concentric circles which act as streets, for example. Later in this chapter we will also
explore the common elements of fire rituals and drum-dominated music and dance.
We can also see ritual, ideological, and discursive elements of Neo-Paganism in
practice in many “theme camps” constructed by participants. Theme camps are
group campsites that are organized around a guiding, organizing theme and through
which Burning Man participants co-create the Burning Man experience. Similar to
the “villages” at ConFest (St. John 1997), Burning Man provides theme camps,
community, and a set of widely distributed rules to support participants’
experimentation with a vast range of personal forms of expression. Theme camps
provide an entertaining and enlightening experience for other participants. Many of
them play with notions of the sacred and seek, with varying levels of seriousness and
satire, to pierce fundamental mysteries of human and social existence. Indeed, on
the central Burning Man website theme camps are described in playful, but
distinctly religious, terms, as “your chance to be a god or a worshiper.”^7
Although there are major differences in motivation for participation in the event
and for the construction of theme camps, we can definitely see many connections to
Neo-Paganism in the descriptions participants provide of their theme camps.
Consider a group that calls itself TOTEM: Temple of the Eternal Mysteries.
TOTEM is “an organization dedicated to community, philosophical inquiry, the
arts, and celebrating the joy of life.” This group of friends from San Francisco has
created several different kinds of theme camp at Burning Man. They began with a
simple, but popular, mud-pit. They created a larger mud-pit, then a party room,
followed by a large “sound-art” system that played “non-rave” music. In 2001 they
changed their theme into a large-scale massage tent. The TOTEM group is
apparently motivated by some of the same philosophies and ideologies that animate
Neo-Pagan gatherings. Consider the relationship between Neo-Pagan discourse and
ritual and Burning Man in TOTEM’s web-page descriptions:
The mysteries and our fascination with them [the eternal mysteries] are built
into us at a very deep level. If we were to strip away all one-god ideology, all
religious institutions and religious literature, and return to our tribal
primitivism, the eternal mysteries would remain, to burn like the brightest sun
above us all. Thus the Burning Man connection. Each year at Burning Man,
we leave behind the baffling bureaucracies of Babylon, and return to our primal
state. Stripped of our usual sources of institutionalized inspiration, we must
search within ourselves for ultimate meaning. Only the truth and relevance of
the eternal mysteries are stunning enough to command the attention of our
modern primitive culture, newly arisen from the mud. We are at Burning
Man because our participation in the festival restores our awareness of our
tribal roots, of the mysteries within.^8The emphasis in this description is on the tribal, the primal, the primitive—on the
regaining of the lost. Appearances must be stripped away, roots must be restored,
mysteries must be returned to, people must be reborn from the mud. These
EXPLORING THE SACRED AT BURNING MAN 293