Nomad Codes

as much for our time as for theirs. Spicer, who worked with computers in the course of his linguistics research, wrote about silicon and punched IBM cards; he cannily foresaw, in 1962, an America ruled by networked computers. This is the America that “drowns itself with machines and weeping,” where “Death is not final. Only parking lots.” We can still hear Spicer through all his uncomfortable music because he channeled something of our condition: all those angry spirits, this aimless noise.
    2009

BEYOND BELIEF

    The Cults of Burning Man

    For without corruption, there can no Generation consist.
    — Corpus Hermeticum

    I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star!
    —Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

    Black Rock City cliché has it that you can’t say anything very penetrating about Burning Man because its diversity and contradictions undermine whatever generalizations you might be tempted to make. This truism is solid enough, and should be mulled over by any Burner foolish enough, like me, to venture into a written analysis of the festival, which takes place every summer in northern Nevada. Yet behind this notion lurks a higher and more important injunction: to keep the event free from the prison of interpretation and explanation, from the insidious net of Meaning. This refusal is prophylactic. By setting their bullshit detectors on high alert, Burners ward off pretension, self-consciousness, and all of the pre-packaged “experiences” that have come to define late-capitalist subjectivity. This tactic also helps sustain the event’s tribal vibe. On the playa, we are united in our evasion of significance.
    Thus it is with some trepidation that I turn to one of the more vexing questions that you might ask about Burning Man: can or should we speak of the event as a sacred gathering? Even if we acknowledge the vagueness of terms like sacred , spiritual , and religious , it is still safe to say that, from the outside at least, Burning Man comes off as exceptionally profane. Ironic and blasphemous, intoxicated and lewd, Burning Man’s ADD theater of the absurd could be said to embody the slap-happy nihilism of postmodern culture itself. Moreover, many Burners would agree with this characterization. According to my own anecdotal inquiries and observations, a good portion of committed attendees would deny that spirituality or sacred emotions have any bearing on their rollicking good times.
    In matters of the spirit, however, you cannot always believe what people say. Sometimes you have to look at what they do, and what they do at Burning Man features clear parallels to some mystic fetes of yore. Take the Eleusinian Mysteries, the greatest public cult of ancient Greece. The mysteries took place at harvest time on the outskirts of Athens and continued annually for almost two thousand years. Initiates came from all walks of life, and made their way to Eleusis only after preparing in the city for weeks. The days leading up to the core rite featured torchbearers, pig roasts, and Dionysian pageants. The peak of the festival took place in the secret telesterion , where initiates witnessed a “great light.” [1] Though we know next to nothing about it, the experience, which some believe was mediated by psychoactive drugs, seemed to provide direct insight into matters of life and death. The similarities between the mysteries and Burning Man are notable, and are certainly not lost on the festival’s founder, Larry Harvey. Writing under the pseudonym Darryl Van Rhey in a 1995 issue of Gnosis magazine, Harvey noted that, like Burning Man, the mysteries attracted a largely urban and sophisticated crowd. “Intense, ecstatic, and immediate, the rites did not stress doctrinal belief, but valued outward show and inward feeling.” [2] Though this historical resonance might sound like wishful thinking on Harvey’s part, no less august a figure than Aristotle basically concurred: “that the initiated learned nothing precisely, but that they received impressions and were put into a certain frame of mind.” [3]
    Even more immediate than such classical resonances, though, are the religious frameworks and sacred symbols that Burners regularly make use of. Whatever their degree of implied irony or seriousness, participants regularly cannibalize Christianity, Satanism, Buddhism, shamanism, Western occultism, Tantra, Judaism, Wicca, and other theme parks of the spirit for their costumes, camps,