What exactly are Neo-Pagans and how do they relate to festivals such as Burning
Man? Pike considers “Neo-Pagans” to be people who are “reinventing ancient pagan
traditions or creating new ones,” shaping those traditions “to meet the needs of
contemporary Americans and Europeans” (2001:27). Pearson et al. similarly define
“contemporary Paganism” as
a general and inclusive category for a range of specific traditions, all of which
may in varying degrees be described as nature religions in the sense that they
involve a reorientation towards, and a resacralization of, both external nature
and our own physical embodiment.
(Pearson et al. 1998:1; italics mine)York offers a more detailed definition. He sees Neo-Paganism as
comprising an animistic, pantheistic, and pluralistic religious orientation that
is non-[d]octrinaire but employs traditional pagan metaphors (myths, foci,
and rituals) or modern reconstructions of them as a means of celebrating a
this-wordly emphasis. Neopagans stress self-responsibility, self-development,
individual exegesis and full freedom of self-determination, the experience of
ritual and ecstasy, and an ecological preoccupation.
(York 1995:136)In the next section, we continue to explore these Neo-Pagan aspects of Burning
Man and related events, and relate these aspects to the incorporation and utilization
of modern technologies.
Invasion of the techno-pagansThe idea of building an anthropomorphic figure, animating it with electricity,
pyrotechnics, and wire, referring to it as “the Man,” allowing multiple
interpretations of the event, and offering it as a central sacrificial rite for celebrants
resonates with ineluctably pagan, especially animist, implications. As well as a call for
community and an invocation of ecstasy, it expresses a need to fashion the natural
world into images of living things, ensouling or reanimating the world of nature.
The urge is both primal—widely ascribed to children and to non-industrial cultures
—and postmodern. A complaint about contemporary society holds that “the
common urban and suburban experience of our [American and Western] culture as
‘impersonal’, ‘neutral’, or ‘dead’” (Adler 1986:25). Re-enchanting the world of
things is the common ground of advertising agencies and Neo-Pagan rituals which,
despite their different motives and foci, seek to make material things seem alive and
filled with delight.
Some of the practices and performances at Burning Man have elements that
evoke Neo-Pagan rituals. The form of the circle is central and sacred in Neo-Pagan
rituals, with Burning Man’s enormous campsite laid out as a series of named
292 ROBERT V.KOZINETS AND JOHN F.SHERRY, JR