Boom Festival 2010: Divine Mothership of Trance

Author: Graham St John
Date: Sep 8, 2010
Views: 14020

My eyes open upon a lakeside vision. As I come up, by me sits a woman who might be an Elven princess from epic fantasy a la David Eddings or J. R. R. Tolkien. She bears an uncompromising grin, and I imagine a slight green coronetelle wound about her brow as her gaze is cast across the bight. Sparkling azure eyes are fixed upon the structures on the other side, now fading under brilliant pre-twilight.


I too had been surveying shapes on the Other Side-its contours now also receding from view. For some duration, perhaps fifteen minutes or so, my sensorium had been exposed to vistas of inter-dimensional proportions, remote visions, spectral gifts that played havoc with my normative space-time continuum. Here, lakeside, I had been submerged in a world parallel to the "real". While it is a "world" to which I am unaware in daily life, within the Mothership where The Veils had thinned to a flickering filigree, these worlds had collided.

I had been visited in this duration by hyperspatial emissaries, bearers of gifts presented to me as in a series of objects unfolding in a Long Duree of brilliant coloured patterns; offered Persian-like carpets that rolled out incessantly and self-unfurling banners festooned with motifs that I could hardly understand; unloaded containers evoking God's Tool Box, consisting of countless back-lit panels that opened before me like drawers within drawers within drawers; revealed puzzles possessing morphing shapes and shifting depths like inter-dimensional Rubiks Cubes. I was enticed by a divine strip-tease performed by animate Matryoshka dolls shedding infinite layers of finely embroidered safaran garments the discarding of which never obtained absolute exposure. It was a ceaseless operation, and all I could do was stare in complete wonderment, with my eyes closed, and my mouth ajar, at the process of revelation. I wish I possessed the mechanism to understand the contents of these gifts, were operating the program to process the data, had installed the wares to recognise the Logos, held the knowledge to reassemble this hyperspatial Kinder Surprise. 

With eyes closed, I had been gazing upon a world parallel to my own, just as she had been gazing across the lake to the other side. We are equally overcome by the wondrous images encountered. And as our vistas merge under a carnival of reflected lights, I see that which grows mesmerising in the faded heat and light of this day.

We are hunkering in the dirt across a small bay of Lake Idanha-a-Nova, Portugal. On the other side lie clusters of bizarre tents and fantastic structures like those found in an oasis of sound and vision to which one has trekked many thousands of kilometers. The structures belong to the zen gardenesque Healing Area: a Puja Tent, Sound Temple, yurts, Sweat Lodges, tipis, mandala meditation and massage therapy buildings.

And more immediately across the bight stands the elegant Sacred Fire stage.

 

Bearing a roof resembling a princely turban, it has been established upon a rise above a fire burning near the water's edge. Its flames are visible on a point of the lake where a puja ritual was held during the Opening Ceremony one week ago.

The Sacred Fire was the scene of a tumultuous orgy of ethno-trance acts last night (including Wild Marmalade, Hilight Tribe and Ganga Giri), the eve of the Full Moon when there also transpired a fire walk. 

We are at the 2010 edition of Portugal's Boom Festival. Founded by Diogo Ruivo and Pedro Carvalho in 1997, the biannual festival has evolved into a sacred site for enthusiasts of psychedelic music, art and culture, who have descended, like us, upon this lakeside site in the Beira Baixa province, from locations around the globe. For thirteen years, Boom has been the venue for the ecstatic and consciousness expanding expression of the Goa vibe (see short film on Boom history): a veritable psychedelic Mothership. And now, here we are, being abducted by the vibe. Behind us, back around our peninsula, abductees are probed by bass, protracting their limbs and winding their heads on another plane, at the Groovy Beach stage, this year a magnificent horned structure built by the people from the Do Lab: (see video).

Back beyond the Groovy Beach, at the crossroads of the festival is the Ambient Paradise, the chill stage purposely built like a decompression chamber with calming LED lights and which at its centre holds a stage with dragon sculptures reclining above a pool of water.

To our right we are captivated, for in that direction lies the Dance Temple.
 

Down in the Temple over the past week we have been treated to sensual wonderments, premiere sounds on the psychedelic continuum, from polished Goa nuggets care of Man With No Name and Psychopod, night sounds of the likes of REV, electrance care of Perfect Stranger, progressive psyvibes manipulated by Zen Mechanics, M-Theory and Flip Flop et al, to soaring morning melodies orchestrated by James Munro and Antix. In this global sacred site for the psytrance community built by Belgian visionary François and with design input from Android Jones and programming of Alfredo Vasconselos, we had been exposed to the work of DJ Dick Trevor who could surely be awarded an honorary doctorate in Psychedelic Science at the Advanced School of Re/Mixing (and who recently played a devastating four hour set at the Ozora Festival - probably the best set to which I've been privileged) and Treavor Walton, founder of California's Moontribe, who, wearing a t-shirt reading "Dance You Fuck" (I needed no such encouragement), not for the first time this season, unleashed a vocal sample care of Israeli duo Quantize which evoked the underlying theme of the year, week and day .... "heavy doses of Dimethyltryptamine".

Allow me to digress. Found in various plants, produced in the human brain (according to Rick Strassman in The Spirit Molecule, the pineal gland), and often smoked ("free based") in a chillum with an effect lasting between 15-30 minutes, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, was spruiked by Terence McKenna as one of the most powerful vehicles for inter-dimensional transit. He wrote in True Hallucinations that its "strangeness and power so exceeded that of other hallucinogens, that di-methyltryptamine and its chemical relatives seemed finally to define, for our little circle at any rate, maximum exfoliation-the most radical and flowery unfolding-of the hallucinogenic dimension that can occur without serious risk to psychic and bodily integrity." While William Burroughs reported traumatic experiences mainlining synthetic DMT at high doses, McKenna was a cheerleader for tryptamines, efforts echoing his personal commitment to spiritual technologies believed integral to humanity's push toward liberation in transpersonal consciousness, and his indebtedness to Hermeticism, the search for the "philosopher's stone" or lapis philosophorum-"nothing less", he wrote in the same source, than "the redemption of fallen humanity through the respiritualization of matter" (1993: 77).

Since the 1990s, references to DMT escalated within psytrance productions-in which McKenna remains the most commonly sampled individual, his popularity proliferating following his death in 2000. Indeed, like a familiar from the beyond speaking on behalf of the multitudes who continue to encounter hyperspatial dimensions, his immortal brogue is stamped all over psytrance productions. For instance, on their debut self-titled album, 1200 Micrograms filter McKenna recollecting a life-changing experience from 1966: "I remember the very very first time I smoked DMT..." ("DMT", TIP.World, 2002). Throughout the decade, artists projected McKenna as something resembling a seer. In 2001, Avihen Livne teemed up with Jörg Kessler and, as Cosma Shiva, producing "In Memory of Terence McKenna" on the EP by that name. The psychedelic dirge invokes McKenna: "vaporize it in a small glass pipe" ... "a shaman is someone who has been to the end, is someone who knows how the world really works" ... "what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is ..." and later the ghost of McKenna speaks in the unintelligible alien tongue he would sometimes deliver in his presentations.

With their material saturated in the effects of DMT and ayahuasca, the Shpongle-inspired ethnodelic outfit Entheogenic (Helmut Glavar and Piers Oak-Rhind) offer a sounding board for McKenna. The opening track on Spontaneous Illumination (C.O.R.N. Recordings, 2003), "Ground Luminocity", heads off into a deep jungle vibe, with bird calls, insects buzzing and water flowing over rocks, all nurtured by flute and warm percussive lines. And like an epigram, the voice of McKenna: "The search for a doorway out of mundane experience .... Nature is the great visible engine of creativity" (Ott's 2005 remix of "Ground Luminocity" [Entheogenic, Dialogue of the Speakers, Chillcode], finishes the sentence: "against which all other creative efforts are measured"). An apparent tribute to the seminal work co-authored by the McKennas, "Invisible Landscapes" begins with the bard: "life is a problem to be solved... its a conundrum. It's not what it appears to be. There are doors. There are locks and keys. There are levels. And if you get it right, somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected." "Twilight Eyes" has a classic orchestral feel, with McKenna averring that "shamans in times and places gained their power through relationships with helping-spirits", and with the line (from I Claudius) "I promise you, you'll dream a different story altogether", the listener is set adrift with McKenna standing on a ceaseless shoreline proclaiming "imagination, really, is the last frontier", while waving the wayfarer off into deep dreamspace.


And now bathed in twilight, I am seated upon the ceaseless shoreline of Lake Idanha-a-Nova, coming up with knowing smiles and nodding heads, and shedding tears in recognition of a permanent impermanence. And like a comic book magi of sacred compounds attired in crinkled Flower of Life pajamas and appearing majestic against the fading light, before us dances nanobrain, our hyperdimensional adventure tour guide. "Acceptance", "love" and "peace" are the words he'd repeated earlier before dispensing an alien brogue not dissimilar to that channeled by McKenna. It has been a long and tiring week at the pulsating heart of the world's visionary dance festival, but the tide was in on the shores of possibility.

I am compelled to take further stock of the cultural aesthetic in which we are implicated. This is a festival culture whose music has been, for at least fifteen years, quite literally smudged with DMT. While attempting to locate the first DMT-influenced track is probably futile, plunged into the Blakeian-infinite which they sought to resonate, The Infinity Project's Mystical Experiences (Blue Room Released, 1995) is likely to have been partially influenced by DMT. The line "I met an alien with a blue aura" (from "Blue Aura") is as proximate to DMT-space as Mary Poppins is to nanny duties. In 1997, the legendary Danish mind experimentalists Koxbox went "Searching for Psychoactive Herbs," the ultimate track on their Dragon Tales (Blue Room Released), an inspired album cleaving away from the astral-planes drifters hallmarking the Goa tradition. With the track "D.M.Turner" (a tribute to author of The Essential Psychedelic Guide, D. M. Turner who drowned in his bath in 1996 after injecting a serious dose of ketamine), it appears that their search had not been in vein.


Forming the group DMT in 1998, members of the Goa trance royal family Raja Ram, Graham Wood, Greg Hunter, Johann Bley and Martin Glover produced the track "DMT" (Dragonfly Classix, Dragonfly Records). But it was Shpongle's landmark Are You Shpongled? (Twisted Records, 1998) that had sung the ode to DMT. With its calypso bassline, "Divine Moments of Truth" features Raja Ram divulging his experience in DMT-space: "it was like a gigantic creature, that kept changing shape".


Over the next ten years and more, references to DMT-space proliferated in music and cover art, in visionary art and event design. Whether in the work of Carey Thompson, whose gateway installation the DMTemple became, in 2006, a prominent feature at festivals in Europe and the United States, including Turkey's Soulclipse, Sunrise Celebration, The Glade and Burning Man, as well as Boom (a variation of which featured at Boom this year), or in the music itself, DMT had grown legion.


The gateway concept has been especially appealing. Within the visionary arts and music community, DMT has been associated with a movement towards a state of grace, a reconcilement to one's own physical demise, an encounter with ego-death and indeed mortality itself. Shpongle had the measure of this on Nothing Lasts ... But Nothing is Lost (Twisted 2005) on which McKenna had the final word. On "Exhalation" there's a break in Raja Ram's flute and McKenna eventually exhales: "Nothing is lost..." The track "Nothing is Lost" from the same release is both a dirge sung for McKenna and an acceptance of impermanence, offering his master's voice: "Nothing lasts... nothing lasts. Everything is changing into something else. Nothing's wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is on track. William Blake said nothing is lost and I believe that we all move on." In this revelatory mode inspirants are challenged to find peace with the ultimate truth, to accept their inevitable complicity in the cycle of life/death. "Life must be the preparation for the transition to another dimension", explained McKenna on "Molecular Superstructure" from the same album. With the expansion of personhood enabled by DMT, and with the now pervasive work of Alex Grey a popular means of expressing comfort with mortality (see especially his painting "Dying"), the barrier that separates life from death for us moderns grows ambiguous.

 

But inside the 2010 Boom Festival, upon the edge of abduction, just where was all this heading fifteen years after The Infinity Project's Mystical Experiences?

Blue Lunar Monkey's "Mysterious Xperience" (Beyond 2012, 2008) spruiks like a carne: "it starts quite quickly and there's quite a strong rush ... and there's quite a display of geometric, kaleidescopic visual imagery". But then it grows introspective in ways expected upon a ride in an amusement park: "I think what may occur with DMT is that it opens specific doorways, which are otherwise closed. And through those doorways it is possible to make contact with external freestanding kinds of real experiences". By 2009, the door to eternity seemed to have been left ajar. Hujaboy's formulaic full-on "Liquifried" (VA, Planetary Service, Mechanik, 2009) offers American comedian Joe Rogan's condensation of McKenna and Strassman: "it's called dimethyltryptamine. It's produced by your pineal gland. It's actually a gland that's in the center of your brain. It's the craziest drug ever. It's the most potent psychedelic known to man, literally. But the craziest thing about it is it's natural and your brain produces it every night as you sleep. You know, when you sleep, during the time you're in heavy REM sleep and right before death your brain pumps out heavy doses of dimhttp://www.chaishop.com/add_contentethyltryptamine." At this juncture, like a carne barking in a fairground midway, Rogan's rant seemed to be on a high frequency play-loop. Thus, on "Freakstuff" (A Spark of Light, FX System), Brazilian Arthur Magno (aka Fractal Flame): "life is a massive fucking mystery. And there's only a few different ways to really crack below the surface of that mystery. And the best way is psychedelics." The same bark had been used by Hujaboy, accept that he decided to include "and the heavier the psychedelic, the better." Mood Deluxe permitted Rogan another breathe: "And guess what? No one's dying from psychedelics. All our thoughts on psychedelics are all based on bullshit propaganda, that you heard about people, you know, going crazy and losing their minds. You're not gonna go crazy, you're gonna go fucking sane" (on "Stealthy Fungus", Divine Inventions, Liquid, 2008). An audio-billboard for the red pill, "DMT Molecule" by Mister Black includes material from the same monologue: "you should all smoke DMT and join my cult mother fuckers!" Rogan even made an encore on Fractal Flame's "DMTrip": "you take this shit and literally you are transformed into another fucking dimension." And by the time Israeli duo Reshef Harari and Adi Ashkenazi (aka Quantize) arrived, any subtlety, subliminality and mysteriousness appears to have vaporized. Their "Dymethyltryptamine" [sic] (Borderline, Echoes Records, 2009), begins with the filtered voice of McKenna repeating "DMT" which quickens next to the pulse before Rogan bursts through with the new black: "heavy doses of dimethyltryptamine."

You can almost smell the bravado, perhaps even thicker than the pungent vapour of DMT itself. But while some of this smacks of braggadocio as producers and DJs compete with one another for hardcore user status, the significance of this sampladelic tsunami should not be underestimated, for the writers of psychedelic sonic fiction (psy-fi) are channeling the zeitgeist. Whether in private alcoves by the beach or suburban terraces on summer afternoons, in special blends optimised for group sessions and indeed for the dance floor itself, DMT is the new black-if by which we understand "black" to be the equivalent of an inter-dimensional portal through which one vibrates in a depth-shifting coat of electric colours, and through which one grows connected to the ever-at-hand-albeit-illusive mysteries, the numinous that captivates one with an intrigue that fuels daily life, and fires a recognition that death and life are not unambiguously separate.

Over the past few years, this recognition has grown ever proximate care of changa, a DMT-blend first prepared and popularised in Australia, and now smoked on dance floors around the world. This short-lasting preparation, has inspired other DMT-enhanced leaf blends which may include, for instance, pau d'arco, damiana, pink lotus, calea zacatechichi, lions tail, calendula, passion flower-the latter being a MAO inhibitor rendering the experience like a "smokable ayahuasca" (see article on changa by Jon Hanna) and has even inspired an effort to establish psytrance as a "religion".

Changa may be rooted in McKenna's 1997 speaking tour of Australia. In his talks at various events, McKenna shared the wisdom that DMT could be harvested from alkaloids in local Acacia, and local psy-fi artists acknowledged the significance of the wattle, the national floral emblem (and local designation for Acacia). On "Burning Point" (Sun Control Species-Unreleased, 2004), Australian artist Drew Davidson (Sun Control Species) drops a McKenna sample pungent with the acrid vapour: "The national symbol of Australia is the wattle. It's an Acacia. The Acacia ecology of Australia is jammed with DMT." The experience in DMT-space (especially the sonorous chirping of insects) had an early impact on trance music production in Australia, notably Space Tribe's 12-inch Ultrasonic Heartbeat, which features "Cicadas on DMT" (Spirit Zone Recordings, 1996), and later the music of Insectoid. If Aldous Huxley had articulated that mescaline afforded a trek into the "Antipodes of the mind", the "psychological equivalent of Australia" where "we discover the equivalents of kangaroos, wallabies, and duck-billed platypuses-a whole host of extremely improbably animals", replete with exotic birdlife (kookaburras), insects, didjeridu and Aboriginal songlines, "Insecticide" and "Tribedelic Nomads (Animistic Mix)" (from Insectoid's Groovology of the Metaverse, WMS Records, 1998) might have been the soundtracks to the antipodean trek from the Antipodes. "New Vistas" offers the pertinent sample to this remote viewing: "I feel that I am merely an agent, giving your some keys, which have been given to me, to pass on to you. These keys are to unlock doors out of your present prison. Doors opening in on new vistas. Doors beyond where you are now." This material reeks of tryptamines and offers echoes of the experiment at La Chorrera in 1971, on the subject of which the McKennas had written in The Invisible Landscape (1975: 109-110): "Because of the alien nature of the tryptamine trance, its seeming accentuation of themes alien, insectile, and futuristic, and because of previous experiences with tryptamine in which insectile hallucinatory transformations of human beings were observed, we were led to speculate that the role of the presence was somehow like that of an anthropologist, come to give humanity the keys to galactarian citizenship". The national floral symbol of Australia seems to have been ingested, and the keys to the tryptamine palace handed over, in further work, such as the various artists producing on the Demon Tea label, whose compilation titles Oozie Goodness - The Eye Opening Elixir (1998) and Not My Cup Of Tea (2001) offer insight on this development.

At the lakefront laboratories downstream from these developments, we are intrepid Australians  communing around a blend of our national emblem presided over by the alien anthropologist nanobrain. The blend is what he styles nanga, a potent changa derivative also dubbed aussiehuasca. It contains Peruvian Banisteriopsis caapi vine shavings which serve as an MAO inhibitor, and DMT "coaxed from Aussie acacialoids by alchemical maestros". As he informs me, "50/50 percentage ratio by weight, mixed with intent and charged with love ... vibrate to integrate, BOOM!"

Out here upon the frontiers of experimentation, we are in proximity to a transnational cult of seekership in which participants are exposed to new sensorial possibilities care of pungent blends and potent derivatives of changa ready-made for an interactive and inter-dimensional dance floor experience. McKenna had touted DMT as the fastest route to the Otherword which he characterised as "hyperdimensionality" or "hyperspace". As Otherworldly events, as hives of consciousness, psychedelic festivals expose participants to something akin to a Mystery School in Hyperspace. While none of this constitutes formal ritual, nor formal education, at Boom's Dance Temple we can read all about it in the music, and smell it in the morning air. We can see it in the spindly dance steps of our fellow Temple worshippers hailing from a multitude of countries, and we feel it shaking hands with God under a misting system at 148 bpm.

With yet another promo for DMT, and Strassman's book, take Swede Wizack Twizack's (Tommy Axelsson) "Spirit Molecule" (Space No More, 2010). The effort to uncover this "strange chemical" and understand its capacity to replicate an experience identical "to events to come after life", should not be undervalued. Opening the door to a psychedelic fairytale, "Spirit Molecule" sails off the map of terra-cognito to relate "the secret history" about which trance multitudes might approve: "since the dawn of time, man has used psychedelics. From the ancient myth of Adam and Eve until today ... From the Eleusian rituals ... to modern day ayahuasca parties, every society has used psychedelics".

Speaking of mystery cults, a few days back I introduced a presentation by Chiara Baldini, my galactic sister (with whom I share a Dreamspell galactic signature: Yellow Planetary Seed).

 Chiara had been on site some two and a half months assisting in the preparation of the Liminal Zone, Boom's educational arena. Part of an amazing bamboo structure called The Drop (which also included Boom's performing arts space, the Theatroom), the Liminal Zone has evolved into a significant portal of consciousness expansion, replete with ecological principles and visionary art, and which this year has been physically embraced by a Visionary Arts Gallery featuring work from, among others, Android Jones, Amanda Sage, Xavi and Carey Thompson (this years Arts Director).

Chiara had also become, over this period, an embedded historian, writing pieces for the Boom website, such as this essay exploring the significance of Shiva and Dionysus in Goa trance. She has also produced a chapter investigating the cult of Dionysus in contemporary psytrance for the collection I recently edited The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance. Her presentation "Boom vs Eleusis" was an entertaining and insightful speculation concerning the Mysteries of Eleusis and their contemporary equivalent. Connections with Eleusis, the two millennia long ancient Greek festival of initiation to the cult of Persephone and Demeter, have been repeatedly drawn within contemporary psytrance, especially among those who seek to return to states of connectedness and intentional ritual they perceive have been lost or forgotten.

It might be argued that the Boom Festival itself exemplifies this loss of direction or vision. While there may be a connection between the kykeon (the barley-derived drink knocked back by fasting initiates at Eleusis on the final night of the festival before they were exposed to the mysteries inside the Telesterion) and LSD-25 (whose psychoactive properties derive from alkaloids in the fungus ergot which may have parasitised the barley drunk at Eleusis), it could surely be argued that, unlike the mystery cults of ancient Greece, there is little evidence at Boom of singular mythical authorities whose stories govern the lives of its festal population. Also, with the prevalence of dodgy drugs, and with the proliferation of cocaine (at least that which is sold as "cocaine") and questionable "MDMA" and other substances, liminars enter this arena with a high degree of risk. And not only that, with growing commercialization (e.g. Boom is selling coca-cola in 2010), along with the gangs of thieves ransacking tents on the final night of the event and throughout the festival, is it any wonder that critics have vent their spleens at the Boom organisation? Opponents have long included those who mount and attend Anti-Boom, an off-party situated across the lake from Boom for years? This year, Anti-Boom would actually be shut down by police after the first night of operation when they launched sonic salvos, like Boom-breaking audio fireworks, from their pirate enclave across the lake. 

But for all the bitter broadsides, beauty, wonder and intention is in bountiful supply on the shores of lake Idanha-a-Nova. Over in the Healing Zone, there are multiple daily workshops, for instance, on sound healing, water practice, Qigong, meditation, yoga, sweat lodges, etc. And down in the Dance Temple individuals and crews of nationals from a multitude of states and altered states converge to conduct personal rituals of transformation, an exposure to Otherness rarely achieved elsewhere. It brings tears to your eyes, as it would to my Finnish companion on a bus back in Lisbon the day after. Tears of joy welled in his eyes as he recounted his first exposure to the Temple a week before, when he wept openly. These moments of transit neither possess nor require elaborate description or explanation, other than that the liminars habituating the torrent of bass and adrift on the mesmerising melodies within the Temple's Funktion One set up might announce little more than that they're having "the shit". But we needn't even measure this experience against the (limited) vocabulary supplied by participants, but by the preparations that those who descend upon this site in central western Portugal undertake to enable their exposure to the Mysteries. They make pilgrimage from all across the world (see Day One entrance video from BoomTV), participants from scores of countries, many hauling their buses, their funky motor homes and their arses great distances. For instance, I've had recounted to me tales of those who've trekked (ie. walked) across Europe to arrive at Boom, and others who have cycled. What's more, they expend considerable effort in acquiring the resources by which their exposure to Otherness is assisted.

No, this is not the Telesterion at Eleusis. There is no unifying mythic system by which participants are able to interpret their visions or translate their altered states. Not a ceremonial occasion, in the shamanic-anarchist style advocated by McKenna the Dance Temple facilitates a multitude of private encounters with the numinous, multiple states of entrancementl. And there are no heirophants, just as there are no singular types or sources of consciousness alterants-no unifying symbols, such as the head of barley a la Eleusis. But among this literal "alphabet soup" of research chemicals-which clearly retains the "meat and three vege" of LSD (commonly signified by the image of its synthesizer, Albert Hofmann), cannabis sativa (whose leaf is a ubiquitous symbol of altered states), psilocybin (with the image of the mushroom axiomatic to alterity) and MDMA (the "love" drug)-we find that DMT has evolved as an authority unto its own, whose private and public teachings are extolled in the sonic mythography and visionary artistry of our times. For the initiated, the numinous affect of usage precipitates reverence, and entire cults of adoration develop in which this plant matter and its psychoactive fruits are venerated. With DMT, since these "fruits" derive from plants with relatively indistinct features, their adoration is rarely expressed in iconography, but is known in its pungent vapour, the olfactory memory of which signals one's own connection with the Other World, and to those with which one has been vaporised.

Disembarking upon this beachhead of possibility, gazing into the Otherworld, it occurred to me that DMT does not enable access to The Mysteries, like a puzzle to be re/solved, a game to be completed, a lock to be opened, a story to conclude. Indeed, solving mysteries is the conceit of the old scientific model. As we subject the unknown to possession, measurement and control, mystery grows ever more illusive, receding from view like the Elves vanishing to Valinor. And it further occured to me, above the clouds on a flight from Lisbon to Budapest post-Boom, that the puzzle-like objects I had been presented with in a nanga session on the shores of Lake Idanha-a-Nova were not to be "solved", cracked open, uncovered, but to be recognised as signs of the greater Mystery in which I was implicated, in which we were soaked-fragments of the universe in which we're a part. Here, the gift is that recognition.

Many thank yous to my travelling and camping companions, especially Nano, Chiara, Aleaha, Paris, Damo, along with Marco, Karl, Graziella and all the organizers and participants of Boom 2010, all accomplices at the scene of the sublime. Special thanks to Dick (Maestro) Trevor. Thanks also to Boti at whose apartment in Budapest I completed this. Parts of the story are extracted from my forthcoming book Global Tribe: Spirituality, Technology and Psytrance.

Graham St John

Shots by Roberdo

 


http://edgecentral.blogspot.com/2010/09/boom-festival-2010-divine-mothership-of.html

Author: LonoRogs / Date: 10.05.2012 15:34:05


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