‘Burning Man’ Is America’s Largest Religious Gathering

Seventy thousand weirdos descend on the Nevada desert this week to bump uglies, welter in filth, and worship Moloch during America’s largest annual religious gathering: Burning Man. The festival began as a summer solstice bonfire ritual in 1986, when Bay Area artists “spontaneously” burned an eight-foot-tall wooden man, as well as a smaller wooden dog, in effigy. Where one spontaneously discovers a giant wicker man, and why one subsequently chooses to incinerate him is anybody’s guess. The ritual mirrored an identical ancient Druidic sacrifice described by Julius Caesar in his Commentary on the Gallic War, though Burning Man’s founders claim ignorance as to the custom’s origin. Today that solstice bonfire has grown into a week-long, annual bacchanal of sex, drugs, and pagan spirituality.

History repeats itself, per Marx, first as tragedy, then as farce. In the ancient tragedy, pagan Celts filled a giant wicker dummy with living men and burned them all alive. In the modern farce, besotted hippies ignite an empty wooden figure, a fitting symbol for an empty culture. Burning Man’s organizers describe the wooden statue, which they house “in a temple that is dedicated to the Golden Spike,” as being “like every one of us.” Ironically, festival organizers describe the man’s incineration as an act of “radical self-expression,” when in fact the ritual amounts to radical self-annihilation.