Michael Verdon’s senior thesis, the Temple of Transformance, burning at GMU. (Photo by Craig Bisacre, via Facebook)

If you crossed Burning Man with a Wiccan cleansing ritual on 4/20, you might have something like the event slated to take place on the Mall next month.

A group of activists is planning to hold a multi-day vigil to “collectively heal from the drug war” on America’s front yard. They’re calling it Catharsis, and the centerpiece will be the “Temple of Essence”—a wooden structure that will be lit on fire in a “burn ceremony” on the night of Nov. 21.

“We’ve created a secular humanist cathartic ceremony,” says Adam Eidinger, one of the organizers. “This is a spiritual thing. This is not a rave. There will be music and dancing—but it is cathartic dancing. We’re healing from the drug war.”

This also isn’t a steathily planned protest, like the giant liberty pole that Eidinger and statehood activists erected across the street from the Capitol under the cover of darkness earlier this year. Catharsis’ organizers—a coalition of DCMJ, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and a group of burners known as It’s All Made Up (IAMU)—have already been given a conditional go-ahead from the National Park Service.

“We have reserved the area for them for the event. They are certainly welcome,” said NPS spokesman Mike Litterst. “We’re just working out the specifics and the details about how the fire itself will be conducted. That will involve D.C. Fire and also the Park Service fire marshal and our turf management specialist.”

Eidinger says they are flexible and open to working with NPS and D.C. Fire to address all of their concerns. With a community of artists who have experience incinerating much larger structures, he says, executing a safe and controlled fire won’t be a problem.

According to Litterst, it won’t be a first for the National Mall— but it will go well beyond previous events. “We have done permits [on the Mall] that allowed fires previously but never anything to this extent,” he said.

The Temple of Essence will be built by the artist Michael Verdon, who similarly burned a handcrafted pagoda called the Temple of Transformance for his senior thesis at GMU. In a clever bit of engineering, the inner framing of the piece he is building for Catharsis is designed to mimic bars, with a wooden bench and toilet placed inside. As the conflagration gets going, a jail cell will appear amidst the flames and smoke. And then it will burn down to the ground.

“These are unworkable drug laws that target minorities,” Eidinger says. “It is a gateway to violating your fourth amendment and unreasonable searches of people that are being profiled.” The Temple of Essence, though is meant to be a “peace-building structure,” drawing attention to the ways that drug laws and incarceration affects communities.

The ceremony itself will incorporate a wide range of spiritual and religious practices, according to Eidinger, including the principles of Judaism’s Tikkun Olam (which means repair the world), Wiccan and Pagan rituals, and Native American traditions.

In the day leading up to the event—which begins on the evening of Friday, Nov. 20 and runs through Sunday, Nov. 22—people are encouraged to bring their “mementos” from the war on drugs. Booking documents, probation papers, and other flammable items will be placed inside the temple and ignited along with the structure.

Eventually it will collapse all in on itself, resulting in a large bonfire—thus “transforming our individual stories into collective memory,” as the groups put it. Then you let people come up to feel the warmth of the fire and dance around it” Eidinger says. “It’s part of the experience to dance around the fire until it burns out.” They plan to be there until the sun rises.

Though the event isn’t officially affiliated with Burning Man, the week-long art festival in the Black Rock Desert, it draws inspiration from many of its components: large-scale artwork, the leave-no-trace principle, and, of course, a dramatic fire. But Burning Man’s famously laissez faire approach to drug use won’t fly on the Mall, where it remains illegal to toke up despite legalization in D.C.

The event is scheduled to coincide with the end of the Drug Policy Alliance’s International Drug Policy Reform Conference, a biennial event that draws more than 1,000 people from the world.

To get an idea of what Catharsis might look like, see this video of Verdon’s thesis project. “Everyone said it couldn’t be done,” Eidinger said. Hundreds of people showed up to watch it burn down.