Monkey Chant at Burning Man
Burning Man is a yearly festival of radical self-expression, interactive art, and intentional community. That’s fertile ground for an atheist Sunday school teacher. Last year at Burning Man, for instance, I attended my first monkey chant. When I say that religion is largely about community, my experience with the monkey chant is not far from my mind. As science writer Nicholas Wade writes in The Faith Instinct, rituals of shared song and dance are society’s traditional community builders, all the way back to our hunter-gathered days, and all the way up to the boot camp drills and chants in the modern military. We seem to have evolved to form heartfelt communities through shared song and dance.
The monkey chant is just such a ritual of shared song and dance, provided one defines the terms loosely. People at the center of a big tent lead a mob of participants in nonsense chants and rhythmic, bodily gestures. It’s held at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, as part of their mission is to spread “healing energy” into the world. I might deny that healing energy is anything more than a really useful metaphor, but there’s no denying that the HeeBeeGeeBees run a fine monkey chant. Here’s a video from 2007. You get the idea pretty quick, so don’t feel like you need to watch all two and a half minutes. The thin, dark-haired guy running the event is amazing, like a mad guru played by Abraham Lincoln. The dance is based on sacred Balinese dances, but it looks thoroughly upgraded.
The chant goes on for over an hour. My vocal and rhythmic talents were not 100% sufficient to the task. But I did get to the point at which I could chant along without even trying. My voice was on autopilot. Maybe it’s like saying the rosary a hundred times, except that you’re following a leader’s changing nonsense chants rather than speaking by rote. The monkey chant is pretty remarkable, and it’s a ritual we could have undertaken even before we evolved speech.
Today modern religion is more abstract than ecstatic. Music still involves dancing, but not always. For most languages, “music” and “dance” are the same word, as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says in This Is Your Brain On Music. Today we have plenty of music no one dances to: hymns, anthems, operas, orchestras, and Pink Floyd. There are also plenty of modern people who never sing or dance, and many of us who do so have clearly not had sufficient practice. We’re a far cry from when the entire tribe danced all night around the fire in healing ceremonies that sent us into trances. But these ancient neural networks are still there in our stone-age brains, which is what makes the monkey chant so compelling.
So if you’re going to Burning Man, check out the monkey chant. It’s held Monday through Thursday from 2 to 3:45 at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, located at 7:00 and Divorce. Predictably, it attracts more of the tribal crowd and fewer of the neo-futurists. Check out the official event post, which has a nice description of the monkey chant and some good links.
The monkey chant is just such a ritual of shared song and dance, provided one defines the terms loosely. People at the center of a big tent lead a mob of participants in nonsense chants and rhythmic, bodily gestures. It’s held at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, as part of their mission is to spread “healing energy” into the world. I might deny that healing energy is anything more than a really useful metaphor, but there’s no denying that the HeeBeeGeeBees run a fine monkey chant. Here’s a video from 2007. You get the idea pretty quick, so don’t feel like you need to watch all two and a half minutes. The thin, dark-haired guy running the event is amazing, like a mad guru played by Abraham Lincoln. The dance is based on sacred Balinese dances, but it looks thoroughly upgraded.
The chant goes on for over an hour. My vocal and rhythmic talents were not 100% sufficient to the task. But I did get to the point at which I could chant along without even trying. My voice was on autopilot. Maybe it’s like saying the rosary a hundred times, except that you’re following a leader’s changing nonsense chants rather than speaking by rote. The monkey chant is pretty remarkable, and it’s a ritual we could have undertaken even before we evolved speech.
Today modern religion is more abstract than ecstatic. Music still involves dancing, but not always. For most languages, “music” and “dance” are the same word, as neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin says in This Is Your Brain On Music. Today we have plenty of music no one dances to: hymns, anthems, operas, orchestras, and Pink Floyd. There are also plenty of modern people who never sing or dance, and many of us who do so have clearly not had sufficient practice. We’re a far cry from when the entire tribe danced all night around the fire in healing ceremonies that sent us into trances. But these ancient neural networks are still there in our stone-age brains, which is what makes the monkey chant so compelling.
So if you’re going to Burning Man, check out the monkey chant. It’s held Monday through Thursday from 2 to 3:45 at the HeeBeeGeeBee Healers’ camp, located at 7:00 and Divorce. Predictably, it attracts more of the tribal crowd and fewer of the neo-futurists. Check out the official event post, which has a nice description of the monkey chant and some good links.
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