I spent a week in early September at something called Burning Man, a kind of festival in the Nevada desert held each Labor Day. The event takes its name from the burning of a giant neon and wooden effigy of a man, which is burned on Saturday night as 40,000 people gather around and watch. The photo above is the Man, which has become something of a cultural icon, now more than 20 years in circulation. Burning Man traces its history back to 1986, when the founder, Larry Harvey, burned an effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. The event was moved to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada several years later and is now the annual meeting place of a far-reaching, extremely energetic subculture.
Astrology is about symbolism, and in this article I’d like to look at a few of the messages of the fire ceremony that’s at the center of this elaborate, creative project called Burning Man. I think for most people who participate, the theme is so intuitive, they don’t really think about it much. You get the message in the creative fire that surrounds the symbol; it comes across as real world. Given the freedom and the safe space to do so, women strip to the waist and walk around in public. Many guys wear skirts and tutus. Everything is connected to a concept, an idea, a game of twisting logic around into something sensible in a different way.
In effect, Burning Man grants many people permission to be who they are, and, in the absence of concrete knowledge, to test out some ideas of who they might be; and not have to worry too much about the legacy of who they were yesterday.
This legacy is our problem. It’s not that we use the past as a reference point for who we are, or where we are going, which would be fine. It’s that we determine our lives almost exclusively by what has happened in the past; by who we knew in the past; by what we held as true in the past; by our family of origin and what they did to us; by the career that we developed, generally with no special intention to have done so. And this is really the least of it.
What we struggle with the most, if you ask me, is the unspoken requirement to be who we were, feel how we felt, and love who we loved yesterday. We allegedly must, by some strange set of unwritten rules, get up in the morning and do what we did the day before. If you look closely there is actually very little to intervene in this train of experience. This is why key life transits such as the Saturn return, Uranus opposition, and Chiron return, are so often experienced as train wrecks. We make next to no room to ritualize the idea of change that would allow us an opportunity to in fact actually change.
Much of this process is encrypted in our social patterns: that is, our relationships with friends and family. We tend to stay the same, fearing their judgments, therefore trying to live up to their supposed expectations. Some of our most fundamental values, such as whether we think marriage has any validity for us personally, are bound up in these social ties. Deep beneath our fear of being ourselves, which really is a phobia on a cosmic scale, is the fear of being cast out of the tribe if we violate its social order.
This by the way is what I would call Chiron in Aquarius stuff: the tribal wound as it manifests as the fear of individuality. Here we have a convenient illustration because this year and next, Aquarius is such a focal point of the astrology. (The once-in-a-lifetime triple conjunction of Jupiter, Chiron, and Neptune is still working out in that sign, the peak of a five-year transit of Chiron in Aquarius.)
From all of this, we get the idea that people don’t change; we merely get locked into patterns. The times we expect to change are generally the moments of the train wreck. Maybe you’ll be different after a divorce or a death in the family, but even then there is only so far the rules of society allow us to go.
Enter Burning Man, where we ritualize and embrace the process of growth. We show up, facing the extreme conditions of the high desert, forced into both radical autonomy and the need to embrace community, both consciously, as a matter of survival.
The thing about the Man is that he’s this elaborate artistic creation, different every year, and then we do something very odd by our society’s standards: We burn him. This is the Death card (Trump XIII) on a grand scale: the point of no return; the actual moment of transformation. We release the form and some new element of energy has the room to express itself. By the time this ritual comes, most participants have been pushed to the limits of their physical and emotional reality. Burning Man is “fun,” but it’s fun only to the extent that we give up some of our worldly trappings, our sense of time, our daily routines, our names, and so on. Like most valid rituals, this is one that takes preparation.
Part of that preparation is what we bring to offer the community. Unlike most enterprises in a capitalist system, Burning Man is about what you give rather than what you get. The whole purpose of capitalism is to maximize profit at the expense of the worker and the consumer. The idea of Burning Man is to give resources to the community, at your own expense. This is a missing experience for most of us, who don’t think we have so much to give; and if we do, the idea of actual generosity is often repulsive or seems inappropriate.
The gift culture ranges from the most elaborate perks from corporate America (somebody with a lot of cash on their hands paid for the Opulent Temple) to the most modest offerings of self. The camp that I was staying in, Poly Paradise, offered a daily Human Carcass Wash, where up to 600 people a day came to be washed down from their coating of playa dust.
Part of the preparation involves developing a new relationship to physicality. I’ll give a few examples. It’s really easy to dehydrate in 110-degree heat. Therefore it’s necessary to constantly think about water, which reminds us that we’re made of water. There are ways to measure hydration; you can figure out how much you drink; or count how many times you pee. My personal method is, if my nose is dry, I’m dehydrated.
There’s nowhere to buy food; therefore every meal is a conscious act. You cannot simply “grab a sandwich.” If you run out of food or water, you’re at the mercy of your neighbors, who are usually generous; everyone is in the same condition. (This particular part is easy for me, because my first gig as a cook was in the galley of The Pioneer, a century-old steel schooner, cooking for 14 people. I was reminded again what a valuable talent this is, to be able to prepare safe, tasty food for myself and others under odd circumstances.)
There are no flush toilets. port-a-potties are glorified outhouses, and if we make a mess out of them, they are messy for the rest of us. We literally have to deal with one another’s shit (something that most of us know not about, in the industrialized world). One result is the most impeccably clean public bathrooms you’ve ever seen at an outdoor event. The potties are plastered with public service announcements created by various camps and factions reminding what and what not to drop down the hole—and the admonition that someone will, in fact, have to dig out your Pepsi bottle if you toss it down there.
By my second day on the playa, I was planning my self-care activities one at a time. Find dental floss. Use dental floss. Find toothbrush. Brush teeth. I shaved once; it was a memorable project, involving the spontaneous discovery that I had left my shaving gear in the glove compartment, then boiling half a gallon of precious water. Every step was a conscious act. The result felt like no shave I’ve ever experienced.
Then there are relationships. Those tend to be rearranged in this environment. It’s true that I was in a camp that had relationship-oriented discussion groups every morning (called Poly High Tea) and where we hosted talks on the history and sociology of monogamy. However, all around, people seemed to be tossed around in a kind of relational anarchy—sometimes pleasant, sometimes not—as a result of being confronted by so much intense beauty and so many people bringing out some aspect of their creative fire. In reality, one makes one’s boundaries, rules, and agreements; then what happens, happens.
Synchronicity is the name of the game at Burning Man; this thing we call manifestation is in full force. The stories are too many to count, and it’s fun to see it in action. I really had to surrender to the notion that if I think of something, it could happen in a matter of minutes; and even if I wasn’t consciously thinking of it, but I secretly wanted it, it could happen in when I was least expecting it. Some of these stories are more appropriate for Book of Blue. Synchronicity messes with your idea of how physical reality intersects with consciousness. It’s true that we were in an alternate plane of reality that was a lot closer to the astral/causal levels. If you play this game well, it’s possible to let go of a lot of negativity.
Then, after a week of this, the whole community gathers for the Burn. This year, all day Saturday was in what I’ll call a category 2 dust storm, caused by persistent winds blowing across an ancient lakebed. The storms do get worse: absolute whiteout. But this one was pretty bad, and it seemed to last forever, all day and into the night, threatening the ritual itself. I got myself there early, to have a seat in the front row, the better to photograph for you. And I sat there as the dusty wind pounded my body and my cameras and my lenses, catching dust in my mouth and eyes despite my mask and goggles.
They can’t safely light a fire that big with 40,000 people around it in such a stiff wind, but unlike last year (when there was a similar problem) the higher-ups made the decision to start the preburn festivities: A lot of fire dancers and musicians and acrobats came out and performed in a vast circle to the audience/participants. These performers were dedicated, doing their thing at full strength despite being slammed by the elements. Most of them had prepared for a year for this event.
Finally, the wind stopped and the arms of the Burning Man were hoisted into burn position: high above his head. Then came the fireworks and the pyrotechnics, and then he burst into flames, taking all of us with him.
More photos and articles about Burning Man are at www.PlanetWaves.net. Thanks to Dr. Jeff Patterson for getting me to Burning Man this year.
Eric Francis Coppolino writes daily at PlanetWaves.net.
This article appears in October 2009.
