The Bohemian Grove Conspiracy Blog

So after the last few weeks, between the Denver Airport and the Great Pyramid of Memphis, I called out on Mickstape and Twitter to say that every non-NFL Sunday I will be doing a deep dive on some conspiracy, myth, or legend. Whether it be something local like the forest dwarves of Haunchyville, Wisconsin, or something massive and relatively well known like the Denver Airport. Why? Because weekends are slow as fuck around these parts until football season comes back around. And this website was founded under the credo that we were attempting to capture the conversational tone of hanging out with your pals at the bar. Wild conspiracy theories fall firmly under the umbrella as long as you have one friend who smokes too much.

Yesterday, I had settled on the Hollow Earth Theory which I wasn’t all that jazzed up about. But then someone @’d me a video telling me about Bohemian Grove, a thing I had never heard of in all my days. A few seconds into the video, potentially narrated by me after a few too many cones of indica, and Alex Jones popped up. Now, you can’t be in the conspiracy game without crossing paths with Big AJ every now and then, but boy did it damper this video. Not to take away any of the journalistic findings by Mr. Jones, but when you also think water is turning the frogs gay I find it hard to align myself with him in other areas.

But I kept digging. Because secret societies are perhaps my favorite sub genre of conspiracy theories. Mostly, and this is going to shock some folks, because I am not in one. And I would desperately like to be invited to join one. I bet Francis is in the Skull & Bones, maybe I’ll ask him what kind of rituals I need to perform in to get noticed by the big dogs. But until then, I’ll keep reading from the sidelines awaiting my call.

There’s a ton of information readily available about the Bohemian Club and their 16-day annual retreat to the Bohemian Grove deep in the forest of Monte Rio, California. More information than I expected. And when I say information, I just mean shit that’s actually happened as opposed to other conspiracy videos. The Club was founded in 1872, which is the perfect age for a club like this. That much time elapsing means all sorts of shit could have gone down. And down it has gone, but we’ll get to that. It was founded by a group of journalists, artists and musicians before spreading its wings and accepting the likes of world leaders, top businessmen and Hollywood A-listers. Oh yeah, no girls allowed. This is truly, in every sense of the word, an old boys club.

The Bohemian Club was organized in the Chronicle office by Tommy Newcombe, Sutherland, Dan O’Connell, Harry Dam, J.Limon and others who were members of the staff. The boys wanted a place where they could get together after work, and they took a room on Sacramento street below Kearny. That was the start of the Bohemian Club, and it was not an unmixed blessing for the Chronicle because the boys would go there sometimes when they should have reported at the office. Very often when Dan O’Connell sat down to a good dinner there he would forget that he had a pocketful of notes for an important story.

All in good fun. Boys being boys. I imagine there weren’t very many people who even knew what art was in 1872, so forming a club to get likeminded people in the same room out in San Francisco seems like an obvious solution. No red flags yet. It was only until they branched out and started including the big wigs like presidents and world leaders did eyebrows start to raise.

The Club motto is “Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.” Which is ominous as fuck. Any time you get that backwards double speak like “Come Not Here” it sounds like you’re intentionally trying to hide something right up front. But the motto is clear, since it is a club of businessmen and world leaders, it’s supposed to be an escape. So, don’t come here to talk business. Leave that shit at the front door. The motto, however, is never followed. And perhaps some of us should be thankful for such.

The Grove is particularly famous for a Manhattan Project planning meeting that took place there in September 1942, which subsequently led to the atomic bomb. Those attending this meeting included Ernest Lawrence, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the S-1 Executive Committee heads, such as the presidents of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, along with representatives of Standard Oil and General Electric as well as various military officials. At the time, Oppenheimer was not an S-1 member, although Lawrence and Oppenheimer hosted the meeting.

Famous, not infamous, for the planning of the Manhattan Project. This is their billboard, and depending where you fall dictates how you view this particular meeting. Again, this is all out in the open. The Club exists, there is no denial of such. The mid-July retreat exists, and this year’s gathering is likely happening as you read. So what’s the deal? Where do the nefarious deeds lay?

Philip Weiss, a writer for Spy Magazine, crashed the festivities back in July of 1989. In his piece, published in November of that year, he wrote 17-pages on what he saw over his time spent at the Grove. Here is a brief excerpt from what he saw during the Grove’s annual opening ceremony:

One reason for the Bohemian Club’s poor public relations is the name it gave to the yearly opening ceremony: The Cremation of Care. The cremation is intended to put the busy men of the club at ease and banish the stress of the outside world, but it arouses critics of the encampment because they interpret it to mean that Bohemians literally don’t care about the outside world. Cremation of Care, they fear, means the death of caring. Demonstrations outside the Grove a few years back often centered around the “Resurrection of Care.”

The cremation took place at the man-made lake that is the center of a lot of Grove social activity. At 9:15 p.m. a procession of priests carrying the crypt of Mr. Dull Care came out of the trees on the east side, along the Grove’s chief thoroughfare, River Road. They wore bright red, blue and orange hooded robes chat might have been designed for the Ku Klux Klan by Marimekko. When they reached the water, they extinguished their torches.

At this point some hamadryads (tree spirits) and another priest or two appeared at the base of the main owl shrine, a 40-foot-tall, moss-covered statue of stone and steel at the south end of the lake, and sang songs about Care. They told of how a man’s heart is divided between “reality” and “fantasy,” how it is necessary to escape to another world of fellowship among men. Vaguely homosexual undertones suffused this spectacle, as they do much of ritualized life in the Grove. The main priest wore a pink-and-green satin costume, while a hamadryad appeared before a redwood in a gold spangled bodysuit dripping with rhinestones. They spoke of “fairy unguents” that would free men to pursue warm fellowship, and I was reminded of something Herman Wouk wrote about the Grove: “Men can decently love each other; they always have, bur women never quite understand.”

Then the crypt of Care was poled slowly down the lake by a black-robed figure in a black gondola, accompanied by a great deal of special effects smoke. Just as the priests set out to torch the crypt, a red light appeared high in a redwood and large speakers in the forest amplified the cackling voice of Care: “Fools! When will ye learn that me ye cannot slay? Year after year ye burn me in this Grove…. But when again ye turn your feet toward the marketplace, am I not waiting for you, as of old?”

With that, Care spat upon the fires, extinguishing them. The priests turned in desperation to the owl. “Oh thou, great symbol of all mortal wisdom, Owl of Bohemia … grant us thy counsel!”

Every year there are new wrinkles on the cremation ceremony. The big improvement this year was to project a sort of hologram onto the owl’s face so that its beak seemed to move. Also, it was Walter Cronkite talking. (Cronkite camps in Hill Billies along with George H.W. Bush, William F. Buckley Jr. and former astronaut and ex-Eastern Air Lines chairman Frank Borman.) Cronkite, as the owl, said that the only way Care could be cremated was to use fire from the Lamp of Fellowship before him, an “eternal” gas flame that burns day and night while the encampment is on.

Yeah, I could certainly see that raising some suspicions. Any time your garb of choice draws direct comparisons to that of the klan, folks are going to assume some bad shit is going down. And this massive owl that they’ve built. If Drake doesn’t have a 30-foot owl then no one should I’ve always said. But Bohemian Grove does, as the Club’s official mascot is also an owl.

But as for more sketchiness… there really isn’t much. At least none that’s leaked out to the public. There are plenty of thoughts about what possibly goes on during the yearly retreats, which is natural. But outside of a few politicians being put on the spot and shakily answering questions about the Grove, it truly just seems like a spot for the elitist of the elites to go and plan how the world is going to work for the next year. Which I figured we all assumed was happening somewhere to begin with, why not deep in the woods of California?

Weiss goes on to describe the fortnight in the Grove as a time when everyone is drinking from sun up to sun down, and paints the entire trip as a place where guys just want to piss in the woods wherever they damn well please. They put on plays, tell jokes, give speeches, figure out who’s going to be president next, more or less just guys being dudes on the highest of levels.

In terms of big time conspiracies, this one fell a little short for me. It’s certainly no Denver Airport, unless these fellas built that which they very well may have. A fascinating read no doubt, a club I hope reaches out and offers me membership immediately, but not nearly as demonic as Youtube wanted me to initially believe.