OK it’s been a year since I first read “The Shaping of Things to Come“, by Alan Hirsch and Michael Frost. But back then this blog wasn’t in existence. And a number of people in Queensland are only now discovering this book.
So now I’m going back through the book, looking through the PowerPoint presentation I developed last year.
The first chapter introduces us to a ‘pagan environment’, Burning Man at Black Rock held in the Nevada desert. This is a festival that explores themes of belonging, survival, empowerment, sensuality, celebration and liminality. This year’s gathering, August 29-September 5, focuses on “Psyche: the Conscious, the Subconscious and the Unconscious”. It’s what I’d call a huge art installation community where people’s camps express another angle to the theme.
Hirsch and Frost point to Burning Man, and the movie, Fight Club, as expressions of a yearning for an experiential activist form of religious, mysitcal experience. I used this reference in a session with the Queensland Uniting Mission Advisory Forum earlier this year. There was a sense of excitement there as we unpacked the implications. We’re wondering where we might be seeing this kind of phenomenon in Australia. Perhaps in the Woodford Folk Festival? I’m not sure that picks up the element of multi-sensory experience developed at Burning Man though.
The first chapter is available to download in pdf form from Hendrickson the publishers. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to access the table of contents, chapter one, and the introduction.
To pursue the “Burning Man” festival further you will find an analysis of it by Robert Kozinets & John F. Sherry, “Dancing on Common Ground: Exploring the sacred at Burning Man” in Rave Culture and Religion, edited by Graham St. John (London & New York: Routledge, 2004) pp 287-303.
These authors look at the event’s overlap with techno-shamanism, neo-pagan festivals, new age human potential, and its anti-market, anti-organized social distancing from the mainstream of consumer culture.
Burning Man itself has a website http://www.burning man.com
You will also find it fruitful to look at Graham St John’s own PhD dissertation (La Trobe Uni) which is on-line. St. John did his thesis on the ConFest, which is the largest alternate cultural event in Australia as a heterotopia. Explores the eco-spirituality, feral spirituality etc of these events.
In the course of exploring it, St John alludes to events like the Woodford Maleny Fire festival, with some bibliographical leads to anthropological essays about the Woodford event.
Also there is a photographic cultural history of the Woodford festival “Woodford Folk Festival Retrospective” Barry Drysdale, Graeme Batterbury, Ian Hallmond and Garry Williamson; published by the Queensland Folk Federation 2003. Contact Qld Folk Federation PMB2 Woodford 4514. Their website http://www.woodfordfolkfestival.com
For St John’s dissertation, which is freely available, go to
http://www.come.to/confest
St John has a brief academic essay also related to his thesis
“Heal Thy Self – thy planet: Confest eco-spirituality and the Self/Earth Nexus,” Australian Religion Studies Review, Vol. 14, no. 1 2001 pp 97-112.
A little bit of background about alternate festivals in Australia is also given in my chapter “Discipling New Age and Do-It-Yourself Seekers Through Booth Ministries” in Encountering New Religious Movements: A Holistic Evangelical Approach, edited by Irving Hexham, Stephen Rost & John Morehead, Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004, pp 227-242.
For specific festivals in Australia, try googling “Rainbow Serpent Festival” and “ConFest”.
Also, the Pagan Awareness Network is a good resource for what’s going on around the traps in the Neo Pagan scene.