Travelling from their base in Canada, down through the US, Mexico and
Guatemala, to Costa Rica, Mycorrhiza’s annual Timeship Terra Gaia caravan is
committed to ‘creating a web of energy to protect and sustain Earth, aiming at
increasing awareness of our interdependence with the natural world’. The collective
takes its name from ‘the largest living organisms in the forest’. Mycorrhizae ‘act as a
vast underground web to help sustain the forest. Mycorrhiza is a symbiotic
association that forms protective strands around the roots of trees, forming a dense
energetic network throughout the forest soil’. As ‘an underground energy network
that sustains’, they are the ‘human macrocosmic reflection’^42 of a fungus whose role
in forest ecosystems was earlier valorized by Terence McKenna (see McKenna
1991).
Earthdreaming: from the Isle of Albion to the Red DesertWhile North American dance tribes valorize ancient Mesoamerican culture,
elements of which have been excavated and reconfigured by various popular
scholars, European future primitives like the semi-nomadic Spiral Tribe revere
ancient monuments—especially those at Stonehenge and Glastonbury—as sites of
special significance. Yet, as earlier discovered by New Age travellers, migration by
semi-nomads to these and other significant sites dotting the rural landscape was
perceived by the government as an invasion, a sacrilege. Thatcher was intent on
repelling the invasive hordes populating and profaning the tranquil idyll of rural
England (see Sibley 1997), their wild spatial territorializations precipitating moral
panics and state terrorism. Such was incarnated most famously in the 1985 ‘Battle
of the Beanfield’ (McKay 1996), where 1,000 police routed New Age travellers en
route to their annual Stonehenge Free Festival on the summer solstice. Further
Draconian statutes and domesticating measures followed the Castlemorton ‘mega-
rave’ of 1992, culminating in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994),
which criminalized a lifestyle and immobalized large free celebrations, including
those representative of Earthen spirituality with an electronic soundtrack.
Such repressive measures have been met with intriguing tactical responses. An
infamous creative manoeuvre was manifested in the series of scrap-metal ‘Henge’
installations built by London’s ‘recycladelic’ industrial-sculpture collective Mutoid
Waste Co (MWC). The first MWC Car-Henges were raised at Glastonbury Festival
in 1987, followed by another in Amsterdam (1989), a Truck-Henge in Italy, Tank-
Henge in Berlin and several fixed antipodean installations: a Car-henge at
Australia’s ConFest (1991), Combi-Henge in East Gippsland, Victoria (1997), and
Plane-Henge, raised in May 2000 on Arabunna land near Lake Eyre in the South
Australian desert. A response to English Heritage’s confiscation of the ‘cultural
headstones’ of New Age travellers, the new and diasporic Henges became ‘an iconic
substitute for the real thing’ (Cooke 2001:139), providing a new generation of
travellers with a set design for the performance of wild abandon and rallying points
for cultural and ecological struggle. While public access to the stones during
summer solstice was reinitiated in 2000, under the MWC mantra ‘Mutate and
226 GRAHAM ST JOHN