Nomad Codes

sculptures, and performances. Since 1994, I have participated in or observed vodoun invocations, Balinese monkey chants, shabbat prayers, Santeria drum circles, sunrise yoga, spiral dances, and group zazen. A friend and I once got shushed for our play-by-play commentary of a ponderous Ordo Templi Orientis Gnostic mass. While some of these appropriations are sarcastic or even blasphemous (especially in the case of Christianity), many are serious attempts to squeeze the juice from more or less traditional rites and images.
    But how far does the distinction between serious and sarcastic get us? It’s much too literalistic to investigate the spirituality of Burning Man by cataloging its samples of religious traditions or by isolating instances of “authentic” practice. Authenticity, in context, may well be a trap. At its best, Burning Man twists authenticity and irony into a Möbius strip that never lets you know what side you’re on but always keeps you going. This productive ambivalence is fundamental to the event’s sacred power, a power that derives, paradoxically, from a circular coniunctio of sacred and profane. The specifically religious elements of the Burn are important not in themselves, but in relation to one another and to the less ethereal aspects of the festival: the carnality, the trash, the desert dust. This wider field of relations is not holistic but multiple: a promiscuous carnival of souls, a metaphysical flea-market, a demolition derby of reality constructs colliding in a parched void.
    So can we say anything meaningful about Burning Man’s spirituality? My approach here is to tease out some cultural patterns within the festival—patterns I am calling “cults”—and to hold them up against the history of countercultural spirituality on the West Coast. The essential cult is the Cult of Experience, a cult to which all Burners in some sense belong. I will also talk about the Cult of Intoxicants, the Cult of Juxtapose, the Cult of Flicker, and the Cult of Meaningless Chaos. My list is not at all definitive. Important Black Rock cults, such as the Cult of Flesh and the Cult of Sleeplessness, will have to be treated elsewhere.
    Though my comments are rooted in cultural history, I will also draw, inevitably, from my personal experience of the Black Rock gatherings I have attended, not quite continuously, since 1994. By experience I don’t simply mean my firsthand observations and reflections, but also the moments of cosmic wonder and insight that have occasionally flared up in my nervous system, at times with a disarming incandescence. One particularly vivid moment occurred during the 2002 Floating World incarnation of the event. Given the year’s aquatic theme, I finally got around to performing a solo shtick I had been planning to do for years, but somehow could never pull off in the face of sloth and distraction. I donned a bathing suit, snorkel, mask and flippers, and plopped down on a touristy Brazilian beach towel at the edge of the playa, near the Esplanade’s main drag. I twisted my legs into lotus position and settled down to meditate for forty-five minutes or so.
    As a statement, I guess you could say I was performing my response to Freud’s dismissal of the mystic’s “oceanic” consciousness as an infantile resubmersion into the womb. [4] Whatever. What really made the act work were the flippers: huge, yellow duck feet that I picked up at a second-hand sporting-goods store in San Francisco’s West Portal neighborhood. Enhancing my already somewhat freakish meditation posture with these Donald Duck jobbies was, simply stated, a hoot—amusing enough, in any case, to wind up featured on a Burning Man web site for a spell. As a bonus, the gag also allowed an internal experiment: what happens when you juxtapose such absurdity with serious meditation?
    My snorkel-sit began auspiciously. As soon as I settled into the posture and relaxed my gaze, I inhaled a distant whiff of sage, which grew in strength until I sensed that some unseen person was smudging me with the Native American/New Age power plant. Gradually I opened my mind to the wide space of sounds encircling me. I was not so much listening as generating a diffuse awareness of ambient events knitted together gently into a single acoustic space. Though I was trying to avoid identifying the source of sounds or focusing on particular noises, I soon became aware of a moving cluster of guttural barks and impassioned “Arrgghs.”