Weaving Spiders Come Not Here (B.C.)

Bohemian Club & Grove Cremation of Care Pagan Rituals & Effigy.

The Cremation of Care is an annual ritual production written, produced, and performed by and for members of the Bohemian Club. It is staged at the Bohemian Grove near Monte Rio, California, in front of a 40-foot-tall image of an owl, at a small artificial lake amid a private old-growth grove of Redwood trees.

The dramatic performance is presented on the first night of the annual encampment as an allegorical banishing of worldly cares for the club members and "to present symbolically the salvation of the trees by the club", but the secretive nature of the Bohemians and the political power of some of its members have been criticized.

In 1878, the Bohemian Club of San Francisco first took to the woods in Taylorville, California (present-day Samuel P. Taylor State Park) for a summer celebration that they called Midsummer High Jinks. Poems were recited, songs were sung, and dramatic readings were given; the practice was repeated each summer in other areas, primarily near the Russian River in Sonoma County. In 1881, the ceremony of the Cremation of Care was first conducted after the various individual performances, with James F. Bowman as Sire. The ceremony was further expanded in 1893 by a member named Joseph D. Redding, with a Midsummer High Jinks entitled The Sacrifice in the Forest, or simply "Druid Jinks", in which brotherly love and Christianity battled and won against paganism, converting the druids away from bloody sacrifice. Redding formed the framework of the ceremony but the main actors, including George Tisdale Bromley as High Priest, were asked to supply their own major speeches. In 1904, the prologue to William Henry Irwin's Grove Play The Hamadryads included text such as "Touch their world-blind eyes with fairy unguents." The play depicted the intrusion, the battles, and the symbolic death of the maleficent Spirit of Care.

In the earliest productions of the Grove Play, several restrictions were imposed upon the Sire (host, chief planner, and master of ceremonies) including that the stage setting be the natural forest backdrop and that the "malign character Care" be introduced in the plot, to wreak havoc with the characters and then be faced down and vanquished by the hero. In these early productions, the Cremation of Care immediately followed, and lasted until midnight. The end of the ceremony was signaled by a lively Jinks Band rendition of There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, and the club members sat down to a late dinner and revelry.

From 1913, the Cremation of Care was disengaged from the Grove Play, and rescheduled for the first night of the summer encampment. The Grove Play was set for the final weekend. A different Sire was appointed for the Cremation, and some concerns were raised in subsequent years that the Cremation of Care was growing into its own secondary Grove Play. Some Sires experimented with a satirical treatment, or topical themes such as a patriotic World War I treatment in 1918 and an unpopular Prohibition script in 1919. "Care" was not killed, let alone cremated, in the 1922 version. In response to member complaints about the unpredictable quality of the opening night fare, Charles K. Field was asked in 1923 to standardize the script for what became the basis for every subsequent Cremation of Care ceremony.

Born January 24, 1974, in San Francisco, Kevin Andrew Collins is the seventh out of the nine children of David and Ann Collins. As a child battling dyslexia, he was quieter than most of his siblings and cousins, but he was still an energetic boy who enjoyed outdoor activities and playing sports. However, this same hobby played a part in changing his and his family’s life forever. On February 10, 1984, as a fourth grader at St. Agnes School, he found himself alone after leaving basketball practice in the school’s gymnasium early, between 6:10 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. He usually would have been accompanied by his then 11-year-old elder brother, Gary, but he was home sick that day.

Being shy, rather than catching a ride home with his coach or other team members, Kevin slipped out of the building and walked to the corner of Oak Street and Masonic Avenue to wait for the city bus to take him home. Reports say that witnesses last saw him at approximately 7:55 p.m., on the same bus stop, talking to a tall blond-haired man who had a black dog by his side. And then, Kevin never made it home. His mother, Ann Collins, instinctively knew that something was wrong. She called her brother and her husband to scour the area for any signs of her boy but to no avail. Then, when the authorities were informed, their initial reaction was that maybe Kevin was at a friend’s house. But he wasn’t, they’d checked.

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