clubs. Such events may be primal sites, like the original London acid house parties;
unlicensed operations in disused industrial spaces, like the Blackburn warehouse
parties (Hemment 1998); events facilitated by the early San Francisco Rave
Community (Silcott 1999: ch. 2; Hill 1999); independent ‘hardcore’ events such as
the original trance parties in Goa and proto electro-hippy ‘drifter communities’
(Cohen 1973:97) at pre-crackdown Haad Rin on Koh Phangan, Thailand
(Westerhausen 2002: ch. 9), Bahia Brazil, West Malaysia or Australian bush doofs
in northeast New South Wales; intentional ritual gatherings like LA’s Gathering of
the Tribes; guided interactive rituals like those facilitated in New Mexico by the
Circle of Tribes; or proto-zones within larger festivals, intentionally remote from the
festal parent culture. In environments where a psy-trance sensibility seems to
predominate, the consumption of LSD and ‘teacher plants’ (e.g. psilocybin, DMT
and Salvia divinorum) is not uncommon. Possessing a pharmacologically
‘progressive edge’ (Reynolds 1998:406), events like Exodus Cybertribal Arts Festival
in northeast New South Wales—where chillout zones possess an ashramic ambience,
and ‘healing’ areas, specialist ‘herbal’ stalls and panels on entheogens and zine
libraries appear—are more likely ‘psychedelic communities’ (Tramacchi 2000), in
which mystical states or primary religious experiences are not only enabled but
perhaps more likely integrated. Many outdoor events are exalted as the ‘primal
point of contact’ (Rawnsley, in Fritz 1999:47), even way stations en route to ‘the
Eschaton’. They are contexts for the experience of trance, the loss of amnesia or
anamnesis,^23 and for the experience of the sacred, or, perhaps more accurately ‘sacred
madness’ which, as D’Andrea claims (Chapter 12), possesses both rewards and
dangers.
It appears that a higher proportion of the population of such events are older and
more widely travelled than that of metropolitan clubs/raves and less preoccupied by
a ‘pleasure principled acquisitiveness’ said to characterize the latter (Reynolds 1998:
425). Having transformed life into ‘a work of the art of sensation gathering and
sensation enhancement’, there are many among their number whom Bauman would
deem ‘paragons and prophets’ of the ‘aristocracy of consumerism’ (1998:70). Yet
what of the phenomenal quality of the ‘peak experiences’ in which Bauman is
apparently uninterested? Participants at renegade parties like those mounted in the
desert by Los Angeles’ Moontribe through the 1990s or Melbourne’s Green Ant are
akin to pilgrims who have often sojourned from a great distance—gravitating
toward communitas with fellow liminars, receptive to visions, metamorphoses and
spiritual healing (Hutson 2000:44).
Yet there is more to these events than the ‘peak experience’ or trance-state, as they
sometimes require a high level of participation—the kind of personal sacrifice
embodied in the rule of ‘no spectators’. The in situ sacrifice—of self to the party—
generates a sense of fulfilment and fraternity, of reward, unlikely to be achieved
simply by turning up and dropping an E. As Pini (2001: ch. 5) conveys, ravers
‘work’ hard for the freedom to ‘lose it’ on the dance floor, but such a ‘peak
experience’ requires a different order of sacrificial commitment. The widely held
view from those who contribute to the planning, websites, logistics, décor, altars,
36 GRAHAM ST JOHN