Burning Man: The New Bohemian Grove
Human sacrifice, psychedelics, MK Ultra and UFO's in the occult oasis of Black Rock
Burning Man is typically known as a yearly congregation of Dune cosplayers and tech bros on a “vision quest” in the desert. But its also an ancient pagan ritual event that can be traced as far back as the 1st century B.C., described by Julius Caesar as “a large wickerwork figure with limbs was filled with living men and set on fire.”1
This annual gathering of dreadlocked freaks, stoners and degenerates isn’t just a symbolic tribute to an ancient human sacrifice ritual, its the same ritual. Just about every year in the past decade there has been at least 1 strange death reported. Here are a few of the sacrifices, I mean, deaths that I was able to find:
2014 — 29 year old woman killed by fur covered party bus
2018 — Founder of Burning Man dies at 70 from a stroke
2019 — 61-year-old man flagger for traffic control dies from car crash
2021 — A man fell 50 feet and suffered traumatic injuries, no update on his condition
2022 — Judge from Tennessee dies from "natural causes"
2023 — 32-year-old man, "officials" suspect drug intoxication
The strangest Burning Man death was in 2017 when a 41 year old man named Aaron Joel Mitchell who charged so aggressively into the fire of the burning effigy that nobody was able to stop him. Very strange behavior for a man who was described as “an adventurous, nature-loving athlete who cared about his health”.
Various art installations throughout previous Burning Man festivals have the same recurring psychedelic and occult themes such as doors, the oculus (all in seeing eye of Horus) and butterflies representing MK Ultra mind control.
We all know that the CIA used psychedelics to psyop hippies through the MK Ultra program to infiltrate and neutralize the threat posed by the 60s counter-culture movement. Leary, Alpert, Crowley and other leading figures were known to be on their payroll.
The psyops successfully fueled the cultural influence of these LSD luminaries and as a result, the entire counter culture movement, to work towards the CIA’s objective. Their first attempt at employing an anarchist utopia was with the Temporary Autonomous Zone. They used the TAZ to convince revolutionaries that they had total freedom in this space, which kept them confined within their own echo chamber and prevented their ideas from spreading through society while subverting their creative spirit from within.
Burning Man then emerged from San Francisco's Cacophony Society on Baker Beach which is not by coincidence, in alchemical adjacent esoteric themes, beaches are a meeting zone for elemental transitions. With the burn ritual added into the equation, the salt plain playa becomes a muddy deluge, fire, earth, water and air meet with psychedelic sorcery and the smoke of human sacrifice. The continuity and connection of these pharmakia induced death rituals is as old as recorded human history.
70 miles south of Burning Man’s original Baker Beach location is Bohemian Grove. As if it were a literal passing of the torch, to use a fitting phrase, Burning Man is a public Bohemian Grove for the counter-culture; a more trendy and accessible human sacrifice ritual empowering the spirit of the visionary tech pioneers and thought leaders of the digital revolution.
Burning Man has become the public version of another lesser-known higher-impact solstice shindig where kings, Congressmen, Bonesmen, and Brothers Templar rollick in the redwood grove of Northern California’s Bohemian Club. The arch aim of the awful affair is the manifestation of a mass fire ritual on the last night of the bacchanal jaunt in which a massive wooden statue known as "The Man" reaching up to well over 100 feet into the desert sky is set ablaze in the cremation of care, death of the old, and rebirth of the new. Patently pagan. Awkwardly American. Grievously vulgar.
Most notably, Google selected Eric Schmidt as their CEO because he attended Burning Man. Some other attendees inlcude:
Elon Musk
Jeff Bezos
Garrett Camp, cofounder of Uber
Alexis Ohanian
Ray Dallio
Brian Chesky, cofounder of Airbnb
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google
Elizabeth Holmes, disgraced Theranos founder
The festival relocated to the Nevada desert in 1991, in the not so coincidentally titled Black Rock City. At the center part is a mile long radius where the burn ritual occurs, called the playa, a dried up evaporated desert basin that acts as center stage for the demonic carnival. The ancient pagans believed that after their wicker man burn ritual the ashes helped the crops grow after the dry summer solstice.
So if this human sacrifice ritual is meant to result in a harvest of crops, why is it being held in the desert and what is it a harvest of? Perhaps it is a harvest of the world’s most creative minds to usher in the new religion of the future through cultural subversion. Hints of this can be seen in the recent tributes to aliens and the UFO phenomoenon. The outer Black Rock city streets resemble the rings of Saturn, the god of agriculture.
In 2016, a group named the Desert Wizards of Mars built an observatory in the playa. The project aimed to connect Burning Man with outer space. The project's lead artist said:
"If you can show someone a decent view of the rings of Saturn, you change someone's life forever ... they don't just take it in -- they make noises, they say things, they move, they get uncomfortable. It is exactly Burning Man."
One account on Reddit from a “stone cold sober” attendee of Burning Man reported seeing a group of aliens during burn night, who came down and were speaking in strange tongues. "This was NOT one of the years with the 'crashed UFO' themed art in the playa but it was one that had multiple 'lights in the sky' phenomena popping up, including ball lightning," she said.
The burners grow in numbers every year and their art becomes more obscure and esoteric. Although the end product is one that has developed over the span of thousands of years, it is of an apocalyptic nature. The collective influence of the festival’s most notable attendants, is powerful enough to mold the entire cultural landscape, and I would argue that it already does. The question is, does the subversive, revolutionary spirit of Burning Man emerge from within the stoner mecca of Black Rock, or is this human sacrifice ritual the result of social generations immersed in pharmakia. If you ask me, it’s a muddy mix of both.
Davidson, Hilda Ellis (1988). Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe: Early Scandinavian and Celtic Religions. Syracuse University Press. p. 60.
It is a shame that it has become so commercialized. Only “professional” hippies can afford attending now I imagine.