I want to make one more initial point. Despite the anti-authoritarianism shared
by Deleuzians and underground ravers alike, it is crucial to emphasize that the BwO
is, in many cases, a product of tradition. Perhaps better characterized as transmission,
tradition is a consistent feature of spiritual claims: even the most anarchic and
disruptive spiritual dynamics are often couched in terms of teachers, sacred texts,
and initiations. This is certainly the case for the Taoists, for the Tarahumaras Artaud
met, for the Sufi masters who may have inspired the tradition of courtly love, and
even for Castaneda’s simulated studies in sorcery. The BwO is certainly constructed,
but that construction itself participates in transmission. Prophets of religious
transcendence may proclaim novel revelations, but the closer one sticks to the
powers of the earth—and that is what we are talking about here—the more likely it
is that your line of flight emerges from an abiding spiritual matrix, however mutant.
One might legitimately argue that within the contemporary spiritual subcultures
of the West—postcolonial, technologized, thoroughly disrupted by modernity—
traditions of practice are either unavailable as such or hopelessly fabricated out of
problematic and commodified desires for continuity and “authentic wisdom.” In
general, that may be true. But this condition does not obviate the fact that
procedural elements of these traditions—the “algorithms” that drive the praxis of
Taoist energetics, yoga, tantra, and even alchemy—have been transmitted by
individual teacher-bodies into bohemian, psychedelic, New Age, and “alternative”
subcultures. In addition, these subcultures, despite their provisional and open-ended
character, invariably fabricate their own lineages, traditions, and networks of
transmission. In other words, the contemporary production of the BwO, at least in
the context of exotic mystical practices, drugs, sacred sex, and trance dancing,
constitutes a “tradition” within the West, one that, while essentially anti-
authoritarian, is passed on and refined as much as it is constantly reinvented.
The question of tradition interests me because Goa has become the site, both
mythical and historical, for a sort of tantric hand-off between an earlier generation of
Western trance dancers and today’s psychedelic ravers. Whether or not Goa is the
core source of rave spirituality—and we are right to resist such origin stories — the
freak colony has emerged as a sacred birthplace, a font. The fact that this story is
partly a construction of desire does not make it a mere myth. In a roundabout way,
the narrative surrounding Goa in itself affirms the spiritual aspirations and tantric
power of today’s global psy-trance scene—because, for all its rhizomatic
multiplicities and cyberdelic futurism, the scene demands a backstory for its
embodied illuminations, a context-building tale about initiation and transmission.
For it is in invoking such a tale that tonight’s BwO can encompass the eternal return
of its progenitors, and that something rather ancient can find its dancing feet again.
Profane illuminationAt the tail end of 1993 I took a one-stop hop from New York to Bombay, before
transferring to one of India’s recently deregulated flights to Goa. At the airport
I caught a taxi up to Anjuna Beach, which my Lonely Planet guidebook told me was
256 GOLDEN GOA’S TRANCE TRANSMISSION