Rave Culture and Religion

The Book of RavElations: zippy Eschaton

Speaking at the launch of the Zippy Pronoia Tour held at the Wetlands nightclub
in Manhattan on 15 June 1994, Terence McKenna announced that ‘every 50 years
or so, society needs liberation from the forces of fascism’. Fifty years since the end of
World War II ‘a vanguard of liberators has secured a beach head on the east coast of
America, and has begun to work its way inland along the Hudson’.^18 For a man
who once wrote how he anticipated ‘the great gaian dj “strange attractor” mix[ing]
the end game of the second with the opening chords of the third millennium’,^19
zippy imagineer Fraser Clark’s association with McKenna’s cosmogonic scheme had
been well established. In the years approaching Z Day, Clark, the editor of Evolution
magazine (originally Encyclopedia Psychedelica International, Epi) and founder of
London clubs Megatripolis and the Parallel YOUniversity, had been an influential
articulator of the technology/ ecology/spirituality tryst. Coining the word ‘zippy’
(Zen-inspired pronoid pagan) to describe those who disowned hippy-like
pastoralism and embraced the cyberdelic evolutionary possibilities in technology,
and compiling Sharmanarchy in the UK, an album championing England’s
revitalization through a fusion of the house generation and green movement, like
McKenna, Clark evangelized rave as the newest and most significant vehicle through
the end-times. ‘Like the old pagan festivals’, Clark announced in a speech delivered
at Stanford University on 2 May 1995,

we’re all in this together. This is our planet. She is indescribably beautiful,

gigantic. We are atoms of that living Goddess. Personally, I can’t see a better

way to help people to learn a love, respect and reverence for Nature than the

classical open-air all-night Rave. Can you imagine what it felt like with 20,

000 people going for it and actually feeling together, and the power of a

people together...and then dancing the sun up? It is awesome, it is religious,

and it is life-changing.^20

In a communiqué posted on California’s WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link)
conferencing system in May 1994, Clark proposed that ‘any relatively conscious
planeter has at least begun to suspect that the competition-based system within
which human culture is currently operating is incapable of adapting, and needs to
be re-coded’. And since ‘the Sign’ for which we all yearn is ‘that WE, the relatively
conscious, are a hell of a lot more numerous than even WE supposed’, there was
reason for optimism. Thus:

The news is good. Very, very good. I see only one sociological phenomenon

within Western Culture which has any chance of bringing about the required

maximum change in the maximum number of people in the minimum period

of time. UK Rave Culture has been evolving for five years now, and at its

most accelerated, the tribal rave scene has united the raw young idealism and

TECHNO MILLENNIUM 217