The Man: Humanity in Transformation

by Eric Francis Coppolino and photographs by Eric Francis Coppolino, September 29, 2009

I spent a week in early September at something called Burning Man, a kind of festival in the Nevada desert held each Labor Day. The event takes its name from the burning of a giant neon and wooden effigy of a man, which is burned on Saturday night as 40,000 people gather around and watch. The photo above is the Man, which has become something of a cultural icon, now more than 20 years in circulation. Burning Man traces its history back to 1986, when the founder, Larry Harvey, burned an effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. The event was moved to the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada several years later and is now the annual meeting place of a far-reaching, extremely energetic subculture.

Astrology is about symbolism, and in this article I’d like to look at a few of the messages of the fire ceremony that’s at the center of this elaborate, creative project called Burning Man. I think for most people who participate, the theme is so intuitive, they don’t really think about it much. You get the message in the creative fire that surrounds the symbol; it comes across as real world. Given the freedom and the safe space to do so, women strip to the waist and walk around in public. Many guys wear skirts and tutus. Everything is connected to a concept, an idea, a game of twisting logic around into something sensible in a different way.

In effect, Burning Man grants many people permission to be who they are, and, in the absence of concrete knowledge, to test out some ideas of who they might be; and not have to worry too much about the legacy of who they were yesterday.

This legacy is our problem. It’s not that we use the past as a reference point for who we are, or where we are going, which would be fine. It’s that we determine our lives almost exclusively by what has happened in the past; by who we knew in the past; by what we held as true in the past; by our family of origin and what they did to us; by the career that we developed, generally with no special intention to have done so. And this is really the least of it.

What we struggle with the most, if you ask me, is the unspoken requirement to be who we were, feel how we felt, and love who we loved yesterday. We allegedly must, by some strange set of unwritten rules, get up in the morning and do what we did the day before. If you look closely there is actually very little to intervene in this train of experience. This is why key life transits such as the Saturn return, Uranus opposition, and Chiron return, are so often experienced as train wrecks. We make next to no room to ritualize the idea of change that would allow us an opportunity to in fact actually change.