OPINION ARTICLES
Festivals or rituals?
Festival politics, religiosity and sociability,
or
The importance of the court jester.
Part XI – Myths and Symbols. Analysis of the symbolic and mythical dimension of festivals as ritual practices that articulate identity, community and cultural transformation.
The ambiguous and indeterminate attributes of liminality are reflected in transition rituals through multiple symbols, such as comparisons to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness and to an eclipse of the sun or moon.
Liminality is not the only cultural manifestation of communitas. There are other areas recognised by the symbols that cluster around them and the beliefs that attach to them, such as “the powers of the weak”, or the sacred attributes of low status or position. One example is the court jester. These figures, representing the poor and the deformed, appear to symbolise the moral values of communitas as against the coercive power of supreme political rulers and play important roles in myths and folk tales as representatives or expressions of universal human values.
Symbols are also crucially involved in situations of social change, such as performances of ritual. Symbols are social and cultural dynamic systems, shedding and gathering meaning over time and altering in form, with the aim of producing effects on the psychological states and behaviour of people exposed to them or obliged to use them for their communication with other human beings.
Community events employ a collection of symbols that define the community and represent it to the outside world. A public mythology is designed and structured by leading members of the community as a symbolic representation of the asserted, believed and controlled community identity. Most festival settings are not marked by symbols as powerful and easily recognisable as those inspired by racial or religious tensions.
Myths are symbolic tales from the distant past (often primordial) that concern cosmogony and cosmology (the origin and nature of the universe), may be connected to belief systems or rituals, and may serve to direct social actions and values.
As for the purposes of myth:
The first is the mystical function… realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and the experiencing awe before this mystery… The second is a cosmological dimension… showing you what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through… The third function is the sociological one—supporting and validating a certain social order… But then there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. (Campbell, quoted by Bottorff, 2015, p. 65)
Taking the case of transformational festivals as an example, the separate but complementary secular and sacred paths tend to come together through art and music, which communicate the subtlety of transcendence effectively.
Burning Man overflows with relationships of symbol and meaning, and carries omnipresent mythologies, narratives, spirituality and community connection that feed the “will to meaning”. Given that the conscious connection with symbols and meanings – what Jung might call synchronicity – can lead to epiphanic encounters with the divine, it could be argued that mixing the ephemeral creative impulse with the physical world results in a symbol infused with meaning.
At Burning Man, in addition to dissolving differences between the sacred and the profane, a complex relationship is created between performance, visual arts, ritual practices and spirituality. Art equates with nature, restoring us to our simplest states of mind.
Burning Man stands out for the large number and scale of interactive art, music, dance and other events. Each year, a theme is chosen to help focus the mind on a particular aspect of meaning-making and direct the intention of those who create sculptures, paintings, performances, dances, music and art cars, among others.
The absurdism of Camus and Sartre is reflected in the conglomeration of art and exotic people. The dreamlike experience that is Burning Man bears some resemblance to the state of complete totality imagined under transmodernism. In this sense, access to these states of utopia is mythical and requires that the tools of myth and symbolism be grasped.
Not only are specific aspects of Burning Man the stuff of myth, but the whole phenomenon has also taken on metamythical proportions. For example, on a micromythical level, the carnivalesque elicits images of the Dionysian mysteries, while on a macromythical level the pilgrimage to Burning Man is itself a hero’s journey.
While Burning Man produces metamythologies, individual participants create their own personal mythologies. This process reflects the meaning-making narratives encouraged by transmodernism and transpersonal psychology.
A personal myth is a constellation of beliefs, feelings, images and rules – operating largely outside conscious perception – that interprets sensations, constructs explanations and directs behaviour. The main concerns of the myth are to understand the natural world in a meaningful way, to find a way forward, to establish secure community relationships and to find one’s place in the vast mystery of the cosmos.
The main tasks of the psyche are to build a guiding mythology, ensuring that the mythology embraces spiritual dimensions and more traditional psychological areas, and realising that a vital and valid guiding mythology largely determines success in life.
As another example, the free festivals were open to all religious philosophies, but more orientated towards pagan, Buddhist and Hindu mythology. Pagan, counter-cultural and eco-spiritual ideas within contemporary rave culture are clearly continuous with an older subculture.
Bibliography:
BOTTORFF, David Lane (2015) “Emerging Influence of Transmodernism and Transpersonal Psychology Reflected in Rising Popularity of Transformational Festivals”, Journal of Spirituality in Mental Health, 17:1, pp.50-74.
QUINN, Bernadette (2003) “Symbols, practices and myth-making: cultural perspectives on the Wexford Festival Opera”, Tourism Geographies, 5(3), pp.329–349.
TAYLOR, Ashley (2015) The Exploration of Transformational Experiences at Festivals. Dissertação de Mestrado, Lethbridge: University of Lethbridge.
TURNER, Victor (1974) Liminal to Liminoid, in Play, Flow, and Ritual: an Essay in Comparative Symbology, Rice Institute Pamphlet-Rice University Studies, 60:3, pp.53-92.
TURNER, Victor (1969) “Liminality and Communitas: Form and attributes of rites of passage”, In The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, pp.94-130.
Authorship: João Carvalho [1].
Based on the project work “Business plan. Cosmic Festival. Transformational Festival”, authored by João Carvalho, under the supervision of Specialist Professor Victor Afonso and co-supervision of PhD Professor Nuno Gustavo, for completion of the Master’s Degree in Tourism, with a specialisation in Strategic Event Management, at the Estoril Higher Institute for Hospitality and Tourism Studies. Presented and defended on December 27th, 2019.
May, 2020.
[1] Master’s Degree in Tourism, with specialisation in Strategic Event Management, by Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies; Beach Break®.
