"Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concrete, factual, practical and unbelievably dull; and there is a subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation."

Norman Mailer
"The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China--why then it will be spring."

"This new history of yours," said McPhee, "is a wee bit lacking in documents."

C.S. Lewis

Synchronicities this week

  • June 24 Midsummer/St. John’s Day
  • June 24, 1947 The first flying saucers are sighted over Mount Rainier by pilot Ken Arnold.
  • June 24, 1542 St. John of the Cross, Spanish Carmelite mystic and poet, is born.
  • June 24, 1938 500 ton meteorite lands near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
  • June 24, 1717 First Free Masons' grand lodge founded in London.
  • June 24, 1374 A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion.
  • June 24, 1314 Battle of Bannockburn; Scotland regains independence from England.
  • June 24, 843 Vikings destroy Nantes.
  • June 23 Midsummer’s Eve
  • June 23, 1972 Nixon & Haldeman agree to use CIA to cover up Watergate.
  • June 23, 1942 Germany's latest fighter, a Focke-Wulf FW190 is captured intact when it mistakenly lands at RAF Pembrey in Wales.
  • June 23, 1888 Frederick Douglass is 1st African-American nominated for president.
  • June 23, 1848 Workers’ insurrection in Paris.
  • June 23, 1713 The French residents of Acadia are given one year to declare allegiance to Britain or leave Nova Scotia, Canada. They choose the latter, migrate to Louisiana, and become Cajuns.
  • June 21 Summer Solstice (11:28 a.m.).
  • June 21, 1964 Three civil rights workers-Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James E. Chaney-are kidnapped and murdered by the Klan in Mississippi .
  • June 21, 1948 The 33 1/3 RPM LP record is introduced by Columbia Records.
  • June 21, 1944 Ray Davies of the Kinks born in London.
  • June 21, 1916 Mexican troops beat US expeditionary force under Gen Pershing.
  • June 21, 1877 The Molly Maguires, ten Irish immigrant labor activists, are hanged in Pennsylvania prisons.
  • June 20, 1947 Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, gangster, the “man who invented Las Vegas,” shot dead in Beverly Hills, Cal.
  • June 20, 1909 Errol Flynn, greatest of the swashbucklers, born in Hobart, Tasmania.
  • June 20, 1944 Congress charters Central Intelligence Agency.
  • June 20, 1943 Detroit race riot kills 35.
  • June 20, 1893 - Lizzie Borden acquitted in murder of parents in New Bedford Mass.
  • June 20, 1871 Ku Klux Klan trials began in federal court in Oxford Miss.
  • June 20, 1837 Queen Victoria at 18 ascends British throne ; rules for 63 years ending in 1901.
  • June 20, 1756 146 British soldiers imprisoned in the "Black Hole of Calcutta." Most die.
  • June 20, 1631 The Irish village of Baltimore is attacked by Algerian pirates.
  • June 20, 1214 The University of Oxford receives its charter.
  • June 20, 451 Germans & Romans beat Attila the Hun at Catalarinische Fields.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

This Week in the Secret History: The 4th of July's Pagan Roots


















Uncle Sam: Patriotic icon...



Or Gandalf in disguise?

Some of the best-documented examples of the survival of pagan ritual into the modern era are the traditional bonfires on June 23, small-scale descendants from the great Celtic Fire Festival of Midsummer’s Eve, celebrating the summer solstice. The midsummer festival lay exactly opposite the winter solstice in the cycle of the year, and the summer revelry was a mirror image of that in December, perhaps even more riotous in the more temperate weather. The focus of the festival was fire, used to bring the life-giving power of the sun god down to earth. There were huge bonfires on every hilltop. Some communities built a giant wooden wheel, wrapped it in tar-soaked rags, ignited it and set it rolling down the slope of the nearest hill. Men and women with blazing torches would run in huge clockwise circles around farm fields to ensure the health of the crop. After the fire rituals, the people would feast and drink long into the night.

Even after all of Britain was converted to Christianity, these customs survived. In rural communities, bonfires continued to be lit on Midsummer’s Eve. Later generations added fireworks to the festivities. According to historian Ronald Hutton, these customs have “a recorded history of almost two millennia, stretching back into the pagan past.”

Neolithic 4th of July


In 1751, Britain adopted the new Gregorian calendar, the standard modern calendar we still use. By that time, the old Julian calendar had fallen eleven days out of synch with the annual solar cycle, and most European countries were adopting the newer, more accurate calendar. Parliament passed an act in 1751 decreeing that the new calendar would go into effect on September 2 of the next year and that September 2, 1752 would be followed by September 14, with the intervening eleven days omitted. This did some violence to the old calendar customs of Britain: What had been Christmas was now January 6th, with Christmas Eve on January 5th; the new Gregorian Christmas had previously been December 14.

It was a little confusing, and in more isolated districts, it was sometimes simply ignored. In such communities, a residue of magic lingered on the old dates. January 5th was known as Old Christmas Eve, and much of the magical and supernatural folklore associated with the solstice still clung to it.

The 18th century in Britain was also the time of the great emigrations to America. In particular it saw the emigration of Scottish, northern English and northern Irish borderers to what was then the North American back country, settling in the hollows and hills of Appalachia, the great mountain chain that stretches along America’s eastern rim. These were an independent, hard-headed people who believed in doing things their own way, and their own way meant, as often as not, the old way, the way they’d always done things. This was especially the case with matters of the seasons and the calendar. Many of them had arrived in America before the calendar change, and many districts in the mountains clung stubbornly to Old Christmas and to the calendar that, for everyone else in the Western world, was now eleven days late.

Meanwhile, the American colonies fought a war of independence, and when they had won it, they thought it fitting to designate a national day of celebration. They chose the fourth day of July, to commemorate, so they said, the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. But was that the only reason for their choice?

Back up in the hills, Old Christmas still hung on like mist in a hollow. And if Old Christmas lingered, what about its opposite number, the other great feast of pagan Europe, Midsummer’s Eve? Just as we look eleven days past Christmas to find Old Christmas, we would look eleven days past June 23—current Midsummer’s Eve—to find Old Midsummer’s Eve. Is it there, buried beneath the Gregorian calendar? Find a calendar and count for yourself, eleven days past June 23rd. You’ll land neatly and definitively on… the 4th of July.

Two nights of fiery spectacle and festivity, layered right on top of each other. Is this coincidence? Or were the Founding Fathers a secret order of druids, dedicated to reviving the Old Religion in the New World? Was paganism a way to break free of the Church of England—a pillar of the English state-- just as constitutional democracy was a way to break free of the crown of England? Was Ben Franklin ever observed dancing around a bonfire with antlers on his head and a bellyful of mead? Was J.R.R. Tolkien trying to tell us something when he made Gandalf, the arch-Druid, the master of fireworks? We may never know, at least until the day that some historian unearths a hidden cache of correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and William Blake. But I have one idea. I think Old Midsummer’s Eve snuck into the American calendar via the mountains. Those old Celts up in the hills sent a lot of volunteers off to the Continental Army, and they provided the new nation with several presidents. When the federal government was casting about for suggestions vis a vis a national holiday, the representatives from the back country had just the thing. They knew that there were two great times for festivity in the year. One, Christmas, was already claimed by the church. But the other one was there for the taking. No-one had celebrated Old Midsummer’s Eve for centuries—maybe a millennium. No-one that is, except for the people of the mountains, who just might have slipped a rough shard of prehistoric Europe into the foundation of the republic.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Conspicuous by Their Absence: Do New Live Tapes Confirm the Legend of Moby Grape?

"The national folk-memory of psychedelia today might be less limp, with fewer images of blissed-out ring-dancers and bongos in the dirt, had we been given more full metal meltdowns like 'Omaha'.”


Moby Grape Live
Moby Grape
(Sundazed)

"The monarchy's mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic," Walter Bagehot wrote in 1867. The same truth may be applied to great records.

As with all tales of unfulfilled promise, a wistful air of what-if clings to Moby Grape, as if there is still a Moby Grape-shaped hole in the ‘60s zeitgeist that they were intended to fill. Here, says the legend, was a band meant to color their era. A lot of people will tell you that their first album, Moby Grape, is the best album to come out of San Francisco, maybe all California, in the ‘60s. And indeed, had the group stayed vital for even a few more albums, they might have leant some snap and crackle to a San Francisco scene that quickly became groggy and burned-out. The national folk-memory of psychedelia today might be less limp, with fewer images of blissed-out ring-dancers and bongos in the dirt, had we been given more full metal meltdowns like “Omaha.”

Read the rest in The Bluegrass Special.


Friday, June 4, 2010

This Week in the Secrety History: Yeats, the Irish Prophet

William Butler Yeats, one of the greatest poets in the English language in the 20th Century, was born June 13, 1865. He was a passionate Irish nationalist, but his version of liberation was just as much about freeing the ancient spirits of the Irish land as with political revolution. Probably he saw the two aims as part of one phenomenon. His poetry shaped the Irish perception of their own country, to the present day.

But let's let the Poetry do the talking...



The Song of Wandering Aengus

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.



THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


Easter 1916 (After the brutal suppression by the English of the Easter Rising in Dublin)

I HAVE met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.