In Oak I expressed the notion that magic has forsaken Ojai's Upper Valley. It had undoubtedly existed, prehistorically, within Awhay, the Chumash village formerly located on the south side of State Highway 150, east of Sulphur Mountain Road, and at other less permanent Indian settlements scattered along the valley's creeks and within its oak meadowlands.
This magic, dispensed in ceremonies and rituals overseen by the Chumash 'antap - tribal elders skilled in the practices of time-keeping, spiritual vision questing and healing - pervaded the local Native American sense of the world. So it was, that for the ten or twelve thousand years that Homo sapiens occupied this land, up until shortly after the arrival of the Spanish at the very end of the eighteenth century, we can speculate that Upper Ojai was singularly experienced, understood, and revered, as a deeply magical place.
But as I suggested in that post, this magic has been well and truly blown out of the tailpipes of the Harley Davidsons that now careen along the highway which runs along this fertile valley floor. Before that, it was eviscerated by the put-put of model T's and by all the other appurtenances of Western civilization that have spread across the land over the last two hundred and fifty years. It has disappeared, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, in the storm we call progress. It has been reduced to a nothingness by the relentless homogenization of time (to borrow another Benjamin trope) in which every moment is equivalent and empty of meaning in contrast to the cyclical, ritual and ceremonial time of pre-modernity that had pertained in Ojai, and indeed all of California, up until the moment of European colonization.
While it was the science that emerged during the Enlightenment that underpinned the logistics of the Iberian colonization project, its Christian emissaries represented a highly reactionary, distinctly pre-Enlightenment institution. It was the rites and customs of the church, its liturgy, that Spain's Franciscan friars attempted to impose upon their subject population. This imposition included a ritualized Christian calendar which possessed a panoply of magic - in which the transubstantiation of sacralized bread and wine into the body of Christ was preeminent. This magic meant little, however, to a profoundly disrupted Native society whose settlements, along with their hunting and gathering lands, had been usurped by the Padres for their Missions, gardens, and grazing lands. The complex, life-giving relationship of the Chumash with their natural environment was upended - leaving the deracinated Indians little choice but to offer themselves up as slaves within the Mission system.
The frame of the world that the Franciscans brought with them to California was profoundly medieval. The sustainability of the Missions was based on Italian practices of agriculture that had existed before the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, where all labor was provided by local, indigenous peasants acting as serfs. In California, the Franciscans corralled its indigenous people both as souls to be saved and as serfs to labor on the Mission's lands. As the salvation project foundered, the capture of indigenes, for their unpaid labor, intensified.
Although Franciscan hegemony in Southern California was relatively short-lived, it nevertheless created the conditions for the genocidal destruction of the local tribal bands. In 1821, Mexico won independence from Spain and by 1834, the Franciscan infrastructure began to be secularized and its lands distributed as spoils of victory to Mexican grandees, generals, and political functionaries. There followed a period of Mexican rule characterized by the establishment of vast cattle ranches on the newly acquired tracts and it was here that Native Americans found employment as ranch-hands - under conditions of serfdom only marginally preferrable to life in the Missions. Then, in the fifty years after the establishment of California as a free, non-slavery state under the compromise of 1850, the Chumash people, and their magic infused language and culture, almost disappeared from the face of the earth in the vicious pogroms of slaughter, starvation, and enslavement that had become endemic throughout the state.
In 1884, Helen Hunt Jackson's novel, Ramona, was published to raise awareness of the plight of indigenous Californians in an attempted echo of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, 1852, which had contributed so greatly to popular anti-slavery sentiment. Instead, her work was misconstrued as further evidence of 'The Romance of the Ranchos' and, like her earlier nonfiction book, Century of Dishonor, 1881, it would have little impact on the fate of the indigenous population in California. Despite the work of the legendary linguist and anthropologist, J.P. Harrington, who assiduously documented moribund Indian cultures between 1907 and the early 1950's, and that of academics such as Alfred Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer, the rich traditions of the American Indian were largely erased from the popular imagination until the widespread political and social ferment of the 1960's and 1970's, led to a proliferation of radicalized Indian organizations highlighted by an occupation of Alcatraz Island. Although initiated in Northern California, these events reverberated in the archetypal Southern Californian Hippie town of Ojai. Stripped of its revolutionary liberation ethos and its implicit demands for a return of ancestral lands, a fascination with the residual incandescence of Indian culture presented itself to this sleepy rural town, and across America, as an opportunity to inject some magic into young white lives made pallid by consumerism and political and social alienation.
In 1972, the British sociologist Colin Campbell developed the concept of the 'cultic milieu' to explain incidental communities of truth seekers testing systems of alternative knowledge, spirituality, and artistic expression. Situated within a valley formed between the magnificent peaks of the Santa Ynez Range and the heavily oaked slopes of the Sulphur Mountain Ridge, Ojai exudes the sacredness of the natural world. As such, the area has long been considered a vortex of spiritual awakening. It was this psychic allure that drew Theosophists to establish their Krotona community in 1924, when their original settlement in Beechwood Canyon, Los Angeles, was threatened by increasing development in Hollywood. Founded in 1875 by the Russian e'migre', Helena Blavatsky, who claimed to be a 'missionary of ancient knowledge', Theosophy was based on ideas of universal brotherhood, the equivalence of all major religions in their seeking of spiritual truth, and the occult transmission of information from ancient masters, or Mahatmas, via the 'astral plane'.
In 1889, Annie Besant, the divorced wife of an Anglican vicar, newly liberated to circulate amongst London's upper-middle class bohemian society, published a review of Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, which laid out the tenets of Theosophy. Shortly afterwards, having met with an ailing Blavatsky, she published her pamphlet, Why I became a Theosophist. Adopted by Blavatsky as her heir apparent, she travelled to India as President of the Theosophical Society In 1893.
In southern India, she joined Charles Leadbetter who had been instructed, over the astral plane, to search for the Society's 'World Leader'. On a lonely beach in the city of Madras (now Chennai), Leadbetter espied the ethereal, prepubescent Krishnamurti who was bathing in the ocean, and declared that he was to be the vessel for the coming of Krishna, Lord of the World. Adopted by Besant and Leadbetter, Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya were sent to England in the years before WW1, to complete their educations. Nitya successfully attended Cambridge University while the otherworldly K, as he was by then known, repeatedly failed the Oxford entrance exam.
In 1922, both men were invited to Ojai by a wealthy Theosophical family in the attempt to cure Nitya's terminal tuberculosis. That year, sitting beneath a pepper tree on McAndrew Road, K began to receive the Holy Spirit in a racked and tortuous process that lasted many days and nights. He emerged, declaring,
I am the lover and the very love itself. I am the saint, the adorer, the worshipper, and the follower. I am God.
Some seven years later, deeply conflicted by his role as the Messiah, Krishnamurti renounced the Theosophical Society and the Order of the Star, which served to promote his teachings, and announced that,
Truth is a pathless land " Truth being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along any particular path " I do not want followers, and I mean this.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
