Author: Dale

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual, part 2

Posted on by Dale

Continuing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.

: Ritual objects :

What, and how many, objects are associated with the rite? … Of what materials are they made? … What is done with it? … What skills were involved in its making?

This is an interesting aspect of 3 Old Men for me, since one of the aims in designing this ritual was to make it as simple as possible.  You may recall that my original idea involved three old guys in loincloths with staffs: next to nothing to transport or keep up with.  The addition of the labyrinth added a lot more cost and transportation issues, but our ritual objects are essentially the same: skirts and staffs.

Are the skirts ritual objects?  Skimming ahead in the chapter, I note that costume is an element of ritual identity.

So that leaves our staffs.  They too are part of the identity of the 3 Old Men, since they are part of the archetype of the Elder, our reclaimed masculine version of the Crone, but I think they are more than that.  I’m sure everyone remembers Gandalf’s claim at the doors of Meduseld that his staff was just an old man’s prop.  Just so: our staffs are our support, but like Gandalf’s staff they embody/symbolize our power as Elders.

The question of how they will be used is still to be determined.  I know that when we proceed around the labyrinth, I envision our staffs marking time as we move in unison.  It is probable that we will incorporate some kind of ritual/dance movement into our peripatesis using the staffs.  The agon involving the offer of struggle: will it involve the staff?  If not, then the laying by of the staff becomes ritualistic.

There is one more use of the staffs for which I’ve already planned: whatever other decoration there may be on them—and we haven’t decided even what they will be made of—there will be markings on them which will guide us in the actual laying out of the labyrinth.  That means there will be four staffs, not just three: laying them out in a square will give us the corners of the innermost octagon.  There is also a centerpoint and the width of the path marked to help lay out the positions of the stakes.  Sacred geometry, folks.

There are other objects that keep floating into the plan but which I keep rejecting.  I would love to add small stands at each entrance, beside which the Old Men would stand, each with one of the four elements: a bowl of water, a bowl of earth, a brazier of fire, a bell or smudge stick (for air).  Participants could use those as they see fit, either before entering or upon their exit.  The problem with the stands is severalfold: transportation issues, of course, and stabilization issues.  The winds are fierce on the Playa; everything has to be staked and tied down, and there is—as I understand it—a prohibition on campfires, tiki torches, etc., so the brazier would be problematic.  Perhaps if the 3 Old Men have a longer life with the regional Burns, the stands can make an appearance.

: Ritual time :

At what time of day does the ritual occur—night, dawn, dusk, midday?  What other concurrent activities happen that might supplement or compete with it?  … At what season?  Does it always happen at this time? Is it a one-time affair or a recurring one? … How does ritual time coincide or conflict with ordinary times, for instance work time or sleeping time? … What is the duration of the rite?  Does it have phases, interludes, or breaks?  How long is necessary to prepare for it?  … What elements are repeated within the duration of the rite?  Does the rite taper off or end abruptly? … What role does age play in the content and officiating of the rite?

Again we are dealing with two overlapping rituals, the Grand Ritual of Burning Man itself and the inner ritual of 3 Old Men.  Naturally, the grand ritual takes place at the same time every year, with its separate questions of preparation, etc.  Interestingly, you might think that the grand ritual of the Festival ends abruptly: burn the Man and go home, but it is not nearly that clear cut.  These days the Man burns on Saturday night.  Many people then leave on Sunday, but many also stay for the burning of the Temple on Sunday night, which has become an equally important part of the grand ritual.  (That is our plan.)  And when you think about it, even those singular high points in the grand ritual don’t have a clear ending: thousands gather for what is essentially a big bonfire.  Who decides when a bonfire is over?

For the 3 Old Men, these questions have not been answered.  In fact, despite Grimes’s warning that his proposed map is not to be taken as a checklist, I think that they provide us a useful guide in deciding how to complete our plans for the labyrinth.  Will this be a daily event?  At what time of day will we take up our positions as officiants?  (Conversations with veteran Burners suggest that dusk is our best bet.)  How long will we remain stationed?  How will we decide when it is time for peripatesis?  How will we decide when it’s time to stop?  If we are able to add to our troupe so that we have back-up Old Men—which I think would be awesome—how do we effect the ‘changing of the guard’?

Even the question of the age of the officiants is not firmly answered: at least one of our hopeful participants, i.e., needs a ticket, is not an old man at all and in fact will probably be quite disgustingly fit by the time August rolls around.  Can a 30-something don the skirt and staff?  A question of ritual identity we will need to examine.

 Tomorrow: ritual identity

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual

Posted on by Dale

I highly recommend, if you are interested in the inner workings of ritual, Beginnings in ritual studies, by Ronald L. Grimes.  It’s introductory, nicely analytical, and clearly written, unlike that other pillar of ritual studies, The ritual process, by Victor W. Turner.  Also useful and readable is Liberating rites, by Tom F. Driver.  (This is how we know I will never write a book on ritual: I don’t have a middle initial, since Dale is my middle name.)  I have not read Ritual theory, ritual practice, by Catherine Bell; every time I look at it on Amazon, it seems thickly written and more about ritual studies than ritual.  Perhaps later.

Finally, I found Theater in a crowded fire: ritual and spirituality at Burning Man, by Lee Gilmore, an excellent book for anyone who intends to create a ritual to take into a desert and share with 68,000 hippie freaks for a week.

Ronald Grimes, in chapter 2 of Beginnings, outlines a “map” of ritual elements for the use of those who study ritual in the field.  He warns that the map is not a checklist but an overall guide, and that if used carefully can provoke more questions (and questions about the questions), which can then lead the observer to a deeper understanding of the ritual being observed.

So what would an observer make of our ritual?

I am going to pause a moment and remind everyone that this little essay is completely theoretical, since at the moment the 3 Old Men is nothing more than scribblings in a couple of notebooks.  What will happen when we’re actually on the Playa is anyone’s guess—we will revisit Grimes’s map in September.

Here are some pertinent questions (out of scores Grimes actually posits), and some tentative answers.

: Ritual space :

Where does the ritual enactment occur?  If the place is constructed , what resources were expended to build it?  Who designed it?  What traditions or guidelines, both practical and symbolic, were followed in building it? … What rites were performed to consecrate or deconsecrate it? …. If portable, what determines where [the space will next be deployed]?  … Are participants territorial or possessive of the space? … Is ownership invested in individuals, the group, or a divine being?  Are there fictional, dramatic, or mythic spaces within the physical space? [Grimes, p. 20-22]

We’re dealing with three simultaneous ritual spaces, of course: Black Rock Desert, Burning Man Festival, and the labyrinth, one natural, the others constructed.  Within the Great Ritual of the Burning Man Festival, to which the 3 Old Men are themselves pilgrims, there are hundreds of smaller, dependent rituals, all of which—if divorced from the Great Ritual—risk being seen as purely artificial entertainment, carnival rides if you will.  But as Theater in a crowded fire makes clear, Burning Man provides a ritualistic structure that empowers its participants to invest all the smaller rituals with true meaning.  The labyrinth derives its potential significance from the Great Ritual.

I explicate this theory because the answers to most of the above questions reveal an artificial construct: I and my buddies built it; I designed it; guidelines came from my own study of labyrinths and the Festival’s 10 Principles, which of course are part of the Great Ritual. Again, we can revisit these questions after the Festival and see if there was more meaning to the process than we might think at the moment.

There are a couple of questions which I have not addressed in previous posts that we should look at.  Are we possessive of the space?  In our discussions so far, the answer would have to be ‘no.’  We’re not concerned with how participants might approach our offering.  They may be partying fools or they may be earnest meditators—we will accept what comes.  What rites will we perform to ‘consecrate’ the space?  Still playing with ideas, but my favorite so far is that we begin in mufti, place our skirts and staffs at our entrances, return to the empty entrance, strip and paint ourselves, proceed through the labyrinth to our posts, don our skirts and take up our staffs, and we’re ready for business.

Who ‘owns’ the ritual space?  My hope—probably one of the reasons I’m doing this—is that the group will own it.  3 Old Men, whoever and  however many there may eventually be, become actual officiants, caretakers, of this experience.

As for “where next” the 3 Old Men might set up, it has already occurred to us that we can do the whole Regional Burn circuit, can’t we?  That’s the advantage of being a dirty hippie freak.

Already I can tell this examination is going to take multiple posts.  Tomorrow: ritual objects and ritual time.

 

A short break

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I want to chat about how the 3 Old Men and their Labyrinth coheres with some of the aspects of ritual as outlined in Ronald Grimes’ Beginnings in Ritual Studies, but I have been overcome with an urge to get back to my little notebooks and do some thinking/planning about how to actually construct the thing.  I’ll be back tomorrow.

Christmas Carol: Trivia

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Let’s see what trivia I can dredge up about the songs in Christmas Carol‘s score.

Opening — Listen for that interval of the descending fourth throughout: “Christmas!”

Bah! Humbug! — A perfect example of my early predilection for oddball meters (5/4 in this instance) as well as for waltzes.  Lots of interior rhymes,  just like Sondheim.   Fun for the audience; not so much for Scrooge.

Past’s Arrival — The Ghost of Christmas Past’s theme is simply two tritones, starting on the G/C “Christmas” interval.  Some might think they hear the old Campbell’s soup theme in the “countryside” theme, but they would be imagining things.  I’ll tell you when I’ve stolen something.

Country Dance — Piece of cake to write, given my years of experience with the University of Georgia Period Dance Group.  But getting Finale 2014 to get the repeats right was an ordeal.

A Reason for Laughter — The NCTC Gala in 2002 kicked off my last season as artistic director, and to prepare the audience for my swan song, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, we staged the finale of Act II.  The audience was surprised and delighted that they a) understood it; and b) thought it was funny.  But no one thought it was as funny as Caroline Carr and Stan Gentry, who were watching from the wings and suddenly recognized Figaro’s entrance as the opening of this song.  Yes, I had stolen the phrase, figuring no one in Newnan would ever really recognize it.  Oops.  Hoist on my own petard.

That You — It’s like this.  I’d been reading The Unanswered Question, by Leonard Bernstein, and I was struck by a comment he made about Don José’s “Flower Aria” in Bizet’s Carmen: no one phrase really repeats; the song just kind of grows.  So I set out to do something similar.  The result is a song that demands a two-octave range from a soprano, and not the right two octaves.   It can’t keep to the same meter for more than three measures, and the accompaniment always sounded clumsy.  On the plus side, it’s pretty.

Christmas Present Street Scene — This was originally a church choir piece called Gloria in excelsis, never performed, and so I cannibalized it, adding the Christmas Waltz (I am a dab hand with a waltz) and the Chorale for the churchgoers.

The Cratchits’ Prayer — Another cannibalization: this one from Neil Simon’s The Good Doctor, which we had done the year before maybe.  There’s a scene in which two lonely types sit on a park bench and sing “Too Late for Happiness.”  I don’t know whether there was official music to the song, but I just wrote one for us.  Another quirky meter (7/4) cum waltz.  Also: this song was nicknamed the “Gag a Maggot Song” for its shameless bathos.  Also also: because of this song and the later scene at Tiny Tim’s death, anyone playing Bob Cratchit was automatically nominated for the now-defunct NCTC 4-H Award, given to that actor who milked a scene beyond the call of duty.

Fred’s Waltz — Yet another cannibalization: when I was in high school, I wrote an overture to The Madwoman of Chaillot, never performed.  This waltz was one of the tunes.

20 Questions — The opening phrase of this one was inspired—if that’s the phrase my lawyers prefer—by the opening phrase of an Australian composer’s symphony.  Also, kudos to Marc Honea, who as a yout’ took the assignment of writing lyrics for this seriously enough to write a neat little scene.

Ignorance and Want — One of the best things I’ve ever written, this grim mazurka pounds out Dickens’ message in perfect 3/4 time.  The text is lifted directly from the novel.

People Like Us — I thought it would be fun to write a little fugue-like piece where each character enters one after the other and keeps adding to the list of material goods they steal from the dead.  The message underscored Dickens’s, that you can’t take it with you.

Graveyard — A setting of the medieval Dies irae, of course.

Finale — I will state outright that I think this is the best ending to any version of Christmas Carol anywhere.  It starts with Scrooge “waking” in his bedchamber, whirls us through his delirious realization that he’s alive, and then we’re off to the races.  The ending of the novella is very quick, but most adaptations get bogged down in fleshing out each part of the ending in detail.  Here we just romp through the turkey, the Philanthropic Gentlemen, the Cratchits, Fred’s house, and Bob Cratchit’s raise, all to the giddy scherzo of “Hey, boy, what day is today?”, woven throughout with the Christmas Waltz, and ending with the reprise of “A Reason for Laughter.”  Done, and done—thunderous applause.

The Return of A Christmas Carol

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In 1980, the members of the Newnan Community Theatre Company prevailed upon me to set Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol to music. Their thinking was that just as every ballet company in the world did The Nutcracker every holiday season, most theatre companies did Christmas Carol, and with similar financial objectives.  They were not wrong.

I set about cannibalizing older pieces and writing new ones, and in a couple of months I had it all pieced together.  It was, as expected, a huge hit, and we did it every year for a number of years.  In fact, after the Newnan City Council effectively shut us out of the Municipal Auditorium and we had no home, it was the cancellation of Christmas Carol in 1983 that spurred the movement that got us the old Manget-Brannon building as a permanent facility.

Eventually we tired of the same piece every year (although audiences never seemed to), and we began alternating with other holiday offerings.  It was last presented in 2001; the last time I directed it was 1992.

When Newnan Theatre Company (same group as NCTC, just a different name) expressed an interest in reviving a couple of years ago, I discovered that I had none of the sequencer files on my computer, nor any of the MIDI files.  It was too late in the year (plus it was my first year  as GHP director, I think) for me to reconstruct the whole thing.  When the topic came up again recently, I was ready, and so I am in the middle of re-orchestrating all 18 pieces, plus reinventing the overture, which was never written down on paper at all.

When I began seriously setting about the task, I was shocked to find how close I had come to losing the whole show: I had only the original, handwritten piano score plus a few vocal pages to go by, and these were scattered across several notebooks and files.  I had nothing resembling the full orchestration that I had developed in the sequencer.  It was all going to be from scratch.

That’s OK.  I want to start over with a live ensemble, and so I’ve been working with a piano, a synthesizer keyboard, a flute, a clarinet, a cello, a glockenspiel, and chimes.  That should be enough.

I’m now two months into the project and am halfway finished, although the “Finale” is a monster by itself.  So far, so good, although Belle’s song, “That You,” set me back two weeks because I had to seriously rethink the harmonization and accompaniment.  The melody was always fine, but everything else was clunky.  It’s better now, but not without a lot of struggle on my part.

Part of the struggle has been dealing with Finale 2014’s idiosyncrasies, including a recent upgrade that was supposed to fix a serious problem and instead reinstated it.  (I ended up downgrading to the first version of Finale 2014, something I’ve never had to do before.) And then the USB extension cable connecting my keyboard to the computer went bad without warning, etc., etc.

I’ve also procrastinated by updating nearly every other piece of music I’ve ever written from whatever version of Finale it was originally created in (as early as 2003 in some cases!) to 2014.  Worth it, but hardly productive.  (Check out William Blake’s Inn in its new settings.)

So today I hammered out “That You” and should be rolling straight through the rest of the show.  If I keep at it, I should be done by the end of April.

Check it out over to the left under My Music.

My secret lust

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Recently I had the pleasure of reading Grock, King of Clowns, the memoir of Adrien Wettach.  No, I had never heard of him either, but Mike Funt said I should read it, and so I found a used copy on Amazon and ordered it.

Totally delightful read, even though I had no clue as to who this man was or how he managed to retire to a 30-room villa in Italy as a millionaire after 50 years of performing as the most famous clown in the world. We live and learn.

But that has nothing to do with my secret lust.

For this book was a discard from a university library, and tucked away in it were these:

::sigh:: Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?  The only way these could be more arousing would be if they were a complete set.  Still, I mustn’t complain.

Actually, these are two main entry cards, possibly from two different libraries.  Neither is what I would call complete.  The first one has the original title (Nit m-ö-ö-ö–glich) but no subject headings; the second has the obvious subject Clowns but not the original title.  There is also the difference of opinion as to where to put this book.  The first library puts it under Circuses in the 791’s, although they could have extended the number with the –092 standard subdivision for biographical works, i.e., 791.1092, although –09 would have been sufficient.  The second opts for the Biography section with the 92, the lazy librarian’s shortcut for the actual number, 921.  Either card is correct.

Both use Cutter numbers for the author rather than the first three letters of the author’s last name.  For the regular school library, that’s an unnecessary complication.  (So would be the extension of the Dewey Decimal number I suggested above. The purpose of such detail is to allow books on similar topics to be grouped together on the shelf, and how many books on the circus does a regular library have, after all?)

This just gets me going.  Even among media specialists I was a cataloging freak.  I loved cataloging, from the days when we still typed the cards ourselves (like these two) to online MARC records.  I knew the Dewey Decimal Classification Abridged edition by heart, and when we built the new East Coweta High School I ordered the full edition.  When it arrived I was physically tingly, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

The new library at ECHS was essentially empty, a blank slate, and over the next four years I got to fill it with 15,000 books, most of which I cataloged myself.  Sure, some came with catalog cards, and most books in those days (1988-1992ish) had full Cataloging in Publication records on their copyright pages, but, you guys, CIP was often hugely inaccurate.  The minions at the Library of Congress were often cataloging based on a title page alone, and that created some incredible howlers, DDC-speaking-wise.  I was compelled—compelled, I tell you—to correct them.

I was so in love with cataloging that I actually programmed an Apple ][e to print a full set of catalog cards for any given main entry.  The way it used to work was that, like the above cards, you had a “main entry” for a book. That main entry included titles, subject headings, editors, illustrators, etc., and after you typed that card, you then typed all the other cards.  Originally, subject cards had the subject line typed in red ink, but around the time I arrived we had settled on ALL CAPS instead.  (See here, for example.)

With my program, you typed in all the elements—author, dates, title, subtitle, publisher, subjects—and then the dot matrix printer spit out every card you needed.  It was awesome, and everyone in Coweta County used it until the state automated us in the early 90s.

Let me be clear: I am not one of those who misses the actual card catalog.  What a nightmare to construct and maintain!  What happens when a book is not returned?  Do you pull the catalog cards?  At the time, the main entry cards (plus title cards) were in one piece of furniture, and the subject cards were in another piece of furniture.  You’d be pulling all these cards from everywhere—pulling the metal rod out of the entire drawer, pulling the card, reinserting the rod, etc.—and, what, storing them?  Because then what if the book shows back up when lockers are cleaned out at the end of the year?  Then you have to refile the cards.  Ugh.

But the cataloging itself?  Remember this scene?  That’s how I feel about cataloging.  I was so notorious amongst my fellow media specialists that when new books came without cataloging, others would wait until I had input mine in the online system, then just add their copies to my main entry.  If the books came with electronic cataloging, I would go through and correct entries, add subject headings, and improve call numbers.  I was incorrigible.

I mean, look at this: Catalog card prøn!

Now go here and get your inner Dewey on!

Labyrinth: the new West point

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You may recall that last weekend I bought a limestone bowl at the American Craft Council show in Atlanta.  This was for the express purpose of installing it at the west point of the labyrinth.

The labyrinth is aligned to the compass, with the entrance at the eastern end.  (When you see photos of the center, the bricks are in line with the points.)  Back in the day, the four elements were each associated with the four directions:

  • East — Air
  • South — Fire
  • West — Water
  • North — Earth

Easy enough.  Over the last six years, each of the four points has gone through various incarnations as I get a better feel for what belongs in the space, and water was the last of the points without a permanent feel to it.  I had settled for a glass bowl that I found at Ross (Dress For Less) for cheap—I had the local glassworker remove the pedestal and reattach it upside down in the bowl to serve as a place to put the candle while the bowl was full of water.

But it froze and broke during the polar vortex, and I decided that this time I would find a permanent solution.  As soon as I saw Brooks Barrow‘s creation, I hoped this would be it.

Oh yes.

Here it is in situ.  I cleaned out the new ivy growth and raked a bit.  Just now coming up are the Japanese painted ghost ferns that grow in front.  I could plant a couple more there just for effect; they’re such lovely plants.

Here’s a long shot of the bowl, from across the center of the labyrinth:

So last night some friends and I had an installation ritual; we used all four elements, with me carrying a bowl of water over to the new bowl.  I poured it in, lit the candle in the center and was immediately struck by how perfect it is.

It’s just this luminous pool of water floating there—perfectly stunning.  Because the bowl’s interior is shallower than the outside, you get a “big bowl” look from the outside, but the inside is this perfect little scoop of light.

Here’s the long shot:

Ta-da!  Finally, all four points are finished to my satisfaction.  I should pull all four together and do a blog post about them as a group.  (For one thing, they have rather tidily arranged themselves from tallest to shortest around the circle: Air–Fire–Water_Earth.)

So there we are, a new piece of the labyrinth.  Stop by and see it.

Burning Man: Order. Community. Transformation. Part Three

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Transformation.  Ah, now we’re down to it.  The third—and to my mind the most important—aspect of ritual is transformation.  The whole purpose of ritual is, like the Hero’s Journey, to change the individual and his society.

From simple rituals like shaking someone’s hand upon being introduced to them [now our social interaction is different than it was a few moments ago] to bar mitzvahs [now the boy is a man] to Catholic confession [now your soul is unburdened by your sin] to GHP [now the student makes intellectual, emotional, and social connections that he/she didn’t before] to Burning Man […], we do not remain the same after undergoing the ritual process.

With a labyrinth, as I’ve said before, the change is entirely internal and personal.  Simply walking through a labyrinth is not likely to produce a change.  The trick is to walk it mindfully, to be open to its suggestions.  It is amazing to me the different ways my own labyrinth can speak.  Sometimes it’s the turning from one direction to another.  Sometimes it’s the approach to the center.  It has spoken through the length of the path; the return journey; what I was wearing (or not, as the case might be); the sculpture/totems at the compass points; the calligraphic patterns in the bowl in the black granite center; the chakra/rainbow candles along the Western Path; the view from the center.

I have taken problems in with me and found solutions.  I have had problems present themselves.  I have found peace, and I have found perturbation.  I’ve had profound revelations, and trivial realizations.  I’ve expressed gratitude, joy, bitterness, grief.

And it’s the ritual that does it.  Getting up from the fire (usually) and making the decision to approach the Path.  Standing for a moment at the entrance.  Walk. Listen.  See.  Stand at the center.  Return.  Exit.

Meaning and transformation: I haz it.

Who knows what we will find at Burning Man?  We’ve already talked about the structure of what we will offer, but we do not know what transformations that participants will end up with.  We cannot know.  We cannot even know what transformations will be wrought upon us.  But if we offer a ritual, and Burners approach it as a ritual, then transformation will occur.

Burning Man: Order. Community. Transformation. Part Two

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Communitas is the second of the products of ritual.

It is easy to see why this is so: for a public ritual such as 3 Old Men, people come together to participate.  They have agreed, corporately, that this action is good and appropriate and that it must be done.

And by doing so, they bond themselves into a community.  They are part of something larger than themselves.  Indeed, they have crossed that line of liminality into something universal.

Note that this communitas is not tribalism (although certainly tribalism uses ritual to reinforce itself).  Those who commit to a ritual come to understand that they are part of the Order created by the ritual, and more importantly, the others in the ritual are part of the same Order.  They are a Community.

With the 3 Old Men, we offer the Burning Man community a ritual of passage: a hero’s journey from the outside to the center and the return, ending with an agon that assumes meaning according to the metaphor constructed by the participant.

One thing that interests me about our ritual is that it differs from the experience of a regular labyrinth. A regular labyrinth offers one path in and one path out, usually the same path; the ritual is a meditation, seeking meaning and metaphor in the walk, undisturbed by conscious choices. In our labyrinth, on the other hand, choice becomes an integral part of the journey.  I don’t know if you’ve traced the pattern, but each of the four paths branches twice before returning to itself.  It is not a maze; there are no dead ends, and you cannot get “lost,” but you must at least pick a path (twice) on your journey to the center—and that’s after picking which entrance to use.

Once in the center, choosing an exit reverses the process, only this time, your choice involves a choosing, if that makes sense: more than the direction you exit, there are officiants standing outside three of the four exits, each offering a different agon.  Indeed, choosing to undergo an agon or not becomes a major part of the ritual.

More: the question arises of what happens when you have chosen to exit towards the officiant who offers a blessing, for example, and while you are making the journey outward, the officiants make their procession to another entrance.  Do you continue your path, exiting to an agon (or the absence of one) different from the one you had hoped to encounter?  Do you stop, return to the center, and exit to your original choice?  Can you do that?

Thus those who participate in the 3 Old Men’s ritual will find themselves involved in a communitas which they may not completely understand—it makes no demands of them to join a “community,” but it does lead them into a confrontation with a structure offered by three mysterious elders, a structure that asks them to regard the choices they make—and the choosing—and to construct their own meaning of those choices.  It offers them a brief liminal experience in the middle of the hurly-burly of Burning Man, and my hope is that that’s a good thing.

Tomorrow: Transformation.

Burning Man: Order. Community. Transformation. Part One

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Ritual, such as the labyrinth, provides us with Order, Community, and Transformation.

ORDER in ritual is two-fold.  On the one hand, ritual tends to be, well, ritualistic.  This is pretty self-evident, since one thing humans crave is repetitive comfort.  Have you ever tried to skip a page when reading a favorite bedtime book to a child?  Or not do the funny voice?

Worse, have you ever suggested to a Presbyterian that for maybe this one service they might consider changing the order of the service in order to drive a metaphorical point home more clearly?

So the fact that most rituals include repetitive elements provides us a comfortable and comforting order.  There’s more, though: just like the child getting ready for sleep or the Presbyterian preparing to enter God’s presence, the comfort of ritual order provides a structure for liminality, for crossing the border between the daily world and the space in which we encounter the Infinite.  You might consider it to be the same kind of repetitive structure that engenders hypnosis, and indeed some rituals are designed to induce meditative or trance states.

On the other hand, ritual creates order from chaos, both social and universal.  Many magical rituals are explicit in their goal of make the universe and its matter “behave” in accordance with the desires of the participants.  I would include most religious rituals in this pattern.

Many rituals are used by social groups to restore a broken or disrupted order.  These can range from the stereotypical “husband bringing flowers to an angry wife” through a rain dance (or—forgive me—a Texas Baptist church’s prayers for the same effect) to the elaborate tribal rituals studied by Victor Turner (PDF, p. 361)—all of which are enacted in order to make things right.

The Labyrinth of the 3 Old Men will offer the structured order of ritual to participants.  Of course, we make no claim that the ritual is designed to restore order in any cosmic sense; that is up to the individual participant.  However, the path of the labyrinth and the presence of the Old Men as officiants, as well as the agones offered to the participants upon their exit, provide a reliable order for each participant to approach liminality on their own.

I was going to do all three aspects today, but that’s going to make for a very long, text-heavy post, so let’s split it up into three separate posts.

Tomorrow: Community.