Faith & Spirit Quote by Larry Harvey

A religion doesn’t need a god to grow a priesthood; it just needs a crowd, a story, and someone willing to manage access. Larry Harvey is calling out that familiar drift: the moment a living, messy experience hardens into a system with gatekeepers who sell “authenticity” back to the people who made it. “Keepers of the mystery” is pointed phrasing - it flatters the power grab as stewardship, like they’re protecting something delicate, when the real move is control. The word “between” does the heavy lifting. It’s not merely leadership; it’s interposition, an institutional body stepping into what was supposed to be direct.

The context is Burning Man’s ongoing tension between spontaneity and infrastructure, communal ethos and brand gravity. As the event exploded, so did the incentives for intermediaries: VIP camps, plug-and-play convenience, influencers, ticket scarcity, and the very human desire to turn participation into status. Harvey frames these forces in religious terms because religion is a proven technology for scaling meaning - and for monetizing or policing it.

The kicker is the “we.” Harvey isn’t arguing against rituals, rules, or organizers; he’s defending a particular moral boundary: no one gets to define the terms of transcendence for you. It’s a populist claim dressed in mysticism, a reminder that the point of the “wonderful mystery” is immediacy, not accreditation. The subtext is also protective: Burning Man can’t stop becoming an institution, but it can refuse to become a church.