The Burning Man Festival as Modern Desert Pilgrimage

Lee Gilmore, a lecturer in religious studies and anthropology at California State University at Northridge, had an epiphany one night in the Nevada desert, brought on by visions of the Virgin Mary, the Buddha, and Elvis Presley.

She had ventured out there for Burning Man, an annual festival held during the week leading up to Labor Day in the Black Rock Desert, about 120 miles north of Reno. Gilmore had attended the festival several times since her first “burn,” in 1996, but in this particular year, 2004, she had made the beginner’s mistake of failing to drink enough liquids to keep going in the hot, dry climate. Instead of attending the annual festival’s climactic spectacle—the torching of a huge, enigmatic human effigy at the center of the temporary tent-and-RV community known as Black Rock City—she found herself in a medical tent, woozy from dehydration. In glimpsing images of Mary, the Buddha, and Elvis hung on the tent’s walls, she became aware of the diverse religious and spiritual backgrounds found among Burning Man’s participants. She went from feeling somewhat jaded about Burning Man to realizing she still had plenty to learn from being there.

The product of her subsequent ethnographic study of the festival is Theater in a Crowded Fire: Ritual and Spirituality at Burning Man, out recently from the University of California Press. Based mainly on structured interviews and informal conversations with festival participants—as well as surveys of more than 300 people who participate in the Nevada festival or one of several regional spin-offs—the book makes the case that spiritual imagery, thinking, and ritual abound at Burning Man, even if the organizers and most participants soundly reject any effort to tie the event to any sort of religion. Yes, some people come to Burning Man just to hit wild parties or dance to internationally known electronic and techno music acts. But, Gilmore notes, Black Rock City is also a place where people encounter crosses, labyrinths, Buddhas, and voodoo imagery, stumble upon tents devoted to meditation, yoga, or discussions of life’s great mysteries, and often find themselves undergoing profound personal transformation. The event is capped, on its closing night, with the solemn burning of a carefully sculpted temple on which many have affixed or inscribed tributes to lost loved ones.

“People go to Burning Man to play with alternative experiences, identities, and spiritualities,” Gilmore writes. “In so doing,” she says, “they individualistically and idiosyncratically draw on a diverse and limitless pool of global cultural resources and engage in an á la carte mixture of the world’s various faith and symbol systems in order to piece together ad hoc and hybrid frameworks through which to perform their personal spiritual beliefs and aspirations.”

It is not just ritual and symbol that people draw upon at the festival, which this year attracted more than 50,000 participants. They can also find themselves deeply changed as a result of adhering to the 10 guiding principles of Burning Man, which include “radical inclusion,” “radical self-expression,” participation, communal effort, and the environmentalist ethic of leaving no trace. No money changes hands in Black Rock City beyond a single cafe in center camp and ice tents operated out of necessity. Instead, people there embrace gift-giving, stopping strangers on the street to offer them jewelry, a meal, or a hug. Many return from the festival determined to be more generous and kind to others, and feeling sad about the coldness of what Burners sometimes call the “default world.” When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast during the 2005 festival, scores of Burners headed to New Orleans to help out.

Gilmore, who has a longstanding interest in paganism, previously co-edited a book on the annual festival, Afterburn: Reflections on Burning Man (University of New Mexico Press, 2005). Her latest book, Theater in a Crowded Fire, similarly retraces the festival’s history and attempts to provide an overview of what happens there. It includes a DVD, featuring footage shot by her husband, that helps readers visually grasp aspects of the festival that printed words don’t do justice.

The new book’s greatest contribution may be the results of Gilmore’s surveys of the religious and spiritual beliefs of participants. Nearly 3 in 10 identified themselves as atheist or agnostic. About 6 in 10 described themselves as spiritual, but unconnected to Western or Abrahamic religious traditions. Just 6 percent described themselves as Jewish or Christian. They included an evangelical pastor who embraced the chance to give bottles of water away to, he said, “show God’s love,” a Lutheran teenager who worried that some of the rituals amounted to idolatry, and a Jewish participant who wryly observed, “my bar mitzvah was nothing like this!”

There is good reason to believe that Gilmore’s latest book is hardly the last academic work that will emerge out of the festival. Andie M. Grace, a spokeswoman for Black Rock City LLC, the organization that runs Burning Man, says about 200 scholars responded to a call in its newsletter, The Jack Rabbit Speaks, to meet up at the latest festival to discuss their academic interests in the event. Among those who offered brief summaries of their work were anthropologists, people studying sculpture and street theater at the festival, and urban planners whose interest was piqued by this year’s theme, Metropolis, which encouraged participants to riff on city life. Grace says her organization is assembling a network of scholars interested in Burning Man. Those interested can contact her group at academics@burningman.com—Peter Schmidt

Schmidt, a senior writer at The Chronicle, attended Burning Man this year, last year, and in 2005.