May 17

The Secret History of the Bohemian Club

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On the night it begins, a small boat crosses a darkened lake in the middle of a California redwood forest. On the far shore, robed figures carrying torches stand at attention before a forty-foot stone owl. A high priest receives an effigy from the ferryman—a mummy-shaped figure called “Dull Care”—and places it at the foot of the shrine. The owl speaks. For many years, the voice of the owl was Walter Cronkite. Then the fire begins, and Care is cremated, and the most powerful men in the world are free.

This is not a scene from a novel or the beginning of a horror film. This is the annual opening ceremony of the Bohemian Grove—and it has been happening, in one form or another, since 1881. It all traces back to a single date: May 17, 1872, when a loose gathering of San Francisco journalists formally incorporated themselves under California law as the Bohemian Club.

What began as a gentlemen’s literary society became—through one of the most remarkable institutional transformations in American history—a private club whose membership has included virtually every Republican president since the 1920s, the men who planned the Manhattan Project, and the architects of some of the most consequential economic policies of the twentieth century.

And every summer, they gather in a grove of ancient redwoods and burn an effigy before a giant stone owl.

Into the Redwoods

In 1872, the word "bohemian" meant something specific: a journalist. In the years following the Civil War, newspaper writers across the country adopted the term as a badge of their trade—free-thinking, artistically inclined, and notoriously underpaid. (Poet Bret Harte had called San Francisco “a sort of Bohemia of the West” as early as 1861, while Mark Twain referred to himself as a bohemian.) The Bohemian Club’s founding members understood this perfectly; journalists like Dan O’Connell—a poet and newsman who’d become one of the club’s few surviving charter members—and the English-born stage actor Henry "Harry" Edwards gathered in the Chronicle offices and a back room on Sacramento Street to talk politics and culture. The formal opening celebration, held on April 14, 1872, was a genuine feast—toasts to the city of Prague, improvised histories of the Amador War, songs of Bohemia. The mood was earnest, fraternal, and gloriously shambolic.

Among the early members were Ambrose Bierce—future author of The Devil's Dictionary—poet Joaquin Miller; economist Henry George; and Harte and Twain were honorary members. During the next generation, Jack London and Frank Norris joined and, when Oscar Wilde visited in 1882, he reportedly observed: “I never saw so many well-dressed, well-fed, business-looking Bohemians in my life.” (Leave it to Wilde to be the first observer of the seams already coming loose.) The original constitution had been admirably clear: journalists were regular members; artists and musicians were honorary members; wealthy patrons with no artistic credentials were, implicitly, not members at all. That dictum lasted perhaps a decade, until the financial resources needed to maintain the club’s increasingly elaborate entertainments required a sizable budget. And money required businessmen as members who could provide it; by the 1890s, the original “bohemian” members were in the minority. The wealthy and powerful had quietly taken control.

The transformation wasn’t cynical, exactly: the incoming industrialists got artistic credibility and a respectable venue for their business networking, while the artists often got financial patronage and the company of powerful men. What neither fully anticipated was the ritual dimension that would emerge from this hybrid institution. The first retreat to the redwoods happened almost by accident when, in 1878, founding member Harry Edwards announced he was moving to New York to pursue his theatrical career. The club threw him a farewell party in the forests of Marin County—lanterns strung among the redwoods, with food, drink, and music. The event proved to be such a hit, the members opted to make it annual and, by 1899, the club had purchased 2,700 acres of old-growth forest in Sonoma County—“Bohemian Grove”—and the summer encampment had became the centerpiece of the club’s year.

But What About the Owl?

In 1881, a club member named James F. Bowman introduced a new ceremony to close the High Jinks: the Cremation of Care—a way of symbolically burning the “dull cares” of worldly responsibility so that the assembled members could enjoy their retreat without guilt. And since an owl had been the club’s totem since the beginning, chosen for its associations with wisdom and secrecy, it now became a symbol of their shrine.

The owl has never been a simple symbol. George Sterling, the club’s poet laureate and a close associate of Ambrose Bierce, wrote lyrically of the owl as “the great symbol of all mortal wisdom,” which is the exact phrase used by the high priest in the Cremation of Care ceremony. In classical tradition, the owl is Athena’s bird—the emblem of wisdom, philosophy, and the penetrating sight that sees through darkness. In the Hermetic tradition, it represents the capacity for gnosis: the ability to perceive what is hidden from ordinary sight. In the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, it’s associated with Binah—the sphere of understanding—of the dark mother—and the intelligence and power that precedes all creation. But the owl carries other associations, darker and more contested: in the Biblical tradition, the owl haunts desolate places—the ruins of Edom, the waste places where civilization has collapsed. The Book of Isaiah describes the owl nesting in the ruins of Babylon. More provocatively, some scholars have linked the owl to Lilith—the night-goddess, the first wife of Adam in Kabbalistic legend, who refused subordination and departed to the outer darkness. (The famous “Burney Relief” from ancient Mesopotamia, often called “The Queen of the Night,” depicts a winged goddess flanked by owls, her feet the talons of a bird of prey.)

And then there’s the Canaanite connection that conspiracy theorists have long seized upon. Radio host Alex Jones infiltrated the Grove in 2000 and filmed the Cremation of Care, subsequently claiming that the ceremony represented worship of Moloch—the Canaanite deity associated with fire sacrifice. The claim is almost certainly wrong in its specifics: the club’s own documentation makes clear that the owl represents wisdom, not a foreign god, and the effigy burned is explicitly “Care,” not a human substitute. But the imagery—robed figures, torchlight, a forty-foot idol, a sacrifice by fire at the edge of dark water—draws on a symbolic vocabulary that predates Christianity by millennia, and the club has never gone out of its way to clarify the distinction. The ceremony was further expanded in 1893 by member Joseph D. Redding, whose elaboration staged a battle between Christianity and paganism—with Christianity winning, converting the druids from their supposed ritual sacrifices. It’s a curious detail: the club explicitly dramatized pagan ritual in order to then reject it, which is precisely the kind of ambivalence that characterizes ceremonial magic’s relationship to forbidden power throughout Western history.

Weaving Spiders

The club’s motto—“Weaving Spiders Come Not Here”—is originally drawn from Act II of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as the fairy queen instructs her attendants to leave the sleeping mortals undisturbed. It’s a graceful injunction: that business is to be left at the gate, the Grove is a space outside ordinary time, where the usual hierarchies of commerce and politics are suspended. However, a memo from one of Ronald Reagan’s own assistants to Alan Greenspan revealed that Reagan’s 1983 cuts to Social Security had been planned at a Bohemian Club meeting two years prior, a Reagan advisor was reportedly persuaded to cut capital gains taxes by a venture capitalist while they “sat semi-naked at the grove.” The Grove’s own historians have acknowledged that the 1942 planning meeting for the Manhattan Project—the most consequential scientific weapons program in human history—took place among the redwoods. Presidents Roosevelt, Taft, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes have all passed through. The Iraq War reconstruction was awarded to Bechtel, a firm whose leadership had deep ties to the club.

Weaving spiders, it seems, are very comfortable among old-growth redwoods. But none of this makes the Bohemian Club a conspiracy in the melodramatic sense—no oaths or literal human sacrifice. What it makes it is something more interesting and perhaps more troubling: a space where the normal rituals of democratic accountability are, apparently, suspended—where powerful men can speak freely precisely because nothing they say will ever be reported, and where theatrical trappings of esoteric ceremony reinforce solidarity among the ruling class. Anthropologists call this kind of practice “liminal ritual”—a ceremony marking the transition from one state to another, dissolving ordinary social distinctions in order to reconstitute them more powerfully. What happens at the Grove each July is, at one level, exactly what the club says it is: grown men playing dress-up in the woods. At another level, it’s a serious enactment of a ritual solidifying a hold over the geopolitical trajectory.

There’s a reason that occult orders—from Freemasonry to the Golden Dawn to the OTO—have always understood the power of ceremony: rituals work not just because they summon supernatural forces, but because they create a shared imaginative reality which participants carry with them long after their actions are completed. Whether or not they were consciously designed through the Cremation of Care as a bonding mechanism for the American elite, that’s precisely what it became.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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