Nova Festival was a psytrance gathering, i.e. a "psychedelic" community playing "trance" music to share that transcendent state in what is conceived as a sacred ceremony. Very different from, say, Reading Festival 😳
Purists might frown upon achieving transcendence via "artificial" means rather than months of isolation, meditation, starvation, whatever... but as I say, I believe that this is how humans discovered it in the first place and that this was what gave rise to worship of some kind, as well as fostering true community (Nova was part of a global tribe, Universo Parallo, that began as tiny gatherings in Brazil). Look up e.g. soma, the Eleusinian mysteries, peyote, bhang...
But one of the things about the psychedelic experience is that you cannot sweep anything under the carpet mentally or emotionally: you'll be confronted with it clearly, and will find yourself easily disposing of neurotic lifetime habits and other bullshit such as status-driven bullshit, snobbery, and other cultural toxins.
For example, I will forever be grateful to the ex-BF who introduced me to all this, but as soon as we "tripped" together I couldn't help but notice he was a complete wanker 😬 ... something that would normally have taken me years to work out (I was accustomed to abusive relationships)! 😂
What seems to have happened with religion is that the authorities who wanted to dominate and exert social control removed the sacrament but kept the ceremony. And installed gatekeepers (vicars, priests, imams, gurus, rabbis, monks...) to mediate our connection to the divine.
For my sins, for a few years I edited a journal on theology. And OMG, the endless arrogant posturing of these tired old academics! The sneaky digs at each other's research! Pages and pages and pages of struggling to impose a spiritually meaningful interpretation onto confusing and contradictory Bibical (and other) text, written centuries apart for different purposes. Now THAT's when I'd really like to have shoved a handful of mushrooms down everyone's necks and said "OK, now go off and write this again." 🫢
The other thing about psychedelics is that it's nothing like getting drunk. Unlike alcohol, it makes you more lucid and more sensitive/connected to everything around you (which is why jungle tribes use them to heighten awareness for hunting). So when you read that the festival-goers at Nova were "on drugs" you need to bear in mind which drugs, and what the effects were, and how this must have made the sudden plunge from heaven into hell all the more traumatic.
The original flyers are no longer available online, but the Universo Parallelo site describes a similar festival later that year as:
The Universo Paralello festival is much more than a simple psychedelic trance music festival – it is an international gathering of people from different styles and cultures, all together to celebrate Peace, Love, Union, and Respect. The festival features several stages but also a bunch of transformational activities. It offers visitors workshops, performances, holistic therapies, artistic and cultural ceremonies, and many more, aiming to give people the tools so they can become more aware and help in the path to transcendence.
In my dreams, I imagine how different things would be now if Hamas and the Gazan civilian mobs had come to Nova in peace and just... joined in.
So, anyway, this weekend is going to be rather "interesting" here in the UK. I'm so glad I'm not in the police and live miles from London. Here's hoping for a peaceful outcome.