The Last Trance Left to Us

A stadium goes dark. Fifty thousand strangers raise their phones like votive candles. Then the bass arrives. It is not merely heard. It is inhabited. Thousands of bodies begin moving with eerie unanimity. A sociologist sees crowd behaviour. A neuroscientist sees entrainment. An anthropologist, however, might recognise something older. Ritual possession wearing modern sneakers.

Trance Before Entertainment

For most of human history, societies treated trance not as pathology but as infrastructure. Shamans drummed themselves into altered states beside fires older than agriculture. Sufi dervishes spun until the self blurred into motion. Temple chants stretched for hours because repetition itself was the technology. Rhythm dissolved the border between the individual and the tribe. Civilisation did not merely tolerate collective ecstasy. It engineered it.

Music does not merely accompany collective identity. It manufactures it.

Modernity claims to have outgrown such enchantments. The bureaucratic state prefers citizens who are alert, measurable and psychologically contained. We distrust crowds because crowds can become mobs. We medicalise visions. We flatten mystery into chemistry. Public ecstasy survives only when disguised as entertainment. A concert ticket. A festival wristband. A football anthem roaring through concrete bowls of light. Yet beneath the lasers and sponsorship banners, the ancient machinery remains almost embarrassingly intact.

The Shared Nervous System

Music works because the human brain is less solitary than we like to believe. Rhythmic synchronisation aligns breathing patterns, heart rates and motor responses across groups. Neuroscientists call part of this process entrainment, though the word feels too clinical for what concertgoers actually report. They speak of dissolving into the crowd. They speak of becoming larger than themselves. They speak of losing time. The language sounds less like consumer satisfaction and more like religious testimony.

This may explain why nearly every civilisation imagined the divine musically before it imagined the divine philosophically. Krishna carries a flute. Biblical heavens ring with choirs. Sufi traditions whirl toward God through sound. Even warfare depended on rhythm. Marching drums transformed frightened individuals into coordinated force. Music does not merely accompany collective identity. It manufactures it.

The Commercialisation of Ecstasy

Critics dismiss such experiences as escapism. Stadiums, they argue, sell synthetic belonging to lonely consumers. There is truth in the accusation. The modern entertainment industry monetises transcendence with astonishing efficiency. The rave became a luxury package. Rebellion became merchandise. Algorithms now predict emotional peaks with almost industrial precision. Yet this criticism mistakes commercialization for emptiness. Medieval churches also sold relics, staged spectacle and accumulated wealth. Human susceptibility to collective trance predates capitalism by thousands of years. Corporations did not invent ecstasy. They inherited it.

The ancient shaman’s fire has not disappeared. It learned to use subwoofers.

The Last Public Ritual

The deeper irony is that secular societies never abolished ritual intoxication. They merely relocated it. As participation in organised religion declines across much of the world, concerts increasingly perform the emotional labour once carried by temples and pilgrimages. Consider the choreography carefully. Pilgrims travel long distances toward a sacred site. They wear symbolic clothing. They chant collectively. They surrender individuality to a larger emotional current. They return exhausted, purified and strangely connected to strangers they will never meet again. A music festival differs from a medieval feast day mostly in acoustics and sanitation.

Perhaps this also explains the modern horror of silence. Earbuds now function less as entertainment devices than as portable emotional regulation systems. We flood dead air with playlists because uninterrupted interiority has become frightening. Music shields us from psychic fragmentation while simultaneously promising reunion with something larger than the isolated self.

Alone, a song comforts. Together, it abolishes separateness. The ancient shaman’s fire has not disappeared. It learned to use subwoofers.