Does a Cult Control the United States? | The Bohemian Grove Exposed

Source: Does a Cult Control the United States? | The Bohemian Grove Exposed, The Lore Lodge, 59:26, uploaded 2023-05-19, Watch Later position 956.

Aiden Mattis opens with the image of wealthy men performing pagan rites in a redwood forest. The place is the Bohemian Grove, a private retreat in Sonoma County that hosts the annual summer encampment of the Bohemian Club. The club has attracted presidents, business leaders, artists, academics, and military officials. Its privacy, political connections, and elaborate ceremony have made it a natural object for conspiracy theories about a New World Order. Mattis follows those theories into the Grove and then keeps pulling them apart.

From bohemian artists to an elite club

The word bohemian first described a way of life that spread among nineteenth-century artists, poets, musicians, and other creative workers. Many had little money and moved from city to city as they tried to sell their work or find an audience. The lifestyle gave people a social world without requiring them to own a home or settle into a conventional career. Mattis compares it to the later hippie movement and to the small communities that artists formed around shared work and temporary camps.

French immigrants brought the idea to the United States in the 1850s. The American version developed in New York before the Civil War, then changed as the war disrupted the lives of its early participants. Wealthy people began to join the movement after the war because they valued art and creativity, even when they had no need for the improvised life that had first defined bohemianism. Mark Twain became a member of the Bohemian Club, and Oscar Wilde appeared as a guest.

In 1872, roughly a dozen San Francisco journalists formed a drinking club at the Asor Hotel. They wanted a place to meet after work and talk about art without the noise of the city. The club’s 1887 bylaws widened the membership to writers, poets, painters, and interested amateurs, with money becoming an increasingly important qualification. Membership grew from 186 people in 1874 to 561 in 1887. The founders openly acknowledged that businessmen helped fund the club’s activities.

The club’s first outdoor gatherings grew from a game called the Jinx, which used dice, drinking, and embarrassing tasks. Members began meeting in the redwoods in the late 1870s, and the practice became regular by 1882. They bought a 160-acre grove in 1889 and later expanded their holdings to roughly 27,000 acres, according to the figures Mattis cites. Early gatherings involved tents, campfires, and performances. By 1914, three consecutive weekends and permanent buildings had turned the trips into a more formal encampment.

The club’s social centre changed during the early twentieth century. Artists remained part of the event, yet wealthy members increasingly attended for the retreat itself and paid artists to entertain them. Guest lists included Sweden’s Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus, Columbia president Nicholas Butler, US Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone, and other figures from government, universities, and business. The Grove began to resemble a private meeting place for people who could move between public authority and private wealth.

The club also became harder to read from the outside. It published guest lists and programmes in 1932, then omitted names between 1933 and 1935 before publishing them again in 1936. Mattis leaves the reason open. In 1934, during the Great Depression, the club spent the equivalent of roughly $22 million on a new clubhouse. Several fires in and around the Grove during the same period may have encouraged the club to tighten security, although no motive was proved. By the 1950s, artists and writers had become associate members, while wealthy members supplied the money and held the status that mattered.

The Grove, its camps, and political access

The Grove became the centre of the organisation around 1929. Permanent cabins, clubhouses, dining halls, theatres, and camps spread through the property. Each camp developed its own identity. The Hillbilly Camp, where George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush stayed, is one example. Mattis cites Peter M. Phillips’s dissertation for an average campsite of sixteen members and one or two paid valets. The arrangement includes hot water, bathrooms, shuttles, a bar, a café, an art studio, a museum, theatres, and a man-made lake with a thirty-foot owl statue.

The club hosts roughly 2,500 members and 500 staff, according to the video. Staff sign nondisclosure agreements, although Mattis thinks they leave before the main ceremony. The scale and comfort make the encampment look like a private summer resort for rich men. Its privacy also gives the retreat a political use. A politician can meet people with similar status in a place that has its own security and social rules.

Presidents from Rutherford B. Hayes through both Bush administrations attended the Grove as members, honorary members, or guests. A 1957 document lists Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Richard Nixon as honorary members. Mattis finds no concrete evidence that the Grove selects Republican presidential candidates. He does think political conversations are inevitable when so many powerful people share a private retreat, and Nixon’s 1967 Lakeside address shows that the club hosted serious political speech. Nixon discussed American foreign policy, communism, the Soviet Union, China, foreign aid, military power, and the future of the international order.

The fact of political discussion does not establish that the Grove controls the United States. It does show why the privacy matters. Mattis considers the idea that the Grove exists to collect compromising material on powerful men. He treats that as more plausible than a supernatural explanation, especially because private conduct could damage the careers of politicians in the period when the theory developed. He offers the possibility as an inference rather than evidence.

The Grove’s owl creates a second line of suspicion. Owls symbolise wisdom in Greek and Roman mythology, and the Illuminati also used an owl. Mattis finds no credible institutional link between the eighteenth-century Illuminati and the Bohemian Club. The club began as an art society for journalists, while the Bavarian Illuminati formed as a political radical movement. Similar symbols do not supply a chain of succession.

The filmmaker and the 2000 infiltration

The ceremony became widely known after Alex Jones entered the Grove with a hidden camera in July 2000. Mattis spends time on Jones’s record because the credibility of the documentary matters to the claims it makes. In the 1990s, Jones built a public-access and radio career by questioning the official accounts of the Oklahoma City bombing and the Moon landing. After 9/11 he called the attack a false flag. In 2012 he claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre involved crisis actors and a government cover-up, then apologised after families were harassed and after a court ordered him to pay a large sum in damages.

Jones’s documentary presents the Grove as part of a plan involving a New World Order, population control, and a global currency. Mattis says the film’s strongest possible explanation is ordinary political compromise. If powerful people use the retreat to exchange favours, protect one another, or discuss policy without public scrutiny, that would explain the secrecy without requiring a supernatural cult. The documentary itself focuses on the Cremation of Care ceremony.

Jones and a British journalist entered the property on 15 July 2000. They hid about half a mile from the private road, moved through a ravine, reached the main parking area, and boarded a shuttle while pretending to belong to the Hillbilly Camp. They filmed wealthy older men, bagpipes, buildings, raised tent platforms, business conversations, and security activity. The footage is grainy, and the identities of most people remain unclear. The filmmakers say that sheriff’s deputies, Secret Service agents, and private security questioned them when the camera was off. They also claim to have seen televisions and cables that connected to hidden cameras, although the film does not establish what those systems recorded.

The filmmakers interview local people before entering. Former employees describe the Grove as a pleasant place and say they never attended the ceremony. Other locals repeat rumours about naked men, prostitutes, or sacrificial rites without offering direct knowledge. Mattis treats the interviews as evidence of the Grove’s reputation, not as proof of what happens inside. A San Francisco gossip column is also used to support a claim about men seeking illicit encounters, which gives him little confidence in it.

The documentary links the Grove to the Manhattan Project through photographs of members of the S-1 committee attending together in September 1943. Mattis finds a 2010 New York Times article that repeats the connection, yet no official document saying that the project was formulated at the Grove. The photographs support a narrower claim: members of the committee were there together outside the normal summer encampment. They do not show that the Grove directed the project.

The film also includes Helmut Schmidt’s account that most attendees were guests rather than members. Schmidt describes a class of intellectual politicians who influence elected officials, move between government and private institutions, or receive appointments when their candidates win. Mattis sees this as a description of the revolving door between politics, business, and lobbying. He then distances himself from Texe Marrs, whom the documentary presents as a professor even though he taught computer science at the University of Texas at Austin. Marrs’s flat-earth beliefs and incompatible claims about Jewish, Catholic, Masonic, and Illuminati control make him a poor witness for the history of the Grove.

The ceremony in its older form

The Bohemian Club’s ritual appears in written form in Porter Garnett’s 1908 The Bohemian Jinks: A Treatise. Mattis says that the recognisable version dates to 1906, although accounts sometimes place the ceremony in the 1880s. The early text opens with a Tree Man, a Hill Man, and a River Man fleeing an unseen monster. They call on St John, then on the owl, while the figure of Care describes hunger, pain, disease, and death. The owl defeats Care, and the assembled Bohemians burn an effigy.

The text’s references fit the club’s history more closely than Jones’s account suggests. The repeated line about sending Care back to a city of dust and ashes may refer to the San Francisco earthquake of April 1906. Care speaks through a dead tree, while Love speaks through a living tree. Love promises that the forest’s fellowship can restore what the men have lost, and a priest lights the pyre. The ritual gives the members a temporary release from work, family, money, and other cares of ordinary life.

Mattis cannot confirm Jones’s identification of the owl with Moloch. Moloch may refer to a deity, a form of sacrifice, or a translation problem involving Milcom. The biblical and classical sources associated with Moloch connect the name to child sacrifice, while depictions of the deity tend to use a bull rather than an owl. Mattis also finds no credible line from Moloch, Baal, or the Mesopotamian underworld goddess Ereshkigal to the Grove’s owl.

The documentary adds further claims about Canaanite, Babylonian, Celtic, and Masonic ritual. Mattis finds that the supposed Druid practice of burning live animals cannot be supported by the evidence he knows. Ancient European sacrifice often involved animals, yet the sources he consulted describe animals being killed before their meat was burned. He also points out that the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry developed in France, so Jones’s description of it as a Scottish practice shows that he had not checked the history closely. The film never identifies a Masonic rite that appears in the Grove ceremony.

What the hidden camera shows

The 2000 ceremony has simplified the older play. Around 1,500 men gather at the lake after dinner, and a programme depicts a small bound body being carried towards a pyre. The drawing makes the effigy look like a child, although it is an artist’s image rather than a photograph. Men in robes carry torches behind it while bagpipes play. A curtain hides several minutes of the action, then the master of ceremonies and the priests begin the public part of the ritual.

The high priest calls the owl the ruler of a leafy temple and names the Grove a shrine. The language gives the owl a more religious status than it has in the 1906 text. The ceremony also removes the invocation of St John, the speech of Love, and the direct references to the earthquake. It retains the owl, the death of Care, the forest, and the repeated language of freedom from the cares of ordinary life.

The phrase “weaving spiders come not here” comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The club presents it as a ban on business inside the Grove. Mattis reads the Shakespearean context differently. Fairies use the line to keep outsiders away from the sleeping Titania, so the phrase may describe exclusion rather than an actual prohibition on business. Political speeches and business conversations at the Grove make the literal reading difficult to sustain.

The priests invite the spirits of dead Bohemians, invoke the forest, and refer to Babylon and Tyre as ruined cities reclaimed by nature. They speak of beauty, fellowship, and freedom at midsummer. The effigy crosses the lake by boat before the priests place it on the pyre. Care then interrupts the ceremony and says that the men cannot destroy him because he waits for them when they return to the marketplace. The torches go out. The priests ask the owl for counsel, and the owl tells them that only a pure eternal flame from the altar of Bohemia can light the fire. The priests carry that flame to the pyre, burn the effigy, and declare that midsummer has freed them.

The ceremony borrows from several religious and literary traditions without reproducing one coherent ancient rite. A 1904 Grove play gives the relevant characters different names: Apollo defeats Madon, a fictional Greek demon who embodies Care. The play describes an Abrahamic God overthrowing pagan gods, then allows Apollo to remain as a patron figure. Mattis thinks this earlier story may explain how Apollo’s victory over Care became the owl’s victory over Care. The connection is speculative, yet it comes from the club’s own theatrical history.

A pagan ritual without a proven cult

Mattis’s answer depends on separating the form of a ritual from the beliefs of the people performing it. The modern ceremony deliberately uses pagan imagery, invocations, priests, an owl, a sacred grove, a fire, and a seasonal festival. That makes it a pagan-style ritual. It does not show that the participants worship a pagan god, that most of them believe the performance has supernatural force, or that the ceremony sacrifices a child effigy to Moloch or Baal.

The older evidence points towards a ceremony that burned away the ordinary cares of the world for a weekend. Someone later combined elements from occult writing, ancient religions, Christian language, Greek mythology, and theatrical pageantry. Mattis cannot establish who made those changes or what they intended. He thinks the ritual was designed to look like the kind of thing that outsiders imagine when they hear about an elite occult gathering.

The result remains strange. The ceremony has religious language and a deliberate wall around it, while many participants may treat it as a silly play. That uncertainty matters because secrecy can support several interpretations at once. A private ritual may have spiritual meaning for a small minority, theatrical meaning for most attendees, and social meaning for the club as a whole.

The question left standing

Mattis finds no smoking gun showing that America’s conservative elite worship demons or sacrifice children. The film’s claims about Moloch, the Druids, Freemasonry, and the Manhattan Project do not survive his checks. The Grove does not appear to be a single ancient cult with a continuous line back to Babylon or the Illuminati.

The political question survives the collapse of the occult theory. Presidents and senior officials have given speeches at a private retreat where the public cannot observe the audience, the conversations, or the relationships formed around them. Nixon’s 1967 address is available through the US Department of State, yet the wider record of speeches and discussions is difficult to access. Mattis asks why an event open to thousands of guests should remain so tightly guarded after it ends.

That question does not prove that the Grove controls the United States. It points to a familiar form of power in which wealthy people and public officials meet outside ordinary institutions, then leave the public to infer what happened. The more Mattis researches the Grove, the less he sees an evil government cult and the more he sees a private network whose secrecy deserves scrutiny. The ceremony is theatrical evidence of that secrecy. The political access is the more substantial concern.

Further reading / references

• Porter Garnett, The Bohemian Jinks: A Treatise, the 1908 collection of Bohemian Club plays that Mattis cites.
• Peter M. Phillips, A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, a 1994 University of California, Davis dissertation cited for the composition of the camps.
• Richard M. Nixon, “Address by Richard M. Nixon to the Bohemian Club”, delivered at the Grove on 29 July 1967 and published by the US Department of State’s Office of the Historian.
• The video also refers to a 2010 New York Times report and a 1981 Washington Post article without enough bibliographic detail to identify them reliably.