Burning Man was therapy of the highest order. She was sick, sad, depressed,
mentally ill by most standards. There was an emptiness, a hollowness that she
couldn’t fill. Religion didn’t help. Even people in general could not help with the
ailment. “The Event”—blessed, perhaps, as in rebirth or resurrection—is attended,
and Zelga is cured. In terms that sound as if they describe a cure or a remission,
Zelga notes that it has been a month and she is still well. She sees the vast web of
connections, the beauty of all things in life. She dreams of being permanently
healed: of getting better.
Zelga’s sense of spiritual therapeutics is crucial to our understanding of Burning
Man and many other contemporary festivals. Whether it is loneliness, inhibitions,
repressions, guilt, pyromania, or any of a vast number of obsessions, participants
view these events as places where healing happens. In 1999 we witnessed an obese
and hirsute middle-aged man lying naked and outstretched in his tent while crowds
walked by Someone remarked as we walked by that his behavior was healthy
“Imagine,” they said to us, “what this guy might do in the outside world if he didn’t
have this place.” Thinking about this gave us a shiver the thought echoed with
wider social ramifications and responsibilities. At festivals such as Burning Man,
healing is emplaced in permissive events that allow the expression of bottled-up
desires. They may seek to cure an emptiness and sense of lack of meaning in life,
replacing it with a holistic emphasis on vast and important connections between the
personal, the social, and the transcendent.
Healing and holism are central concerns within the New Age and Neo-Pagan
movements. According to York (1995:8), it is in their healing and holistic emphases
that these movements are in part outgrowths from the broader human potential
movement. Viewed as part of a broader alternative spiritual movement, events like
Burning Man, post-raves, and many other festivals might be seen to contribute to
personal and collective development. They offer particular, dynamic, contemporary,
sacralized, therapeutic, holistic flavors to their utopias. For instance, Hutson
concludes that
raves increase self-esteem, release fears and anxieties, bring inner peace and
improve consciousness, among other things. Raves don’t cure disease, but
when someone claims that “last night a DJ saved my life”, it is reasonable to
suspect that at least some form of healing takes place.
(Hutson 1999:71)Beckford (1984) recognizes the way in which groups and events involved in healing
tend to relativize the institutional boundaries around practices usually confined to
religion and psychiatry In the discourse and practice of many New Age groups,
spiritual belief and psychotherapy commingle. Yet, despite this commonality, we
should acknowledge the immense pluralism and diversity existing within the New Age
movement. As York (1995) indicates, New Age is an umbrella term, which overlaps
in places with Neo-Paganism, itself highly pluralistic and diverse. Both movements
exhibit what is often called the “American metaphysical tradition” (ibid.:33), but
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