Ted Gioia on Burning Man: the connections between pop culture and ritual sacrifice. It’s a Labor Day story.

Somehow the whole Burning Man phenomenon blew by me these last few decades. I hate crowds, anyway. You never know what a crowd will do … but maybe that’s the point. Jazz scholar and music historian Ted Gioia links the history of music with ancient ritual violence over at “The Honest Broker,” his Substack column. And in his excellent piece, “Why Do They Burn a Man at Burning Man?” he makes striking connections with the work of the French theorist René Girard, the member of the Académie Française who was a longtime Stanford professor.

“How do you celebrate Labor Day weekend?” Ted Gioia asks. “At the annual gathering known as Burning Man, enthusiastic participants set fire to a large wooden effigy—which they call The Man. This is truly sticking it to the man, in the parlance of the counterculture. And the stick here is a log, soaked in fuel and bacon grease, then set ablaze with a large magnifying glass.”

The event regularly draws as many as 80,000 participants. This year, possibly more – because like everything else in the COVID era, it’s gone online. You’ll be able to watch the “virtual burn” here, should it cross your mind to do such a thing.

Ted continues that “the arbitrary nature of the sacrificial victim is essential to the success of the ritual. That is one of the key learnings we draw from René Girard (1923-2015), a pathbreaking thinker who life’s work focused on the importance of ritualized sacrifice in human culture. I believe that Girard’s 1972 book Violence and the Sacred is one of the most significant scholarly works published during my lifetime—full of rich implications for anyone who cares about the origins of our commercial and cultural institutions, or even about contemporary phenomenon, such as social media and generational conflict.”

So why isn’t René Girard mentioned more frequently in the connection to, say, rock concerts? Music history is rife with ritual sacrifice, he notes. And then he describes the gruesome history of that music – drums and flutes that were used to drown out the screams of sacrificial victims. The examples he cites are memorably grisly.

“In fact, drums are linked to sacrificial ritual in every region of the world. In some places (Africa, South India, etc.), the sacrifice is made to the drum—which is believed to embody a deity or powerful spirit. In other instances, for example among the Incas, the skin of the sacrificial victim is turned into the drum. But whatever the particulars, the drum is viewed with awe, perhaps even fear, in the context of these ritualistic connections.”

Think that’s a thing of the ancient past? Not so fast, says Ted. He remembers a hideous example: “the notorious Altamont concert on December 6, 1969—remembered today for the stabbing death of Meredith Hunter in front of the stage during a performance by the Rolling Stones. But just a few weeks earlier, the murderous Charles Manson gang relied on the Beatles’s song “Helter Skelter” as an anthem in their own quasi-ritualistic killing spree. How strange that the decade would come to a close with the music of the two defining bands of the era—so focused on peace and love, according to the leaders of the counterculture—having their songs co-opted in senseless murder.”

Read the whole thing here. And below, a reminder of how much Sigmund Freud was on the same trail as Stanford’s eminent French thinker.

Tags: René Girard, Ted Gioia

This entry was posted on Friday, September 3rd, 2021 at 11:37 pm by Cynthia Haven and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.