In the early hours before the its coming demise, the temple was quiet, except for some Hare Krishnas chanting in one corner of the courtyard and a guitarist playing through a small amplifier in the other. Inside, a woman dressed up in red lace meditated in the lotus position in front of the central altar while the man next to her, coated entirely in silver paint, took photos of the altar and its offerings.Some ‘Burners’ (as the festivalgoers are called) wore furs against the morning chill. Others were sunburned and naked, oblivious to the dust and the cold. They were busy writing or reading messages, praying softly to themselves, weeping.

The air was thick with grief and loss. Every surface of the walls, arches, stairs, and altars was covered with messages, letters, photos, and offerings. The face of a beloved German Shepherd, its collar hanging from a picture frame; the smile of a grandmother in a yellowed photo; the military uniform of a father — they all sat side by side on an altar, strangers until now.

Some messages spoke of the living: ‘May the cancer in the cells of all who are living with that disease melt away by the graceful fire of this temple and the true and clear prayers of us all that we offer this evening.’ But most were dedicated to the beloved dead: ‘This burn was for my brother Bill who died in June of this year… he was in the temple now I can put his ashes away.’ And ‘For my beloved — in the light you still guide me … the universe can feel just how much I miss you.’ And: ‘For my little sis… died age five… never had a chance.’ No boundaries or borders distinguished one person’s grief from another’s. Mourning was contagious, afflicting us all as we gazed on thousands of photos of dead sons, mothers, lovers and pets, a three-dimensional collage of collective loss.

The Temple is built in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada at the end of every summer, as part of the Burning Man festival.  Started in 1986 by the artist Larry Harvey, who burned an effigy on a beach in San Francisco which drew a small crowd, the festival is now bursting at the seams, with more than 50,000 attendees from around the world. The organisers want to increase attendance to 75,000, if they can get permission from the Bureau of Land Management, a government agency that manages the desert. Burning Man has also spawned regional ‘Burns’ from Australia to New Jersey, as well as ‘Decompressions’ and ‘Afterburn’ parties.

As a sacred destination, Burning Man is rife with contradictions, some of them disturbing

Events such as Burning Man are flourishing in the US, especially among young adults. According to Burning Man’s census, close to half of attendees are under 30 years old. Polls show that the number of Americans of all ages exploring spirituality outside institutional religion is on the rise too. Jeet-Kei Leung, musician and organiser of the Mystic Garden festival, proclaims such events as the spiritual wave of the future. In a TED talk in 2010, he praised ‘transformational festivals’ for rejoining ‘sacred ritual with secular festival’. Festivals such as Burning Man offer participants opportunities for pilgrimage, transformation and spiritual experience without requiring any commitment to a specific creed. For many Burners, this is their church or religious holiday:a sacred time and place set apart from ‘the default world’. Like other festivals, it offers an escape from the society they leave outside its gates. As the naked greeters say to those arriving at the festival: ‘Welcome home’. Burning Man is a sacred space that embraces opposites, a place of inversion and dissent, of intense seriousness and lighthearted play.

After travelling many hours along a two-lane highway across a barren desert landscape, Burners feel like pilgrims shedding their old ways, open to new possibilities. But as a sacred destination, Burning Man is rife with contradictions, some of them disturbing. Heavy drug use and drinking coexist with ascetic New Age regimes. A camp down one street is hosted by an evangelical preacher urging passers-by to get saved while, down another, Bianca’s Smut Shack offers pornography. A Buddhist meditation retreat is next door to a rollerskating rink. Trampolines and children’s swimming pools beckon Burners of all ages throughout the city. And the slogan ‘Leave No Trace’ is belied by the trash bags littering the highway leading out from the Burning Man site. This place, which is supposed to be liberated from all ordinariness, nonetheless requires the presence of hundreds of police, fire fighters, emergency medics and drug enforcement officers.

 The Man, an abstract sculpture that looms over the festival space, is a universally recognised symbol of the event. This genderless figure is traced in dust on cars when Burners travel home, painted and tattooed on their bodies, stenciled on banners to decorate camps, and crafted into necklaces to give away to other Burners. It marks the centre of Black Rock City from which everything else emanates.

We know that tattoos are a ritual blood sacrifice, and the symbols selected are worship to the idol or totem of choice.

We also know that banners are very powerful in the spirit.  They whip through the air breaking through the spiritual atmosphere, declaring spiritual truths and calling in or inviting spiritual influences.  God’s Word says “His BANNER over us is LOVE.”

Every year the figure looks the same, but different artists design its base. This year’s arched base was colorfully lit by night, but by day its walls were simple and functional. On them, Burners wrote lighthearted graffiti: ‘Make tea, not war’, ‘You are beautiful, welcome home’, ‘Peace, love, light’. There were no offerings or altars. Burners wandered through, watched each other, chatted with friends, shared cans of beer, and gazed out at the city spread before them. Every year, in an extravaganza of fireworks, rave music, art cars, costumed stilt-walkers, fire-spinning, and wild parties, the Man is burned down on the Saturday of the festival, and revelers cheer and dance around its ashes all night long.

By contrast, down a lantern-lined avenue away from the Man and the city stands the temple. Within the ritualistic space of the whole festival, Burners create the same kind of opposition that exists between Burning Man and the outside society. If the Man is exuberance and excess, the temple offers an experience that is deeper and more intimate. Both are sites of collective rituals, but one is for festivity and play, while the other speaks to sorrow and loss. Each allows for the expression of feelings that are repressed in the outside world. Yet it is the Temple that has become the heart and soul of Burning Man, stealing that honour from the festival’s namesake. The temple too is burned to the ground, but in an altogether different atmosphere.

What makes the Temple feel sacred,a space to approach with reverence, while the Man is not treated in quite the same way, despite being new every year? Burners might know what they will find at the temple,but what makes it so very powerful are the images of the dead and the intentions of the living invested in the messages and offerings at the altar. The temple speaks to a society looking for new ways to mourn its dead.

In a spectacular, cathartic bonfire, the temple is burned down on the last night of the festival, with tens of thousands of Burners gathered solemnly around it.

This year’s Temple of Juno might have been transported from a mountain monastery in Thailand, with its delicately curved and pointed corners, intricately carved walls and graceful arches.Many Burners had showed up early at the temple’s gatesto find them closed.

We know that GATES and ARCHES arches are PORTALS for Spirits.  Just like doors, windows and Mirrors.  If your gates/doors/windows/archways and Mirrors are not protected by God’s angels, you will be inviting spirits/entities/beings

For the rest of that week, until the ‘Temple Burn,’ they came to leave offerings, meditate, play bagpipes or guitars, write messages to those they had lost, and read messages strangers had left for their parents, grandparents, children, lovers, dogs, and cats. They wept and prayed and embraced one another.  

You need to ask yourself to who or what are they Praying?  To whom are they offering sacrifices?

Soon, the fire was lit and the interruptions forgotten as flames roared and the air grew unbearably hot

There are no spiritual authorities here. No one orchestrates movement through the Temple or decides what happens there. It is a space for the spontaneous rituals of grief.

They may believe that, but it is a lie.  THERE IS ALWAY A SPIRITUAL AUGHTORITY in EVERY SPACE in EVERY MOMENT.  There really are only two, God’s Authority and Satan’s.  Though they see no physical authority, there are spirits in control of everything that happens there.   Even over everything they feel, every thing they say, everything they do, and every image that comes into their mind.

No other festival provides anything like the Temple and its collective mourning rite, but new, experimental ways of mourning the dead are spreading everywhere across the US and other Western countries. The spontaneous shrines to victims who died in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks might have been seen by the Burners. They might have walked along the Vietnam War memorial and noticed the intimacy that can be found in mourning with strangers. Creativity and self-expression help to fill the place once occupied by socially mandated religious rites. New kinds of grief require new kinds of mourning: the AIDs quilt; new rites for pregnancy loss; organ donor memorials; and roadside shrines. Old rites can be co-opted to meet new needs, as in the popularity across America of the Latino celebration of the Day of the Dead.

Like all of these communal rituals, the Temple transforms private grief into a public rite. Modern death rites have become privatized, shifting the emphasis from the community to the private world of the individual and the family.

Yes, yes, prior to salvation through the blood of Jesus, there was no HOPE for pagans who had died.  There was no promise of eternal life for them.  So, pagan communities worshipped their ancestors.  They practice communing with the dead, not knowing that in truth, it was not their ancestors but demons pretending to be their ancestors with whom they communicated.  God’s word says there is NO COMMUNION with the DEAD.  THE DEAD ARE DEAD.  Even the dead in Christ, lie buried in the ground until the RESURRECTION.   As the world turns its back on GOD and turns to demonic spirits, they are reinstating all the Pagan practices that brought on the FLOOD!

The Temple at Burning Man reverses this process, making grief and mourning public and shared between intimate strangers. Studies by Philippe Ariès, Peter Homans and other scholars suggest that death and loss become more bearable when the burden of mourning is taken on by a community rather than left to the individual.

That is the religion of SCIENCE.  Who do you worship GOD in Heaven? Or, the wisdom of men, which is foolishness?

Burners’ testimonies suggest that unmourned grief is overwhelming for those who cannot turn to traditional ways of collectively and publicly mourning the dead. Collective rites of passage around death and grief are designed to allow for the dead to move on and for the living to let the dead go.

That is BUNK, there are no dead spirits hanging around waiting for humans to release them.  Or, looking to resolve their unresolved issues.  When you life is over, it is over.  What you left unfinished, is out of your hands.  It is either covered by the blood, or it is not.

Most Burners identify themeslves as ‘spiritual’ but not religious, and for them the dearth of rituals for grief and mourning is especially difficult.

Of course it is, because they have no peace.  They have no peace about what will happen to their dead loved ones, and they have no peace about what will happen to themselves.  They are troubled in their spirit and they are looking to demon spirits for help.  BUT, ONLY GOD CAN HELP THEM.

Bill, one of the carpenters who worked on the Temple of Juno, suggested that ‘a lot of these people at Burning Man don’t have a structured religion to help them’. The Temple, he pointed out, provides a place in which they can ‘express their grief and joy’.

If just expressing your grief could bring relief most of those people would have had closure by now.  They certainly have been expressing their grief.  You cannot help it.  When you are hurting, it just comes out. IF not in words, in actions and in groanings.  The only way they are going to find peace is to turn to the PRINCE OF PEACE. Not to religion to the PERSON, JESUS CHRIST, TO GOD OUR HEAVENLY FATHER and TO THE PRECIOUS HOLY SPIRIT who leads us, guides us, comforts us, reveals all truth to us and EMPOWERS US TO STAND!

Although the Temple at Burning Man is a site for mourning, in a characteristic twist, it is also a popular location for weddings. 

Not surprising since JUNO was the goddess over marriage and reproduction.

At night, the contrasts can be keenly felt, always threatening to tip the balance of civility and warmth that Burners expect from the festival into something edgy and darker. 

Soon, the fire was lit and the interruptions forgotten as flames roared and the air grew unbearably hot. Dust devils spun out from the fire as the spirits of the Temple carried messages to the deadand released mourners’ grief into the dark landscape all around. As the glowing embers of the Temple faded into dust and ashes, we returned to our camps, packed up our belongings and headed home. The desert had served its purpose and our mourning was done.