of ‘ancient, natural traditions of ecstatic dance’ amongst a marginal African-
American subculture, a ‘liberation of the loins and soul through music and dance’
(Apollo 2001: issue 34) later transmitted to rave and its progeny.
In expressing the desire for a new relationship to the natural world, rites
performed also articulate a post-Christian return to something likened to the
Eleusinian Mysteries. Indeed, preference for hallucinogenic substances like LSD —
similar to the consciousness-altering substances thought to have been used in the
Eleusinian initiation rites (Hofmann 1997)—generates resonance. For example,
with each gathering including a ritual performance associated with a celebrated
Oracle Card—like ‘the Gypsy’, ‘In the Garden’, ‘the Senses’ or ‘the Elements’—the
Pacific Northwest’s Oracle Gatherings are dedicated to ‘call[ing] upon new ritual
experiences through dance based on the wisdom of our culture, creating: sacred
space, transformational experiences, art with intent’.^8
The strong revivalist sensibility in the rave imagination is consistent with the
mood of cultural and spiritual recovery characteristic of Neo-Paganism. Inhabitants
of post-rave are not so much heir to unchanged traditions, but are, as are many
pagans and practitioners of Earthen spirituality, innovators, syncretists, sampling
from existing traditions, cobbling together reinvented traditions and adopting new
technologies in their veneration of nature. While many techno-pagan commentators
allude to a generalized mythos of the ‘tribal gathering’ (see Fritz 1999:171), some
reconstructionists are informed by particular historical periods, cultural icons or
regions, and others, more likely, work with a multiplicity of influences: e.g.
Celticism, Druidry, Goddess Spirituality, Hinduism, the Mayan calendar, and
perhaps fusing the ideas of Rupert Sheldrake, Buckminster Fuller and Terence
McKenna. Ritual syncretism, for instance, is evident in RTTS, where ‘a crystal
symbolising cosmic energy is hung above [the dance floor]...spring water from
Glastonbury is ritually sprinkled, and American Indian sage is burnt to cleanse the
energy’ (Saunders et al. 2000: 170). And the popular practice of remixing religious
iconography, such as statues of the Buddha, Aboriginal didjeridus, images of Hindu
deities and subverted Christian motifs, sometimes raises the ire of cultural
authorities.^9
Techno-pagans mount varied strategies of re-enchantment and re-sacralization.
Eschewing rational materialist worldviews, they harness and exploit psychedelic,
audio and computer technologies in preparation for what McKenna called a ‘cosmic
journey to the domain of Gaian Ideas’ to be retrieved and fashioned into art ‘in the
struggle to save the world’.^10 Participating in what Davis (Chapter 13) deems
‘spiritual hedonism’, they sometimes form discrete techno-tribal outfits like Spiral
Tribe, Moontribe or Cosmic Kidz, which practice a dissolution of human and
nature, performer and audience, creator and created (see Green 2001), are
sometimes accomplices to ‘techno-primitivism’ of the kind Fatone (Chapter 10)
identifies in her research on the appropriation of a gamalan orchestra by elements
within the San Francisco rave scene, and sometimes enter the global circuits of
Fraser Clark’s zippy ‘Shamanarchy’ (see Chapter 11), or that which D’Andrea
(Chapter 12) calls a ‘freak ethnoscape’. With such dimensions in mind, rave’s fusion
26 GRAHAM ST JOHN