Bohemian Grove
Bohemian Grove is a private campground covering approximately 2,700 acres in the redwood forest near Monte Rio, California, owned and operated by the Bohemian Club — a private men's club founded in San Francisco in 1872. Each July, the Grove hosts a two-week summer encampment that draws an invitation-only roster of some of the most powerful men in the world: sitting and former U.S. presidents, Cabinet secretaries, military generals, intelligence directors, central bankers, corporate CEOs, and media proprietors. The event combines theatrical performances, musical recitals, and heavy drinking with informal discussions that critics and researchers argue constitute a shadow policy-making forum operating entirely outside democratic accountability. The Grove's central ritual — the Cremation of Care — involves a staged burning of an effigy before a 40-foot stone owl idol, and has been captured on film. Survivor testimony, journalist investigations, and documentary evidence have made Bohemian Grove one of the most scrutinised elite gatherings in the world, alongside the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations.
History of the Bohemian Club
The Bohemian Club was founded in San Francisco in 1872, initially as a gathering place for journalists, artists, and musicians — the term "bohemian" at the time connoting a free-spirited, artistic lifestyle. Within a decade, the Club's membership shifted decisively toward wealthy businessmen and political figures who were attracted to its exclusivity and social cachet. The artists were effectively absorbed into an elite networking institution, though the theatrical and musical traditions they introduced were preserved as the ceremonial core of the annual encampment.
The Club acquired its redwood camp in Sonoma County in the late 19th century, and the annual summer Encampment became a fixture of California elite society. By the early 20th century, Bohemian Club membership had expanded to include prominent figures at the national level. U.S. presidents, beginning with William Howard Taft, became associated with the Club, and the Grove's attendee list came to read as a roster of American power.
The Club maintains a formal membership cap and a notoriously long waiting list, reportedly spanning decades. Membership costs are substantial, and prospective members must be sponsored by existing members. The result is an institution that is self-selecting, self-reinforcing, and effectively closed to outside scrutiny.
The Annual Encampment
The Encampment runs for approximately two weeks each July. Members and guests are divided into roughly 120 "camps" — named clusters of cabins and lodges scattered through the redwood forest. Different camps carry different social cachet, with camps such as Mandalay, Cave Man, and Hillbillies reportedly housing the most senior political and corporate figures.
Activities during the Encampment include:
- Theatrical performances, known as the "High Jinks" and "Low Jinks," staged in the Grove's outdoor theatre
- Musical recitals and lakeside talks given by prominent members and invited guests
- Informal lectures called "Lakeside Talks," which have featured policy discussions by serving Cabinet members and intelligence officials
- Communal meals and extensive social drinking in a setting explicitly designed to encourage frank, off-the-record conversation
- The opening-night Cremation of Care ceremony
The Encampment's unofficial motto — attributed to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — is "Weaving spiders, come not here," meaning that business dealings are formally prohibited inside the Grove. Critics note the paradox: the prohibition on formal deal-making is used to deny that the Grove functions as a power-brokering venue, while the informal conversations between the world's most powerful men inevitably shape decisions made afterward.
The Cremation of Care
The Cremation of Care is the opening ritual of each Encampment, performed on the first Saturday evening. It involves:
- A procession of robed figures carrying torches through the darkened forest
- The arrival at a large artificial lake, known as the Lake, in front of a 40-foot concrete owl idol called Moloch or the Owl of Bohemia
- A dramatic performance involving a barge, hooded figures, and chanted verse
- The ceremonial burning of an effigy representing "Care" — symbolically liberating attendees from the burdens and moral responsibilities of the outside world for the duration of the Encampment
The ceremony is theatrical and has been defended by the Club as a harmless Shakespearean tradition dating from the 1880s. Researchers and critics, however, note several significant elements:
- The owl idol has been linked by some researchers to the Canaanite deity Moloch, associated with child sacrifice in ancient sources and referenced in occult literature
- The robed procession and fire ritual bear structural resemblances to Masonic and mystery school initiatory ceremonies
- The explicit theme of burning away moral constraint ("Care") as a precondition for what follows has been noted as ideologically significant
- The ceremony occurs before an audience of individuals who collectively control military, intelligence, financial, and media institutions
Some researchers, drawing on works such as An Illuminati Primer and Bloodlines of the Illuminati, situate the Cremation of Care within a broader tradition of elite occult ceremonialism connected to Luciferianism, Satanism, and Secret Societies such as the Hell Fire Club of 18th-century Britain.
Documented Notable Attendees
The Grove's guest lists are not officially published, but have been partially reconstructed through leaked documents, journalistic investigation, and admissions by members themselves. Confirmed or widely reported attendees over the decades include:
- U.S. Presidents: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton (reportedly attended before presidency), Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower, Herbert Hoover
- Government Officials: Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Shultz, Caspar Weinberger, Colin Powell
- Intelligence Figures: William Casey (CIA Director), William Webster (CIA/FBI Director), multiple NSA and military intelligence officials
- Corporate and Financial: Executives from major defence contractors, investment banks, energy corporations, and media conglomerates
- Media: Senior figures from networks and newspaper groups, which researchers argue helps explain the lack of mainstream coverage of the Grove's activities
Nixon was recorded on the White House tapes in 1971 describing the Grove as "the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine," suggesting that even insider accounts of the Encampment have been complex and contradictory. Regardless, Nixon attended.
The Manhattan Project Connection
One of the most historically significant claims about Bohemian Grove concerns the Manhattan Project. According to documented accounts, preliminary discussions that led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project — the U.S. programme to develop the atomic bomb — took place at a Lakeside Talk at Bohemian Grove in 1942. The physicist Ernest Lawrence and other scientists reportedly presented arguments for a crash nuclear weapons development programme to assembled government officials and military figures.
If accurate, this makes Bohemian Grove the site of one of the most consequential informal policy discussions in modern history, made outside any formal governmental structure, before an audience of elite members whose identities were not publicly recorded.
Journalist Infiltrations and Exposure
Alex Jones (2000)
In July 2000, journalist and broadcaster Alex Jones infiltrated the Bohemian Grove Encampment with a concealed camera and filmed the Cremation of Care ceremony in its entirety. The resulting footage was released as a documentary and widely circulated online, providing the first publicly available visual documentation of the ritual.
Jones's footage confirmed:
- The existence of the 40-foot owl idol
- The robed procession and torchlight ceremony
- The burning of an effigy at the owl's base
- The participation of hundreds of identifiable adult men in formal ceremonial dress
The footage generated significant public and academic interest. The Bohemian Club did not legally challenge its release or contest its authenticity, instead dismissing its significance as evidence of anything beyond theatrical tradition.
Other Investigative Coverage
Philip Weiss published an account of his own infiltration of the Grove in Spy magazine in 1989, documenting the camp hierarchy, the informal political discussions, and the general atmosphere. His account corroborated later investigative work and provided contemporaneous evidence of the Grove's function as an elite networking hub. Several mainstream journalists have subsequently attended on background terms, producing accounts that acknowledge the Grove's influence while avoiding its more controversial dimensions.
Survivor Testimony and Allegations of Criminal Activity
Cathy O'Brien
Cathy O'Brien, a self-described survivor of the CIA's MK-Ultra-linked Project Monarch mind control programme, makes explicit allegations about Bohemian Grove in her book Trance Formation of America, co-authored with Mark Phillips. O'Brien alleges that she was brought to the Grove as a mind-controlled slave and subjected to sexual abuse by prominent political figures within the Grove's grounds.
O'Brien's testimony, while unable to be independently verified through conventional evidentiary means (she alleges that her memories were deliberately fragmented through trauma-based programming), is consistent in structure with accounts from other MK-Ultra survivor testimonies and is taken seriously by researchers in the field of ritual abuse and state-sponsored mind control. The allegations include:
- Transportation of mind-controlled individuals to the Grove for the use of senior political figures
- The use of the Grove's geographical isolation and controlled access to ensure no witness accountability
- The presence of specific named political figures during alleged abuse
O'Brien's full account appears in Trance Formation of America and is cross-referenced with the broader literature on Trauma Based Programming and Project Monarch.
Broader Allegations
Beyond O'Brien's account, researchers have noted that the Grove's combination of extreme secrecy, controlled access, elite membership, and an explicit ritual framework designed to dissolve "care" and moral responsibility creates structural conditions consistent with the accounts offered by other survivors of alleged elite abuse networks. The connection to older elite libertine traditions — particularly the Hell Fire Club, which similarly combined political power with secret ritual and alleged sexual licence — is noted by researchers examining the historical continuity of such institutions.
The Grove as a Shadow Power Structure
Researchers examining the New World Order framework argue that Bohemian Grove functions as one of several overlapping informal structures through which elite consensus is built and maintained outside the visibility of democratic institutions. In this analysis, the Grove complements rather than duplicates the functions of:
- The Bilderberg Group — annual invitation-only conference of Western political and corporate elites
- The Council on Foreign Relations — think tank and membership organisation shaping U.S. foreign policy
- The Club of Rome — elite environmental and technocratic policy group
- Round Table Groups — British imperial-origin networks including the CFR's predecessors
- The Trilateral Commission — founded by David Rockefeller to coordinate policy across North America, Europe, and Japan
The Grove is distinctive among these in several ways: it is explicitly ritualistic, it is exclusively male, it is associated with a specific physical location that has been deliberately kept off-limits, and its activities include theatrical and ceremonial elements with identifiable occult structural parallels.
The convergence of military commanders, intelligence directors, elected officials, and corporate executives in an off-record setting annually, bound by mutual secrecy and a shared ritual experience, is argued by researchers to produce a coherent elite culture that functions as an informal governance layer above formal institutional structures.
Secrecy and Denial
The Bohemian Club has maintained consistent denials regarding any policy-making function of the Grove. Official statements characterise the Encampment as a social holiday and artistic retreat. The Club does not publish attendee lists, does not permit press access, and employs private security during the Encampment period. Local roads around the Grove are effectively closed during July.
The mainstream media, whose senior figures are frequently attendees or are connected to attendees through ownership and advertising relationships, has historically provided minimal investigative coverage of the Grove. Academic treatment has similarly been limited, with the Grove appearing primarily in sociological studies of elite culture rather than in political science or intelligence studies literature.
This pattern of minimal scrutiny from institutions whose senior personnel are personally invested in the Grove's secrecy is itself noted by researchers as structurally significant.
See Also
- Bilderberg Group
- Council on Foreign Relations
- Club of Rome
- Hell Fire Club
- Secret Societies
- MK-Ultra
- Project Monarch
- Cathy O'Brien
- Trance Formation of America
- Luciferianism
- Satanism
- Occult
- New World Order
- Bloodlines of the Illuminati
- An Illuminati Primer
- CIA
- Trauma Based Programming
References and Further Reading
- Domhoff, G. William — The Bohemian Grove and Other Retreats (1974)
- O'Brien, Cathy and Phillips, Mark — Trance Formation of America (1995)
- Weiss, Philip — "Masters of the Universe Go to Camp" — Spy magazine (1989)
- Alex Jones — Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove (2000, documentary)
- van der Pijl, Kees — The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (1984)
