You dance with Shakti, refusing climax, among bands of wild youths and
sneaky gnomes.
Your blue throat holds the world’s poisons, its toxins and psychoactive
drugs. Shiva, you are stoned.
Your serpents tongue our spines, fuck inside our cells. They proffer amines,
the gnostic fruits that taste like
no
turning
back.^5Freak transmissionShiva, of course, is Dionysus’ Eastern twin, giving Goa’s patron saint an East-West
doubleness that also marks the psycho-geography of the Indian state. As an Indian
stoner I met in Mysore put it, “Goa isn’t India.” And Goa hasn’t exactly been India
since the Portuguese first colonized the area in the 1600s. Then, “Golden Goa”
provided the kind of oriental luxury that allowed an already waning imperialist
power to really go to seed. Miscegenation was encouraged, and some adulterous
native wives reportedly took to dosing their husbands with datura weed, rendering
the men, as one early account put it, “giddy and insensible” (Collis 1943:38).
Goa remained in Portuguese hands until India seized the region back in 1961,
and the largely Catholic area was still deeply syncretic when beatniks like Eight-
Finger Eddie discovered its beautiful beaches a few years later. By the end of the
1960s, hundreds of thousands of European and American freaks were streaming
overland into South Asia. Though Goan beaches like Calangute and Baga did not
offer electricity, restaurants, or much shelter, they did provide sweet relief from the
overwhelming grind of travel in the East. The impoverished locals, most of whom
practiced a Western religion and were already used to Europeans, were largely
accepting. Every winter a motley tribe of yoga freaks, hash-heads and art smugglers
would gather, until the growing heat and the threat of the summer monsoon pushed
them further on. Going to Goa was like going home for the holidays, and the freaks
celebrated: Christmas, New Year’s, and especially full moons.
Many of these transients were seekers, willing to weather the rigors of Indian music,
meditation, and yoga in order to taste sacred forces. But, as heirs to bohemia, their
desires for exploration also encompassed drugs, orgies, and general freakiness. This
mixed mode is what I characterize as spiritual hedonism. Here the West’s secular
affirmation of the body and its pleasures, most certainly including aesthetic
experiences, is no longer strictly contrasted with religious forces. Instead, pleasure
itself is refined beyond mere sensuality, ramping up into an outré spirituality hungry
for immediacy, energy, weirdness, and unchurched gnosis. Because of its taste for
intensities, spiritual hedonism even includes room for strict asceticism alongside
indulgence and a variety of “middle paths.”^6
Gil the DJ—who goes by Goa Gil in the West—was one of Goa’s original spiritual
hedonists. Gil grew up in Marin County in the 1960s, and fell in with Family Dog,
ERIK DAVIS 261