"We take people to the threshold of religion. Our aim is to induce immediate experience that is beyond the odd, beyond the strange, and beyond the weird. It verges on the wholly other"
About this Quote
Larry Harvey frames Burning Man as a carefully built threshold, a liminal space where people brush against the sacred without stepping into organized creed. The phrase wholly other echoes Rudolf Otto’s account of the numinous, the uncanny mix of awe and dread that overwhelms rational categories. Odd, strange, and weird are everyday currency on the playa; costumes, mutant vehicles, and surreal art quickly lose their power to shock. Harvey points higher, toward an encounter that outstrips novelty, spectacle, or eccentricity and becomes an immediate, felt intensity that seizes the body and reorganizes attention.
That aim is consistent with Burning Man’s principles, especially Immediacy, Participation, and Decommodification. By stripping away spectatorship and transaction, the event reduces the mediation that normally buffers experience. The desert’s harshness, the gift economy, the absence of ads and commerce, and the demand that everyone contribute create a crucible. Art is not merely viewed but climbed, navigated, and risked; ritual is not observed but enacted. The Man burn and, more poignantly, the Temple burn, function as secular rites that compress grief, release, and collective focus into moments where thousands share one breath. Such orchestrated liminality, described by Victor Turner as communitas, can feel religious without invoking scripture.
Harvey’s choice of threshold signals intention as well as restraint. He courts the atmospheric feel of religion while refusing dogma, priesthood, and fixed theology. The experience is primary; belief is optional. The architecture of the event aims to catalyze a certain quality of attention and relation, then dissolves. The city disappears, leaving no trace, so the sacred is not anchored to monuments but to a memory of presence.
To verge on the wholly other is to remind participants that transcendence can arise inside a temporary, collaborative artwork called a city. When weirdness ceases to startle, awe must come from depth, not novelty. Burning Man seeks that depth: an encounter that rearranges the self and briefly reveals how human making can open onto more than itself.
That aim is consistent with Burning Man’s principles, especially Immediacy, Participation, and Decommodification. By stripping away spectatorship and transaction, the event reduces the mediation that normally buffers experience. The desert’s harshness, the gift economy, the absence of ads and commerce, and the demand that everyone contribute create a crucible. Art is not merely viewed but climbed, navigated, and risked; ritual is not observed but enacted. The Man burn and, more poignantly, the Temple burn, function as secular rites that compress grief, release, and collective focus into moments where thousands share one breath. Such orchestrated liminality, described by Victor Turner as communitas, can feel religious without invoking scripture.
Harvey’s choice of threshold signals intention as well as restraint. He courts the atmospheric feel of religion while refusing dogma, priesthood, and fixed theology. The experience is primary; belief is optional. The architecture of the event aims to catalyze a certain quality of attention and relation, then dissolves. The city disappears, leaving no trace, so the sacred is not anchored to monuments but to a memory of presence.
To verge on the wholly other is to remind participants that transcendence can arise inside a temporary, collaborative artwork called a city. When weirdness ceases to startle, awe must come from depth, not novelty. Burning Man seeks that depth: an encounter that rearranges the self and briefly reveals how human making can open onto more than itself.
Quote Details
| Topic | Faith |
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