The author talks about linking it to human sacrifice, which is definitely an angle worth considering. But there are some others-
1. Immediacy is one of the ten principles of burning man, and burning the art when finished forces people to appreciate it in the moment while it still exists. It’s worth noting a lot of art is burned, not just the man.
2. Fire is aesthetically pleasing . A huge percentage of the burning man crowd is into fire dancing and fire arts
3. They burn the Man because that’s what they do - similar to abstract art you can just accept how that makes you feel rather than needing to cognitively analyze it.
4. It connects to both eastern and western religion. Impermanence is a pillar of Buddhism and a man publicly dying is a pillar of Christianity
Of course I don’t think drawing a connection to human sacrifice is outlandish as a ritualistic burning of a symbolic man during a large semi-spiritual gathering is easy to connect to human sacrifice. But it’s worth considering a few other ideas.
Native Americans of the Pacific coast who saw bountiful years more often than not also engaged in rituals of conspicuous consumption, typically by burning the excess.
This is something that would have been taught to anyone taking an anthropology class in college from at least the 1960s, and if you've seen these displays in person, they're fairly impactful.
That's what I've always associated Burning Man with. It's an effigy and totem of our ephemeral human-ness, enabled in a harsh and hostile environment by the excesses we've accumulated over the whole of human history. We pause briefly to remember that how we live now is not the only way and reflect on the loss of our common pasts, and that one day this too will not exist.
The human sacrifice angle feels like the kind of contrived pop-culture interpretation someone who's watched Temple of Doom too many times and hasn't read enough local history would convince themself of.
> Native Americans of the Pacific coast who saw bountiful years more often than not also engaged in rituals of conspicuous consumption, typically by burning the excess.
Burning Man definitely feels like white people 'discovering' potlatch. The actual burning of the man is mostly a hood ornament for the event. The festival itself and its culture revolve around creating a community and your rank in that community mainly comes from how much you give away. That's really the thing that keeps people coming back, not the fancy bonfire.
> and your rank in that community mainly comes from how much you give away
really it's how much perceived value and social power you have, which is not necessarily related to gifting. you can have elevated rank if you run a theme camp, if you organize big art, if you're the head of a department, if you can get a lot of tickets, if you run a turn-key camp, or if people just really really like you. technically none of that implies gifting.
I once read (I believe it was in [1]) that the indigenous tribes of the PNW especially along the coast had one of the highest standards of living on earth at the time Lewis & Clark arrived. Food (salmon, berries, shellfish) was exceedingly abundant as was wood for building and fuel.
This is a little outside your point, but the arrival of Lewis and Clark was kind of an irrelevant point for the PNW nations. Russia had been trading with the northwest since 1740, numerous other expeditions had been out there, and there had already been massive changes caused by contact.
There was also pretty widespread trade between tribes up and down the West coast from what is now BC all the way down through the what is now the Baja.
> a man publicly dying is a pillar of Christianity
OT, I am not deeply familiar with any particular religion, but do you have more information on this, or perhaps why it is a pillar? Do other religions not have something similar in their [historical/current] practices?
But why is it not a pillar of ancient Celtic religion, for example? They were literally burning people in wicker cages for religious reasons. When you say "burning man", I certainly imagine druids much more readily than Christianity.
The Celtic practices are apparently in some doubt these days, since "fake news" had already been invented in Roman times. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicker_man for more details)
In any cases, burning some poor bloke as a sacrifice to the gods seems of a different order than building the main thrust of your symbolism (ie, crosses everywhere) around the death of your main prophet figure. Many religions did the former, very few seem to have done the latter.
What is specifically Christian about the death of Christ is that he's the final sacrifice. He's also the highest ranking sacrifice - the son of God - and he is resurrected afterwards. He is the one-off payment to redeem humanity.
It's also a sacrifice that christians can participate in despite it happening twenty centuries ago by drinking his blood and eating his body.
(Lapsed church of England here; while I don't believe this myself I was thoroughly taught it. Interesting that it's no longer so dominant that everyone has a background awareness of what the doctrine is. Difficult to interpret much pre-1800 European art without it)
It probably is the pillar of christianity just because it is what happened. It is rather shocking if the founder is executed in such a brutal way so you need to make a story around that. It is in fact so shocking that the story pretty much turned out to need to redefine reality or god or something like that. Nobody understands this trinity stuff anyway.... And then you can choose to believe it of or not believe it...
> It is rather shocking if the founder is executed in such a brutal way so you need to make a story around that.
Not sure what's shocking about it. Probably tens of thousands of people were executed in the same way; it was a commonplace method of execution at the time. Are you shocked by lethal injection, for example?
Perhaps because Christianity was a better proponent of sadomasochistic tendencies than pagan rites ever were. It looks as if it was also a huge component of its success.
There are similar stories in other religions. Krishna stands out, being killed while in human form, forgiving his killer, and then ascending to heaven. Although that was an accident, not intentional sacrifice.
The snarky replies are because people are interpreting your questions as challenging and ignoring obvious context. So, they’re trying to shut you down.
A less snarky response:
> do you have more information on this, or perhaps why it is a pillar?
Christianity is referring to Jesus Christ (not his actual name). He was a religious figure and publicly executed. The story of his life, execution and what happens after (resurrection and ascension) are central to Christianity. This is what makes his death a “pillar”. The religions is built on it, like a building is supported with pillars.
> Do other religions not have something similar in their [historical/current] practices?
The “not” in your question implies that it this question is opposed to your last question. That a public death can’t be a pillar of Christianity if it’s in other religions. This is not the case. Something doesn’t have to be unique to be a pillar. Asceticism and isolation are pillars of monastic Zen. They are also pillars of Shipibo shamanism.
So, yes, lots of other public sacrifices. Point still holds.
> The snarky replies are because people are interpreting your questions as challenging and ignoring obvious context.
I knew Jesus plays a notable (?) role in Islam, and other prophets / people are also notable in both religions, so I didn't know if the sacrifice was a critical component in both, but:
> what happens after (resurrection and ascension) are central to Christianity.
I think that helps a bit more with context.
> That a public death can’t be a pillar of Christianity if it’s in other religions.
That wasn't what I meant per se, it was more that OP specifically cited Christianity, so I was curious if that was unique component to Christianity, but you and other comments helped clarify.
Eh, I say Jesus Christ even though I haven't accepted him as my lord and savior. "Jesus of Nazareth" wasn't exactly his name either as in "what people called him when he was alive". Yeshua seems to be the closest.
Jesus’ death and resurrection is important because of why He died.
He died for us. We’re born as sinners. We live lives that are offensive to a righteous God.
Though we have the inbuilt desire to be justified, we fall so far below God’s standard there is nothing we can do to be right with God.
But He loved us so much, He decided to send His only Son - Jesus - to live the perfect sinless life that we could not.
Then He sacrificed Himself on our behalf. In believing in Jesus, His righteousness is accounted to us and we are made right with God. The implications of this are incredible but I won’t get into it.
Jesus came to the earth preaching this good news (the gospel). And this news is a good story, but the crux of what makes it true is that He was resurrected by God.
His resurrection validated His claims. Believing in Him has transformed millions of lives because God’s Spirit dwells inside of His people when they believe.
By His Spirit for millennia, starting with His own disciples, people have done tremendous feats and have been willing to die to share this news with the world.
AFAIK other religions requires their followers to sacrifice to their god(s). In Christianity, God sacrificed Himself for us - out of love.
I think this article lacks an actual history of the event as opposed to the meaning people seek at the event today.
It's my recollection -- from speaking with some long time san francisco residents -- that the original burning man was really a burning woman, and was an effigy of one of the founder's former girlfriends. If you look at photos of the first burn, the "man" appears more to be a woman in a hands-on-hips scolding posture https://www.presidio.gov/blog-internal/PublishingImages/then... . Subsequent burns shifted to a more neutral hands at sides posture.
Of course, if you speak to the original burners the somewhat misogynistic roots have been smoothed over to clarify that the man is a more universal symbol. There are some decent articles https://www.trippingly.net/burning-man-musings/2019/2/14/why... that cover the different accounts of the first burn, which is a bit more well researched that "something a SF long time resident told me".
If you want to read a pretty good account of the atmosphere and attitude at the time, I highly recommend reading this book, if you can find a copy: http://talesofsfcacophony.com/
It goes into the origins of Burning Man, SantaCon, art cars – the whole deal. Burning Man in its current form started as “Zone Trip #4” or “A Bad Day in Black Rock”, organized by the Cacophony Society, after the burn at Baker beach was stopped by police.
If you want to read the original flyer for the event, the Internet Archive actually archived the whole of Rough Draft, which was the central organizing newsletter of the Cacophony Society. Here it is: https://archive.org/details/roughdraftoffici1171vari/page/n9...
Sure - but if I, a stranger, am really looking forward to seeing the burning of an effigy of some dude's ex-girlfriend, that would make me look pretty weird.
I don't know, burning a symbolic "ex" could be something many people would relate too. Instead of taking out your anger on a real human, you take it out on a symbolic effigy. It's better for everyone involved.
Why? Billions of teens are dancing along to songs of Taylor Swift figuratively burning her ex-boyfriends. That doesn’t mean they hate men or that they “look pretty weird”.
Well back in the mid-1970's, over a period of a few years they ended up completing a fairly good human likeness built from slabs of scrap logs having different diameters & shapes, almost like it was 3D printed.
This would have been considered a small hippie community in the mountains with a handful of permanent residents and often another half dozen to dozen guests, visitors, and temporary residents from time to time.
Lots more of these loosely connected groups were found in California (crowded "progressive" place). Compared to the Southeast (rural "not-so-progressive" place) where their multi-state "network" ended up with the moniker Rainbow family.
Without Facebook, cellphone, or even landline a traveler could have a thousand real friends & acquaintances and without Airbnb enjoy overnight or limited-stay accomodation, as some artists, musicians & craftspeople acted to contribute whatever they could that was appreciated by hippies when they were there.
But these were less and less often the actual hippies of the 1960's since it was already the 1970's. LSD had been illegal for a number of years by then. Less than 10 years after Woodstock the Greatful Dead was drawing bigger crowds than ever even though they never got significant mainstream airplay on the radio. They had toured Europe in 1973, and US tours had by then built up more tonnage and number of 18-wheelers than any other road show.
Hendrix, Santana and The Who were also Woodstock headliners and they were on the radio more than ever even though Hendrix didn't make it into the '70's alive. Who & Santana were selling out stadiums everywhere too no different than Zeppelin & the Stones, Pink Floyd was now well recognized and these are all some of the most legendary concerts too. Zappa was way out of the mainstream. But only the Dead was like Woodstock came to town when they got there. It could be almost like a temporary community joining forces with the local enthusiasts to gather on the night of the concert.
Anyway, out in Cali my buddy had helped cut some of the wood for the artists and it turned out over 10 feet tall. Such painstaking work after such a long time by so many contributors and it had arose right there at the front of the property, symbolic of the community.
Interestingly it greatly resembled the headless man still there as surplus art at Walnut & Sterrett in Houston, where the historical warehouse district was formerly inhabited by lots more artists seeking low rents decades ago.
Only not headless, and when they decided to burn it there was quite a bit of consternation because so many hours had been spent building it by so many different people. It had been an icon for quite some time, some returnng to add touches year after year.
There was discussion about art being temporary, man being temporary, community being temporary, things like that. A contributor or two might have even been on mushrooms.
I may still have a photo he gave me, it was an impressive statue.
But it was all dried out by then and they took it down to a beach where a small group of their like-minded friends could gather safely and up in flames it went. Once again mushrooms might have been involved, perhaps by more than just one or two participants. Who knows, maybe a renewal of some kind.
In the spring there again appeared ambition to build a replacement man in the front of the residence, which had been planned by some even before the first one was burnt.
It was going to be a different kind of man this time, intended to be burnt itself before the year was out, so it was built with more dried out wood to begin with.
It was such a hoot the first time, it got more popular every year and they got kicked off the beach.
You should blog this with a bit more detail somewhere; haven't seen any of this referenced in articles I've read prior on Burning man! Bonus points if you find the photo!
That was way more interesting than I expected. Apparently, ritual sacrifice of humans in which music is played, probably to drown out the cries of the victims, goes back millennia to many ancient cultures in every continent that almost certainly had no contact with each other. And the author speculates there is a "Purge" like thing going on with continued violence at rock concerts and violent deaths of musicians themselves bringing a sort of collective catharsis to stave off even worse violence if we didn't let our ya yas out somehow.
I was just expecting to hear whoever originally organized this festival watched Wicker Man one too many times or something. But I suppose Wicker Man itself would be a manifestation of this older tradition.
To be perfectly clear, I am not in any way intending to advocate for the position that we should feel catharsis from injuring or killing people.
But it's there. We are all descended from violent predators that got by in the world by killing other animals. A lot of people still do that for sport. Even just with human sport, perhaps you've never played a contact or combat sport where you directly hit other people. Whether or not it's right that it should be this way, I can assure you that it feels really good.
I used to be a tank commander, and I guess I was lucky as hell to never have to kill someone myself, but I'll never quite forget my first commander at the armor school who would get us pumped up talking about when he graduated, he'd gone straight to Ramadi to replace a platoon leader who'd just been killed in action and how it made his dick hard to think about blowing up hospitals. The man was an absolute psychopath, but there is no denying a lot of people like that exist. The commander of my lead 2 tank had once shredded a man with a .50 cal from less than a hundred feet away and found it the most addictive thing he'd ever done. As the war started to wind down and normal units no longer got real combat assignments, he was determined to move into the Special Forces to stay in the game. That guy was never going to be normal again.
Whether it is sports, actual combat, sexual dominance and sado-masochism, or even just extreme endurance athletes and alpine mountaineers putting their own bodies through hell, pain inflicted on others and pain inflicted on yourself can be quite addictive, and it is definitely better for society if we can find some way to do this ritually rather than by actually starting wars. Ideally not via human sacrifice, but you know, somehow.
I played full contact football and never felt anything pleasant from it. Nothing convinced me of what you were talking about except that I'd not considered sadomasochism in this context and now what you're saying makes sense. Sexual sadomasochism is experiencing some kind of torture in a safe, imaginary way. So other ritual violence works in a similar way. That comparison clicks for me. Thanks for the insight.
I agree - I found the writing to be the kind of thing that makes me immediately skeptical.
A lot of fanciful connections that seem “smart”, but without much to back it up - it’s possible there’s truth to some of it, but someone could similarly argue a different reason and make it sound just as good. I suspect it’s overconfident in what the causes are and drawing more of a conclusion than what’s there.
this isn't a direct answer to your first question, but the people who go to burning man are probably familiar with the Rolling Stones album entitled "Get Your Ya Ya's Out" and since "ya" is a cry of agreement often used as a cheer, I always assumed it meant "group shout in celebration" and I don't think that's a big stretch
as to your second question, humans have innate senses of violence as a reaction to certain stimuli, and also celebrations of victory whether in actual or symbolic combat so... can you seriously not see the emotional catharsis, or are you simply questioning it as being emotional and un-rational?
I would add that to me--anthropomorphizing a little, emotions are rational: emotions were discovered by evolution as a good way to regulate behavior, and evolution is actually one of the most logical of processes.
Yeah, I was intentionally invoking the Rolling Stones, since the article mentions the Altamont incident where Meredith Hunter was killed by the Hell's Angels right in front of the stage as one of its examples. Might not be entirely clear to readers who aren't familiar with the Stones' back catalog.
just to tune up that sentence a little, Meredith Hunter was killed by a Hell's Angel after he drew a gun. There was beef. The Hell's Angel was tried and acquitted, self-defense.
I can’t find instances of human sacrifice by burning with loud music on any continent. The only instances of ritual human sacrifice I can find are in the Americas. What’s so cathartic about killing a person? I can understand punishment for doing something society disagrees with or as blood sport for entertainment but what are you talking about?
Other instances are in this article. It specifically mentions ancient Canaanites doing it and being condemned for it by the Hebrews. It mentions Carthage and the Northern Ewe in Africa. Also claims South India, though whatever specific example the book cites isn't in this article and you'd need to read the book to find out what it is.
Because despite all the pseudo spiritual bullshit, most attendees of Burning Man are just extravagant people that do not care about its environmental cost. They just want to see shit burn.
If you have "spiritual" problems, throwing a Halloween party in the desert is not going to do shit for you.
Flying people from all corners of the planet to gather somewhere is never going to be carbon neutral.
Flying from coast to coast has the same carbon footprint of burning trash for an entire year. Then, burning massive amounts of shit once you arrive has an even higher footprint.
Want to connect with your inner self? fucking close your eyes and breathe. It is free.
Back in the day I was friendly with some of the people in the Burning Man organization and someone mentioned that the original Man represented Larry Harvey's ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend.
It used to be possible to find this info by searching too, but it seems to have been largely scrubbed from the internet.
The artist in me regards BM as extremely attractive. The rest of me regards it as an existential threat. If I let the artist roam free for a week, he won't go back to his place in my life without a long conversation and a lot of convincing. In other words, the me I know might never come back.
I think that's the goal. The story I heard was that the burning man represented the founder's old self, old habits and the like he wanted to be rid of.
I think they burned a man at Burning Man because the guy who came up with it was going through a divorce and had a kind of spontaneous inspiration/dream/vision about doing it. So if anything, it would be transition or rebirth, not scapegoating or execution. Or at least that's why he did it. The reason Burning Man Inc. does it is because they saw something authentic that was working[0], copied it, stripped everything interesting or frightening to people with money out of it, scaled it up, and turned it into a living.
[0] There should be scare quotes around "working", I think some people got set on fire and somebody might have died.
Lots of festivals before and since burn a wicker man, it has its roots in pagan mythology, but the reasons are probably not complex; they saw others doing it and stole the idea.
quite.
it became something the great LandArtist's [LandArt 1.0] probably not imagined possible -- Holt, Smithson, de Maria, Heizer, Turell, etc
and nothing is left behind.
A philosophical read is nice, but I'd like to hear straight from attendees capable of introspection, what burning the man does for them. I dont doubt it's got connections to things in TFA, but the personal variations are probably interesting.
At one burn, someone very special had just died, and so people that knew him thought of it as sort of honoring his passing to another realm. The embers rising up in gusts of wind looked like fireflies or little spirits dancing upward into the night sky.
At another burn, a bunch of us were just tired and angry and needed to let out all our negative energy, and were overjoyed to dance around the man howling and crying and releasing everything pent up. The fire consumed and carried it all away.
It's also very hypnotic and transportive to just stare into the flames for hours. It brings us all together and helps us connect to each other. We can mentally/spiritually put anything into that fire, different for each of us, but all of us are connected in the same experience.
Why is it a man? Well at regional burns it isn't. It might be a temple, a pony, something else. The form doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we just burn something big to bring everyone together.
> That is one of the key learnings we draw from René Girard (1923-2015), a pathbreaking thinker who life’s work focused on the importance of ritualized sacrifice in human culture.
It would be a bit of an oddly named event should a man (of effigy of) not be burnt.
Which goes full circle, somewhat of a line break after a paragraph of text, or <FIN> in a movie, as what's being burnt is one's self through the event, in-person or in-spirit, seeking catharsis, though perhaps best captured Sartre-esque in the words emblazoned on Patrick Bateman's eyes as he stars and realises that this is not an exit but a return to lives passively rejecting status quo, outwardly promoting radical change by words while passionately embracing the norm, tiny iterations of which are pointed to for the justification of conforming to a safe radical that maintains a lifestyle and entry to the club, a very empty club, for the unchanging monotony to maintain itself and me to maintain my place in the hegemony of our constructed rules.
Correlation doesn't mean causation. I'm sorry, but the theory is bonkers, which becomes clear after the assertion that the link between music and violence is "undeniable"
The real subject of this as I understand it is “How people ascribe deeper meaning to a guy burning a depiction of his ex-girlfriends new boyfriend because it became a traditional stable of a festival”
... Imagine, if you will, a parallel universe in which there had been no Burning Man.
One day, you read an article about people who gather in the middle of the desert and burn a woman in effigy and call their event Burning Woman. The article neutrally describes the event: gift economy, participatory culture, light art, costumes, shirt-cockers, maybe drugs. It's Burning Man, but in this universe, the exact same event just happens to be called Burning Woman.
Would there be accusations of misogyny, credible enough to shut down the event, or no?
There is a somewhat similar tradition in Poland (without the gitf economy art and drugs). People burn an effigy of winter god called Marzanna on the first day of astronomical Spring (and/or throw it into a nearby river). It's common in most Slavic countries I think, but in some of them it vanished because catholic church was fighting it at one point.
There are accusations of misogyny because that's the world we live in, but mostly nobody cares cause it's fun for kids.
Ironically this pagan tradition comes from a religion that was much more woman-friendly than catholicism that replaced it.
80k people for a few hours in a stadium surrounded by infrastructure purpose built for it is a completely different matter than 80k people on a featureless, waterless, hot desert plain for a whole week.
This is an event where 80K people go to the desert for a week for no practical reason, then clean up after themselves and go back to where they came from.
More specifically it's a Trump rally where people show up out of nowhere, sleep at the rally for a week with no facilities of any kind, and then leave absolutely no trace that they were ever there. Most humans couldn't pull that off with just 10 people, much less 80,000.
1. Immediacy is one of the ten principles of burning man, and burning the art when finished forces people to appreciate it in the moment while it still exists. It’s worth noting a lot of art is burned, not just the man.
2. Fire is aesthetically pleasing . A huge percentage of the burning man crowd is into fire dancing and fire arts
3. They burn the Man because that’s what they do - similar to abstract art you can just accept how that makes you feel rather than needing to cognitively analyze it.
4. It connects to both eastern and western religion. Impermanence is a pillar of Buddhism and a man publicly dying is a pillar of Christianity
Of course I don’t think drawing a connection to human sacrifice is outlandish as a ritualistic burning of a symbolic man during a large semi-spiritual gathering is easy to connect to human sacrifice. But it’s worth considering a few other ideas.