With the MDMA ‘family tree’ of compounds granted subcultural legitimacy
through work like Alexander and Anne Shulgin’s PIHKAL (or Phenethylamines I
Have Known And Loved: A Chemical Love Story, 1991 ) or Nicholas Saunders’ oeuvre
(including E for Ecstasy and Ecstasy, Dance, Trance and Transformation), and with
therapeutic folk-lines traced through psychotechnologies like yoga, isolation tanks
and meditation techniques, E is said to possess ‘a quality of gnosis, of access to a
wonderful secret’ (Reynolds 1998:410). Regarded by one therapist as ‘penicillin for
the psyche’ (in Beck and Rosenbaum 1994:89), MDMA is also thought comparable
to Nepethe—the mythic drink of the ancient Greek Gods which induced a ‘state of
transcendent ecstasy [which] temporarily dispels our psychic darkness, filling us with
the light that heals’ (Eisner 1994:137). Satisfying contemporary desires for instant
self-actualization, for discount enlightenment, MDMA accelerates the arrival of
perfection, quickens the knowing, enables ‘neural tuning’ (according to Takahashi,
Chapter 7) and installs a dial-up connection to an advanced global consciousness
which Rushkoff calls the ‘Gaian neural net’ (1994:115). In this popular story, the
techno-rave spiritual cyborg establishes contact with a neuro-digital network.
Depending on your pill of choice, you might even crack the Matrix. Successful
negotiation of the neo-network promises ‘E-volution’, a path, a way, a groove, a
circuit with more than passing resemblance to the inner alchemical journey which,
through all of its pitfalls and perils, promises bliss for the lonely avatar.
Return to the sourceThis fantasy of merging with something greater than one’s self is detectable in a
further cluster of narratives which emphasize enchantment or more pointedly,
reenchantment, through connection or reconnection to a source, to a sacred power.
As the reconnection or remembering of the source implicit in such stories also
catalyses self-perfection, the getting of wisdom, it is apparent that they too possess a
gnostic trace. Yet, by comparison to the vectors of Cyberian techgnosis—replete with
body-effacement and drives for self-immortality—the micro-narratives of ‘return’
suggest processes that, while not at all technophobic, are congruent with the
recognition of a chthonic heritage. Inevitable crossovers notwithstanding, while
ascensionism inclines toward New Edge cargo cult, re-enchantment implies a
Romantic revivalism, variously disillusioned with modernity patriarchy and
institutional religion. It implies a pantheistic re-sacralization of the self and world. If
there is a Millennium here, it appears more approximate to an Arcadian revival than
an Extropian Golden Age. Those seeking the ‘return’ may be practitioners of magic,
borrowers of traditional and indigenous iconographies, in possession of a desire to
move closer to the sacred, to court the mysteries via clandestine dance and digital
surrealism, to harmonize with the ‘source’. Nature (often construed as the inner
self), the female, the body, tradition, the indigene are here all homologically
authentic and accorded hierophanic value—that is, are expressions of the sacred.
In expressing desires to reconnect with ‘forgotten tribal roots’, these narratives
employ atavistic tropes. While this might explain the nostalgia manifested, for
24 GRAHAM ST JOHN