Hello everyone!

I just got back from my third Burning Man two days ago, and am reintegrating back into the "default world" as they call it there. I just finished the third webinar on Mythic Activism and am applying the insights I've gained from it to my experience at Burning Man. 

The place has an ineffable quality to it, it's really impossible to describe or condense into something that could possibly explain what it is. The Burning Man that can be described is not the real Burning Man, just like the Tao. However, I will try my best with the awkward and limited medium of language...

Black Rock City, the glowing, vibrant, flowing metropolis created for the event, is in one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The Black Rock Desert (known as “The Playa”, meaning beach in Spanish) easily bakes into the high 90's to 100’s during the day, dips down into the 30's and 40's at night, is extremely dry, and is constantly blown over with dust that is caustic to metals, electronics, and human skin. Without showering or lotion, small cuts and scrapes can erupt into gaping wounds from the corrosive dust over the course of the week (“playa foot” is a common ailment for the poor fools who don’t wear shoes, I found this out the hard way my first year).

At the center of the city is The Man, is a giant wooden effigy that is burned at the end of the week in an explosive and cathartic ritual, with roots in the Pagan harvest ritual burning of “Wicker Men”. Strewn throughout the endless expanses of the Playa are people riding on fantastically decorated bikes, booming-bass emitting “Mutant Vehicles”, art installations of all kinds that express literally every fantasy of the human mind, and unpredictable/synchronistic displays of music, creativity, dance, bizarreness. The sheer entropy of the place is what makes it indescribable. Burning Man, basically, is a physically-anchored collective dream world, where ideas and visions unfettered by the usual constraints of cultural programming and bias, are excreted into the physical plane through hard work and planning, into wondrous displays of awe invoking beauty.

One image kept emerging for me during my time there last week: that of the Cosmic Egg. As an experimental workshop/playshop for new cultural memes, myths, and archetypes, Burning Man gives birth every year to a creative impulse that invigorates and revives the decay and rot of a society that has lost direction and all sense of healthy identity.

Besides the fact that Burning Man itself is very egg-like (round structure with interior space, complexifies and grows throughout the week, encapsulated and closed off from the outside world, embodies the essence of creativity itself), its formation follows the mythological progression of Cosmogenesis through the coupling of the Masculine and Feminine, the Anima and Animus.

While the Man effigy gets most of the attention, largely due to the event’s name, the other unspoken but ever present force at the event is the Goddess of the Playa - the space holding, weather and Earth embodiment that radically shapes everyone’s experience with rain, wind, dust, sunshine, and the womb-like enclosure of the surrounding mountains.

Something that I have noticed in my three years at Burning Man is that the weather in particular seems to have an active agency and synchronistic alignment to the events taking place. This can be most strongly witnessed during the Man Burn Night, which always happens on the Saturday during the week. This year, the Playa Goddess was roaring for the entire day on Saturday, barely ceasing with her gusts of white-out inducing dust storms where you can’t see your friends on their bikes 10 feet away. But like clockwork, at the time of the Burning of the Man, the Playa Goddess calmed down a bit, allowing the Nevada Fire Marshalls to give the thumbs up to start the flames which would Orgiastically consume her consort. No major dust blows or white out occurred during the entire interval, while the crowd of 60,000+ gaped in awe.

But this year, the Man took his sweet time in his moment of Burning Glory. Normally it takes an hour for most of the structure to burn down; this year it took nearly two and a half hours for him to fall to the ground. This delayed-response time prevented the premature-evacuation that everyone in the crowd was so eager for. After maybe an hour and a half, some guy behind me got up and yelled “BURN DOWN YOU F*****!”. He seemed to be expressing the sentiments of many as the crowd cheered him on. And then the next thing he screamed revealed the rest of that train of thought “WE ALL WANT TO GET TO THE PARTY!”. His voice wavered as he said it, as many in the crowd sensed this underlying motive in themselves and felt guilty. I felt it myself. And then I reminded myself “why are we in a rush, what do we have to do that is so much more important than taking in this moment, in its fullness”. This is what the event is about, the union of the Brightly Burning Man and the Forces of the Playa Goddess. It’s not about the party, the party is a side-attraction. My faith in the event, in its true spirit, was shored up as I saw that none of the encircling mutant vehicles were budging, that everyone in the crowd was holding space for the defining moment of the event, and sticking it out till the end.  

As soon as the Man fell to the ground, the crowd began to disperse into flashing and booming chaos. With impeccable timing, the Playa Goddess roared to life again, spewing her orgasmic dust blows onto all present. The rest of the night recapitulated this rebalancing of the divine Masculine and Feminine forces within my phenomenological field.

I could keep writing on and on about the mythological interpretations of Burning Man, but I should probably stop myself here. Looking forward to the next Webinar!