Phoenix Rising: The culture of fire at the Burning Man Festival

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ Art cars are also known as mutant vehicles – golf carts, cars, buses, and other vehicles that are transformed beyond recognition. Some examples of art cars include motorized cupcakes, a double decker bus transformed into a 16th century Spanish ship, a golf cart covered in pink faux fur etc…These vehicles must be registered by the DMV, the department of Mutant Vehicles and receive a day or night license. All night vehicles must be illuminated. They are required to travel at 5 miles an hour. There is an entire society at Burning Man dedicated to art cars.

² Fire played an important role in the development of religion, and many cultures evolved deities associated with fire. To name only a few: the Egyptian goddess Sekhet, who represented destructive heat; the Japanese fire goddess who lived in a volcano, worshipped by the Ainu; the Icelandic Surtr, a god of volcanic fire; the Hindu goddess Devi, who dwells in natural fires; the Greek goddess Hestia and her Roman counterpart Vesta, who presided over the hearth and home; and the Yoruba Shango, the god of thunder. Agni, the Vedic god of fire, is often depicted with two faces, one good and one evil. His three limbs represent the sun, promoting growth and fertility; lightning, promoting vengeance; and earthly fire, promoting humanity and warmth (Rossotti 1993: 241). The Zoroastrians of Iran also worship fire. Zoroaster, the founding prophet of the religion, engaged in spiritual contemplation on a mountaintop and escaped unscathed when the entire mountain was destroyed by fire. For his followers, fire symbolized both sacred purification and transport of their prayer to their god (Heesterman 1993: 71). Fire is also essential to carnival. As Bakhtin points out, the Roman Carnival ended with the fire festival of Moccoli (‘candle stumps’), a grand pageant along the Corso in Rome with each participant carrying a paper lantern illuminated by a burning candle (Bakhtin 1984: 248). The entire Corso is flooded with the glow of illuminated candles and torches, and the objective of Moccoli is for participants to blow out one another's candles and yell, ‘Sia ammazzato’ – ‘You're murdered!’ (Goethe cited in Falassi 1987: 32). Symbolic death is a recurrent theme of Carnival as it is at Burning Man.

³ Commemorating the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot on 5 November 1606, Guy Fawkes Night has been celebrated in the United Kingdom ever since. The current celebrations take the form of a series of torch-lit processions through town. Effigies of Guy Fawkes and Pope Paul V, who became head of the Roman Catholic Church in 1605, are featured every year (Sharpe 2005).

⁴ Beltane is a specifically Gaelic holiday celebrated on 1 May. Large bonfires herald the arrival of summer in the hope of good harvest, prosperity and well-being to all. Need-fires, as they were called, were built to purify cattle of disease and the plague – villages would rush their cattle through the fires to purify the animals as well as themselves. The festival persisted widely until the 1950s and is still celebrated in some places (Adams and Gailey 1977: 5).

⁵ As Schechner notes, ‘Ravana's cremation signals his final surrender to Rama and his release from his demonic self’ (Schechner 1993: 149).

⁶ Although the fiesta dates back to 1712, Santa Fe artist Will Shuster was inspired by the Yaqui, and at the fiesta he held in his home, added the burning of the Zozobra effigy in 1924. The name ‘Zozobra’ derives from the Spanish word for ‘the gloomy one’ and is the epitome of anguish and anxiety. Shuster assigned all rights, title and interest in Zozobra in 1964 to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which owns the trademark and retains the exclusive copyright of the figure (see Goodwin 1998).

⁷ The phoenix, according to mythology, is a bird reborn from its ashes. Thought to be the size of an eagle, a peacock or heron, its tears have healing properties and only one phoenix exists at a time with a lifespan of 500 to 1,400 years. When the phoenix senses that death is near, it builds a pyre of aromatic wood (some myths say cinnamon bark), and then it sets the pyre on fire and is consumed by its own flames. Out of the ashes is born a new bird. This myth is told and pictured in many cultures, including the Chinese (Feng-Huang); Japanese (Ho-oo); Russian (Firebird); Egyptian (Benu); and Native American (Yel), for example (Eason 2008: 60). In each version, the bird is identified with the sun. Some depict it engulfed in flames while others think of it as a bird of shining colors. The Egyptians depicted it as a bird of brilliant shades of red, making it look as though it was enveloped in flames.

⁸ ‘Poi’ is Maori for ‘ball’ and, originally, it was a flax bag used to carry small objects such as eggs. The Maori also use poi as a bag to crush food in, and it was adapted as a tool for warriors – to help develop strength, flexibility and coordination. Later, it was adapted for performance. The traditional performance poi (a light ball made of raupo – a swamp plant – attached to a long or short flax rope) can be found in Maori action songs and dances, where it is swung around rhythmically to produce a percussive sound (Starzecka 1996: 46).