ABSTRACT
In the last two chapters, we have been focusing on “trance formation”—the ritual of trance dancing to electronic music at raves that generates deep experiential states and opens access to the sacred. For many ravers, this experience can be incredibly powerful and revelatory. However, while trance formation is clearly at the core of the rave phenomenon, this experience does not remain limited to the dance floor, but spills over into the lives of ravers in a variety of important ways, irrevocably and profoundly transforming them. The rave experience has been articulated into a spirituality, philosophy, and worldview that makes sense of it, contextualizes it in a larger perspective, and translates it into a code for living, a way to actualize its potential in the concrete details of daily life. Moreover, this transformation is not simply an individual experience, but one that has spawned a multitude of rave communities around the world and, indeed, a global rave culture that in turn has had an impact on mainstream culture. From trance formation to transformation—this trajectory exactly follows the model of religious development proposed by the ‘history of religions’ school of religious studies that I mentioned in the introduction. In this approach, the human encounter with the numinous, the religious experience, forms the basis for subsequent developments that lead to the organized external forms that we call religion. Religious experience is the underlying substratum for all cultural activity and serves as the foundation for culture in general. As Charles H. Long notes, “Religion is thus understood to be pervasive not only in religious institutions, but in all the dimensions of cultural life.” 1 In terms of the rave scene, then, the religious experience of trance formation on the dance floor at raves forms the basis for the subsequent transformation of ravers in the rest of their lives and leads to the organized external forms of rave spirituality, rave philosophy and worldview, rave lifestyle, and rave culture. In this chapter, we will examine each of these in detail.
