"There is more than one history of the world..."
John Crowley
“The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.”
Harry S. Truman
"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.
These one-of- a-kind cd's are custom programmed, full of rarities and other artfully selected tracks, with original cover art. They are available only through the Secret History. Starting today, the first four readers to post comments on any story, current or archived, in the Secret History, will win the cd of their choice.
The first four readers who respond to any comments will also receive their choice of cd. And finally the next four readers to sign up as followers will get a cd.
Almost since the events themselves, people of a certain cast of mind have insisted that crucial events of the American and French Revolutions were guided, planned, instigated by occult orders who practiced advanced forms of spirituality not accessible to the masses. Depending on which side of the Revolution you were on, this was either a good thing--the spiritually advanced sharing their gifts to lift humanity to new levels of freedom and dignity--or a bad thing--hidden radical elites wielding a dangerous level of influence over the ignorant masses to tear down divinely ordained hierarchy. Both sides were sure that the Order in question was the Freemasons. It used to be a given that the Freemason's were active on the side of American freedom--a disproportionate number of Masons signed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Some of the most important revolutionary leaders were Masons, including George Washington, Ben Franklin, Samuel Adams and possibly Thomas Jefferson. About half of the officer corps of Washington's army were Masons. But modern materialist historians, allergic to anything that smells of mystery, had to eradicate the notion that the Mason's were helping to act out a scenario for the spiritual development of the world. To which the only answer, it seems to me, is that if they weren't, they certainly thought they were.
Which brings us to the door of the Green Dragon.
Boston's Green Dragon Tavern was one of the oldest tavern's in the city,having been in operation since the 1670's. In 1736, it was purchased by the St. Andrew's Lodge of Freemasons to serve as their headquarters.
Not coincidentally, it came to be known as the "Headquarters of the Revolution." In its cozy confines, the Freemasons played host to most of the radical revolutionary groups of the time, including the Sons of Liberty and the Committee of Correspondence. A group of men dressed as Indians set out from the Green Dragon to dump tea from British ships into Boston Harbor. The British advance towards Lexington and Concord was monitored from the Green Dragon. Paul Revere set out on his ride from the Green Dragon.
Here's how the Masons see it...
"...it can easily be shown that in many ways the revolutionary ideals of equality, freedom, and democracy were espoused by the Masonic fraternity long before the American colonies began to complain about the injustices of British taxation. The revolutionary ideals expressed in the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the writings of Thomas Paine, were ideals that had come to fruition over a century before in the early speculative Masonic lodges of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where men sat as equals, governed themselves by a Constitution, and elected their own leaders from their midst. In many ways, the self-governing Masonic lodges of the previous centuries had been learning laboratories for the concept of self-government"(The Masonic Trowel)
On September 18, 1793, President George Washington, dressed in his Masonic apron, leveled the cornerstone of the United States Capitol with the traditional Masonic ceremony. Historian Stephen Bullock in his book Revolutionary Brotherhood: Freemasonry and the Transformation of the American Social Order, notes the historic and symbolic significance of that ceremony. "The Masonic brethren, dressed in their fraternal regalia, had assembled in grand procession, and were formed for that occasion as representative of Freemasonry's new found place of honor in an independent American society. At that moment, the occasion of the laying of the new Republic's foundations, Freemasons assumed the mantles of 'high priests' of that 'first temple dedicated to the sovereignty of the people,' and they '“helped form the symbolic foundations of what the Great Seal called ‘the new order for the ages’.”
Joaquin Murrieta (1829–ca. 1853), also called the Mexican Robin Hood, was a semi- legendary figure in California during the California Gold Rush of the 1850s. He was either an infamous bandit or a Mexican patriot, depending on one's point of view. Murrietta was partly the inspiration for the fictional character of Zorro. His name has, for some political activists, symbolized resistance against Anglo-American economic and cultural domination in California.
There is little historical evidence for the tale of Joaquin Murrieta. The only written source is a highly romanticized biography written a year or two after his death. The book says that Murrieta and his family went to California in 1850 to seek their fortune in the California Gold Rush. Instead of opportunity, he encountered racism and discrimination.
In the same year as their arrival, a Foreign Miners Tax was imposed in California and their Anglo-Saxon neighbors tried to run them off by telling them that it was illegal for Mexicans to hold a claim. Reportedly, the Murrieta brothers tried to ignore the threats as long as they could until they were finally forced off their claim. While mining for gold, he and his wife supposedly were attacked by American miners jealous of his success. They allegedly raped Murrieta's wife, flogged him, and killed his brother.
Angry and unable to find work, Joaquin turned to a life of crime, along with other disposed foreign miners, who began to prey upon those who had forced them from their claims.
In the novel, Murrieta sought justice through the legal system but was informed by a friend who was also a constable that there was no way to prosecute the crime because of a California law that prohibited Mexicans from testifying against Anglos. To avenge this injustice, Murrieta formed a gang from his family and friends to hunt down those that attacked his family. They killed at least six, and as they were then outlaws, they turned to a life of organized crime, stealing and using the money to help Californio's (Native Californians.)
On May 11, 1853, Governor of California John Bigler signed a legislative act creating the "California State Rangers," led by Captain Harry Love (a former Texas Ranger). Their mission was to capture Murrieta and his gang. The California Rangers stood a chance to share a $5000 reward for the capture of Joaquin Murrieta. On July 25, 1853, a group of Rangers encountered a band of armed Mexican men near PanochePass in San BenitoCounty, 50 miles from Monterey. A confrontation took place, and two of the Mexicans were killed. One was claimed to be Murrieta.
The Rangers severed the alleged Murrieta's head as proof of their deaths and preserved it in a jar of brandy. The jar was displayed throughout California; spectators could pay $1 see the remains. Seventeen people, including a Catholic priest, signed affidavits identifying the remains as Murrieta's, and Love and his Rangers accordingly received the reward money. The preserved head was destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
A plaque (California Historical Landmark #344) near the intersection of State Routes 33 and 198 now marks the approximate site of Murrieta's headquarters in Arroyo de Cantua, where he was presumably killed.
"My wife and I were listening to the folk music show on our local public radio station the other Sunday night when we could no longer take one more brawny chanty about plying the Great Lakes on the grand old steamships. So I plugged in my iPod and started to play one of my British folk music playlists. It did the job clearing the air of all the heave-away-haul-away with its astringent northerness. The last song was a majestic and mournful pipe duet called "Kintail" from the great Scottish pipe band the Tannahill Weavers, which sounded like watching your true love pass over the horizon on a ship bound for Amerikay, or Frodo leaving Middle Earth at the Grey Havens. About halfway into it, my wife said, "They're always so sad." She meant all of it, all the songs we had just been listening to, all "folk" music. She was right. The folks that folk music comes from, way back when, were by and large people who didn't have much buffer, if any, between them and life. And that also means, of course, between them and death. Folk music is sad all over the world.
As country music grew from its poor mountain roots, moved into the city and started getting a steady paycheck, and a dry summer didn't necessarily mean immediate destitution, country singers, if they were after greatness, still had to invite the ghost to the party. It's not an accident that the greatest country singer of all, Hank Williams, is among the most notably mournful.
The ghost became the blues. The blues were the old hard times, internalized."
There were rivers and paths in America that once seemed to be the gate to all good adventure. The Mississippi River, Route 66, all the blacktop two-lanes that led into the groves of America.
After the dolorous stroke in DealeyPlaza, such arteries of possibility dried up. The men to whom fear and money were everything laid over the land a vast grid of concrete in the name of national security, whose purpose was to turn all the places into no-place, so that people no longer knew where they were or where they came from.
These concrete sluices drained the life off half the nation, created an unthinkable continent of ghost towns, and sure enough the ghosts come forth to disturb our sleep. Now the withered spirits blow up and down old Route 66, Timothy McVeigh and the patriots, they own that road.
The act of DealeyPlaza led to this America where the dry souls are stacked like kindling.
The land was given over to the mundane light and the dry electric fever. “Save us from... the fever that strikes at mid-day” the psalmist prays. This was the same mundane light that fell on DealeyPlaza at noon that Friday.
“It will be cool under the underpass”, Jackie thinks as the black car rolls with dreadful slowness down Elm Street. In fact it never got cool again.
That mundane light of Dallas which to the spiritual eye is dreadful darkness, the dunnest smoke of hell.The light on DealeyPlaza is the light of Sunbelt gangsters, is the light on the parking lot of an Arizona savings & loan, is the light of Las Vegas that burns off the top of people’s heads to desiccate the moist brain inside, is the light that evaporates the pools of mystery,the light that shone all over America and burned out every shadow, that makes every photograph from the 50’s black and white, the light that says you’re seeing all there is to see, which is the great lie, the lie of Hitler’s open hand.
July 14, 1789 The hated Bastille Prison, symbol of royal despotism, falls to the Paris mob.
A shout out to all you French Freemasons--nice work. Good to win one once in a while.
"It is very hard today to feel that the French Revolution was as fresh as it really was. The Marseillaise is played today at diplomatic dinner-parties, where smiling monarchs meet beaming millionaires, and is rather less revolutionary than "Home Sweet Home." The Marseillaise once sounded like the human voice of the volcano or the dance-tune of the earthquake, and the kings of the earth trembled; some fearing that the heavens might fall; some fearing far more that justice might be done."
- GK Chesterton
July 12, 1962 The Rolling Stones play their first gig
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