Note to Readers: Sarah Taylor won’t have a Weekend Tarot feature. So I went spelunking through the archives and found this piece from three years ago, focused on the Burning Man festival, which ended last weekend. Amanda was there — hopefully she’ll have some stories for us. This article is about Burning Man 2009, and looking at the event as a symbolic experience. — efc
Dear Friend and Reader:
I spent most of last week at 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. In my daily series (now running about four times a day) I’m looking at Burning Man in words and pictures, explaining the basics of this odd, survivalist example of capitalism turned inside-out.
The photo at the right 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.
Planet Waves first covered this phenomenon in 1999, as part of a series about the grand cross and total solar eclipse titled after the festival; the festival itself is covered in part four of the series, which you can read here.
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.