Neo-Pagans tend to place greater emphasis on embodiment, earth religions,
ecology, and magic. While there are other differences and similarities, Neo-Pagans
tend to stress ceremony and ritual. It is thus in their ceremonialism that post-raves
and Burning Man relate most closely to Neo-Paganism.
An important link between New Age and Neo-Pagan discourse and practices and
those of Burning Man and other post-raves is the centrality of ritual within the
healing practices of these groups and gatherings. York contends that “self-
improvement and self-growth orientations” constitute the raison d’être behind the
rituals of New Age and Neo-Pagan practitioners (ibid.:11). To this, we would add
many of the various rituals performed at festivals and post-rave affairs, from ritual
drug use, dance, trance-invocation, to ceremonial social bonding. Outside critics
often decry the Bacchanalian aspects of these events as mindless intoxication. Yet
the institutional equivalents of many festival actions are recognized to be
therapeutic: confessions, group therapies, exercise, prescription drugs. Regarding the
latter, altered states of consciousness are widely understood within the New Age
movement as legitimate forms of questing for meaning and spiritual experience (see
Ferguson 1987:31). For participants at events like raves and Burning Man, New
Age and Neo-Pagan philosophies provide an ideological wedge allowing them to
insert rituals into a sophisticated and individually (rather than institutionally) driven
process of healing the self. In the next section, we explore the specific role that Neo-
Pagan rituals and discourses play in this process.
Neo-Pagan connectionsThe central and culminating event of Burning Man has probably done the most to
give the event a pagan profile—although we, along with the erudite organizers of
the event, would contest singular and constricting assignments of meaning to the
ritual or the event itself (see Black 1998). A Neo-Pagan reading is only one
potential interpretation among many. Yet it is also important to realize that this
open-endedness is an important hallmark of New Age and Neo-Pagan philosophies,
and indeed of many American religious movements that followed the
countercultural period of the 1960s. “With no central authority, New Age is not
doctrinaire and consequently means many things to many people” (York 1995: 35).
Communications on Burning Man’s website emphasize the open-endedness and
individualism of the event. Here is a small section from an article entitled “What is
Burning Man” that blends this open-endedness of ritual interpretation with distinct
promises of sacred, transformational experience:
On Saturday night, we’ll burn the Man. As the procession starts, the circle
forms, and the man ignites, you experience something personal, something
new to yourself, something you’ve never felt before. It’s an epiphany, it’s primal,
it’s newborn. And it’s completely individual.^6290 ROBERT V.KOZINETS AND JOHN F.SHERRY, JR