Research Report

burning spirituality in black rock city

By Carl Teichrib

Hippies, nudity and open sexuality, free flowing drugs, wild living… such is the image most have of Burning Man, the once-a-year gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. It’s a partly correct view; yes, it is a party in the desert, but that’s just the tip of it. 

For twelve days – Aug 22 to Sept 2 – I lived in the dust and heat of Black Rock City (BRC), the desert home of Burning Man.

For those who are unaware of this gathering, Black Rock City is an ethereal community of approximately 80,000 people, annually springing to life in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada. At the end of a week of celebration and ritual, tens of thousands of participants surround a massive human effigy made of wood, and watch it burn to the ground. The following day, an enormous Temple – where all week long people had poured out grief and pain – is consumed in flame. Other art installations meet a fiery end, like this year’s Folly, a multi-stored, village-like structure with an imposing clock tower.    

Burning Man is a spectacle, a light-and-sound extravaganza that pulses day and night; it is sensory overload, without let-up. The Burn is many things to many people: A place for seekers to find their “higher Selves” and tap into the power of communal energy, to explore sexuality, to discover avenues for social and civic restructuring, to lose oneself in party and play, to look for life meaning and purpose, to network with global change agents, and to access new layers of creativity. BRC is clothing optional and hyper-sensual, and it’s immensely spiritual.

The concept of transgression as transformation is lived out in real-time

My purpose in attending, like my previous visits, was twofold: research and outreach.

Research: Burning Man is not a single event, but hundreds of daily activities transpiring at once. Workshops, lectures, and panel discussions take place. Some were a flop, like when a politically connected intelligence asset giving a lecture on world peace was too stoned to form a coherent line of thought. But others were gold mines. For example, the CEO of Burning Man described how her conservative upbringing was key to the event’s success: it’s run on a fiscally conservative platform. She also said that four Congressmen were in attendance, including one Republican – and that the Republican not only had a better handle of the event, but that the BM organization has a powerful advocate within the federal administration. She also explained how Democrat presidential hopeful, Marianne Williamson, had attempted to come to this year’s Burn, but was ignored because her focus was political publicity. In another workshop we were told the US Conference of Mayors had sent a delegation of 52 city leaders to BRC, to learn lessons and take away ideas. In a different lecture by a world-renowned artist, it was explained that new artistic movements – what we were experiencing in real time – was the burgeoning of a universal religion, an aesthetic connection to a new global spirituality.

And at an interactive discussion on the UN Sustainable Development Goals, highlighting the dreams of the world’s top young leaders – a cryptocurrency guru, globally connected entrepreneurs and artists, tech and medical insiders – we were given a remarkable glimpse of 2030: a new spiritual outlook, with goals of planetary governance and global citizenship. As the moderator explained, the grandchildren of yesteryear’s world-changing billionaires are now gathering at the Burn to envision their own new world order.

Outreach: This year our camp was comprised of five members, and we had multiple opportunities to share our Christian faith. Upon entering the Burn, I ended up talking with an entrepreneur from Berlin who was interested in what our camp – the Camp of the Unknown God – stood for. Upon parting I gifted him a copy of my book. Later I spent time with a European Union liaison officer to the US Federal Government, and we had an afternoon mulling over the foundation of human values. Brian, a member of our group, had people coming up to him out-of-the-blue, asking questions leading to conversations about faith and God. Two others from our team had a lengthy discussion with a fellow Canadian after one workshop, and Jen, another member of our camp, had some exciting encounters, sharing her faith into the wee hours of the night. On another day, while waiting for a lecture on psychedelics and spirituality to start, Jen found herself in a remarkable exchange with a powerfully connected personality. Two days later, she and I were in his camp, having a deep and lengthy discussion contrasting his Cosmic Christ with the person of Jesus Christ. This “Kissinger” of transformational spirituality accepted a copy of my book, and we hope he will reach out after reading it.

But there were times, especially in the first half the week, when we were scratching our heads, wondering how to reach out effectively – especially after a neighboring camp had shown disdain and distanced itself upon finding out we were Christians. At one point I reminded the crew: “Look, we’re in a foreign culture, a different world, and we’ve only been here for a few days… don’t be so hard on yourselves, conversations will happen.”

Finally, the Burn is a very harsh and tiring place. It is extremely hot, windy, and the alkaline dust is corrosive. Most of our boots and shoes were finished after the week, three of our bikes suffered damage due to the dust (including a change of bearings), my large two-room tent was finally tossed after inspecting the wear, and our vehicles took a hit in this caustic environment. And it was physically exhausting, with very little sleep (I averaged 3-4 hours a night). As I write this, a handful of days after my return, I’m still feeling tired; but that’s to be expected, after all, it’s Burning Man.

Was it worth it? Yes. Will we go back? Plans are already in motion.

To help you better understand what Burning Man is about, the following is adapted from Carl Teichrib’s book, Game of Gods. It is the only critical source, written from a Christian perspective, that unpacks this movement in its broader context.

Playa Fire

On the evening of the summer solstice, 1986, a handful of friends carried a wooden, 8-foot tall human effigy to the shoreline of Baker Beach, a strip of oceanfront along the southwest side of the Presidio in San Francisco. A small but curious crowd assembled to watch as the figure was raised, set in place, and then doused with gasoline. At sunset the effigy was torched.

From its humble beginnings, Burning Man has become an annual, world- recognized gathering that starts on the last weekend of August and ends on Labor Day. Attendance has dramatically increased: less than two dozen in 1986, 300 in 1989, 1,000 in 1993, 10,000 in 1997, and over 25,000 by the Millennium year. More than 69,000 people attended in 2013, and since 2015 the number of paying participants has been capped, officially, at 70,000.

Beyond the growing numbers, the artwork and cultural footprint of Burning Man has become legendary, so much so that in 2018 the Smithsonian dedicated its entire Renwick Gallery to the Burn experience. Academic researchers study its ethos and cultural spread, and social engineers and change agents use the platform to cross-pollinate ideas.

Personnel from technology companies flock to the Burn. This makes sense as the West Coast tech sector is interlocked with the 1960s counter-culture.[1] So much so, that the tech industry carved out its own Temporary Autonomous Zone [see Game of Gods, chapter 14 for a discussion on the TAZ concept], the annual Digital Be-Ins, a cyber-psychedelic spin-off of the 1967 Human Be-In, with presentations by Timothy Leary and sponsorship from Apple, Microsoft, and Yahoo.[2] During the 1997 Digital Be-In, Larry Harvey – the co-founder of Burning Man – compared his event to the digital world, painting the Burn as a “compelling physical analog for cyberspace.”

His was an appeal for a new kind of social network,

Both Burning Man and the Internet make it possible to regather the tribe of mankind, to talk to millions of dispersed individuals in the great diaspora of our mass society. Living as we do, without sustaining traditions in time and ungrounded in a shared experience of place, it is yet possible to transcend these deficiencies. We must use technology to create space stations here on planet Earth, islands of intense and living contact. It is time to come home.[3]

And come home they did.

The following year, a new internet search engine – Google – clearly aligned itself with Burning Man. Days before the company was incorporated on September 4, 1998, Google splashed its first doodle on their webpage, the Burning Man symbol. It went up on the 30th of August, hours before the event started, sending a message to Silicon Valley that the very week the company would be incorporated, the team would be at the Burn. In its early years, Google headquarters was decorated with Burning Man images and the company ran a free shuttle-bus to the event,[4] and in 2007 the corporation produced an internal video for employees going to the desert festival.[5] One Google milestone is of special importance, the hiring of Eric Schmidt as CEO. After reviewing fifty candidates, Schmidt’s résumé floated to the top. Why? Schmidt had been to the Burn. The clincher was taking Schmidt to Burning Man so he could be observed in a wild and complex social environment.[6] If he passed this test, he would get Google. He did, and the world changed.

Other personalities gravitating to the Burn include Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, a multi-year attendee, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon. Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life – the first virtual world accepted by the mainstream – was inspired by the 1999 Burn.[7] Elon Musk of Tesla Motors brought his Roadster prototype to the Burn in 2007. While at the 2014 HBO premier of the television series, Silicon Valley, Musk chastised the producer and cast, saying they had missed the mark: Burning Man is Silicon Valley.[8]

Transhumanism, too, has points of connection. In the weeks before the 2018 event with its art focus on robotics, a Burning Man Journal article reflected on the interplay of man and machine,

Much as we teach our robots to be like us, we robot creators play God, creating something in our own appearance and liking. It is only a matter of time before our creation will eat the apple, and know the difference between good and evil. Silicon Valley replays Christianity like an annual pageant.[9]

Why is this desert gathering so important to the tech world?

It is a setting where sensory overload boils over into new ideas, even products.[10] Burning Man is the tech industry’s creative commons, its unofficial United Nations; a place for networking and envisioning the future.

Urban planners also have their eyes on Black Rock City (BRC), the temporary community built around the Man effigy. BRC was highlighted during the 2018 winter meeting of the US Conference of Mayors, as civic leaders looked to find correlating inspiration for American cities.[11] Then during the 2018 Burn, members of the US Conference of Mayors – including the president of the Conference – took a trip to BRC for a first-hand look.

And BRC is a city. It has streets and plazas, a federally approved airport with hundreds of flights during the week, a post office and newspaper, emergency services, and a radio station. To note: there are no vendors with the exception of ice and coffee sales in Center Camp. Citizens of BRC bring everything needed for a week in the desert, and the event’s internal economy is based on gifting, one of the Ten Principles forming the ethos of Burning Man.[12] And as the event is “leave no-trace,” people pack-out their own trash.

“A true city arises, develops, evolves, catches fire, then disappears,” wrote journalist Brian Doherty, “built on a back-drop of nothing, imbuing it with a rich metaphorical resonance…”[13]

BRC is an evolutionary city with an evolutionary culture, and Burning Man is the premier, transformational event of our time.

Since 1990, the Burn has been held in the Black Rock Desert of northern Nevada,[14] an enormous region with a 200-square mile playa – a flat, alkaline lakebed (playa means beach in Spanish). Daytime temperatures can exceed 100-degrees Fahrenheit, and fierce winds drive massive dust storms across the city, choking out the air in whiteout conditions. The sheer size of the playa compels a response to scale; colossal-sized temples, huge art installations, and of course, the Man – a towering human effigy, some years standing over 100-feet tall – the central figure of Black Rock City. At the end of the week, the Man is burnt to the ground as tens of thousands party around the inferno, an explosive outpouring of celebration. On the following day, the Temple – gigantic and complex structures, in 2011 it was 120-feet tall with a 200-foot diameter – is razed as thousands watch in silence. After each burn, naked dancers and fire spinners move among the red hot coals.

Other shrines and temple-art pieces are erected. In 2015, some of Timothy Leary’s ashes were brought by actress Susan Sarandon, deposited in the temple-like, 5-story Totem of Confessions, and torched. Other installations included the House of Enlightenment in 2017, and the 70-foot-tall, all-metal Flower Tower, a flame-shooting “Cathedral Devoted to Happiness.”

At the end of the week BRC breaks apart as people leave, and the Black Rock Desert returns to its barren state – until next year.

Describing Burn Man is notoriously difficult. Is it a festival? Is the Burn an experiment in social cohesion, or a model of libertarianism? Is it about art and play? Is it hedonism, nudity and debauchery, or introspection and spirituality? Yes and no, all at the same time.

One contributor to BRC’s newspaper expressed it this way,

It is our palette and canvas, to create the world we can’t enjoy at home… It’s pagan. It’s anti-religious. It’s a Trojan horse… It’s a chance to get out of town and hang with some good chaps. It’s sex and drugs and trance music. It’s artistic expression. It’s a week of survival on chips-and-salsa… It’s Utopia-On-A-Stick.[15]

It is the “largest act of ephemeral collective creativity man has ever known,” explained Brian Doherty, “in an atmosphere largely free of imposed meanings or behavioral norms – [it] has no real parallel.”[16]

Part of the alchemy that makes Burning Man hard to categorize is the participant driven nature of the event. Every sculpture and painting, each camp program, and all daily offerings – from raves to art cars to personal costumes – are voluntary creations. This means the Burn is constantly shifting, minute-by-day-by-year. A general theme is announced months in advance, giving overall direction and philosophical perspective, but this is a guideline only.[17] In 2018, the theme had a transhumanist orientation, I, Robot, while the Temple – a massive, spiral structure titled Galaxia – was built to represent Isaac Asimov’s “superior form of Gaia… the ultimate network, the fabric of the universe connecting living beings into one entity.”[18]

Meanwhile, hundreds of encounters take place simultaneously without any reference to the theme whatsoever. It is a montage of experiences within one convergence. Burning Man is an oversized, full-sensory Happening.

It is important to understand that Burning Man is not a single event, but a container for an array of interests and experiences. The definitive guide to what transpires is the annually published What, Where, When. Handed to participants upon entering the city, this book lists the daily lectures, discussions, rituals, and other activities. From 2011 to 2016, the WWW was 160 pages long, and in 2017 and 2018 it was 191 pages, with each page averaging ten descriptive listings – keep in mind, this only reflects the accepted WWW listings.[19] Everything under the sun is open to explore, from the serious to the silly, the sexual to sociable, the spiritual to sacrilegious.

The following ten activities are a sampling. Camp names are in brackets:

Journey Into Gender – Enter this coming of age at any age ritual to redefine gender and reclaim past rites. Bring open heart, mind, soul, desire, objects, and costumes to share. (Gender Blender)[20]

The Great Work: Holy Guardian Angel – Aleister Crowley believed knowledge and conversation with one’s Holy Guardian Angel should be the preeminent goal of every magician. Learn more! (Sacred Spaces Village)[21]

Fire Dodgeball – Make new friends, and throw a ball of fire at them. Please wear fire-safe clothing. (!Zoom!)[22]

Building a Mainstream Psychedelic Movement – Daniel Jabbour, founder of the Psychedelic Society of San Francisco discusses the ethics and strategy for building a mainstream psychedelics movement. (Soft Landing)[23]

Slut Celebration Play Party – Young sluts unite. Come play in the sluts’ five bedrooms. No monogamous couples or single guys. (Sensual Playhouse)[24]

Reiki Shamanism – Weaving Reiki energy medicine with ancient shamanic journeying, illuminate your pathway to spiritual insight, channeling spirit guides, rescue souls. (Shamandome Camp)[25]

Carnal Healing: The Circle of Sexuality – Join us for a night of Sexual Magic as we cast a circle to invoke and honor global sexual deities and ask for their healing and support. (Diva Nation)[26]

The UN’s Agenda 2030 & Sustainable Development – Learn about increasing our impact through international & national initiatives. Explore ways to be a local and global citizen. (Earth Guardians)[27]

AI & Man’s Quest to Invent God – The story of our development of an Artificial Intelligence being and how will we grow with it. (Red Lightning)[28]

Holy Sacrament of The Man – It is time to drink the kool-aid. Come for communion to receive the body and blood of The Man & reflect on The Man’s sacrifice for us. (Bhudda Bank)[29]

The spiritual dynamics are significant.

The BRC census from 2013 to 2017 revealed interesting data points. When asked about Spiritual Identity, approximately half of the participants considered themselves “Spiritual, Not Religious.” Roughly one quarter identified as Atheist, 15% Agnostic, about 7% responded with “I Don’t Know,” 6% as Religious, and less than 1% Deist.[30] In the category of Religious Denomination, the breakdown for 2017 was: No Religion, 71.8%; Catholic, 7%; Jewish, 6%; Christian (other), 4.1%; Other 3%; Protestant, 2.6%; Buddhist, 1.9%; Pagan, 1.4%; Pastafarian,[31] 1.2%; Muslim, 0.6%; and Hindu, 0.4%.[32]

Burning Man itself is a platform to explore alternative spiritualities.

Re-enchantment, occulture, and myth are ingrained in many of the activities and artwork. Messages of cosmic oneness are prevalent, along with workshops on Yoga, shamanism, goddess rituals and sacred femininity, tarot, and esoteric philosophy. An earlier reference to the mythic was Pepe Ozan’s famed operas. From 1996 to 2000, the Argentine sculpture orchestrated large theatricals for Black Rock City.[33] These were primal, ritualized operas embellishing Pagan themes: Satan’s amusement with Empress Zoe, the marriage of the Mesopotamian deities Ishtar and Dumuzi, a Dravidian Fire Ceremony, a Haitian Vodou story, an Atlantean pyramid ritual.[34] Regardless of the medium, the concept of spirituality as experience is a central component. Diverse religious practices and beliefs are thus accepted. In the great American search for higher meaning, Burning Man “has become a ritualized space for those who seek spirituality but not religion.”[35]

Christianity, however, is mocked. Irreverence for all things is expected, but in terms of religious messaging, Christianity is seriously derided.[36]

Christopher Partridge writes: “it is clear that the spirituality encouraged at Burning Man is explicitly non-Christian… when it makes use of Christian symbolism it almost always does so negatively, as parody.”[37]

The Man itself is an object of mythic interpretation. Although no explicit meaning is assigned to the effigy, Burning Man insiders and academic observers recognize a ritualistic persona.[38] Stewart Harvey, brother of Larry Harvey – the visionary behind Burning Man – describes the annual event as a “ritual of destruction and renewal.”[39] As he put it,

…a deceptively simple and incredibly moving reenactment of destruction and rebirth… The Man is consumed by fire and yet lives to be reborn the following year. The ritual feels both timeless and yet utterly immediate, and it takes place in an environment that is at once otherworldly and oddly familiar.[40]

“Although Burning Man channels many of the ceremonial aspects of religious ritual,” Steward Harvey writes, “it does so without an accompanying dogma.”[41]

Larry Harvey places the Man within a setting of secular divinity,

The Man we’ve made, of course, is not a god, nor is the burning of the temple evidence of supernaturalism. Energy did not flow from the Man into a group of followers. Rather it was their energy, their full-hearted participation that created the Man.[42]

After the 2017 Burn with its theme, Radical Ritual, Larry told an audience at the Nevada Museum of Art,

The moral of our theme, in fact, was that it doesn’t really matter what you believe, it’s what you experience… The whole point, this year, was to convince people that Burning Man is a spiritual movement. It’s not a religion, but it’s a spiritual movement. And you know it when you see it.[43]

Larry Harvey, who passed away on April 28, 2018, was an avowed atheist with a penchant for metaphysical philosophy. He was fond of reversing the religious world order, to flip the question of which supernatural Being is supreme by saying, why not “simply say that being is supreme?”[44] 

Harvey’s background and the genesis of Burning Man are important in understanding the worldview context. Although this history is both complex and vague, we will briefly focus on a few factors.

Larry was a product of his generation, and his own internal struggles. His father was a staunch Freemason with an interest in sacred symbolism, and Larry himself gravitated to reading studies of comparative religion as a teenager. Both men had a hard time relating to one another, a fact Stewart Harvey brings out, noting their clash of sensibilities, yet recognizing that “Larry and our father were the same man.”[45] To his parent’s consternation, Larry started exploring his “own quest for pharmaceutical revelations… [becoming] a proto-hippie.”[46]

In 1967, Larry went to San Francisco and experienced the Summer of Love. He left briefly, returning for a time in 1968 to “get a second dose of hippie heaven.” Then, in the mid-1970, he took a place on Ashbury Street “just a few blocks from the Grateful Dead house.”[47] The utopian glow left over from the1960s, and the continued artistic vibrancy of the Bay Area, offered a cultural milieu that was amiable to Larry’s sense of identity.

Years later, in the summer of 1986, Larry was reading James G. Frazer’s classic text, The Golden Bough. First published in 1890, Frazer’s book was instrumental in the early field of comparative, mythological study – influencing the thinking of Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung.[48] A section in The Golden Bough outlines the history of fire festivals and the ritualistic torching of effigies, including midsummer burns, interpreting these as acts of magical protection against evil and witches.[49] According to Jerry James, the carpenter who built the first Man, Larry was into The Golden Bough when he called James to construct the figure.[50]

Is this the reason the first Man was burnt on Baker Beach, to play-act an ancient ritual – a mythic stepping-stone in human evolution? Larry had been to other solstice fires, a not uncommon happening along the shores of San Francisco.[51] Stewart Harvey, too, points to The Golden Bough story, but adds that Larry wanted to create “a more personal gesture of fiery expression,” and not imitate some “hoary legend from the distant past.”[52]

It is an intriguing angle, but the meaning behind the initial Burn remains unclear. When asked about its genesis during an on-stage interview at Le Web, Europe’s largest tech conference, Larry responded by saying, “Well, I’ve made up seven or eight stories about it, because people want a myth, and they’re all true.” He remembers calling his friend about building the effigy, but nothing before that: “Like so much that’s creative, it just came out of the black water, just materialized in front of me, probably largely due to subconscious processes.”[53]

Stewart Harvey comments,

Creative inspiration is rarely delivered in a tidy package… but in Larry’s case the road is especially twisty, because he is a person who has spent most of his life trying to make sense of human existence, and he is voraciously well read on the topic. Human evolution is absolutely at the heart of Burning Man.[54]

By the 1987 Burn, Jerry James could sense that something ritualistic was taking shape. Others, too, could see potential.

Members of the recently formed Cacophony Society, “culture jammers” with ties to the defunct Suicide Club – a secretive, San Francisco prankster group – were part of the early Burns. Both Suicide and Cacophony were artistically rooted in the neo-Dada movement, the Beats, and the Happenings.[55] Each were extensions of the city’s earlier counter-culture, and Cacophony dubbed itself the “Merry Pranksters of the 90’s.”[56] Larry never joined Cacophony, but the group played a role in the annual event.

After local police stopped the Burn on Baker Beach in 1990, it was obvious a new location was needed. Cacophony suggested taking the Man to the Black Rock Desert in September of that year. The rest, as they say, is history, and it has been a roller-coaster ride with accidents and deaths, organizational dramas, and colorful encounters with authorities and local residents.[57]

One internal tension point was over EDM and the development of a rave encampment a mile from the Burn. In 1996, three ravers were seriously injured when a speeding car hit their tent. The following year, anti-ravers in a flaming art vehicle – shooting 70-foot streams of fire – threatened to burn down the rave camp. Goa Gil, who was performing that night, found himself squared-off in front of the mutant vehicle. The art car backed down and “ravers gained a foothold at Burning Man.”[58]

In time, the other elements of today’s Burn were added; a stronger emphasis on art, theme-based encampments, a full slate of workshops, and a Temple in the year 2000. Information technologies and the internet itself were maturing, and Burning Man paralleled this development – moving from its “wild west” persona of the 1990s into a defined cultural movement.

As the Burn grew in popularity and size, a Regional movement sparked to life. Regional Burns now take place across the United States, in Canada, and around the world. For example, Israel hosts the Mid-Burn gathering where an effigy of Adam and Eve is torched, and AfrikaBurn takes place near Tankwa Karoo National Park in South Africa. The virtual world of Second Life is home to BURN2, the only official Regional held in a completely digital environment. Unofficial gatherings like Washington DC’s Catharsis on the Mall are rooted in the Burn, and many transformational festival are directly influenced by the desert convergence.

The Burning Man organization, too, has gained an international voice. Staff members are sought after for media interviews, speak at major conferences, and lecture in academic settings. Global Leadership Conferences and European summits are hosted by the organization, and it interacts with foundations and think tanks, such as the Esalen Institute and Steward Brand’s Long Now Foundation.

Burning Man is far more than a party in the desert. It is a planetary TAZ with global implications.

Essentially, the Dada-Crowley-Kesey effect of the 1960s has been reshaped for our global context. Stewart Brand, co-host of the 1966 Trips Festival – and an important figure in the development of the internet, popularizing the term personal computer – understood the cultural-social connection,

Burning Man, they have surpassed in every way the various things we were attempting with the Acid Tests and the Trips Festival, Burning Man has realized with such depth and thoroughness and ongoing originality and ability to scale and minimalist rules, but enough rules that you can function, and all the things we were farting around with, Larry Harvey has really pulled off. I don’t think that would have come to pass without going through whatever that spectrum of the ’60s was, the prism of the ’60s, the spectrum of bright colors that we espoused for a while. It all got exacerbated by the Internet and sequence of computer-related booms, but I think it flavored a whole lot of the basic nature of Burning Man.[59]

One participant interpreted the Burn experience this way,

I think of Burning Man as the first extraterrestrial city on earth. It completely integrates technology and visionary art with neo-tribal ritual… The playa is a portal, preparing us for the cosmic dance party everyone’s waiting for.[60]

“Burning Man is a self-service cult,” Larry Harvey once famously remarked. “Wash your own brain.”[61]

 Endnotes:

[1] See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006).

[2] See the Digital Be-In official webpage: www.be-in.com/events/past-events. 

[3] Larry Harvey, Burning Man and Cyberspace, 1997. His speech notes can be found at: https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/founders-voices/larry-harvey/cyber.

[4] S. Kotler and J. Wheal, Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work (DEY St., 2017), p.19.

[5] Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production,” New Media & Society, Volume 11, Issue 1-2, February/March 2009, p.75.

[6] Kotler and Wheal, Stealing Fire, pp.20-21.

[7] Philip Rosedale interview, “Why Build A Virtual World?” NPR TED Radio Hour, September 18, 2015 (www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=440302192).

[8] Nellie Bowles, “At HBO’s ‘Silicon Valley’ Premier, Elon Musk Has Some Notes,” Recode.net, April 3, 2014 (www.recode.net/2014/4/3/11625260/at-hbos-silicon-valley-premiere-elon-musk-is-pissed).

[9] Misa Rygrova, “I, Robot – We, God,” Burning Man Journal, August 7, 2018 (https://journal.burningman.org/2018/08/philosophical-center/the-theme/i-robot-we-god).

[10] The Burn has been a test site for Google Earth tools. See Fred Turner, “Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production,” New Media & Society, pp.89-90. Another inspired development is SolarCity, one of America’s largest solar installation companies, conceived by Elon Musk and Lyndon Rive during the 2004 Burn. 

[11] Draft Agenda: The 86th Winter Meeting of The United States Conference of Mayors (January 24-28, 2018, Washington, DC, Capital Hilton Hotel).

[12] The Ten Principles: Radical Inclusion, Gifting, Decommodification, Radical Self-reliance, Radical Self-expression, Communal Effort, Civic Responsibility, Leaving No Trace, Participation, and Immediacy. An unwritten eleventh principle is Consent.

[13] Brian Doherty, This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground (BenBella Books, 2006), p.3.

[14] In 1997 it took place in Hualapai Flat.

[15] S. McKenzie, “Utopia-On-A-Stick,” 3 Sept. 1998, in Burning Man Live: 13 Years of Piss Clear – Black Rock City’s Alternative Newspaper (RE/Search Publications, 2009), p.58.

[16] Doherty, This is Burning Man, p.4.

[17] The first official theme was Inferno in 1996. Playing off this, a theatrical production titled HELCO – featuring Satan and the selling of souls, including spoof TV commercials – was produced in anticipation of the Burn. HELCO became that year’s premier art installation.

[18] The Galaxia Story, Temple Galaxia webpage [https://templegalaxia.org/temple].

[19] In 2017, over 3,600 events were submitted for inclusion in the WWW. In 2018 the number jumped to more than 4,300. Note: due to circumstances, not all listed events take place.

[20] What, Where, When: 2011 – Rites of Passage (Burning Man, 2011), p.55.

[21] What, Where, When: 2012 – Fertility 2.0 (Burning Man, 2012), p.59.

[22] Ibid., p.127.

[23] What, Where, When: 2013 – Cargo Cult (Burning Man, 2013), p.104.

[24] What, Where, When: 2014 – Caravansary (Burning Man, 2014), p.99.

[25] Ibid., p.110.

[26] What, Where, When: 2015 – Carnival of Mirrors (Burning Man, 2015), p.99.

[27] What, Where, When: 2016 – Da Vinci’s Workshop (Burning Man, 2016), p.53.

[28] Ibid., p.73.

[29] What, Where, When: 2017 – Radical Ritual (Burning Man, 2017), p.106.

[30] Black Rock City Census: 2013-2017 Population Analysis, p.28.

[31] Pastafarian is a parody religion mocking Christian beliefs, creationism in particular.

[32] Black Rock City Census: 2013-2017 Population Analysis, p.29.

[33] Other operas took place in 2002 and 2003, but were of lesser renown.

[34] For more on Ozan’s operas, see The Burning Man Opera: www.burningmanopera.org. See also, Lee Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press, 2010), pp.83-87. The documentary, Dust and Illusions (Madnomad Films, 2009), also outlines the story of Pepe Ozan.

[35] Lee Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press, 2010), p.67.

[36] The back issues of Piss Clear, BRC’s newspaper from 1995 to 2007, amply demonstrates that ridicule of all sorts is common to the culture – including mockery of the Burn itself.

[37] Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volume 1, p.164.

[38] One academic work of note is Lee Gilmore’s Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man (University of California Press, 2010).

[39] Stewart Harvey, Playa Fire: Spirit and Soul at Burning Man (HarperElixir, 2017), p.6.

[40] Stewart Harvey, “Black Rock Dawn,” Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man (Black Dog Publishing, 2014), pp.30-31.

[41] Harvey, Playa Fire, p.6.

[42] Larry Harvey, “Forward,” Playa Fire: Spirit and Soul at Burning Man, p.viii.

[43] Larry Harvey in Conversation with David Walker: Reflections on the Growth of Burning Man, hosted by the Nevada Museum of Art, October 12, 2017. The selection quoted can be accessed here, beginning at the 11:16 mark: https://youtu.be/NYPJoRGKMSk.

[44] Larry Harvey, “Forward,” Playa Fire, p.viii. He often repeated this phrase.

[45] Stewart Harvey, Playa Fire, p.11, see also p.14.

[46] Ibid., p.10.

[47] Ibid., pp.9-12.

[48] John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough (Princeton University Press, 1973), pp.94-95.

[49] A revised edition of the classic text was published as The New Golden Bough (Criterion Books, 1959, edited by Theodor H. Gaster). For the section on fire festivals and effigy burns, see pp.610-647.

[50] Jerry James, “In the Beginning,” Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man (Black Dog Publishing, 2014), p.20.

[51] Jerry James references Larry’s prior attendance at solstice burns, and Stewart Harvey details San Francisco’s solstice history. See James, “In the Beginning,” Playa Dust, p.20; Stewart Harvey, Playa Fire, p.13.

[52] Stewart Harvey, Playa Fire, p.14.

[53] Larry Harvey interview, Le Web London, 2013. A video of this talk is online at: https://youtu.be/ufQncdmuHlw.

[54] Stewart Harvey, Playa Fire, p.9.

[55] Gilmore, Theater in a Crowded Fire, p.26.

[56] Rough Draft, Issue #48, September 1990, the newsletter of the Cacophony Society.

[57] Brian Doherty’s, This Is Burning Man (BenBella, 2006), details some of this history.

[58] Graham St. John, “Begoggled in the Theatre of Awe: Electronic Dance Music Culture at Burning Man,” Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man (Black Dog Publishing, 2014), p.148.

[59] Stewart Brand, “Summer of Love: 40 Years Later,” SFGATE, May 20, 2007, [www.sfgate. com/news/article/Summer-of-Love-40-Years-Later-Stewart-Brand-2559651.php].

[60] As quoted by Jonathan Talat Phillips, The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic (Evolver Editions, 2011), p154.

[61] Quoted by Brian Doherty, This Is Burning Man, p.290.