The Spiritual and the Revolutionary: Alternative Spirituality, British Free Festivals, and the Emergence of Rave Culture

Abstract

This article examines the sacralisation of festival and rave culture. Beginning with an exploration of the British free festival as a site of countercultural ideology and alternative spirituality, it traces the spiritual and ideological lines of continuity between the free festivals that took place with increasing frequency in Britain throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s and the rave culture of the 1980s and 1990s.