Bohemian Grove: The Secret Retreat and Its Illuminati Myth

Bohemian Grove, the 2,700-acre redwood camp in Monte Rio, California, that has hosted an annual two-week encampment of the Bohemian Club every July since the late 19th century, is one of the most mythologised gatherings in modern American conspiracy literature. It has been described, as the secret world capital of a shadowy global elite, as the site of an annual mock human sacrifice in front of a forty-foot owl statue, and as the real seat of the American government. None of these descriptions is accurate, but the persistence of the myths is itself an interesting phenomenon, and a useful case study in the landscape of American conspiracy thinking.

The Bohemian Club’s History

The Bohemian Club was founded in 1872 in San Francisco, originally as a private club for journalists, artists, and other professionals interested in the bohemian culture of post-Gold Rush California. The club’s early membership was overwhelmingly drawn from the San Francisco cultural and journalistic elite, and the club’s initial purpose was to provide a venue for the discussion of literature, music, drama, and the other arts. The first “summer encampment” was held in 1878, on the site of a former mining camp in the redwood forest of Sonoma County, and the club purchased the site in 1899, beginning the long process of construction that produced the present-day Grove.

The club’s membership was, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, broadened to include leading figures from business, finance, politics, and the arts. By the 1920s the club had become one of the most exclusive and influential private clubs in the United States, with a roster that included Republican presidents, leading industrialists, and the senior figures of several major American industries.

The Annual Encampment

The annual encampment, known as “The Grove” or “Bohemian Grove,” is held over the course of two weeks in mid-July. The encampment draws roughly 2,500 to 3,000 members and their guests, who stay in rustic but well-appointed cabins in the redwood forest, attend lectures, plays, and concerts, and engage in the kind of informal social networking that has been the principal function of the encampment since the 1870s. The encampment is, by all reliable accounts, an unusual combination of high-level political and business networking and camp-style frivolity: there are skits, there is a small lake with a diving platform, and there is, in the later part of the encampment, the ritual of the Cremation of Care.

The encampment is “private” in the sense that press coverage is not permitted and the proceedings are not open to the public. It is not, however, secret in any meaningful sense of the word. The membership is published. The dates are published. The speakers are usually known in advance. The press has, on many occasions, been admitted in the past, and several journalists have written detailed accounts of their experiences at the encampment.

The Cremation of Care Ritual

The Cremation of Care is the most famous ritual of the Bohemian Grove encampment. The ritual takes place in front of the club’s forty-foot concrete owl statue — known as the “Owl” or, in more conspiratorial literature, as “Moloch” — and involves the symbolic burning of an effigy called “Care” (usually a paper or wooden figure). The ritual is, in its official description, a purification rite marking the transition from the responsibilities of the working year to the leisure of the encampment. The proceedings are led by a “High Priest” (a club member selected for the role) and include various invocations, processions, and the lighting of a bonfire.

The Cremation of Care is the most-mythologised single element of the Bohemian Grove mythology. The conspiracy literature, drawing on the descriptions of disgruntled former members and on the symbolism of the owl and the effigy, has claimed that the ritual is a Satanic ceremony, that it involves the symbolic or actual sacrifice of a human being, and that the owl is a representation of Moloch, the ancient Near Eastern deity to whom children were allegedly sacrificed. The most-cited sources for these claims are the chapters on the Bohemian Club in G. William Domhoff’s Who Rules America? (1967, repeatedly updated) and the Alex Jones / Infowars documentary tradition (notably a 2000 field visit that ended with Jones being ejected from the property).

The Cremation of Care is, in fact, a typical late-19th-century fraternal ritual, of a kind that was common in American fraternal orders of the period, and it has many analogues in the fraternal orders of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The owl is a long-standing symbol of the Bohemian Club, and there is no documentary basis for the Moloch interpretation. The sacrifice claim has, on multiple investigations, been shown to be unfounded. The club has, at various times, invited journalists to attend the ritual and has, on the whole, treated the conspiracy theories as a nuisance rather than as a serious threat.

Famous Attendees

The Bohemian Grove’s list of famous attendees is long and, for conspiracy writers, irresistible. The list includes: presidents from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan (with the notable exception of Franklin D. Roosevelt); leading American political figures from both parties, including Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush; leading industrialists, including executives of the major American banks, oil companies, and technology companies of the 20th century; leading cultural figures, including the conductor of several major American orchestras, leading writers, and the heads of major American universities.

The list is, in the conspiracy literature on the American political elite, the principal evidence for the claim that the United States is secretly governed by a shadowy cabal. The fact that the list is also the list of the people who have actually been politically and economically prominent in the United States in the past century is, in the same literature, taken as confirmation of the thesis rather than as evidence against it.

The Illuminati Myth

The Bohemian Grove has, in the modern Illuminati myth, become one of the principal sites of the alleged secret government. The claim is, in its most common form, that the encampment is the place where the alleged global elite gathers each year to plan the next phase of the alleged world takeover. The Bohemian Club is treated, in this literature, as a continuation of, or a stand-in for, the alleged Illuminati of the Bavarian order, and the encampment is treated as the real site of a real global government.

The claim is, on the available evidence, not supported. The Bohemian Club is a real club with a documented history, a published membership, a public schedule, and a public set of activities. The Illuminati of the Bavarian order was a small, briefly existing 18th-century society. The two are connected, in the modern conspiracy imagination, by the general theory of a New World Order and by the broader landscape of American secret-society mythology, but they are not, in any documented sense, connected historically.

The most accurate description of the Bohemian Grove is that it is a real, well-documented, and unusually exclusive private club, the kind of institution that the study of American elite networking takes as a given, and the kind of institution that the conspiracy literature treats as a hidden system of world control.