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Bohemian Grove

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Bohemian Grove is a 2700-acre (11 km²) campground located at 20601 Bohemian Ave, Monte Rio, California 95462Google Earth provides the address and telephone number. The camp is located at 37 25.818' N, 122 05.36' W. belonging to a private San Francisco-based men's fine arts club known as the Bohemian Club. Every year (since 1899) Bohemian Grove is the location of a two-week (covering three weekends) encampment, beginning in the middle of July, of some of the most powerful men in the world.

The Bohemian Club's membership includes many artists, particularly musicians, as well as many high-ranking business leaders, government officials (including many US Presidents) and senior media publishers. As a measure of the Club's exclusivity, it is reported the waiting list for membership is about 15 years. Members may invite guests to the Grove, who are subject to a rigorous screening procedure. These guests come from across America and overseas. Californian guests are generally limited to attendance at the "Spring Jinks", in June, preceding the main July encampment.

The Grove motto is "Weaving Spiders Come Not Here", which implies that outside concerns and business deals are to be left outside. However, there is demonstrable evidence of political and business deals having been developed at the Grove. The Grove is particularly famous for a Manhattan Project planning meeting that took place there in September of 1942, which subsequently led to the atomic bomb. Those attending, apart from Ernest Lawrence and military officials, included the president of Harvard and representatives of Standard Oil and General Electric. Grove members take particular pride in this event and often relate the story to new attendees*[Sociology of the Bohemian Grove], A Doctoral Dissertation by Peter M. Phillips, Ph.D., Director of Project Censored and Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences at California's Sonoma State University.

Contents

History

Bohemian Grove was established over time, shortly after the founding of the Bohemian Club in 1872. For several years, the members of the Club camped together at various locations, including the present Muir Woods, Samuel P. Taylor State Park, and a separate redwood grove near Duncan Mills, down river from the current location. Regular July encampments similar to those held today began in 1899.

The first parcel of the grove was purchased from Melvin Cyrus Meeker who developed a successful logging operation in the area. Gradually over the next decades, members of the Club purchased land surrounding the original location to the perimeter of the basin in which it resides. This was done to secure the rights to the water, so that its water supply would not be affected by uphill operations.

Not long after the Club's establishment by newspaper journalists, it was commandeered by prominent San Francisco-based businessmen, who provided the financial resources necessary to acquire further acreage and facilities at the Grove. They still retained the "bohemians" however - the artists and musicians - as their primary purpose in establishing the campground was to provide entertainment to their international members and guests (journalists - though not media publishers - were subsequently excluded from both Club membership and guest attendance at the Grove).

The Grove itself consists of redwood trees over 1,500 years old. It is a spectacular nature preserve, untouched by logging, and containing many elevated walkways. The longevity of the redwoods stands as emblematic of an untouched natural setting, far removed from modern day vulgarity. This traditional "purity" underpins the cremation of care ceremony (see below).

Past attendees

The Bohemian Club is a private club; only active members of the Club (known as "Bohos") and their guests may visit the Grove. These guests have been known to include politicians and notable figures from countries outside the US. Particularly during the midsummer encampment, the number of guests is strictly limited due to the small size of the facilities. Nevertheless, up to 2,500 members and guests have been reported as attending some of the annual encampments.

Both the annual Club Membership and Grove Guest Lists are kept secret but a few dedicated researchers have gained access to some of them. [See Peter Martin Phillips' Dissertation, Kerry Richardson and Joel van der Reijden's comprehensive Membership List (refer External Links below) for references to these names.] From these varied sources, reportedly, notable past attendees have included: current President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney (current Vice-President), Donald Rumsfeld (current Secretary of Defense), Karl Rove (Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor to George W. Bush), Jeb Bush, and former American Presidents George Herbert Walker Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt; as well as Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Earl Warren (former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), Robert Kennedy, David Rockefeller (Senior and Junior), Nelson Rockefeller, James Wolfensohn (former president of the World Bank), Alan Greenspan (former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank), Paul Volcker, Colin Powell, Jack Welch (former chairman of General Electric), David Packard, Riley P. Bechtel, Prince Philip, John Major, Helmut Schmidt, Lee Kuan Yew, James A. Baker III, Newt Gingrich, Arnold Schwarzenegger (actor and current governor of California), Bob Novak (political commentator), Malcolm Forbes, David S. Broder (senior Washington Post columnist), Mark Twain, Francis Ford Coppola, Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood and Walter Cronkite.

Facilities

The primary activities taking place at the Grove are varied and expensive entertainments, such as an elaborate Grove Play (known as "High Jinks") and musical comedies ("Low Jinks") - where female roles are played by men in drag - produced by the members and associate members of the Club. Thus the majority of common facilities are entertainment venues, interspersed among the giant redwoods.

There are also sleeping quarters, or "camps" scattered throughout the grove, of which it is reported there were a total of 104 as of 2005. These camps, which are frequently patrilineal, are the principal means through which high-level business and political contacts and friendships are formed. For senior corporate executives, the camps are said to be the pinnacle of socio-political networking in the US.

According to Joel van der Reijden (see External Links below for a full list of camps and substantive details on the past affiliations of the camps' members), the pre-eminent camps are:

Symbolism and rituals

-->Since the founding of the club, the Bohemian Grove's symbol has been the owl, long held as a representative of wisdom.  A forty-foot concrete owl stands at the head of the lake in the Grove and, since 1929, has served as the site of the yearly "Cremation of Care" ceremony (see below). The club's motto, Weaving Spiders Come Not Here, is taken from the second scene of Act 2 from A Midsummer Night's Dream; it signifies that the Grove is limited to exchanging friendship and the free sharing of common passion, summarized in the term, "the Bohemian Spirit."
The Club's patron saint is John of Nepomuk, who legend says suffered death at the hands of a Bohemian monarch rather than disclose the confessional secrets of the queen. A large wood carving of St. John in cleric robes with his index finger over his lips stands at the shore of the lake in the Grove, symbolising the secrecy kept by the Grove's attendees throughout its long history.

Cremation of Care

The Cremation of Care was devised in 1893 by a member named Joseph D. Redding, a lawyer from New York. The New York Times described the show in a June 25, 1899 article:

"Great attention was paid to all the details, and the Druid priests who figured prominently in the show bore all the insignia of their order on their vestments. Over 500 persons figured in the spectacle, and electric and calcium lights were used to illuminate the tableaus. There was a symphony orchestra and a grand chorus. A Druids' altar and sacrificial stone lent an air of realism to the scenes. Mr. Redding served as High Priest of Bohemia. Then came a procession of eight Druid priests bearing six chained captives-- a Gaul, a Celt, a Roman, a barbarian, and two men from the Far North. Each captive was in costume and each in turn pleaded his cause before the assembly, but was condemned to death. Only the Gaul, who represented Bohemia, was able to make a defense that lifted the sentence from the heads of the captives. A loving cup was then drunk by Druids, captives, and Bohemians. Mephisto and a number of devils rushed in and attempted to rescue [an effigy representing a personification of] "Care" from the catafalque [sacrificial pyre]. The devil made an impassioned address, saying that goodfellowship was a mockery and that "Care" could not be banished. Then the Druid leader drove them into the woods with a lighted torch, which he at once applied to the funeral pyre. After this came the "low jinks," a species of amateur minstrel show. Then the Bohemians retired to their tents and to such sleep as the wags and practical jokers of the club permitted them to take."
Today, the ritual consists of hooded members accepting the effigy representing "dull care" from a ferryman traveling across a creek. Music and fireworks accompany the ritual, for dramatic effect. The mock human sacrifice is placed on an altar and set on fire. The ritual represents the act of embracing the revelry of Bohemian Grove while setting aside the "dull cares" of the outside world.

Rumors, Protests and Controversies

With the combination of secrecy, power, and a elite bias, the Bohemian Grove is an attractive target for annual protests at the July encampment from political activists. Specifically, the Bohemian Grove Action Network organizes protests and has aided journalists who wish to penetrate the secrecy surrounding the encampment. Over the years, individuals have infiltrated the Grove then later published video and claimed accounts of the activities at Bohemian Grove.

On July 15, 2000, Alex Jones and Mike Hanson infiltrated the Grove with two hidden video cameras and filmed the Cremation of Care ritual. In his documentary about the infiltration, Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove, Jones contends that a large group of members engage in an "ancient Canaanite, Luciferian, Babylon mystery religion ceremony" involving a 45-foot statue of an owl.

Jones had a fellow infiltrator, the author Jon Ronson, who documented the adventure in his book, . Ronson's interpretation of the ritual was more sanguine, claiming it was a startlingly immature and weird way for world leaders to behave on their summer vacation, but not evidence of covert Satanism.

In the Franklin Coverup Scandal of 1989, Paul A. Bonacci claimed that he had been kidnapped and flown to the Grove by Republican leader Lawrence King and was forced into sexual acts with other boys. In a later lawsuit claiming that Paul Bonacci was the subject of mind control experiments, Bonacci testified to these and other charges in court with U.S. Senior District Judge Warren K. Urbom presiding. Bonacci was awarded $1 million by Judge Urbom in a default judgement, but the judge did not find that the allegations were true.http://www.raven1.net/ra1.htm A grandjury investigated the claims in the Franklin Coverup Scandal. On July 23, 1990, after hearing many hours of testimony, the grand jury threw out all of the allegations concerning sexual abuse and labeling the charges a "carefully crafted hoax".

Harry Shearer of This is Spinal Tap fame has made a movie with the same parody concept about Bohemian Grove, called Teddy Bears' Picnic.

Purported ceremonies and customs

During the Cremation of Care ceremony, a mock human sacrifice representing "dull care" is cremated to symbolize the liberation of the participants. It can be argued that its symbolism is analogous to that of the Burning Man which has often been compared to the Midsummer Encampment at the Grove.

German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt wrote about the Grove in his autobiography Men and Powers. He stated that Germany had similar institutions, some of which included such rituals, but that his favorite was the Bohemian Grove.

Quotations

"The Bohemian Grove, that I attend from time to time — the (inaudible) and the others come there — but it is the most faggy goddamn thing that you would ever imagine. The San Francisco crowd, it's just terrible. I can't even shake hands with anybody from San Francisco." - President Richard M. Nixon, Bohemian Club member starting in 1953 (Domhoff, p 15);

"If I were to choose the speech that gave me the most pleasure and satisfaction in my political career, it would be my Lakeside Speech at the Bohemian Grove in July 1967. Because this speech traditionally was off the record it received no publicity at the time. But in many important ways it marked the first milestone on my road to the presidency." - President Richard Nixon again, in a more mellow mood, in his Memoirs(1978), cited by Domhoff below. (The rule that sitting presidents are not allowed to attend the Grove was sparked by a media clamour to cover a Lakeside Talk that Nixon wanted to give in 1971, but was forced by the directors of the Grove to withdraw.)

"Who would ever have imagined that the president of the United States, together with a large chunk of America's elite, attends a yearly gathering where an ancient Babylonian (mock) human sacrifice is carried out in front of a huge stone owl?" - Joel van der Reijden (2005 Website: see External Links below);

"The mood is reminiscent of high school. There's no end to the pee-pee and penis jokes, suggesting that these men, advanced in so many other ways, were emotionally arrested sometime during adolescence" - Philip Weiss, Spy Magazine journalist, who infiltrated the Grove in 1989.

"So, I was there witnessing something right out of the medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch’s Visions of Hell: burning metal crosses, priests in red and black robes with the high priest in a silver robe with a red cape, a burning body screaming in pain, a giant stone great-horned owl, world leaders, bankers, media and the head of academia engaged in these activities. It was total insanity" - Alex Jones, describing the Cremation of Care ceremony he witnessed at the Grove in 2000 (see External Links below).

"The world is divided in to three classes of people: a very small group that makes things happen, a somewhat larger group that watches things happen, and the great multitude which never knows what happened." - Bohemian Club member Nicholas Murray Butler (President of Columbia University, 1901-1945), as quoted by Professor Carroll Quigley, on Joel van der Reijden's 2005 Website (see External Links below).

Further reading

See also

Other international gatherings of high-level business/political/media officials:

References

External links

 

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