Bonfire of the Futilities
Nevada's Burning Man Festival: Ritual without Dogma
Read Mercer Schuchardt
October 1, 1997
"Yet here we are as a nation starved for religion, and the hunger is fiercest at upper social levels, where people set up shop as webpage designers. The fundamentalist churches are doing fine, but they don't do much business among the technological elite."
"And the people bowed and prayed, to the neon god they made."
In 1986 a man breaks up with his boyfriend and decides to hold a little gathering on a California beach. His friends come and together they construct and then burn a large man in effigy. From these humble beginnings, Burning Man has steadily grown over the last ten years. Attendance has doubled almost every year, and 15,000 people came to this past Labor Day weekend's event held at Black Rock Canyon in the Nevada desert.
Something obviously clicked. With a serious following of devotees, over 2,800 of whom subscribe to the Burning Man e-mail server, Burning Man as a cultural indicator is worth looking into, if not actually attending.
Burning Man seems to be several things simultaneously. It is a five-day neopagan festival in the Nevada desert that culminates in the ritual burning of a wooden and neon effigy. It is a Labor Day weekend free-for-all where clothing is optional, alcohol is abundant, and public sex is not uncommon. It is the inevitable result of the dissipation and dissolution of religion from American public life. At heart, it seems to be an annual attempt to refresh the world—to escape the dull but all-consuming ache of late-twentieth-century life, and especially the old, useless, and commercially encrusted traditions of Judeo-Christianity.
This at least is the sense that RQ got from the attendees at Burning Man, a random sampling of whom were asked five questions by our itinerant videographer. ...
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