Category: 3 Old Men

Body paint

Posted on by Dale

Those of you who have been reading along can skip this post.  This is for those who, like me, were looking for a cheap white body paint they could make at home for whatever reason.  I’ve tagged the post so that perhaps it will show up in searches.

Brief history: I and my compadres in the 3 Old Men ritual troupe needed a cheap white body paint.  There is no such thing as cheap commercial body paint, and so I had hoped that the intertubes would provide me with a recipe to make it myself.

Alas, all internet recipes I found were completely ineffective.  They were based on cold cream, which would have been problematic in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert anyway, but worse, they weren’t actually white.  I regard the accompanying photos of happy, whitefaced children as fraudulent.

Luckily, here in Georgia we mine kaolin, a white clay used for various industrial purposes such as making paper white and shiny and for Kaopectate.

Knowing that some people eat it for whatever reason—you can go do that research yourself if you like—I figured it would be available somewhere around here.  I asked the Facebook and got more than a couple of kaolin resources, the best of which is a nearby grocery store, where it sits in the produce section:

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?  Yes, the price is $1.49 for about a pound of kaolin.

So here are the instructions to make an incredibly cheap white body paint based on my experimentation.

Dump your kaolin into a bowl and add 1-1/2 to 2 cups of water to it.

Just let it sit for about half an hour, stirring occasionally.  You will want to use a little larger bowl than I have here, and my advice is do this outside.  It can get very messy very quickly, and as you will discover, a little bit of this stuff can go a very long way.

Add water if necessary:

It should be the consistency of sour cream.

Buy yourself a bowl large enough to hold your final mixture; a strainer that will hook over the bowl; and a spatula, one that is completely flat on its face (unlike mine).  It is possible to use your household utensils, but if you’re going to be making a lot you will want dedicated equipment so that you don’t have to completely clean the kaolin off of every nook and cranny.

Scoop the goop into the strainer, and force it through with the spatula.  The finer mesh your strainer had, the finer your body paint will be.

As you moosh it through, you may need to add water for any clumpy bits.  Also, of course, it doesn’t fall straight into the bowl.  A lot of it will cling to the other side of the strainer, so be prepared to scrape the bottom:

Finally, you will have a bowl of white, yummy kaolin.  Stir, add water, etc.

I was smart to buy a stainless steel bowl with a rubberized bottom, but I wish it had come with a lid.  You will want to keep it covered to keep it wet, although if it dries, it’s not difficult to reconstitute it.

How well does it cover?  Here’s about a teaspoon smeared on my arm, still wet:

And here it is dry:

Used in a fairly liquid state, it dries smooth and does not come off.  If you don’t use as much water, it may cake and crack—that’s a definite look as well.

It’s comfortable on the skin, and best of all it just rinses right off.  Pretty much perfect: cheap kaolin, water, comfortable, and removable.

Unanswered questions: how much does it take?  I started with a pound of the stuff, and I covered my entire body with maybe a fifth of it.  However, that was the first formulation, which was thicker and cakier, so it ought to go even further if you use a runnier consistency on fewer body parts.

Also, I don’t know whether this could be tinted or not.  I’m sure you could use food coloring, but you would risk dyeing your skin.  Perhaps sidewalk chalk or tempera paint?  I may or may not play with that; we just needed white.

Could you add cold cream to it?  I don’t see why not, but why go greasy when it’s perfectly comfortable the way it is?

Finally, there are online sources for kaolin, but it’s not cheap like that.  My advice would be to start checking around convenience stores and groceries that cater to the African-American community; it is mostly older black ladies who eat “white dirt.”

Bottom line: you can spend $12.95 for 4 oz. of body paint, or you can spend $3.00 for a pint.  You’re welcome, internet.

3 Old Men: skirts & stakes

Posted on by Dale

Hello, my old friend Holkeboer:

Back in the day, in costume design class, Dr. Jackson Kesler—who is a god—had us do “book reports” on a long list of resources.  We evaluated them for usefulness, and that list of books became our go-to library for the rest of our lives.    (Which was his intent, and which is why he is a god.)

Patterns for Theatrical Costumes was not published until 1993, but it would have been one of the tops on the list.  It’s skimpy on details, but it’s great for basic shapes/drapes/silhouettes:

So there’s the basic pattern for the ceremonial skirt that the 3 Old Men wear as officiants for their labyrinth.

Did you know that a new patio is a great costume shop space?

Five yards of muslin.  Step One of any costume, Dr. Jackson Kesler taught us, is to mock it up out of cheap fabric.  We had bolts of some cheapass cotton sateen that we called “grahdoo green” which was our preferred mock-up of choice.  (Generally speaking, the mock-up—after we used it for fitting and then disassembled it for the pattern—became the lining of the actual costume.)

It being a beautiful day, I thought I might as well set up the entire shop:

All told, it took me about an hour and a half to get the first mock-up put together.  More later.

That was yesterday.  Today, I removed the labels from 144 tent stakes:

Three plastic tubs, 144 16-inch stakes, water.  And then I peeled the labels.  Sometimes the work of ritual troupes is merely tedium.

3 Old Men: the labyrinth

Posted on by Dale

All right, class, who can tell me what this is?

That is correct, it is a right triangle made of rope.  Each of the three corners is actually a metal ring to which the ropes are tied.  Stake it out and the ropes will automatically form a right triangle.  The Egyptians used something like this to measure acreage.

The right angle, though is not the angle we care about.  It’s the angle nearest us, which contains the arc between the short radius of an octagon and the long radius.  This is what we will use to lay out the octagonal labyrinth that is at the center of the 3 Old Men ritual.  You can’t see it in this photo, but the short radius is marked off every two feet with a little piece of blue duct tape, and the long radius is marked similarly with red tape.

So we’ll use our staves to form an 8-foot square, stake out the center, and position the triangle with the short radius along one of the directions of the compass.  From there, we have ropes with stakes already threaded through—we use the tape marks to determine where to place the stakes.  Flip the triangle, repeat.  Move the short radius to the next compass point.  Repeat.

This is theory.  Practice may turn out to be something else altogether.

Here’s what 144 (give or take today’s shipment of the final 16) tent stakes look like:

There were two additional boxes already downstairs.  Apparently there is not a warehouse anywhere in these United States that is capable of storing a gross of 16″ tent stakes, so they came from everywhere.  That’s fine—they were delivered in two days and for free.

Unpacked and counted:

Notice the two spools of rope, not pictured in the second photo.

I’m getting very excited about this project.

A confession

Posted on by Dale

OK, I confess: I have developed an obsession with my new friend kaolin.

The discovery that I can have all the white body paint I want for practically nothing has me dazzled.  Yesterday I realized that instead of dipping chunks of the stuff in water, I could go ahead and dissolve all of my holdings into an earthenware bowl.  Even when it dries, it becomes like my own personal bowl of pancake makeup.  Woot!

Of course, the dissolving itself was fascinating:

Isn’t that just grotesque?  I love it!

Soon, of course, I will need to test it out to see how much it takes to cover my person so that I can make plans to create enough paint for our venture at Alchemy.  That’s where I will draw a discreet curtain over the process.

3 Old Men: one small triumph

Posted on by Dale

I’ve been composing/orchestrating with some excellent results, but the intertubes have been destroyed, no doubt by aliens, so we all have to wait until tomorrow to hear the duct-taped glories of “Rise and fall.”

In the meantime, I will share today’s other small victory via the miracle of my iPad and the 3G network.

I’m sure everyone remembers my musings on the 3 Old Men ritual troupe, originally created for a trip to Burning Man next month and now re-aimed at the Alchemy Burn in north Georgia in October. One of the items I needed to figure out was body paint. (At one point in the ritual, we will be adorning our aging physiques.)

The real stuff is expensive, so I went looking for some home made recipes on the web. I found a really easy one, just cold cream, cornstarch and water. When I finally got around to testing it, though, it was not in the least opaque.

I searched again, and found a similar one that added flour. Good, I thought, that’s opaque enough. But the admixture was still just cold cream.

So what would be opaque enough? I thought about using poster paint, but who knows what kind of toxicity is involved there.

And then it came to me: kaolin, Georgia’s own “white dirt.” I asked Facebook where it could be bought, and I got all kinds of responses for local establishments that carried it. The winner was Food Outlet, where you can find it in the produce section right next to the okra.

Next step was to drag out the cold cream and shave off some kaolin into the mixture.

Nope, still not really what I wanted. (What do I want? Something along the lines of Butoh dancers.)

Today, casting about for something to do other than get out in the heat and humidity, I remembered thinking that I should try to dissolve the kaolin in water and then use that precipitate to mix with cold cream.

Was kaolin even water soluble? It was. And as it began to dissolve a little bit, I picked up the piece of wet kaolin and smeared it on my hand.

And lo:

So that’s it: carry chunks of the extremely cheap mineral with us, have a ceremonial bowl of water, dunk a chunk, and smear away.  It doesn’t seem to rub off, and mere water washes it away.  More research is required to see if cold cream might in fact give us protection against rain, although frankly I’m not sure I’m going to be standing in a long, trailing skirt in the rain.

Alchemy (formerly Burning Man)

Posted on by Dale

You may recall that my plans to celebrate turning 60 by going to live in an alkali desert for a week were scotched by the inability of my partner in crime to travel with me.

We have regrouped.  There are more than a couple of regional Burns, and we have decided to go ahead and establish our 3 Old Men ritual performance group and start with Alchemy, taking place here in Georgia Oct. 2-5.  We have tickets (more than we need, actually) and are putting together our team.

We are also beginning to move forward with all the practical matters that we would be in the middle of anyway were we still heading to Nevada in 10 weeks, i.e., the labyrinth, staves, and skirts.  We met a couple of weeks ago to discuss these things, and now that I’m not having rotator cuff surgery, I’m ready to get started.

This weekend my lovely first wife and I have been in Raleigh, NC, for a family wedding, and while here we needed to visit some kind of “largest” fabric store for private upholstery reasons.  I’ve already bought muslin to mock up the 3 Old Men skirts cheaply, and I’ve pretty much decided to make them of monks cloth because of its hand and drape, but since I was bored, I messaged the following photos to my fellows:

The fake fur is a Burning Man joke, of course.  I don’t see how people wear anything out there other than loincloths, frankly. The G.I. Joe fleece was likewise a joke.

The psychedelic fabric, though… There is some part of me that can see us standing in the woods of north Georgia, waiting at the entrances of the four-path labyrinth, clad in some pretty freaky skirts.  It doesn’t take it a lot of imagination to assign earth, fire, air, and water to them, either.

Also, I found as I wandered aimlessly around this largest fabric store that there could be many different interesting ways to build these skirts: brocades, sheers, etc.  I finally decided that I needed to get home and actually build the thing first, study how the skirt will move and flow, and then powwow with my fellows on what ritual aspect we want to present.

At any rate, we will now resume updates on the progress towards Alchemy/Burning Man.

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual, part 4

Posted on by Dale

Finishing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.

: Ritual sound & language :

What is the role of silence in the rite? … Do the people consider it important to talk about the rite, avoid talk about it, or to talk during it?  Are there parts of the rite for which they find it difficult or impossible to articulate verbalizable meanings? … How important is language to the performance of the rite?  What styles of language appear in it — incantation, poetry, narrative, rhetoric, creeds, invective, dialogue?  In what tones of voice do people speak?  … To what extent is the language formulaic or repetitious? … How much of the language is spontaneous, how much is planned?

I don’t have answers to any of these.  I have deliberately postponed any kind of planning on language/sound until Craig and I (and others, hopefully) get on our feet, as we say in the theatre, and start to play with it.  All I know is that when a participant exits the labyrinth, I must in some way connect with that person and offer one of the agones.  I honestly have no clue about how this will work.

I imagine that the offer of the agon will be formulaic, but then the rest of it is going to have to be improvised.

As for music/sounds, I’m not planning anything, but that could easily change as well.  As I said in our Theme Camp application, we would welcome drum circles and other musicians to contribute to the ritual as they see fit.  If our camp were bigger, say ten or more people, we could plan to have our own drummers in attendance.  As it is, we each have our own bells/bowls/shakers we can bring with us, but how we implement them I will leave to more shamanic minds than mine.  I can easily see a participant singing or playing an instrument or singing bowl or shaker while walking the path. It will be very interesting to report back what happens on the Playa as the community participates in the 3 Old Men ritual.

: Ritual action :

What kinds of actions are performed as part of the rite, for example, sitting, bowing, dancing, lighting fires (!), touching, avoiding, gazing, walking?  In what order to they occur?  … What are the central gestures?  … What actions are not ascribed meaning?  What actions are regarded as especially meaningful and therefore symbolic?  What actions are regarded as efficacious rather than symbolic?  What meanings, causes, or goals do participants attribute to their actions? … Which actions are repeated?  What gestures mark transitions?  What are the recurrent postures?  What qualities of action persist—quickness, slowness, verticality, hesitance, mobility, linearity, exuberance, restraint?  Are parts of the rite framed theatrically? … What parts of the body are emphasized by participants’ kinesthetic style?  … How do the social and environmental contexts influence the actions?  What actions are done with objects? …  What actions are optional, required?

Again, a bucketload of questions, some of which we can answer, splitting our focus between the officiants and the participants.

For the Old Men, for this Old Man anyway, here are some answers:

  • Performance includes standing, walking, dancing/movement (during the walking), and touching.  I would include the agones themselves as actions, and they are to my mind central and especially  meaningful.  I think from my perspective they are in fact efficacious rather than symbolic, although of course I have no control over the actual efficacy; I can only offer a gesture that I hope is effectively meaningful to the participant.
  • The agones are repeated, and they are themselves the transition from the journey of the labyrinth back to the world at large.  They are, however, optional: the participant may decline the offer, or even choose to exit where there is no officiant.
  • Again, not having gotten on my feet I’m not sure of the “qualities” of these actions.  In my head, I sense they should be slow, deliberate, nonthreatening, even the ‘struggle’ agon.  But I will not be surprised if, out on the Playa, the Old Men choose to become exuberant at least part of the time.
  • Body parts.  This is very important to me, since the whole impetus behind the 3 Old Men is of course our aging bodies.  The skirt will emphasize our torsos, specifically our bellies, which among our current participants are not taut.  I think too our arms and hands will play a large role by dint of holding the staff and engaging in the agones.  Also, if we go with the nude walk through the labyrinth as our opening, then all kinds of body issues will present themselves as part of the ritual.  One question that arises: do we paint just our heads and torsos, the visible parts of our bodies once we don our skirts, or do we paint our entire bodies for the trip through?  That will require some discussion.  (Sorry about the mental image…)

One question I have not resolved for myself is whether installing the labyrinth is part of the ritual.  I think it will be for me, although once we arrive on the Playa and set to work, it may become just a bloody chore.  Certainly we have no plans to take the thing down and re-erect it every day.

For our participants, the ritual action is pretty straightforward:

  • Approach the labyrinth.
  • Choose an entrance.
  • Enter the labyrinth.
  • Journey to the center.
  • Choose an exit.
  • Journey outward.
  • Choose whether to engage in the proffered agon, and if so, engage.

What meaning our participants assign to these actions is, as I’ve said before, anyone’s guess.

And that fact leads me to question whether what we’re doing is a ritual at all, since it is not part of an actual culture that produced it other than that of dirty hippie freaks like me and the 68,000 other Burners.  Still, my experiences with my own labyrinth have convinced me that this offering to the Burning Man community will in fact be received as a meaningful experience by those who participate.  In any event, I have an interesting anthropological study ahead of me.

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual, part 3

Posted on by Dale

Continuing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.

 : Ritual identity :

What ritual roles and offices are operative—teacher, master, elder, priest, shaman, diviner, healer, musician?  How does the rite transform ordinary appearances and role definitions?  Which roles extend beyond the ritual arena, and which are confined to it? … Who initiates, plans, and sustains the rite?  Who is excluded by the rite?  Who is the audience, and how does it participate?  … What feelings do people have while they are performing the rite?  After the rite?  At what moments are mystical or other kinds of religious experience heightened?  Is one expected to have such feelings or experiences? … Does the rite include meditation, possession, psychotropics, or other consciousness-altering elements?  … What room is there for eccentricity, deviance, innovation, and personal experiment? … Are masks, costumes, or face paint used as ways of precipitating a transformation of identity?

Well, that’s a lot to cover, isn’t it?

As for the role of the 3 Old Men in the ritual, I have noted in one of my Burning Man notebooks the following:

  • What are the attributes of the officiants?
    • solemnity
    • compassion
    • serenity
    • wisdom
    • openness
    • groundedness
      • not anger
      • despair
      • decay
      • aggression

I have avoided from the beginning calling them guardians, because they’re not guarding anything.  They’re there as anchors more than anything, providing a sense to the participants that there is mind behind the installation of rope and stakes.  They are also there to provide a sense of closure at the end of the journey, whether or not the participant elects to engage in the proffered agon.  (I think the Old Men can at least bow/nod/reverence an exiting participant—and I really need another term besides “participant.”)

So let’s just go with Elder, since that’s part of our gestalt anyway.

Transformation of appearances: this is one reason I’m leaning toward the idea of the Old Men opening the ritual by stripping from their regular clothes, painting their bodies, walking the labyrinth, then donning their skirt and staff.  It makes it pretty clear that we have become the Old Men.  The last question in the set addresses this as well, and I think it’s important.  Just as priests and shamans and judges put on specific garments to become their role, the 3 Old Men put on theirs.

The body paint thing is problematic, of course.  For one thing, it’s going to trigger associations with Butoh dance, with its visceral emotions and existential terror, and that’s not what we hope to project at all.  For another thing, it’s 100° out there and we don’t have showers.  Ew.  This is an idea that we’re going to have to consider carefully before committing to it.

Who is the audience and how do they participate?  All of Burning Man is the audience, all 68,000 of us.  Such is the nature of the festival, however, that we will be one of thousands of experiences available to people, and unless we are selected as an official theme camp and given a space where we might attract attention, we will be off on one of the side streets and will host whoever stumbles across us.

How our participants respond to the ritual is anyone’s guess, since nothing about it is prescriptive.  Our hope is that the experience is meditative and personally transformative.  (As for psychotropics… I’m shocked—shocked—that you would suggest such a thing might be possible at Burning Man.)  Our hope is that people find meaning in their walk through the labyrinth, and that engaging in the agon upon their exit gives an extra push to what they found in their journey.  Our hope is that they find themselves still thinking on it as they walk away or in odd moments during the week.

What room is there for eccentricity, deviance, innovation, and personal experiment? Honey, please.  You just defined Burning Man.  We would be idiots to presume that we’re not going to host Burners whose Dionysian impulses make a mockery of the solemnity of our setup.  And that’s OK: clowns can be priests; fools can be visionaries.  I expect to see people walking the labyrinth in silence and prayer; singing and dancing; giggling and inattentive; naked; stoned and lost; smirking and cynical; hurriedly.  I expect drummers and other musicians to join us.  I expect people to be puzzled or put off by the offer of an agon; I expect some to accept it gratefully, with tears, with joy.  I expect to be quizzed—”What is this about?  How do I do it?”  I expect to be ignored.  I expect to have others expect me to be something more than I have offered.

And I expect to be transformed by all of it, to learn more about my identity as an Old Man.

Tomorrow: ritual sound & language, and ritual action

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual, part 2

Posted on by Dale

Continuing our examination of Ronald Grimes’s mapping of rituals, from the second chapter of his Beginnings in ritual studies.

: Ritual objects :

What, and how many, objects are associated with the rite? … Of what materials are they made? … What is done with it? … What skills were involved in its making?

This is an interesting aspect of 3 Old Men for me, since one of the aims in designing this ritual was to make it as simple as possible.  You may recall that my original idea involved three old guys in loincloths with staffs: next to nothing to transport or keep up with.  The addition of the labyrinth added a lot more cost and transportation issues, but our ritual objects are essentially the same: skirts and staffs.

Are the skirts ritual objects?  Skimming ahead in the chapter, I note that costume is an element of ritual identity.

So that leaves our staffs.  They too are part of the identity of the 3 Old Men, since they are part of the archetype of the Elder, our reclaimed masculine version of the Crone, but I think they are more than that.  I’m sure everyone remembers Gandalf’s claim at the doors of Meduseld that his staff was just an old man’s prop.  Just so: our staffs are our support, but like Gandalf’s staff they embody/symbolize our power as Elders.

The question of how they will be used is still to be determined.  I know that when we proceed around the labyrinth, I envision our staffs marking time as we move in unison.  It is probable that we will incorporate some kind of ritual/dance movement into our peripatesis using the staffs.  The agon involving the offer of struggle: will it involve the staff?  If not, then the laying by of the staff becomes ritualistic.

There is one more use of the staffs for which I’ve already planned: whatever other decoration there may be on them—and we haven’t decided even what they will be made of—there will be markings on them which will guide us in the actual laying out of the labyrinth.  That means there will be four staffs, not just three: laying them out in a square will give us the corners of the innermost octagon.  There is also a centerpoint and the width of the path marked to help lay out the positions of the stakes.  Sacred geometry, folks.

There are other objects that keep floating into the plan but which I keep rejecting.  I would love to add small stands at each entrance, beside which the Old Men would stand, each with one of the four elements: a bowl of water, a bowl of earth, a brazier of fire, a bell or smudge stick (for air).  Participants could use those as they see fit, either before entering or upon their exit.  The problem with the stands is severalfold: transportation issues, of course, and stabilization issues.  The winds are fierce on the Playa; everything has to be staked and tied down, and there is—as I understand it—a prohibition on campfires, tiki torches, etc., so the brazier would be problematic.  Perhaps if the 3 Old Men have a longer life with the regional Burns, the stands can make an appearance.

: Ritual time :

At what time of day does the ritual occur—night, dawn, dusk, midday?  What other concurrent activities happen that might supplement or compete with it?  … At what season?  Does it always happen at this time? Is it a one-time affair or a recurring one? … How does ritual time coincide or conflict with ordinary times, for instance work time or sleeping time? … What is the duration of the rite?  Does it have phases, interludes, or breaks?  How long is necessary to prepare for it?  … What elements are repeated within the duration of the rite?  Does the rite taper off or end abruptly? … What role does age play in the content and officiating of the rite?

Again we are dealing with two overlapping rituals, the Grand Ritual of Burning Man itself and the inner ritual of 3 Old Men.  Naturally, the grand ritual takes place at the same time every year, with its separate questions of preparation, etc.  Interestingly, you might think that the grand ritual of the Festival ends abruptly: burn the Man and go home, but it is not nearly that clear cut.  These days the Man burns on Saturday night.  Many people then leave on Sunday, but many also stay for the burning of the Temple on Sunday night, which has become an equally important part of the grand ritual.  (That is our plan.)  And when you think about it, even those singular high points in the grand ritual don’t have a clear ending: thousands gather for what is essentially a big bonfire.  Who decides when a bonfire is over?

For the 3 Old Men, these questions have not been answered.  In fact, despite Grimes’s warning that his proposed map is not to be taken as a checklist, I think that they provide us a useful guide in deciding how to complete our plans for the labyrinth.  Will this be a daily event?  At what time of day will we take up our positions as officiants?  (Conversations with veteran Burners suggest that dusk is our best bet.)  How long will we remain stationed?  How will we decide when it is time for peripatesis?  How will we decide when it’s time to stop?  If we are able to add to our troupe so that we have back-up Old Men—which I think would be awesome—how do we effect the ‘changing of the guard’?

Even the question of the age of the officiants is not firmly answered: at least one of our hopeful participants, i.e., needs a ticket, is not an old man at all and in fact will probably be quite disgustingly fit by the time August rolls around.  Can a 30-something don the skirt and staff?  A question of ritual identity we will need to examine.

 Tomorrow: ritual identity

Burning Man: mapping the field of ritual

Posted on by Dale

I highly recommend, if you are interested in the inner workings of ritual, Beginnings in ritual studies, by Ronald L. Grimes.  It’s introductory, nicely analytical, and clearly written, unlike that other pillar of ritual studies, The ritual process, by Victor W. Turner.  Also useful and readable is Liberating rites, by Tom F. Driver.  (This is how we know I will never write a book on ritual: I don’t have a middle initial, since Dale is my middle name.)  I have not read Ritual theory, ritual practice, by Catherine Bell; every time I look at it on Amazon, it seems thickly written and more about ritual studies than ritual.  Perhaps later.

Finally, I found Theater in a crowded fire: ritual and spirituality at Burning Man, by Lee Gilmore, an excellent book for anyone who intends to create a ritual to take into a desert and share with 68,000 hippie freaks for a week.

Ronald Grimes, in chapter 2 of Beginnings, outlines a “map” of ritual elements for the use of those who study ritual in the field.  He warns that the map is not a checklist but an overall guide, and that if used carefully can provoke more questions (and questions about the questions), which can then lead the observer to a deeper understanding of the ritual being observed.

So what would an observer make of our ritual?

I am going to pause a moment and remind everyone that this little essay is completely theoretical, since at the moment the 3 Old Men is nothing more than scribblings in a couple of notebooks.  What will happen when we’re actually on the Playa is anyone’s guess—we will revisit Grimes’s map in September.

Here are some pertinent questions (out of scores Grimes actually posits), and some tentative answers.

: Ritual space :

Where does the ritual enactment occur?  If the place is constructed , what resources were expended to build it?  Who designed it?  What traditions or guidelines, both practical and symbolic, were followed in building it? … What rites were performed to consecrate or deconsecrate it? …. If portable, what determines where [the space will next be deployed]?  … Are participants territorial or possessive of the space? … Is ownership invested in individuals, the group, or a divine being?  Are there fictional, dramatic, or mythic spaces within the physical space? [Grimes, p. 20-22]

We’re dealing with three simultaneous ritual spaces, of course: Black Rock Desert, Burning Man Festival, and the labyrinth, one natural, the others constructed.  Within the Great Ritual of the Burning Man Festival, to which the 3 Old Men are themselves pilgrims, there are hundreds of smaller, dependent rituals, all of which—if divorced from the Great Ritual—risk being seen as purely artificial entertainment, carnival rides if you will.  But as Theater in a crowded fire makes clear, Burning Man provides a ritualistic structure that empowers its participants to invest all the smaller rituals with true meaning.  The labyrinth derives its potential significance from the Great Ritual.

I explicate this theory because the answers to most of the above questions reveal an artificial construct: I and my buddies built it; I designed it; guidelines came from my own study of labyrinths and the Festival’s 10 Principles, which of course are part of the Great Ritual. Again, we can revisit these questions after the Festival and see if there was more meaning to the process than we might think at the moment.

There are a couple of questions which I have not addressed in previous posts that we should look at.  Are we possessive of the space?  In our discussions so far, the answer would have to be ‘no.’  We’re not concerned with how participants might approach our offering.  They may be partying fools or they may be earnest meditators—we will accept what comes.  What rites will we perform to ‘consecrate’ the space?  Still playing with ideas, but my favorite so far is that we begin in mufti, place our skirts and staffs at our entrances, return to the empty entrance, strip and paint ourselves, proceed through the labyrinth to our posts, don our skirts and take up our staffs, and we’re ready for business.

Who ‘owns’ the ritual space?  My hope—probably one of the reasons I’m doing this—is that the group will own it.  3 Old Men, whoever and  however many there may eventually be, become actual officiants, caretakers, of this experience.

As for “where next” the 3 Old Men might set up, it has already occurred to us that we can do the whole Regional Burn circuit, can’t we?  That’s the advantage of being a dirty hippie freak.

Already I can tell this examination is going to take multiple posts.  Tomorrow: ritual objects and ritual time.