Why do they burn a man at Burning Man?
tedgioia.substack.com
tedgioia.substack.com
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.
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?
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.
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?
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)
Even specific to Jesus though, do other religions not have a prominent sacrifice in their history?
> Do other religions not have something similar in their [historical/current] practices?
Is the prominent sacrifice of a person unique to the background of Christianity? I do not really understand the snarky replies.
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.
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.
TL:DR; Repent and believe in the name of Jesus.
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.
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.
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.
But some of the others are also connected to human sacrifice, such as...
> It connects to both eastern and western religion. Impermanence is a pillar of Buddhism and a man publicly dying is a pillar of Christianity
The “man publicly dying” that is a pillar of Christianity is a human sacrifice, though.
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".
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...
Simple really, you just need to start early.
Quite a bit earlier than the museum goes back to.
Don't ask me how I know, not the subject of this thread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But yeah, I suspect the idea for burning man must have originated with Zozobra.
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.
It used to be possible to find this info by searching too, but it seems to have been largely scrubbed from the internet.
[0] There should be scare quotes around "working", I think some people got set on fire and somebody might have died.
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.
It is obviously a metaphor for Ego death, which is not even mentioned once in your article.
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.
and it being copied to get the same experience.
The original reason is probably as simple as someone not wanting to bring their makeshift art installation home.
Sumer is Icumen in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Grows the seed and blows the mead,
And springs the wood anew;
Sing, cuckoo!
Presuming an “official” BM goes forward again, I would not be surprised if the man design changed to to include female features
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 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.
They were all hanged, except one who was pressed to death.
Which makes it handy when your aim is to throw a big party.
Much like a hammer is good for driving nails.