Magic

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 émigré, 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.

Nevertheless, for the rest of his life, K continued to speak around the world, explain his philosophy in numerous books and audio tapes, and visit Ojai - the place where he believed he had been filled with the Holy Spirit -on an almost annual basis until his death here, in 1986.

The early presence of Theosophists, and Krishnamurti’s regular gatherings beneath the oaks of Ojai, between 1922 and 1985, formed the foundation of the town’s cultic milieu. Subsequently, the exploration of alternative spiritual paths, the practice of alternative health modalities of body and mind, as well as a long-established connection to L.A.’s film industry creatives, have built upon this foundation. Within this cultic milieu, there also remains a connection to the indigenous people through a continuation of local shamanic traditions, echoes of the effulgent hippie era, and the presence of Chumash tribal members in the valley.

Magic requires a supportive environment in which to do its work. Despite the strong proclivity towards enchantment shown by the sub-set of Ojai’s population that forms its cultic milieu, residual magic that might linger in the valley is vitiated under the oppressive weight of modernity. This condition was diagnosed by Max Weber in 1917, when he suggested, “The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.” The ‘Disenchantment of the Modern World’ now constitutes a significant academic trope.

Michael Salen, in Modernity and Enchantment, 2006, suggests that “pre-modern wonders and marvels have been demystified by science, spirituality has been supplanted by secularism, spontaneity has been replaced by bureaucratization, and imagination has been supplanted by instrumental reason.” Ojai, like much of the world, is now entirely removed from those ‘wonders and marvels’ which were found embedded in occasions of communal transcendence that characterized societies in the West prior to the Enlightenment - the era that initiated modernity.

The wonder of California is that it remained in a pristine pre-modern condition until 1769, when it was first sundered by the arrival of the Spanish, despite earlier coastal incursions initiated in the sixteenth century, in voyages led by Cortes and Cabrillo and by the British sea-captain, Francis Drake. But four decades of Franciscan assault, backed by squads of Spanish soldiers marshalled under Governor Don Pedro Fages, then the arrival of Californios (civilian settlers of Spanish and Mexican descent) and finally, the American takeover of California, finally led to its destruction.

Most of the three hundred thousand men who had arrived in Northern California for the Gold Rush quickly fanned out across the State, wildly seeking profit, after production collapsed in the early 1850’s. Lacking community, and unconstrained by ritual, ceremony, reverence, or regard for life beyond their own, these pioneers of the 31st state exulted in their destruction of California’s web of indigenous people, flora, and fauna. For  the next several decades, this violence blossomed across the land and all but extinguished the magic inherent in our Valley.

It is Ojai’s cultic milieu that now holds space for its eventual return.