The Secret History of MasSUSchusetts (Pt. 2B): Human Alchemy

In the third installment of The Secret History of MasSUSchusetts and the second part of our Historical Materia Ultima miniseries, we continue our mapping of the New England node of the transatlantic Rosicrucian and alchemical brotherhood that initiated the colonization, enslavement, & transmutation of America. The sundry foci of this EP: Slave-owning ministers & congregants of King’s Chapel; the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the colonizing and plantation-owing arm of the Anglican Church; shitty modified baptismal rites; John Winthrop Jr.’s tutelage of George Starkey; the 17th century obsession with social-reforming “utopias”; Winthrop Jr.’s relationship w/ Jan Comenius; his John Dee fandom and library; his uncle Emmanuel Downing’s push for the enslavement of indigenous Americans; John Winthrop Sr.’s bloody rule of MA during the Pequot War and the fact that the Mystic Massacre cleared the land for Winthrop Jr.’s alchemical plantation; John Winthrop Sr.’s membership in the General Court that drafted the MA Body of Liberties, the first legal document in New England, which legalized slavery... ...John Locke’s secret Rosicrucian triumvirate w/ Isaac Newton & Robert Boyle, his hypocritical investments in Companies & employment by Councils directly responsible for creating the slavery economy, and the justifications for slavery in his “liberal” political theories; Newton’s millenarian interpretations of the Book of Revelation; alchemical & Rosicrucian philosophies reifying social hierarchies... ...the Templar origins of England’s Inns of Court barrister society, and the Inner Temple & Gray’s Inn’s connections to Rosicrucianism through Winthrop Jr. & Francis Bacon (+ the Order of the Pegasus); Hospitallers, fighting monks, and Wat Tyler’s Rebellion; Winthrop's education there, and alchemical experiments... ...alchemical ciphers; Winthrop’s search for legit Rosicrucians & pilgrimage to Constantinople; Winthrop Jr.’s alchemical economic development of New England, including its first ironworks, salt works, etc.; pansophic & millenarian attempts to convert Native Americans; the divine nature of salt; Winthrop’s Eurotrip and a shit ton of alchemists named Johann; Moraien’s “universal menstruum” and his beef w/ Descartes; Glauber’s salt; animist metallurgical beliefs and spiritual alchemical allegories that Winthrop used to justify Native conversion & colonization; thiccccccc deposits of limonite; makin’ money in the Enlightenment; Winthrop’s connection to slave-trading Gov. Endecott... ...the saga of Thomas Morton; John Adams, J. Quincy Adams, & Thomas Jefferson's interest in Morton; Morton's arms-trading with local Ninnimissinuok; his friendly relations w/ his indigenous neighbors; his matriculation in the Inns of Court; work on behalf of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, anti-Puritan royalist; his frontier rager & the infamous maypole; a comparative religious & literary analysis of Hawthorne’s “The May-pole at Merry Mount” by way of J.G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough; May Day, Lord of Misrule, Beltane, wicker men; the Lord & Lady of the May; the quasi-Oedipal story of Attis & Cybele; Bacchanalia; Saturnalia; dick sacrifices; Morton’s poem to Hymen; Midsummer (& Midsommar); St. John’s Eve; Myles Standish's attack on Merry Mount; Morton's arrest and marooning on the Isle of Shoals; and much more. A list of all the texts, research papers, & articles referenced will be uploaded w/ notes on Substack or Patreon at a later date. Songs:  | Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel ~ “White, White Dove” | | The Wizard of Oz ~ “Ding-Dong! The Witch is Dead” | | Nina Simone ~ “Four Women” | | Barney & Friends ~ “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” | | Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) ~ Midsommar (Mushrooms & The Maypole Queen Dance Scene) | | Leonard Cohen ~ “Dress Rehearsal Rag” |