they are recreating timeless environments and reconnecting with natural forces’
(Hill 1999:100). Influenced by Goa psychedelic full moon parties and the UK feral
sound-system tradition, these gatherings are often held in open-air locations (where
dance floors are positioned in bushland, forest, beach or desert), celebrate celestial
events and seasonal transitions (e.g. moon cycle, solstices, solar eclipse and other
planetary alignments), and are attended by a large cross-section of the dance
community, including pagans, travellers and other practitioners and affiliates of a
techno-Earthen spirituality who may or may not consume psychoactive alterants.
Hosting intentional ‘Trance Dance’ rituals approximating Keehn’s paean to
‘transform energy into higher gradients and radiate it back out into the world’, these
events incorporate fluorescent décor, fractalized mandala projections, altars, chai
tents, totemic installations, sacred geometry, earthworks, large speaker stacks
positioned at the cardinal points and psytrance—with a seductive syncopated
rhythm using ‘ethnodelic’ samples (e.g. didjeridu, djembe, sitar) together with an
assemblage of psychotropic lights and visuals. Sonorous and sensual, sometimes
opened with permission ceremonies conducted by indigenous custodians or through
blessing rites, such events are celebrated as ‘no spectator’-style odysseys with a
celebrated climax at sunrise.
Following the first SF Full Moon party held by British expatriates Wicked sound
system (incarnated from Tonka sound system) at Baker Beach in March 1991 (see
Push and Silcott 2000:54–8), new spiritual dance collectives emerged on the West
Coast, and then elsewhere across North America. The most influential of these has
been southern California’s Moontribe, which formed in Los Angeles in 1993,
holding regular full moon parties (Twist 2002). For instance, Moontribe’s Gaian
Mind, held in January 1997 (Perring 1999:23–4), celebrated a’six-pointed star’
formation consisting of an alignment of all the planets, the sun and the moon.
Koinonea, who have facilitated trance events called ‘2012' since 1996, claim they
are ‘dedicated to bring healing to the planet through sacred dance ceremonies [by
employing]...ancient rites using modern day technology, hoping to reaffirm the
bonds of connectedness with each other, the planet, and the spiralling galaxies’.^34
Having led a dance ritual at Four Quarters InterFaith Sanctuary of Earth Religion in
Artemis, September 2002, Philadelphia psytrance collective Gaian Mind are
proponents of a dance-based eco-spirituality:
The energy of modern electronic dance harnessed by pagan spirituality and
ceremonial settings joins the tribal traditions of our ancestors with the living
tribal traditions of today. The result creates an experience of spirit that unites
our common heritage as children of this planet.^35The Consortium of Collective Consciousness (CCC) publicize the theory of
evolution proposed by Judith Anodea in The Wheels of Life (1987), which sees
humanity currently evolving into the Fourth Chakra Age—that of Air, which means
an awakening consciousness. Converging in San Francisco a year after an
inspirational Goa beach experience in 1993, the CCC are definitive. ‘We dance for
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