
taking shape. A complex counterculture consisting of a ‘fragmented rag-tag nation of
reality technicians, cyber operatives, pagan evolutionaries, trance guerrillas, and
Zippies’ were adopting ‘African Shamanic Technology’—a hardware thought