Twilight of the Gods

            The Twilight of the Gods camp is a radical experiment in lived religion. The central question is one of idolatry - Who do we bow down before? What is holy and what profane? At the Twilight of the Gods camp, we believe that the cosmos is a mystery, and that this mystery is the essence of true religion. Anything that stands between us and this mystery is therefore a false idol, and should be burned.

            The Twilight of the Gods camp brings together religions East and West: every Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu and Buddhist dedicated to eradicating all that stands between us and the free and terrible abyss.

            During the year, we are committed to consecrate our respective paths and symbols. But for one week, at Burning Man, we will cast those symbols to the earth. We will desecrate and debase them in recognition of the infinite gap between the known and the Unknown.

            So we ask you to join with us in prayer - a prayer said backward. At Shabbat, beef will be served with its mother’s milk. Obscene Masses, based on the Black Masses of the Middle Ages, will be performed daily. We will break the bonds of comfort and peace with naked bondage yoga to greet each new day. After crucifying the Buddha of compassion we will be led by the wrathful Buddhas through our inevitable decay and death in mediation on the Hell and Between realms of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We will seek not peace, but the embrace of suffering, despair and evil. We will laugh at the face of the dead and suffering God

            Through this inversion, we will cultivate emptiness. We will watch as all of our beloved stories are consumed in the fire of the deep. We will face the agony and terror, the Silence which all of our babbling has covered up during the space of the year. Join us in hating what we love so that once again we can recognize our freedom and that all idols are those of our own making.

            "Pray to God to be rid of God," the sublime mystic Meister Eckhart once wrote. The true religion is not the religion of what we know, but of what we can never know. The true God is revealed only as the fire which destroys all things.

            The theme of this year's Burning Man is the psyche. According to Jung, everything that we know and believe about ourselves casts a Shadow. When we say "I love my father," there is a hidden and repressed voice that says "I hate him." The conscious self, the ego is a negation of this duality. "I am this," we say, "I am not that." What we intend, then, is the negation of this negation. Through embracing the inverse of all to which we cling, we intend the ultimate act of unrepression. We cast ourselves back on the primeval "Yes," on non-duality, on the true God who is beyond all Gods, beyond the "Yes" and the "No," beyond good and evil.

Interactivity at the Twilight of the Gods Camp

            At 2:00 PM every day, we invite all persons religious and non-religious to join us in blaspheming against our own religious traditions. This itself is a religious tradition of sorts. During Carnival in Medieval Rome, paupers and prostitutes would break into the Church to perform obscene and bawdy Masses. The host was served from a woman's buttocks, a homily was given condemning the wickedness of priests. Society was turned upside-down.

            Our daily services will begin with the crucifixion of a new God or Ideal on the side of our temple. The Buddha will be crucified along with Christ in a spirit of laughter and ridicule. All persons are invited to stand by or to join us in mocking ourselves and our highest ideals.

            When this outdoor portion of the ceremony has been completed, we will invite those present to join us inside of the sanctum for ritual deconstruction of our religious traditions and the profanation of our altars. Although participants by no means need to belong to any specific religious tradition, the day's ceremonies will be lead by someone for whom this tradition is important and essential in its right-side-up form.

            Buddhists will lead deep imaginal meditations on the Hell realms and will ask us to embrace suffering, despair and evil. Christian Communion will be performed which dwells on and revels in the debasement of God. We will spit on the Body of Christ as His tormentors were said to have spat upon Him. The laws of Leviticus will be broken just as religiously as any Jew has upheld them so that we may contemplate together the sameness and difference of the Law and the inverse Law.

            Although no doubt these acts will be horrifying to some, and to us as well, we believe that the Silence is greater than any story, and it is only through watching our idols and truths fall into the flames that we can truly begin to understand the incomprehensibility of the divine.

            At other times our tabernacle will be open for prayer, reflection and inspection. If the issues of religious deconstruction and inversion are of any interest to you, you are invited to stop by at any time to discuss these issues with one of our "monks."