Yesterday, as you may have noticed, was the winter solstice. While hanging up laundry in my dining room, I spotted a big old flame dancin’, bongo drum playin’ party going on in the park below my building. So, I grabbed my tripod and camera and headed over for a few quick photos.
I’m not actually making light of wiccans or hippies, but what do you call these people? Fire dancers? Pagans? Fire-dancin’ purple pagan people?
Travis has taken some eerily similar photos from Coal Harbour. What does all this Web 2.0, everything-sharing technology teach us? That our experiences are not (not even remotely) unique.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
From your description, I would call them fire dancers. You didn’t mention anything religious about their dancing, so it would be jumping to conclusions to call them pagans or wiccans. The definition “hippy” that I get from google says is “someone who rejects the established culture; advocates extreme liberalism in politics and lifestyle.” Playing bongos / fire dancing doesn’t necessarily imply extreme liberalism in politics, or even lifestyle really (maybe they’re businessmen during the day), so I don’t think that the label hippy applies.
I know people who juggle fire and fire dancer. I work with a fire juggler (who I happen to be friends with), and he’s an atheistic (I think) software engineer. Certainly not pagan, wiccan, or hippie. The fire dancer I know (the juggler’s fiance) works in a cancer research lab, and has similar world views. I’m learning to juggle myself, and I’ve been in drum circles before, but I’m certainly not any of the aforementioned labels.
Firespinning, or firedancing. Yesterday was the winter solstice, so people were out spinning in droves.
It was possibly connected to this event, which is apparently a celebration of the Chinese winter solstice festival called dong zhi.
Or it could have just been some of those damn firedancing hippies, who knows.
Whatever you call it, it makes for cool pictures though.
I have to do something to appease the CSS-positioning gods. Maybe I need to do some firedancing.
Now, where did I put those goatleggings…
I’m one (the pagan variant), though I wasn’t involved in festivities like you saw. We had our usual Sabbat and sang Christmas carols (using different lyrics, of course). I’m also into the drum circle scene, but I’ve not yet intermingled the two. I have, however, attended several evening-time drum circles in which we played around an awesome bonfire and people danced around us. Very cool stuff, but I think each took their own spiritual view of it.
I think the Hard Drumming Society had some sort of joint celebration with the Secret Lantern Society. I saw something about this on an events calendar.
It’s called poi and it’s a Maori tradition, not Wiccan. You can find out more here. There’s a girl in Victoria who teaches poi. I took classes with her last year and it was super fun. Her site is Poi Pixies.
What Julie said. 🙂
I was at the Granville Island Secret Lantern celebration. I go every year. It’s absolutely beautiful and a really fun way to spend an evening. Morris dancers and poi and lanterns and lots of really great folk singing. The community centre and Performance Works all fill up with great talent, and there’s hot chocolate and all sorts of other cold winter’s night treats.