Principles and Transformus: The Beginning

Back in 1986, 35 west coast weirdos burned a wooden figure on a beach(1). It seems unlikely they had any way of anticipating how deeply that action would go on to influence thousands upon thousands of people over the coming years.

By 2004, that 35 person event had moved from a beach in San Francisco to a desert in Nevada, had increased a thousandfold(2), and one of the founders had decided to try to capture the overarching spirit and ethos of this thing – called a community, a movement, or a terrifying gathering of heathens, depending on who you asked – in mere words. Today, we know those words as the ten guiding principles of Burning Man, and they have a profound meaning to all those who call Burning Man and its regional and related events “home.” It’s important to note that Larry Harvey, the founder who’s most well-known, wrote these principles not as rules or to dictate action, but as a reflection of what had been built over the years(3).

In 2004, across the country, an event wanted to allow a safe space for oddballs, festival
freaks, psytrance phamily, and more to come together and create something special in the southeast. As they began building their event, the newly written 10 Principles of Burning Man seemed ripe for adopting and adapting. And so the founders of the event we now know as Transformus did exactly that.

In this series, we’ll explore the principles as written by Larry Harvey; how they compare to the principles as adapted by WordPlay, Sid, Rhythm, CHW, Maya, and the others; what they mean to the Transformus community today; and how the Transformus community has built on those initial guidelines. So much of our history is experienced instead of documented, so bear with us if some details are lost to the years and the cycle of people in and out of the community at large.

For now, I leave you with these words from Maya, whoals she shared them with the Transformus Facebook group as we approached the tenth anniversary of our beloved event in 2013, about our initial interpretation of the principles: “The rest of the story, our mission, our goals, where we are going… well, we are writing that story, living it and figuring it out together along the way. For now we know that at the very least, we like the principles set out by Burning Man, and that we can live with those as we begin to write our own principles and guides. So we decided to start exploring what those mean to us. We know that like a child growing up, we will evolve and grow into our unique identity, and we invite you to join us in this transformative journey of discovery.”

1: citation:https://burningman.org/timeline/
2: citation:https://burningman.org/timeline/
3: citation: https://burningman.org/culture/philosophical-center/10-principles/