Our Past Is Far More Radical Than We Are Allowed to Know

On "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" and the Folk Revival That
Birthed the '60s Counterculture and Called Back the Great Goddess

(Photographs referenced below are here and here.)

YES I HAVE BEEN GONE a long time, and yes there are more changes in Dispatches forthcoming, changes I will announce in another week or so, as soon as I have thought them to completion.

Meanwhile here at last with my apology for the unforeseen delay is the essay I promised Kate King in gratitude for her unusually knowledgeable You Tube comment about "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" -- an ancient but timeless epic of familial dysfunction, murder, Goddess-magic and revenge told by a very old and eerie traditional Scots ballad¹ hauntingly performed in the early 1970s by the incomparable Martin Carthy.

There is eeriness here as well. When I applauded Ms. King last June I was at the nadir of my disablement  by an excruciatingly painful leg and knee injury. In keeping with the theocratic sadism that is ever more obviously the core of U.S. medical policy, I was (of course) denied the prescription pain-killers that would have made my injuries bearable. In any nation under the Abrahamic god, such injuries are reckoned divine punishment for sin, and the associated suffering is minimized only enough to reinforce its Big Lie of caring.

When I recovered sufficiently to begin writing the promised addendum, I assumed the task would take no more than a couple of hours, and I welcomed how its need for concentration refocused my mind from the injury's by-then-diminished but nevertheless still intrusive throbbing. But then, much to my surprise, the writing became not the intellectually sociable fulfillment of a promise as I had intended but rather a relentless compulsion that would not let me stop until I had hammered out close to 30,000 words. It was my first encounter with the impassioned Zen of writing; it was an effective distraction from physical pain; it was at times as if I were possessed by the Muse, an intensity I had often experienced while working in photography but unlike anything I had ever before encountered at a keyboard, and it revoked with finality the profound self-doubt that prompted my oft-repeated statement that "photography is my passion while writing for me is never more than intellectual struggle."

I thus owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Martin Carthy and Katie King and several others I will name as this story unfolds. 

But now I had to edit my often stream-of-consciousness prose and somehow condense its text back to reasonable size. Hence I divided what follows into what I hope are intellectually palatable sections; hence too I apologize for the occasional repetitiveness thus rendered unavoidable and also for the typos and dropped articles I am bound to have overlooked. I'll probably be making minor  corrections and revisions in this piece for as long as it and I remain alive. Which -- at least for the foreseeable future -- defines it as a work-in-progress. 

***

THOSE OF US who are already familiar with  traditional British and European folk balladry --  especially those of us aware of the hypothesized origins of its form and much of its content in prehistoric liturgies of the Cosmic Mother (and the pivotal role that content seems to have played in the birth and growth of the 20th Century Counterculture) -- may of course scroll down directly to "Now About 'Famous Flower' and Its Patriarchy-Subverting Content" and start reading there. Despite  its 1972 recording date,  "Famous Flower"  exemplifies the traditional music popularized by the folk revival a decade and a half earlier -- music that based on its apparent role in shaping the Counterculture seems to possess an uncanny power to change both spiritual and political consciousness.

That's why I suspect even those of us who were part of the Counterculture and are thus presumably intimate with at least some of the eye-opening truths buried within its maliciously censored history will find the this entire essay affirming, supportive and thought provoking. These sections preceding its "Now About 'Famous Flower'" conclusion will provide vital perspective for those of us who weren't there, and they refresh the perspectives of  those of us who were. In either case they're essential background if we are to appreciate how the folk renaissance of the 1950s engendered the chronically overlooked (and no doubt deliberately ignored)  aesthetic solidarity that paradoxically lay beneath the Counterculture's obvious ideological fragmentation.

Fifty-nine years ago, seemingly by happenstance, I learned some of the oldest traditional European folk  music -- melodies and words powerful enough to repeatedly evoke those  perplexing chills of gooseflesh ovation (as if our every cell were momentarily rising in  applause) -- had been traced back to the psychologically compelling symbolism of prehistoric Europe's Old Religion.

My subsequent backward-looking searches through the relevant scholarship eventually led me,  like Yin to Yang,  forward to the modern-day resurrection of the Great Goddess.  Eventually I recognized her return, which is more process than event, as spontaneous rejection of not just Abrahamic religion and its offspring Capitalism but of patriarchy itself -- and therefore by far the most revolutionary development of the present age.

Thirty-five years ago I set out this hypothesis  in a profusely illustrated book-length manuscript entitled "Glimpses of a Pale Dancer," the result  of 24 years of evening, weekend and vacation-time research and photography. I considered it my life's most important project in investigative journalism; it documented  the roots of Countercultural consciousness in the folk music renaissance that peaked in the United States during the early '60s. As  we shall see, it was methodically suppressed within a few years here in the imperial homeland, though in Great Britain and on the European mainland, far more tolerant governance allows it to continue into the present.  This  essay, inspired by Ms. King (to whom again my most profound thanks), summarizes from recollection and remedial research the conclusions "Dancer" expounded, and it here  presents them as both prelude to and defense of my comments about "Famous Flower." It describes how the influence of traditional folk music helped free us from the shackles of 1950s conformity, launched the Counterculture and -- in the name of human survival -- brought back our oldest deity.

While the notion of a deity -- any deity -- is bound to provoke strenuous objections, we who are dialectical materialists and therefore presumably agnostics or atheists should never forget that a deity's objective reality is not an issue in evaluating its psychological and socioeconomic functions. Whatever else she might be, the Goddess -- like all deities --  is ultimately an art symbol, the distillate of our collective consciousness. In this sense her societal effectiveness can be as easily embraced by those of us who recognize her as a Jungian archetype as it is by those of us who are certain she is objectively real.

What makes her resurrection revolutionary -- why it scares the proverbial shit out of the Capitalists -- is the Goddess is our most potent symbol for a world that is the diametrical opposite of the slave-pen realm in which the Capitalists are methodically imprisoning us. Note how artists everywhere have long embraced the Goddess as  personification of liberty, equality and revolutionary defiance. The Capitalists regard even those sorts of chastely sculptural observances as bad enough, though they dare not object to them publicly lest Capitalism's instinctive loathing of artistic truth become common knowledge.

But when the Goddess escapes her stone pedestals to haunt the edges of our minds, as she did during the Counterculture, that's when she becomes our  declaration Capitalism and all its antecedents must be overthrown posthaste -- not only because Capitalism itself is ever-more murderously exploitative, but because we are recognizing it and the patriarchal horse it rode in on as irremediably eco-misogynistic and therefore inescapably apocalyptic. We know the Capitalists abuse our Mother Earth with at least the same hateful intensity of misogynistic arrogance that prompts the sadistic abuse of earthly mother and daughters. We realize Capitalism will render us extinct if we do not rise up and replace it with an ethos that recognizes the preservation of ourselves and our species is dependent on healing and preserving the life-sustaining well-being of our Mother Earth. We are rediscovering the environmental consensus implicit in conscious collectivism: from each according to ability; to each according to need -- with full recognition our needs and our abilities to fulfill them are determined ultimately by the productiveness or barrenness of our natural environment. We know too that human survival and  environmental sanity are literally synonymous. We are finally realizing Capitalism is not just the antithesis of such sanity but its eternal enemy.

I believe -- in what is most likely my last dwindling quark of optimism  --  these are precisely the realizations we need to demolish the seemingly impregnable barriers the Capitalist-owned Abrahamic religions invariably raise against even our mildest quests for environmental sanity: Torah, Bible or Qur'an, their god helps only those who prey the best. (And no, that's not a typo.)  The resurrection of the Goddess thus becomes -- precisely as the Capitalists and their vassals fear -- a universal demand for whatever changes are essential to assure our species' survival in the only way possible: that is, by restoring and sustaining the health of our planetary Motherland. From that realization to recognition of the need for at least basic forms of collectivism is only a short step, but again the Capitalists -- witness their violent antipathy to labor unions -- instinctively bar the way. Collectivism reduces hierarchy from a divine right to a situational function -- and Capitalism, like slavery, can't function without a divine-right boss to crack the whip on the backs of those of us poverty damns as sinners. So thwarted, we wander from from barrier to barrier until we realize the pivotal  truth that Capitalism is so fanatically destroy-the-village-to-save-it murderous, it will kill us all unless we replace it with socialism as soon as is humanly possible. It's then -- witnessing the Capitalist response (think not just Trump the Tyrant but Barack the Betrayer) -- we admit to each other only way we can save ourselves and our children and our grandchildren and their descendants is behind the shield of purposeful solidarity. 

In all humanity there are but two classes, two castes, two sides. One is the side of Capitalism; the other is the side of Humanitarianism. And where else on the Humanitarian side is purposeful solidarity to be found save in Marxism? 

Perhaps someday -- if we have any future at all --  we will recognize patriarchy has done to the Goddess exactly what Capitalism does to its revolutionary martyrs -- kill them, neuter them politically then obscenely reanimate them as Big Lie paragons of nonexistent democracy. Perhaps someday the statuary cited above will be hailed as early exclamations of the return of the Goddess. Perhaps  Marianne, Our Lady of the Harbor and the Militant Mother who raises her sword against the oppressor will someday be reclaimed as assertions of genuinely revolutionary truth.     

*** 

THE AESTHETIC SOLIDARITY of the Counterculture -- the vision from which the resurrection of  the Goddess emerged -- proves it to have been the "revolution in consciousness"² the late Walter Bowart -- the founding editor of the The East Village Other -- so often asserted it was; the way in which the Counterculture was suppressed here in the United States -- even as its core ethos continues to thrive on the opposite side of the Atlantic Ocean -- proves my fears of its vulnerability to Imperial oppression to have also been valid.

"EVO," as we compulsive punsters in uplifted-finger jests fondly began calling Walter's underground paper after some Bible-dicked patriarch denounced it as "evil," is significant here for two reasons, neither of which are mentioned in the Wikipedia material accessed by the above link. The East Village Other was one of the very first non-musical expressions of the Countercultural aesthetic solidarity expressed by the popularity of songs such as "Famous Flower"; it was also -- though this would not become apparent until years later -- the last dying spasm of the bohemia that had made New York the de facto capital city of every Left-radical art and political movement in the 20th Century United States and in much of world.   

The referential otherness of the paper's name, like our community itself and the Goddess it was spontaneously bringing back to consciousness, was an apt expression of  that era's angry iconoclasm; it was a brazenly public, every-other-week  "Fuck You" to the  obscenely wealthy, implacably powerful real-estate barons who by forcible gentrification had already banished bohemia from  the (real) Village  and now, by changing our neighborhood's name to "the East Village," declared war on the community of bohemian exiles who had found new homes in the bathtub-in-kitchen apartments on the Lower East Side.

Meanwhile these same gloating real estate profiteers who victimized us -- or more likely their always-Orwellian Madison Avenue advisors -- also sought to eradicate all memory of the the Capitalist horrors documented there by Jacob Riis,  whose work remains noteworthy today because it shows us that whether then in the Triangle Shirtwaist era or now in the Bhopal era, Capitalism is  murderous, ultimately apocalyptic savagery -- and that the only possible relief from it is revolution.  

Unsurprisingly  the new "East Village" name was instantly adopted by the mainstream media propaganda machine; the name change would abet the process of gentrification, which we understand now years too late was the first offensive in the Capitalists' ongoing war of vengeance not just against those of us who recognized Capitalism as our planet's ultimate Evil and dared challenge it accordingly, but against the far greater mass of U.S. humans whose poverty damns them to naught but increasing wretchedness and whose strident anti-intellectualism and violent bigotry forever denies them any means of liberation.  

Precisely as our masters intended, gentrification not only killed the Lower East Side bohemian community, but now guarantees there will never again be another such bohemian community rise to take its place anywhere on U.S. soil -- not until the United States itself is no more.  

That's because -- as our overlords obviously know all too well --  the one vital ingredient in the formation of a bohemian community was the cheap rent that granted us just enough dispensation from the Capitalist rat race to enable us to live out our true vocations of study and contemplation and activism and the constant refinement of our thinking by regular social interaction with our aesthetic and ideological peers in local saloons and coffee shops and with our sadistically violent enemies 

Given the conspiratorial nature of Capitalism itself, it is clearly no accident every former bohemian enclave in the U.S. has been gentrified to the socioeconomic exclusiveness that formerly defined only the most prohibitively expensive gated communities.

Here in the imperial homeland, where we are methodically denied accurate knowledge of the unspeakable human and environmental consequences of the agenda for global conquest the One Percenters who rule the Empire have gleefully taken from their secret hero Adolph Hitler and adopted as their own, gentrification is Capitalism's most revealing atrocity. It imposes and perpetuates homelessness, the fuck-off-and-die response to which shows us the sneeringly sadistic Ayn Rand moral imbecility that is the ruling Evil amongst Capitalism's poison plethora of Evils. With half the U.S. population now living in inescapable poverty, homelessness already afflicts at least 564,708 persons -- picture a growing encampment of homeless people that's only a bit smaller than Milwaukee or slightly larger than Albuquerque. And  homelessness does indeed kill, a fact meticulously suppressed here in the Imperial Homeland but asserted with appropriate forcefulness in the few nations that still allow genuine freedom of the press.

Gentrification is thus best understood as weaponized Capitalism. By eliminating affordable rentals, it prohibits the formation of bohemian communities. This (intentionally) kills forever any possibility of communities of dissenters evolving as they did in the last century. In turn, the permanent absence of such communities makes the evolution of any effective anti-Capitalist movement itself impossible.

(Yes, I know it is claimed the requisite interaction can be accomplished via electronic media. But that is merely another of the Big Lies that ensure our subjugation. I have lived in both worlds, the tactile, think-and-act-eye-to-eye-with-our-comrades world of geographical communities and the tragically  impermanent, hopelessly abstract world of social media -- the truth of its ephemeral nature proven beyond debate by the tragically short lifespan of the Occupy Movement. And having been part of that -- having witnessed both the sociology and the underlying technology of its collapse -- I am now convinced it is the very abstractness of the so-called "social media communities" that make them instead the absolute antithesis of community.)

And let us not forget that anything sent via social media also goes directly to one or more of the 17 secret police agencies the Empire has constructed to defend to our deaths its Capitalist emperors. Which means the one absolute rule of social media is it can achieve only what our overlords choose not to disapprove. 

Thus by murdering our ability to effectively interact (and thereby making it all the more difficult to rescue ourselves from the relentlessly approaching apocalypse), gentrification  does in slow motion precisely what the imperial war machine and its puppets do in an instant by the deliberate murder of children. 

That's how gentrification killed the Counterculture and its music, how gentrification tries to guarantee nothing like the Counterculture or its music will ever be allowed to arise again. It happened not only on the Lower East Side and at North Beach, but also to Countercultural communities in notably smaller locales such as Asheville, Provincetown and Bellingham. The Capitalists know that to stop gentrification (or even ameliorate it) might give rebellion the geographical homes it formerly had in all such places and thus again allow it communities in which to grow. That's how we know the Capitalists will always act with with the vindtctiveness they displayed in Seattle.

Anything to send the Goddess back to the chastity-belt prison in which patriarchy had confined her for so long.  

***     

WALTER BOWART AND I had been casual neighborhood acquaintances for about two years when the Memorial Day 1967 police riot in New York City's Tompkins Square Park thrust us together as temporary working-press colleagues. My photographs of the riot (click on link) played the decisive role in convincing Walter to publish the Extra of text and pictures that documented the entire atrocity. The cops had run amok, illegally arresting at least 40 people, three of whom --  a pregnant woman the Tactical Police Force night-sticked into miscarriage and two men the TPF also beat bloody --  were so badly injured they were hospitalized and shackled to their beds rather than imprisoned in the city's jails. Meanwhile neighborhood rumors claimed there had been many more arrests then the New York City Police Department admitted; the actual number was never disclosed. When mainstream-media indifference let the story die almost immediately, the need for the Extra became undeniable. 

Beyond the glaring illegality of the arrests, the criminal behavior of the NYPD remains significant today, 51 years later, for at least three reasons.

Reason One:  Even in comparison to the 1963 international incident in which vindictively white-supremacist University of Tennessee officials conspired with Knoxville's aggressively Ku Klux cops and  stubbornly segregationist newspapermen to falsely arrest and maliciously slander "forty Negroes and whites" including a Panamanian diplomat -- I'll link to that atrocity in a bit (if you can't wait,  scroll down to the section beginning "WE CANNOT GRASP") --  I had never witnessed a more glaring example of unprovoked false arrest. Nor had I ever seen  cops behave with such obvious sadism toward such obviously innocent victims. 

Thus in a sense what happened in Tompkins Square Park on Memorial Day 1967 was a prophetic prelude to the murderous police violence that defines how Neoliberal dictatorship  is now relentlessly tightening its zero-tolerance JesuNazi stranglehold on all of us, especially people of color.

The professional musicians who were playing in the park that 1967 afternoon -- as I recall there were about a dozen -- had a city-issued troubadour permit to perform there.  They were good but not great,  young performers of the caliber that in a bygone era might have made comfortable livings playing at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. But that is not to discredit the musicians' talents, which were sufficiently compelling they almost immediately gathered a sing-along audience of maybe 60 generational peers. Now the musicians were sitting contentedly at center of a comfortable slowly expanding circle of people seated on one of the ragged patches of grass that had grown from the park's mostly barren ground. This racially mixed group included not only the neighborhood's hippies but their older Beat and bohemian predecessors as well as a few of the neighborhood's indigenous Hispanic youth, all peacefully coexisting in shared enjoyment of  music.

My attention however was focused elsewhere. Tompkins Square Park  is not tiny -- it is a true square that extends exactly 3/20ths of a mile north from East 7th Street to East 10th Street and exactly the same distance west  from Avenue B to Avenue A. The park is surrounded by a black chest-high wrought-iron fence that is more a formality of design than a functional barrier. The music was happening on the Avenue A side not far inside the fence and close to its approximate latitudinal midpoint; I was on the Avenue B side photographing two friends interacting with their toddler son in one of the children's sandboxes near the 7th Street corner.

Nor was the music itself in any way unusual; in those days it seemed there was always music in the park. Performances by street musicians were as much a part of the City's  pre-gentrification ambience as wild birdsong is part of the background music of catless country living. On that police-riot afternoon it was a pleasantly eclectic mix of traditional British folk songs and folk-rock derivatives and Afro/Hispanic conga-drum music that had been indigenous to the neighborhood for so long it had become the Lower East Side equivalent of the legendary but very real  heartbeat of the forest, which unless you have uncommonly acute perception you feel as a whole-body sensation rather than a faintly audible rhythm, but which  either way assures you you're in true wilderness in much the same way constant congas tell you you're in a real City even after repetition has thoroughly muffled their beat by absorbing it into the greater urban symphony.   

What was unique to that Memorial Day musical gathering -- though only in retrospect -- was how its racial and ethnic diversity and its manifest peacefulness hinted  at a potential broadening of Countercultural aesthetic solidarity to include many more people of color, for proof of which you need only click on the "police riot" link and look at my opening photograph.

Hence when a gang of cops entered the park with the sudden intrusiveness of an invasion force, I was deeply perplexed and more than a bit alarmed; so were my companions, who rushed home with their three-year-old son to keep him out of harm's way. We three adults knew there was absolutely no justification for such a police presence. We sensed its ugly potential immediately; it was obvious in the facial expressions and body language of the cops. Long before they began bashing heads,  I knew I was witnessing the beginning of a major story. But I didn't see any other working press in the park; perhaps I had an Exclusive. As my friends were leaving I bid them farewell and refocused my attention accordingly.

Though it would take me another 48 hours to begin to verbalize it (and 51 more years to state in its present form) -- I somehow already sensed the cops were human bullets fired at us by our Capitalist overlords as lightening bolts of hatred -- hatred of our music, hatred of the Counterculture within which it was gestated and born, hatred of us as ever-more-obvious rebels against Capitalism, Abrahamic religion, patriarchy and their symbiosis in the ever-more-alarming Vietnam War malignancy of the Empire's local, state and federal governance.  

Eventually of course the government and Madison Avenue and Tin Pan Alley would awaken to their mutual interests and figure out how to kill the Counterculture with tactics that were nearly invisible but in their apparent transparency were many times more effective than truncheons and pepper gas occasionally underscored by double-ought buckshot and M2 Ball. Gunfire was alarming, especially when it produced body counts as it did at Kent State University and Jackson State College. Sneakier, our masters concluded, is always Better; they'd figure out some sneaky snakey secret slither to suppress the best of the Counterculture's music and then use proven tactics that can be traced at least as far back as Ancient Rome to co-opt the rest.

Did they succeed? You be the judge; I'll be one of the jurors to vote "yes (guilty)" in agreement with the prosecutorial contention the masters of the music market reduced the Countercultural medley either to background accompaniment for the depressing rituals of subsistence shopping or to a harsh atonal discordance I suspect expresses a sad nostalgic yearning to hear again the noise pollution generated by the stolen factories from which we the people were formerly allowed to wrest a significant degree of financial security.    

(Sorry folks, but to my ears most of the present era's popular music is about as appealing as the rasp of fingernails on chalkboard. I hear it as all shrieks and snarls of rage with absolutely no ideological,  aesthetic or poetic content beyond its [entirely justified] anger. Which is most emphatically not to belittle its significance  -- an atonal discordance I cannot doubt is [yet another] Jungian proof our individual and collective subconscious has concluded the looming apocalypse is inevitable, whether thermonuclear or environmental or both.)

***       

Reason Two: The police riot against the cultural rebels in Tompkins Square Park adds to the damning evidence of the U.S. Government's enduring love and admiration for Nazis, a terminal disease worthy of Page One coverage even now -- especially with the coup-like victory of the Trump/Pence Regime and the steadily worsening consequences of its JesuNazi triumph.

But the story of the U.S./Nazi role in the Tompkins Park Police Riot will probably never be told apart from a few infuriating facts an anonymous informant leaked to Walter. His never-revealed source was most likely an ethical, fairness-minded, exceptionally courageous protect-and-serve police officer of the sort whom today is methodically excluded from any of the local departments that are being federally militarized into increasingly Gestapo-like armies of occupation in retaliation for the 99 Percent's increasingly demonstrated fury over its reduction to serfdom and slavery. In 1967 every competent newspaper reporter had such sources. Among other things, they helped put a break on police brutality. The (permanent) prohibition of that sort of journalism today is yet another of the malign forces that facilitate the post-22-November-1963 conversion of the United States into the de facto Fourth Reich.    

As we worked on the Extra, Walter told me he had learned the police riot had been provoked by the Ukrainian Nazis who lived in the Lower East Side neighborhood immediately surrounding the park. Demonstrating the almost incomprehensible intensity of hatred and malice that defined 20th-Century Nazism and fascism  (and most assuredly still defines it today), these Nazis were enraged by Countercultural musicians making pacifist music on a war holiday and so deluged the New York City Police Department with complaints. 

If we are to understand what almost certainly happened next -- how the NYPD's upper-level chain of command was momentarily neutralized and its longstanding neighborhood anti-violence policies forcefully violated -- we need to recognize the complaining Nazis had been fanatical supporters of Hitler, the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and the genocide that inevitably followed. These were the Ukrainians who joined the Waffen-SS or the German-occupied Ukraine's version of the Gestapo and gleefully participated in Großdeutschland's signature genocides. They were  war criminals the Soviet Union would have rightfully shot as traitors and enemies of the people. But the Capitalists who own the U.S. Government have always loved the Nazis and their fascist predecessors. So ordered by its Capitalist masters, the Central Intelligence Agency clandestinely brought these Ukrainians to the U.S. and embraced them as allies in Capitalism's perpetual war against humanitarianism. 

Apparently the U.S. government was so obscenely protective of its Ukrainian Nazi allies it illegally granted them the patently illegal, unconstitutional power to momentarily command the NYPD -- as if Germany had won the war and Hitler were still being happily Zieg Heil'd in Berlin and Kiev. This was among the many probabilities Walter and I discussed at the time, but of course we could not prove it -- Seymour Hersch's exposure the CIA had illegally unleashed a domestic branch so predatory it had become a new Gestapo was seven years in the future. (Note too how this linked report strongly suggests CIA involvement in the murder of John Lennon.)

But Walter as editor finally decided to omit such speculation as "too far out." As I remember the Extra did report NYC Mayor John Lindsay's Police Commissioner Sandford Garelick was so infuriated when he learned of the atrocity taking place in Tompkins Square Park he gave up his holiday and raced to the park in the hope of stopping the police riot before it severely blemished Lindsay's reputation as a man who governed by tolerance rather than ruled by tyranny. Garelick was of course too late. One of my last photographs that day was of the commissioner angrily ousting from command the still-smirking NYPD captain who had orchestrated the riot.

Given what we know today about the CIA's illegal functions as a domestic Gestapo, who can doubt the agency's NYPD assets -- ever faithful to their Ukrainian Nazi partners -- orchestrated the entire outrage.

Closer focus, please: not only on the mass arrest of all the musicians; not only on the far messier mass arrest of all the audience members who dared protest the original arrests and joined hands in a literal sit-down strike and refused to leave their places in the patchy Tompkins Park grass and were dragged away by the cops; focus not just on the arrests themselves but on the brutality that defined them. Now think  for a moment what all this means in the context of the JesuNazi Trump/Pence present.

It means our parents and aunts and uncles and older brothers and older sisters who fought World War II have all been betrayed by the very government they were defending. Thanks to that government the Nazis have won. 

***

Reason Three: The Tompkins Park riot  was an official declaration that even in relatively tolerant Manhattan, which James Baldwin had famously hailed as Another Country (Dial Press: 1962), the United States would identify and crush aesthetic rebellion with the same weaponized malice by which it routinely suppressed any political ideology that dared oppose Capitalism's ever more boundless greed.

In other words, the Nazis our parents fought against and died and supposedly defeated in World War II were now conquering us here at home. 

Eventually Walter and I conversed enough it became obvious we each recognized the aesthetic unity that underlay the Counterculture's  superficial fragmentation into separate, often mutually hostile factions. We also discovered we were each powerfully influenced by the understanding of art as spontaneous prophecy -- the understanding first propounded by Carl Jung  and elaborated by Marshall McLuhan. We already knew we were living in the pre-apocalyptic death-house world against which Edvard Munch had warned us in his four iterations of "The Scream." Like Jung we believed "art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness"; like McLuhan we understood art as "...an Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.”

We were also, despite our notions of journalistic independence,  very much part of the Counterculture ourselves. We knew it had grown from the Beat and bohemian art movements of the previous decades. We knew it not only as the extension of an art movement, but as an art form itself -- pesumably as prophetic as Munch's paintings or any other such body of work. We assumed the Counterculture's ultimate radicalism; we believed it offered  the potential of an as-yet-undefined revolution that would be far more encompassing and therefore far more compelling than any of our species' profoundly aggrieved but hitherto always fatally vulnerable³ spasms of rebellion against the savagery of  Capitalism and the fanatical white-supremacist Christianity from which Capitalism had arisen. It seems to me we also sensed the Counterculture's potential to overthrow patriarchy itself -- the ultimate species-saving, planet-rescuing triumph hinted at in Walter's provocative and therefore useful notion of "revolution in consciousness." But we disagreed as to the Counterculture's ultimate direction.

Walter believed the Counterculture was spontaneously resurrecting First Nations traditions of gender equality,  earth-centered spirituality and ritualistic ecstasy -- as if our own bodies were animated by the reincarnated souls of the very peoples our ancestors had exterminated (and yes though he seemed as much an agnostic as I am, this was his own metaphor). Though he was surely no Marxian, he clearly recognized the ever-more-pronounced moral imbecility that sustained Capitalism's Ayn Rand malignancy and catalyzed it into apocalyptic symbiosis with the ecocidal misogyny at the core of Abrahamic religion. In keeping with the Jung/McLuhan definition of art, Walter believed the Counterculture was evolving the spiritual and socioeconomic antidotes that would counteract the deadly toxicity of Capitalism's everywhere-spewed venom and give birth to an "alternative society" that would expand by normal growth processes to take over the United States in much the same way one generation grows to replace its predecessor. So -- by presumably nonviolent evolution rather than presumptively violent revolution  -- it would  save our Mother Earth and preserve us from extinction.  

Instead, thanks to Nygard, Graves, Jung and McLuhan,  I saw the Counterculture as an instinctively produced human survival mechanism that -- bad news -- proved the apocalypse was inevitable but also -- good news -- indicated  some of our species would survive. That was the message I read into how the Counterculture was bring back not only useful First Nations lore but the Goddess herself, the latter as if to mother a racially mixed, ethnically diverse, culturally antagonistic brood of post-apocalyptic orphans into a single Earthly family.

Walter seemed opposed to the the notion of a resurgent Goddess; as I recall he felt any declared deity beyond the "Great Holy Mystery" traditionally acknowledged by First Nations folk risked co-optation into a rationale for tyranny and oppression. Again I disagreed: what is a deity but an ultimate art symbol, a microcosm of the society that produces it and the most ultimately concise statement of its joys and fears and yearnings? Viewed from that perspective, the Goddess should be as acceptable to those of us who understand her as metaphor as she is to those who regard her as objectively real.      

Meanwhile our overlords had recognized the Counterculture's potential and hastened to slay it lest it have time to evolve a unifying ideology -- or so it now seems.  Obviously what the One Percenters and their secret-police vassals feared was an already implicit hybrid of Marxism, Gaian paganism and Wicca --  precisely the coalescence of dialectical materialist ideology and alternative spirituality many of us believed was essential if we are to build enough revolutionary solidarity to save ourselves from extinction.  

Hence "Dancer" with its 602 typewritten pages of text and 47 typewritten pages of explanatory and bibliographical footnotes and all its thousands of pages of typed and scribbled notes and all but six of the thousands of photographs and manipulated prints and transparencies from which I intended to choose its 50 illustrations was burned like a witch on 1 September 1983.

The fire also destroyed the all the rest of my life's work including the notes, photographs and drawings for two other intended books. One of these would have exposed the vexing anomalies  in Pacific Northwest archaeology -- academically suppressed evidence that suggests either a First Nations culture far more astronomically sophisticated than any (white male) archaeologist has ever dared imagine -- or an extension of the prehistoric European presence that's long been postulated to have reached inland from the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes region and beyond. The other book was corner-stoned by the nearly 200 pages of journal entries that grew from  my experiences as engineer on a 96-foot purse seiner and as a member of the fishing community; it would have honored (and in some instances eulogized) the courage and skill of the men and women of the commercial fishing fleet that was based at Bellingham, Washington's Squalicum Harbor. "Dancer" however was to be the springboard by which I leapt from the realm of daily, weekly and monthly periodicals to the far more exalted realm of book authorship.

***

IF WE ARE to cleave through decades of lies and disinformation to understand what the Counterculture truly was, we must begin with the fact it was uniquely born,⁴ not from the intellectualism of some self-proclaimed revolutionary manifesto, but from the emotional yearnings expressed by an art movement. It was the child of the folk-music renaissance that had originated in the bohemianism of the 1930s and 1940s and had become, by the mid-1950s, among its most defining characteristics.

There in the relatively protective obscurity of bohemia it might have remained -- or been deliberately marginalized. But the Capitalists in those days were still mostly indifferent to the fact their premeditated profiteering could have unpredictable consequences. Nor had they yet expanded the criteria of their premeditative scheming to include today's deliberate, zero-tolerance exclusion of any word or text or image that might encourage even the most minimal rebelliousness against Capitalism's pre-apocalyptic reduction of all of us -- the entire 99 Percent -- to corporate serfdom.⁵  So in the late 1950s the masters of musical media expanded their greedy quest for ever-more-obscene profits rather than function as censors. They launched traditional folk music -- and ironically the radically anti-Capitalist, anti-Abrahamic vision so much of it expounded -- into exploding popularity.

Soon the music had evolved into an entirely new medium that at its best combined modern instrumentation with antique forms and timeless content. At its apex in the late 1960s, it seemed to be gathering its millions of fans into a separate community of our own, a sanctuary for a spontaneously radical rejection of the status quo whether theological, political, socioeconomic or sexual.

I'm not sure who originated the term "counterculture." As best I recall, we of the alternative media began using it in the mid '60s to describe our emergent community, and the mainstream media picked it up from us as they so often did in their endless efforts to hide their un-hipness.⁶ 

Eventually Theodore Roszak elevated the term from a common noun to a proper noun by writing The Making of a Counterculture  (University of California: 1969).  Roszak described the Counterculture's rebellion as "youthful opposition" to "the technocratic society." Misleading though superficially correct, his analysis seemed unable to see beyond the  ideological and biological-identity conflicts that fragmented   the Anti-Vietnam-War, Feminist, Environmentalist, Gay Rights and Back-to-the-Land movements into apparently irremediable divisiveness. Like virtually every other published analyst of the Counterculture, he overlooked (or deliberately ignored) the far more revolutionary potential of the deep and abiding aesthetic solidarity expressed by the Counterculture's music. 

Roszak was surely not alone, even amidst the Counterculture's cognoscenti. Most of the traditional knowledge by which we might have identified and claimed our own radicalism had been relentlessly suppressed by centuries of Christian theocracy. The study of folklore was forbidden even here in the (allegedly) secular United States. Yes the anti-proletarian calumny that condemned studies of Euro-American folklore as gateways to Marxism and excluded them from any government-approved  syllabi for secondary and higher public education were expressed in secular anti-Communist disguise. But we who were so assailed -- especially those of us who had served the Civil Rights Movement in the Jim Crow South -- understood our attackers were driven by the same white-supremacist Christian fanaticism that has since slithered from beneath its regional camouflage and now as JesuNazism terrorizes us all by its imposition of zero-tolerance theocracy and its headlong race toward  apocalypse.

Tragically, while our understanding included recognition of the Abrahamic vindictiveness and how it mandated the suppression of folklore and mythology, most of us did not think to focus on the suppressed material itself. Literally -- thanks to the deficits in our education -- we didn't know enough to know where to look.

That's why the aristocrats who command the Central Intelligence Agency and work at its upper echelons seem to have recognized the Counterculture's revolutionary potential before we ourselves did; they were in the main far better educated than we were. The prohibitively expensive private colleges and universities they had attended were sufficiently caste-segregated to exclude any potential opponents of patriarchy, Abrahamic religion or Capitalism; their administrators had therefore concluded it was safe to continue the very studies of British and European folklore the rest of us  had been denied. Hence the CIA apparently noticed what Roszak did not: the women in traditional balladry were powerful, independent, openly sexual and decisive -- utterly unlike the subjugated girls and women of the  togetherness 1950s.

Alarmed by the multifaceted potential of radicalism it recognized in the lyrics of traditional folk music and its rapidly evolving variants, the CIA's commanders soon (illegally) reverted to the total-surveillance methods pioneered by its Nazi German founders; with the approval of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, the CIA launched Operation Chaos. So unleashed, these Gestapo-inspired secret police agents escalated their intrusiveness to disruptive and sometimes fatal extremes probably unseen in the United States since  the white supremacists robbed African-Americans of all Reconstruction's gains. The resultant Countercultural body count -- which almost certainly includes some of its leading performers and musicians -- will no doubt forever remain classified. But the Countercultural mind, in keeping with its art-scene origins, was sufficiently perceptive to sense and and accurately identify unseen threats. Hence the Counterculture responded with a hitherto-unprecedented tsunami of entirely rational paranoia. That in turn inspired Frank Zappa's defiantly dystopian "Who Are the Brain Police?" Which brings to mind Leon Trotsky's dictum that in every gathering of three revolutionaries, there is at least one agent of the Okhrana. Obviously -- whomever the Brain Police might be -- there's no question they include the people who burned up my life's work.

***

WE CANNOT GRASP what was so implicitly revolutionary about the Counterculture's music and art without first considering the relentlessly crushing intellectual and emotional oppressiveness of U.S. society in the late '50s and earliest '60s.

The purge of Communists, socialists and intellectuals in general, which began even before World War II ended, had "cleansed" the nation any allegedly "subversive" influences. The resultant climate of fear was so overwhelming that in 1963 it ended my first marriage. Soon after 39 others and I had been falsely arrested, my wife demanded to know if I was "getting involved with Communists and stuff." When I answered "probably," she replied "then I'm leaving." We were divorced a few weeks later.  

And that is only one example of the vindictively oppressive climate that prevailed virtually everywhere in the nation. Despite constitutionally secular governance, fanatical Christians in every state had outlawed the sale of birth control to any woman who could not prove she was married. Homosexuality was everywhere a felony. Also a felony,  Interracial marriage was outlawed throughout the former Confederacy and in the states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Missouri and Oklahoma. Whether in matrimony or elsewhere, the interactions of males with females were strictly governed by biblical principles: woman an archetype of the üntermenschen, weak in body, mind and morals, allegedly protected, actually imprisoned; man the übermenschen, warrior-strong, unemotionally decisive, absolute monarch  of home and household, brutal when (provoked?) -- no archetype necessary. And public school districts, particularly in the already visibly theocratic South, routinely violated the constitutional prohibitions against forcing students of presumptively secular schools to attend religious events -- usually screaming, Bible-thumping, talking-in-tongues protestant fundamentalist revivals.

The era's popular music reflects the nation's aesthetic impoverishment: listen to "Dream Lover," (Bobby Darin);  "Earth Angel" (The Penguins);  "Sh Boom, Sh Boom" (the Crewcuts);  "Come and Go With Me" (The Del Vikings);  "Little Bitty Pretty One" (Thurston Harris); "And Then He Kissed Me" (The Crystals); "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" (The Shirellles);  or "Speedo" (The Cadillacs).

That was the 1950s youth culture; the adult culture was many times more barren and repugnantly hypocritical, the ethos exemplified by I Love Lucy, Father Knows Best, The Price Is Right and the "champagne music" of Lawrence Welk.

Most of the films were just as bad -- or worse:  horse-opera westerns that celebrated the genocidal extermination of First Nations peoples; recruiting-office warsterns approved by the imperial war machine as war-is-good USA-USA-USA propaganda; Abrahamic godsterns approved by the religious authorities for their celebrations of hypocritical holiness; sexless lovesterns that dramatized female submissiveness;  comedies that were funny only if you had the sadistic humor of a fascist. (Confession: I watched dozens of mostly moronic movies because they offered escape from familial dysfunction at a cheap price, a dime if you were 12 or under, otherwise a quarter, though from all my movie-going childhood and pre-military youth [1948-1959] I remember only five films: The Wizard of OZ [of course]; She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [which horse-cavalry-veteran relatives recommended because it was the first Hollywood film to show the real-world horse-soldier protocol of an hour afoot to rest the horses for every two hours in the saddle];  The Roots of Heaven [which I saw thrice, not only because I was in lust with Juliet Greco -- who could not be? -- but because it was such a fine story, maybe the first real ecology movie ever made], The Horse Soldiers [the Hollywood version of Grierson's Raid]; and of course On the Beach [at the end of which I was hard pressed to hide my tears from my girlfriend].    

Such were the circumstances of the nykulturny⁷ nation that celebrated huge monstrously gas-guzzling shark-finned automobiles, 15-cent-per-gallon gasoline and 14-cent-per-pound ground beef as conclusive proof it dwelt in paradise. (Never mind the mandatory Home Ec and Typing for all 9th and 10th Grade girls or the number of wombs fertilized by teenaged lovers who foolishly trusted flimsy 25-cent gas-station condoms because they had no alternative; it was a felony for any storekeeper to knowingly sell any sort of birth control to anyone who couldn't prove they were married.) 

Dion and the Belmonts undoubtedly immortalized far better than anyone before or since the rubber-prohibition-era's  adolescent obsessions: "Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love."

Sheb Wooley's "Purple People Eater" tried to satirize and belittle our never-to-be-spoken-aloud fears of thermonuclear annihilation and instead provided us with an enduring symbol of the era's oppressive shallowness.

At the same time⁸  Nevil Schute's consciousness-wrenching novel On the Beach and its film version not only verbalized those fears but shouted them loud enough to be heard everywhere on the planet. Fifty-four years after the fact, the final moments of that film remain the most frighteningly mournful ending Hollywood has ever released.   

But then as if to rescue us from our teenage angst and the brain-deadening conformity of Capitalist society, Harry Belafonte had already come to remind us there is a very different world beyond football and after-game sock hops and pregnancy scares. He did it by singing us a Haitian prayer of thanksgiving called  "Merci Bon Dieu":

"All the children that were hungry are going to eat." 

Cynthia Gooding sang of "Katherine Jaffrey":  

"She was twice married in a day
 Ere she cast off her gown." 

Ewan MacColl  sang of "Eppie Morrie":

"She would nae be a bride a bride
 She would nae be a bride"

Susan Reed sang "Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair:^.9

"His lips are something wondrous fair
The purest eyes and the bravest hands
I love the ground on where he stands..."

MacColl sang again, this time the 800-year-old ballad titled  "Thomas Rhymer," to whom an only minimally disguised Great Goddess  had given access to the world's poetic wisdom: 

"Syne they came on to a garden green,
And she pu'd an apple frae a tree:
'Take this for thy wages, True Thomas
It will gi' ye the tongue that can never lie.'”

Then a decade later Grace Slick wrote and sang us "Triad," which at the time, 1968,  was an astonishingly courageous, breathtakingly revolutionary public revelation of the multi-orgasmic female's biologically instinctive but brutally long-suppressed  preference for polyamory:

"I don't really see
Why can't we go on as three
We love each other-it's plain to see
There's just one answer comes to me
Sister, lovers, water brothers
And in time-maybe others
So you see, what we can do is to try something new..."

Jacki McShee sang "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme" a old traditional testament to female independence resurrected as a feminist anthem:

"A woman is a branchy tree
And man's a clinging vine
And from her branches carelessly
He'll take what he can find."

Tim Buckley wrote and sang "Phantasmagoria for Two," a modern version of the ancient dialogue between poet and Muse that exemplified the thoughtful  male's reaction to his evolving role:

"I can plainly see that our paths have changed
our sands are shifting around
Need I beg to you for one more day
To find our lonely love."

And now as if to absolve us of whatever few doubts we might yet harbor about whose resurrection was implicit in the Counterculture comes Maddy Prior to sing us "The Ballad of the Fabled Hare": 

"I am ruled by the moon, I move under her mantle.
I am the symbol of her moods, of rebirth cycle.
I am companion to the gods, I can conceive while I'm pregnant.
I call the dawn and spring in, I am the advent.
I bring life from water in a cup that must be broken.
I whisper to the bursting egg, I'm Aestre's token."

***  

INTUITION -- THE STRONGEST, most compelling intuition I have ever known¹⁰ -- focused my attention on the folk revival. According to our Capitalist masters and their scientific vassals, human society was embarking on a epic of technological brilliance and material comfort unequaled in our species' 200,000-year existence. Why then were we of the English-speaking world resurrecting folklore and folk music? It was our oldest literature and most primitive knowledge; the anomaly seemed obvious. The question it compelled me to ask felt not only vital but mandatory.  

For as long as I can remember, I have been blessed with insatiable curiosity about our Mother Earth -- particularly her science and the archaeology, anthropology and history of her human children. Had I been able to afford the education, I would have become a scholar, though  it would have  been damn hard for me to choose a single discipline. I was and remain deeply interested in history, sociology, anthropology, folklore, mythology and archaeology. I was equally drawn to the natural sciences,  especially botany and geology. Even now at age 78 I think of myself as a perpetual student. But I knew before I was out of high school it would take a genuine miracle to provide me enough money to obtain a scholar's education. So  I decided to become a journalist instead. I taught myself to write -- and think -- in the requisite inverted-pyramid mode. That was in early 1955, shortly before I turned 15; by November of 1956 I was able to convince Managing Editor Charles Clapp and Sports Editor Bob Host of The Grand Rapids Herald to hire me as a copy boy and a sports stringer. A few months later, when The Herald began sinking into oblivion, Sports Editor Clank Stoppels welcomed me as a stringer¹¹ to The Grand Rapids Press. During the summer of 1956 I worked in the sports department full time; I would become a part-timer when September summoned me back to high school for my senior year, and then after graduation I would in all probability be promoted from stringer to staff writer.  Instead -- so much for optimism -- my maternal grandparents terminated my tenure at The Press by evicting me from their home. This was in late August; it forced me to return to my father's family in Tennessee, But Assistant Sports Editor Ben Byrd soon hired me as a stringer at The Knoxville Journal. Though my grandparents' animosity ended forever my plans to attend the University of Michigan while working for a Press affiliate in Ann Arbor, thanks to Byrd and The Journal I had at least been able to continue gaining significant reporting experience. Now too the often-pointed curiosity that had sometimes gotten me in serious trouble as a child and a teenager was protected and encouraged by the imprimatur of a press card, which in turn was teaching me to trust my intuition.     

Nevertheless, but for a fellow student at the University of Tennessee, "Dancer" would probably have remained nothing more than a typewritten note to myself in the annual  journal I had begun keeping in 1956 and now by 1959 had enlarged into a catch-all for whatever writing and photography I did beyond the immediate demands of journalism and classroom work. The note was a reminder that if I somehow managed to buy the requisite education, I should look into the folk renaissance and see if I could figure out what it might be trying to tell us. So it remained until I became friends with an art major named Mary Uhlmann, who  described to me in detail Holger Olof Nygard's  still-controversial hypothesis that at least some of the traditional ballads collected by Sir Walter Scott during the late 1700s and early 1800s and a half- century later by Francis James Child  had originated as pre-Christian religious liturgies. Now I wondered: might traditional balladry's pagan origins explain its already obvious evocative power?

Greco-Roman sources tell us the rituals of pagan Europe were mostly invocations of the Goddess and her gods to enhance crop fertility,  protect her peoples and lands and curse those who were their enemies, particularly the patriarchal invaders. Herodotus suggests inhaling the smoke of burning hemp -- marijuana -- was among their main sacraments. The Roman accounts say the knowledge of how to direct these rites and chant their liturgies was mandatory for pre-Christian bards, who were either members of a  Druidical sub-order or a separate, companion order of equal prestige and power. The bards were also oral historians; they kept the people's rituals and historical epics alive despite the near-total destruction of written records that occurred during Western Europe's post-Roman reversion to tribalism. For the next 700 years at least, the region's primary means of preserving knowledge was oral transmission from generation to generation, aided by the mnemonic devices melody and rhyme.

In all probability these bards were the grandparents and great-grandparents of the women and men who by Medieval times had begun calling themselves minstrels.

Robert Graves (The White Goddess; Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 1966), provides Nygard's work an important cornerstone by describing how the advent of Christianity forced the minstrels -- often on pain of death -- to edit pagan material out of their songs.  Other sources tell us  the minstrels were targets of Christian malevolence until their value as court entertainers secured them the armed protection of the feudal nobility. (Even then, familiarity with balladry was part of the evidence by which women were  persecuted as witches from about 1400 well into the so-called "Enlightenment.") Sometimes, as in the opening verse of "Fabled Hare," the minstrels would inject the Devil into a story to give it a morality-tale disguise. Mostly what they did was change the names of the deities to secular names in common use amongst their audiences. The Goddess became Janet or Eleanor or Margaret or Eppie Morrie or Katherine Jaffrey; the Star Lord became Jack Orion; the Harvest Lord became John Barleycorn.  One of the best examples of this editing process is "Coventry Carol, which  despite the song's alleged  600-year-old origin in biblical deception is apparently much older and as an example of its evocative power is becoming -- as I suspect Joan Baez intended when she recorded it in 1965 --  a eulogy for the world's genocidally murdered and abused children. Christianizing it required changing only one word: "O sisters two," an obvious reference to the Triple Goddess from whom the Christians thieved the trinity, became "O sisters too," perhaps merely one nun speaking to the rest of her convent-mates. But the archetypal choreography of the stories remained the same; they portrayed one or another aspects of the the eternal dance of the Goddess with her gods (or of nuclei with electrons) that underlies all being.  

Nygard himself, who died in 2015, was for many years the professor of English and folklore at Duke University (see especially his work on "The Ballad of Heer Halewijn"); Nygard's conclusions are supported not only by the arguments Graves first expounded in the original (1948) edition of The White Goddess. but by a succession of other source materials including texts by Erich Neumann, Joseph Campbell,  Sir James Frazer, Marija Gimbutas and Alexander Marshack.  All of these sources were repeatedly cited in "Dancer."

But I would not discover the Graves connection  until several other journalists and I were struggling to comprehend what we had witnessed on Easter 1967 while covering the astonishing "Human Be-In"¹¹ that filled the vast Sheep Meadow of New York City's Central Park with an officially estimated 20,000 dancing, singing, chanting, marijuana-smoking and LSD-tripping celebrants.  The date was 30 March --  my 27th birthday. As a consequence of our what-the-fuck-did-we-just-see conversation, a colleague brought me a copy of  The White Goddess.  Reading it, I soon began to recognize the aesthetic solidarity evidenced by the Counterculture's music. By the end of that summer I was contemplating the obvious parallels between the Counterculture's be-ins and rock festivals and the great Midsummer festivals known to have taken place in the Middle Ages and presumed to have begun thousands of years earlier.

I no longer doubted I knew what the story was. The folk renaissance was resurrecting the Great Goddess, patriarchy's ultimate enemy.

Now, today in 2018, the fate of the Counterculture demonstrates how ignorance is by far our most devastating form of sensory deprivation. Had we known what we were about, we might have defined ourselves forcefully enough to guarantee our own survival. Instead our masters weaponized our induced ignorance of folklore into the vacuum that sucked the Counterculture to its destruction. Since then the Counterculture's radical potential is easily belittled or denied not only  because it had never been allowed to expand beyond its aesthetic origins, but because it had only begun to recognize and explore its aesthetic solidarity.  It was exterminated because our better-educated overlords  recognized its still-gestating radicalism even before we did -- which is surely one of the more bitter ironies of recent history.

Let Jefferson Airplane's prophetic  "Wooden Ships" (1969) be its eulogy.  No song has ever better expressed the Counterculture's  innermost yearnings: 

"Sail away where the wind blows sweet and young birds fly
Take a sister by her hand. 
Lead her far from this barren land..." 

***              

Now About "Famous Flower"and Its Patriarchy-Subverting Content

I TRUST THE above introduction adequately explains the personal history that prompted me to respond as I did to Kate King and her analysis of "The Famous Flower of Serving Men" and how I acquired the knowledge of traditional balladry in general. I apologize for its length; it is a piece of writing that would not let me stop until it was twice as long as it is now, which means I had to set aside (but not destroy) a lot of good writing, much  of which I will publish here later in small installments as addenda to this work.  And yes I know I linked to "Famous Flower" at the very beginning of this piece. Old I am; feeble-minded I am not (at least not yet). But that opening link was a few thousand words ago, for which again my apology though it is without regrets.    

Normally I am extremely reluctant to comment on YouTube music threads; as best as I can remember, "Famous Flower" is only the third such thread I have posted on since I first went online in 1999. My reluctance is a reaction to the fact that no matter the excellence of YouTube music, its accompanying dialogues are for the most part dismaying reminders of the ignorance and anti-intellectualism that increasingly define Moron Nation and illustrate how and why the Empire's weaponized stupidity has become our planet's doomsday machine. But once in a very rare while someone posts a genuinely compelling remark, as did Ms. King on the thread of Martin Carthy's near-perfect rendition of this ancient and haunting Scots ballad.  Responding to an obviously honest inquiry by another member of the online audience, Ms. King shared knowledge that once might have characterized her as a Wise Woman. Quoth she:

“And the white hart, a white deer, and the dove, are magical creatures. The dove represents the spirit of the murdered husband, and in folk tales white harts always point to some deeper truth when seen in the hunt. In the story the white hart leads the hunting king to the spot in the forest where the murder took place, and the the dove comes and sings about the murder. The song is based in a ballad from the area between England and Scotland - 'the borders' - where there was much violence and murder and cattle raiding through the centuries."

To which, sharing some of the knowledge that birthed "Dancer" -- knowledge that only a couple of centuries ago might have characterized me as a Cunning Man (and possibly gotten Ms. King and I both burned alive as Witches) – I replied in now-much-revised detail:

“The Famous Flower of Serving Men” is most often described as just another old-time murder ballad with mythic overtones. While these descriptions are accurate as far as they go, there is much more to this particular song. Listen closely to the lyrics, for the text of which go here. Note the additional relevant information, including the fact that in the oldest versions of the song, which have been reliably traced to 1656, the Famous Flower and the King are wed. Remember too the probability -- based on the seemingly universal forms of pre-literate ritual -- such lyrics were originally orally preserved scripts to folk plays acted out in ritual dance – rites the invading patriarchs (first Romans, then Christians) oon forbade as subversive and heretical.

Above all else note the independence and power of Fair Eleanor, the once-and-future heroine who is first victim, then -- as a result of disguising herself as "Sweet William" and becoming the king's chamberlain -- the victor over her assailant.  To honor and invoke the Great Goddess while simultaneously concealing her true identity from the sadistically murderously churchmen  -- who because of their caste and its haughtiness and misogynistic bigotry were as ignorant of and hateful toward indigenous European culture as their white-supremacist descendants would be towards First Nations culture -- the minstrels who disguised this song chose for its heroine a name that means shining light or bright one.  The implicit reference to the primary Goddess-symbol of the full moon was probably obvious to all save the dogma-blinded Christians.

The academic sources I cited in the prefatory text above would have no doubt recognized these connections immediately and cited Fair Eleanor's womanly power and independence as additional conclusive  evidence of the ballad's pre-Christian, anti-patriarchal origins. As Scott observed, pre-Christian Northern Europe was far more  gender-egalitarian than the human society of his era or even of ours today: 

"Neither are those prophetesses to be forgotten, so much honoured among the German tribes, that, as we are assured by Tacitus, they rose to the highest rank in their councils by their sup-posed supernatural knowledge, and even obtained a share in the direction of their armies. This peculiarity in the habits of the North was so general, that it was no unusual thing to see females, from respect to their supposed views into futurity, and the degree of divine inspiration which was vouchsafed to them, arise to the degree of HAXA, or chief priestess, from which comes the word Hexe, now universally used for a witch; a circumstance which plainly shows that the mythological system of the ancient natives of the North had given to the modern language an appropriate word for distinguishing those females who had intercourse with the spiritual world.  It is undeniable that these Pythonesses were held in high respect while the pagan religion lasted; but for that very reason they became odious so soon as the tribe was converted to Christianity."

Nor should we overlook the pre-Christian legacy of sexual tolerance subtly endorsed by the gender transformations common to a great many ballads, in the instance of "Famous Flower" by a woman who disguises herself as a man and a minstrel (whether male or female) who sings both female and male roles.

***          

"Famous Flower" is therefore much more than just a ballad; it is a traditional folk song that is an exceptionally well preserved example of the medium at its apex.  Its form -- particularly the hypnotic resonance of its melody and rhythm -- suggests it is also what was known in olden times as a Lay of Magic, an epic poem sometimes many mesmerizing hours long that is sung and chanted (and often danced) to weave and lay an irresistible spell whether curse or blessing.

Reasoning from information set forth by Nygard, Graves and several other sources, I strongly suspect the poetry-egg from which “Famous Flower” hatched was most likely laid and nested sometime during the prehistoric ages of patriarchal genocidal warfare against all Peoples of the Goddess -- the original, matrifocal (if not matriarchal) inhabitants of our Planet Earth.  That ongoing war continues today as our species' longest and most vicious conflict. Its duration forever disproves the nonsensical, demented, deluded, utterly spurious, ultimately suicidal notion "the arc of the moral universe...bends toward justice." In bitter fact, any properly unbiased study  proves that if our "moral universe" arcs in any direction at all, it is ever-more-steeply toward the permanent imposition of zero-tolerance subjugation that is our overlords' response to the  thermonuclear and/or environmental apocalypse we now know ensures our descendants will curse the parents who brought them to life amidst the horrors of global extinction.        

Obviously the looming apocalypse is patriarchy's ultimate fulfillment. To the more knowledgeable amongst those of us slated to be its victims, the forthcoming apocalypse proves the elevation of male over female was our species' one and only truly “unnatural act.”  We were seduced by talking serpents, loquacious burning weeds and the appearance of fiery wheels over the desert; their voices urged us to ignore the fact all mammalian life originates in wombs, which in a rational world would define females as the dominant gender; the same seductive voices goaded us into all the centuries of violence made inevitable by how male supremacy -- that "unnatural act" again --flies in the face of biology.  

Gimbutas tells us patriarchy began five or six thousand years ago with invasions that subjugated nearly all of Africa and Asia and the non-Celtic realms of Europe. It triumphed with the post-Norman-Conquest subjugation of the Celts and the near-total extermination of the North and South American First Nations peoples. Granted omnipotence by Capitalism's endless expansion of ever-more tyrannical technology and compelled by the morally imbecilic greed and sadism of its overlords and the equally sadistic religious dogma of its Moron Nation masses, patriarchy and its offspring  now openly court ecological ruin and thermonuclear apocalypse, actively seeking not only the suicidal destruction of ourselves but the reduction of our Mother Earth to a bug planet.  In such times as these, with ever more of the population weighed down to desperation with pre-apocalyptic depression, it's no wonder the advent of patriarchy is an event more and more people are coming to believe was the intergalactic forerunner of the smallpox-infected blankets with which our recent ancestors genocidally poisoned so many First Nations people.  What but some technologically superior but nevertheless hideously insectoid species might  benefit from a planet so trashed?

In any case it seems "Famous Flower" is  both blessing and ward simultaneously. Because of the dynamics of its conflict I would reason it originated in one of the earliest battles  of the Celtic World's  ongoing but seemingly doomed resistance to patriarchy.  By the line "they couldn't do to me no harm," Fair Eleanor evokes a riddle: why or how was she so protected? The only plausible answer identifies her as the (immortal) Goddess, disguised by one of several names that describe her in innumerable other ballads that during the earliest Medieval centuries were cleverly disguised by unspoken riddles  -- as in who is Fair Eleanor?  -- to protect the minstrels and their audiences from the ever-more-murderous eyes of the Church but nevertheless retain the power of invocation.  Notice also how "the ladies took to their fans and smiled" -- that is, hid their grins behind the ornate folding fans carried by aristocratic women in summer -- which strongly hints they had known all along  the Famous Flower's true identities whether human or cosmic.

Though much of the ancient liturgy was seasonal, as befits an agricultural economy, I can't imagine any specific season for which "Famous Flower" might have been ritualistically appropriate. Its reference to hunting suggests autumn and therefore Samhain. But another element -- "four and 20 ladies playing at the ball" -- suggests the start of summer at Beltain  (1 May).  Thus "Famous Flower"  appears to have no defining calendric connection. Could it then have originated as some sort of dark parable to warn against the violence we moderns euphemistically call "familial dysfunction"?  I don't know. Perhaps someone whose scholarship is more recent than mine might have the answer. 

***        

IN MANY OTHER such ballads, as for example in Sandy Denny's thealogically¹² restored “Tam Lin" by Fairport Convention, subtly feminist lyrics implicitly identify the singer's voice as both that of Tam Lin and the Goddess quite early in the ballad's dialogue:

"Why come ye to Carter Haugh¹² without command from me?"
"I'll come and go, young Janet says, and ask no leave of thee."

Janet -- ironically meaning "gift from God" (and therefore probably deliberate bardical satire) -- is another of the names by which Medieval ballad-riddlers routinely disguised the Goddess from the churchmen. An English version of "Tam Lin" names her "Lady Margaret"; Margaret means pearl, which to those who are learned in lore is an another obvious  lunar reference.    

For comparison, also for their exemplary value, two other variants of "Tam Lin" are here and here. The former is Ewan MacColl's superb performance of its (present-day) traditional Scots original. The latter, by S. J. Tucker and Heather Dale, dramatically typifies for modern listeners how it might have sounded as ancient ritual; picture it performed not on an electrified stage but on some moonlit hill topped by standing stones wreathed by the intoxicating smoke of burning hemp and danced around by an entire community of people, women, children and men alike.      

Other resurrected ballads that evidence similar pagan origins include "Willie's Lady" (an obstetrical lay?);  "Jack Orion," which illustrates why one should never rape a minstrel's lover; and "Bonny Swans,"  Loreena McKennitt's variant of an ancient lay that seems to reassure us efforts to suppress the Goddess will always fail; murder her and she becomes a harp that will play untouched by any human hand and curse her murderer. This exquisitely haunting ballad exists in many European languages and has many names  including  "Binnorie" and "Two Sisters."  Another celebration of femaleness, its pagan origins  evidenced  by both its form and content is the traditional Irish "Fill-Iú Oro Hú Ó"; an English translation is in the discussion thread.

Too bad the resurrection of the Goddess is not publicly celebrated here as it is throughout Western Europe. I cannot doubt that if it were, it would be that much easier for us to build the solidarity we so desperately need if we are to rescue our species and our Mother Earth from the JesuNazi savagery of the Capitalists and their vassals. 

Meanwhile let us assuage the horrific uncertainties of the present with a possibility suggested by our past: in the folk renaissance, we of the Counterculture invoked the Great Goddess as our minstrel forebears did. We did so mostly unwittingly; few us had any inkling of the power preserved in the music we embraced. Yet it seems that in response the Goddess answered, revealing herself even to those who had no idea of her identity.  Perhaps -- since it now is clear only a miracle can save us from the JesuNazis' double-pronged apocalypse --  she will in her mercy show herself again, this time undeniably.

So mote it be.      
__________________

¹A ballad is by definition a poem or a song that tells a story.

²As far as I know, Walter Bowart himself coined the phrase "revolution in consciousness" by which the Counterculture would later describe itself.

³One of the most formative elements of the Counterculture was the nationwide conviction -- brutally reinforced by Capitalism's never-ending efforts to purge the United States of even the most innocuous elements of humanitarian consciousness -- that the atomic bomb had rendered ideology itself irrelevant. Forty-four years later that same conclusion -- now eternally preserved by the nation's ever-expanding anti-intellectualism -- would destroy the Occupy Movement by obstructing all its efforts to achieve ideological solidarity.

⁴To my knowledge, no political movement in all the 250-thousand years of human history has ever been born from aesthetics alone.

⁵Our ever-worsening reduction to corporate serfdom and/or prison slavery and the genocidal intent evidenced by the One Percent's efforts to destroy the already broken remnants of the socioeconomic safety net  are direct consequences of the Powell Memo, the Mein Kampf of post-New-Deal Capitalism.

⁶Though I wouldn't swear to it, I think the first time I encountered the term "counterculture" was in a Village Voice report -- or perhaps in Bowart's  East Village Other -- probably in 1966 or 1967, maybe as early as 1965.  

⁷Nekulturny is a Russian word that means literally "without culture";  in Russia proper and the much larger realm of Russian influence, it is the gravest of insults.  

⁸These songs are not presented in the order they were released but rather, from memory, in the approximate order I discovered them during my teens. 

⁹I first heard "Black Is the Color" in 1959; Mary Uhlmann, the UT student who introduced me to Nygard's work, was a skilled guitarist and evocative singer blessed with a Sandy Denny voice,  and she often performed the song as a personal declaration to her lover. Sixty years later I still consider it the most exquisitely beautiful love song in the English language

¹⁰Journalistic intuition is close kin to Female Intuition, distinguishable from it only by the fact many journalists are not biologically female. But neither I nor any other member of the drinking press I ever knew was troubled by the sneering accusation ours was a "female skill." Though it's undoubtedly true the best journalism -- journalism that rises to art -- comes from those of us who embrace that femaleness of perception regardless of our sexual preference. That type of (maximum caliber)  perception, by the way, is why the Capitalists and the Christians hate all artists; they are terrified we might map out a new escape route from under patriarchy, and they despise us accordingly.

¹¹Midway through the Be-In, a journalistic colleague, groping for the description he would later write, said the event made him think of the “re-enactment of a medieval fair.” But I said “no, it's not medieval, it's a helluva lot older than that – in fact it's older than god,” with chills and gooseflesh as I said the last three words.  Then another colleague smiled sagely, said “I have a book for you” and two or three days later brought to my East 5th Street apartment a dogeared paperback copy of The White Goddess. Its contents seemed an answer to Walter Bowart's question: the Counterculture was the spontaneous, mostly unwitting fulfillment of the prediction Graves had written 25 years earlier: “The Return of the Goddess.” Older then god indeed. For more on the Be-In, go here, then scroll down to Part 4.  

¹²Haugh is defined by Oxford  as "a piece of flat alluvial land by a river, forming part of the floor of the river valley." Merriam-Webster says it is "a low-lying meadow by the side of a river." But the ballad scholars I studied for "Dancer" say it is a "sacred forest," and a scholarly individual I knew long ago claimed one of his literature professors identified "hough" as Saxon word for stone circle, a place such as the Callanish Stones of Scotland, which (as is also strongly suggested by “Famous Flower's” references to tacitly ritualistic stone), could have been the original venue of both that ballad  and "Tam Lin."

Blessed be.

LB/24 June-16 August 2018, with ongoing revisions as the details of the apocalypse -- which is now undeniably upon us -- become ever more apparent.

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