Bohemian Grove

The Bohemian Club was founded in San Francisco in 1872 by journalists, artists and musicians — a bohemian gathering in the original sense of the word. The Club's motto, taken from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, is "Weaving spiders come not here" — a declaration that business dealings are to be left outside. The annual summer encampment in the redwood grove north of San Francisco began in the 1870s as an informal camping trip.

Over the following decades, as San Francisco grew into a major American city, the Club's membership shifted. By the early 20th century, business and political figures had largely displaced the artists and journalists who founded it, attracted by the prestige of membership and the networking opportunities of two weeks in the company of American power. The Club retains its artistic programming — the Grove Plays, musical performances and other events — but its current character is primarily that of an exclusive retreat for the American establishment.

Membership is male only — a policy that has been legally challenged and upheld. The waiting list for membership reportedly runs to decades. Current and former members have included US presidents (Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes), cabinet members, corporate executives, media figures and military leaders. The concentration of influence in one place at one time is genuinely remarkable.

The most discussed element of the Bohemian Grove gathering is the Cremation of Care — a theatrical ceremony performed on the first night of the encampment, before a 40-foot concrete owl on the shore of the artificial lake at the grove's centre. The ceremony involves robed figures, torchlight, a boat carrying an effigy, and the ritual burning of the effigy — which represents "dull care," the anxieties and responsibilities of the outside world.

The ceremony has been performed annually since 1881, and its script — with some variation — has remained broadly consistent. It is explicitly theatrical in character: the Club employs professional actors, set designers and musicians for the Grove Plays and associated events. The Cremation of Care is the opening ceremony of a two-week theatrical and social event, not a religious ritual in any conventional sense.

The ceremony gained public notoriety when journalist Philip Weiss published an account in Spy Magazine in 1989, and was later filmed covertly by Alex Jones in 2000. The film — and Jones's interpretation of it as a Satanic ritual — became the foundation of much Bohemian Grove conspiracy theory. The actual ceremony, viewed without Jones's commentary, is an elaborate piece of amateur theatrical pageantry that would not look out of place at a particularly well-funded university drama society.

The genuine significance of Bohemian Grove is not the Cremation of Care but the two weeks of informal interaction it provides between people who control significant portions of the American economy, military and political system. The "Lakeside Talks" — informal addresses given by members on policy topics, off the record — have included presentations that anticipated and perhaps influenced major policy decisions.

The Manhattan Project was reportedly discussed at Bohemian Grove before the official programme began. Reagan and Nixon reportedly first discussed Reagan's political future there. These connections matter — not because they involve secret rituals but because informal networks of elite relationship are genuinely influential in how power operates, and Bohemian Grove is one of the most concentrated versions of such a network in the American context.

This is the genuinely interesting and genuinely concerning aspect of Bohemian Grove: not the owl statue but the concentration of elite male sociality outside public accountability. The problem is not that they are worshipping Moloch; it is that major decisions may be informally shaped by relationships formed in a context that is entirely closed to most of the population.

Bohemian Grove is simultaneously more mundane and more significant than conspiracy theory suggests. More mundane: the Cremation of Care is theatrical pageantry, not occult ritual; the gathering is primarily a two-week camping holiday for wealthy and powerful men who enjoy dressing up in robes and watching plays in the woods. More significant: the informal networking between members of the American power elite in an off-the-record, all-male, entirely private setting is a genuine concentration of influence that raises legitimate questions about elite accountability and the relationship between informal social networks and formal power.

The conspiracy theory version — shadow world government, Satanic ritual, secret decisions about world domination — is both more dramatic and less useful than the reality. The reality is that powerful people socialise with other powerful people in settings that exclude the public, that these informal relationships influence formal decisions, and that this is a feature of elite power that deserves scrutiny rather than supernatural explanation.