volume XV, 2006 - ALL.pdf - San Francisco State University

Ex Post Facto 

Journal of the History Students at San Francisco State University 

FALL 2006 VOLUME XV

Ex Post Facto 

Ex Post Facto is published annually by the students of the Department of History at San 

Francisco State University, and members of Kappa Phi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, the 

national history honor society. All views of fact or opinion are the sole responsibility of 

the authors and may not reflect the views of the editorial staff. 

Questions or comments may be directed to: 

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1600 Holloway Ave. 

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Contact us via email at: epf@sfsu.edu 

The journal is also published online at userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf 

The Ex Post Facto editorial board wishes to thank the Instructionally Related Activities 

Committee at San Francisco State University for providing funding. Ex Post Facto also thanks 

Christopher Waldrep, Vernon Sanders, and Deborah Kearns, who have all made the process 

much smoother than it might have been. Thanks should also go to the professors who encouraged 

students to write the high quality papers that are included in this publication. Ownership of 

papers is retained by authors and may be submitted for publication elsewhere. Authorization has 

been granted by authors for use of papers both in the printed publication of Ex Post Facto and 

thewebsite. 

Copyright © 2006, San Francisco State University.

Benjamin Brown 

Martin Burke 

Daniel Elash 

Sierra Gehrke 

Kayleigh Henson 

Rebecca Hodges 

Peter Johnsson 

STAFF 

MANAGING CO-EDITORS 

Rhiannon Anderson & Michael T. Caires 

EDITORIAL BOARD 

Wojciech T. Kawalek 

Timothy Kellogg 

Jonathon Krupp 

Thomas Ladd 

Sarah Lara-Toney 

Marc McGinnis 

Steven Myers 

LAYOUT 

Rhiannon Anderson & Piret Saagpakk 

FACULTY ADVISOR 

Christopher Waldrep 

Kevin Mummey 

Jacob Richards 

Elizabeth Rodoni 

Megan Schultz 

Ryan Tripp 

Jared Taylor 

Lauren Woods

Dear Readers, 

As managing co-editors for this year, it is our honor to present the Fall 2006 issue 

of Ex Post Facto. For many issues now, EPF has served as a unique venue to display the 

work of the history students at San Francisco State University and at the same time 

exhibit their dedication, hard work, and insightfulness. We believe this year to be no 

different and feel that this issue contains many excellent articles that display these 

characteristics. We have preserved the format of last year’s issue by dividing the articles 

into undergraduate and graduate sections. However, we have also made some minor 

adjustments that we believe are beneficial for the journal. As you might have noticed, we 

have decided to change the dating of the journal from a Spring publication into a Fall 

one—due to the reasoning that EPF is always published in the Fall. It is our sincere wish 

to thank the many students, staff, and faculty that made this endeavor possible. We would 

also like to encourage students to continue submitting their work and to become part of 

the future editorial staff. In closing, we hope that this issue reflects the very active and 

thriving community of historical scholars at SFSU that we consider ourselves lucky to be 

a part of. 

Sincerely, 

Michael T. Caires & Rhiannon Anderson 

San Francisco, California 

August 2006

CONTENTS 

Undergraduate work 

MARK PIPER p. 1 

The Holy Office of the Inquisición in the New World: Sorcerers and Plants in the Indies 

TRACY DODGE p. 31 

“American Can Save Greece:” 

The World War II Relief Mobilization of the Greek Diaspora and the American Public 

KEVIN MUMMEY p. 45 

Anatomy of a Crusade: 

The De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi and the Lisbon Crusade of 1147 

JARED TAYLOR p. 63 

Royal Culpability: King James VI and the Scottish Witch Craze of the 1590s 

Graduate work 

THOMAS DORRANCE p. 79 

Trials & Troubles: 

Organization, Cooperation, and Administration in the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp 

ARI CUSHNER p. 95 

Coming to Terms with Cannabis: A Discursive History of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act 

DANIEL FRONTINO ELASH p. 117 

Not One Man in America Believed Him: 

On the Historical Misunderstanding of John Adams, with an Apologia 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO p. 135 

The Roman Cult of Mithras: Religious Phenomenon and Brotherhood 

RYAN W. TRIPP p. 155 

A Corruption of Morals: The Boston Massacre in the Social Imagination of Resistance and Revolution 

Book Review and Historiography 

Lucinda McCray Beier, Sufferers & Healers: The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England 

Reviewed by TIMOTHY A. KELLOGG p. 177 

PETER S. GRAY p. 183 

Is the Origin of Capitalism “Eurocentric?” A Review of Recent Debates in Socio-Economic History

T he Holy Office of the Inquisición 

in the New World 

Sorcerers and Plants in the Indies 

Mark Piper 

UNDERGRADUATE WINNER OF THE JOHN MULLIN PRIZE

ccording to historian Richard E. Greenleaf, the leading twentieth century 

authority on the Mexican Inquisición, the tribunals of Holy Office of the Inquisición in 

the New World did not often encounter witches’ Sabbaths or damage to body or property 

caused by curses among the indigenous, standard accusations in the European witch 

trials. Instead, the Holy Office encountered idolatry and human and animal sacrifices 

conducted by indigenous priests using mind-altering plants. 1 The mechanics of how the 

Spanish Crown and Council of the Supreme Inquisición dealt with indigenous pagan 

religions in the New World is the primary objective of this article. Queen Isabela of 

Castille and King Ferdinand of Aragón established the Inquisición in 1478 specifically to 

persecute the covert practice of Judaism and Islam as heresy. 2 Monastic inquisitorial 

persecution in the New World religions began in 1522; in 1535, the Spanish Crown 

named Fray Juan de Zumárraga apostolic inquisitor in Mexico. 3 Formal Inquisición and 

Provisorate tribunals continued this work on from 1571 to 1818. 4 From this point forth, 

the Holy Office became a state-controlled device used to enforce the conversion of the 

indigenous of the New World to the Catholic faith and their acculturation to European 

culture; to eradicate indigenous pagan religions, including banning the use of mindaltering 

plants; and to discredit indigenous leaders in order to empower the Spanish 

colonization. Important primary sources for the study of the Inquisición in the New 

World are the letters and narratives of the Spanish chroniclers including Bernal Díaz de 

Castillo, Bernardino de Sahagún, Ramón Pané and Diego de Landa that served in the 

New World. The documents of the Holy Office and the Spanish chronicles clearly show 

that the language and demonization of the European witch trials were applied to New 

World indigenous religious practices, following European historical patterns to legitimize 

their eradication. 5 

A number of Inquisición trials in Europe can be interpreted as also supporting the 

argument for enforced acculturation by Inquisitorial persecution to eradicate pre- 

Christian cults and folkways in European cultures. Carlo Ginzburg’s book The Night 

Battles describes a series of Holy Office investigations of ritual traditions dating from the 

1570s to the 1640 in the Friulian region of northern Italy. 6 Ginzburg interprets the 

Friulian traditions as remnants of an ancient European fertility religion–healings and the 

1 Greenleaf cites ninety-six tribunal processes of indigenous defendants dating from 1522 to 1818 in the Mexican 

National Archives. None of the indigenous processes mention witches’ Sabbaths or curses. See: Appendix to “The 

Mexican Inquisición and the Indians: Sources for the Ethnohistorian” The Americas, 34, no. 3 (January 1978), 337-44. 

2 Gary K Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 19, 

30-1. 

3 Monastic Inquisición tribunals refer to processes presided by Spanish priests in the early years of the colony, which 

were replaced after 1535 with state-appointed apostolic inquisitors. See, Greenleaf, “The Mexican Inquisición and the 

Indians,” 315-6. 

4 Greenleaf, “The Mexican Inquisición and the Indians,” 316, 335. 

5 Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft, 100; Julio Caro Baroja, The World of Witches [1961] trans. Weidenfield & 

Nicolson (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), 41-66. 

6 The Friulians were a pre-Roman people of Italian, Germanic and Slavic origin in the northern Italian peninsula. See, 

Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteen and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John 

& Ann Tedeschi (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), ix, xx.

4 Ex Post Facto 

protection of crops and fertility by witches battling evil forces in a dream state. The 

Friulian traditions were determined by the Holy Office to be witchcraft. The Inquisición 

tribunals had the desired effect, reducing the Friulian benandanti cult to isolated 

practitioners. 7 Martin Luther condemned the practice of dowsing as witchcraft; dowsing 

appears to be a pre-Christian practice described by Greek and Roman writers as 

rhabdomancy. After conversion, dowsing remained prevalent in areas of historic Celtic 

and Germanic cultures. Curiously, many traditions call for the divining rod used in 

dowsing to be crafted from hazel, a tree sacred to Celtic religion, on St. John’s Day, 24 

June, very close to the day of the summer solstice. 8 The Inquisición tribunals of 1609- 

1614 in the Basque region of Spain, described by Gustav Henningsen in The Witches’ 

Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisición (1609-1614), describe the 

investigation and persecution of witches who used toads to create poisons, which cast 

spells, and participated in sexual orgies known as witches’ Sabbaths. 9 Pierre De Lancre, 

the witch hunter of the French Basque region, himself despised the superstitions, myths, 

and folklore of the Basque. 10 Noted Basque historian, Julio Caro Baroja sees a 

“remarkable similarity between their activities [Basque rituals described in the 1609-1614 

investigations] and the mystery-religions of classical antiquity.” 11 As late as 1586, Pope 

Sixtus V wrote that “[o]thers cling on to relics of the age-old worship of the ancient 

gods.” 12 Even if not intended, the Basque Inquisición tribunals had the effect of 

eradicating many pre-Christian Basque cultural practices. The conversion of Europe to 

Christianity before the year 1500 was not firm, with many converted pre-Christian 

populations practicing pagan rituals fused to Catholic icons. 13 In this manner, Samhain, 

the pagan Celtic celebration held at the end of October became the syncretic Catholic All 

Saints Day, known as Halloween, a celebration that incorporated the Celtic concept of 

7 The benandanti, meaning “good walkers” were a small group of men and women who, because they were born with a 

caul, were regarded as witches. A caul is a remnant of the amniotic sac that adheres to the face of a newborn baby and 

was considered by many ancient European religions as a special mark indicating second sight. See, Ginzburg, The 

Night Battles, ix, 143-5. 

8 Dowsing is the practice of locating hidden objects with divination rods. Dowsing is frequently used to locate hidden 

reserves of water, minerals and lost objects. See, Theodore Besterman, “The Folklore of Dowsing,” Folklore 37, no. 2, 

30 (June 1926): 113-33. 

9 The Basque are considered a proto-European culture that is not part of and predates the Indo-European family that 

includes most European, Levant, Central Asian and Indian sub-continent peoples and languages. Not much is known 

about Basque religion before Roman times, but archeological remains suggest it was based on a sacrificial solar cult 

with associations with animals, as known with other prehistoric nations of Europe. See, Mark Kurlansky, The Basque 

History of the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 23, 80-82. For more on the investigation and persecution of 

witches in this area, see Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisición 

(Reno: University Nevada Press, 1980), 297-300. 

10 Baroja, The World of Witches, 159, 173. 

11 Baroja, The World of Witches, 173. 

12 Sixtus V, Coeli et Terrae [1586], cited in P.G. Maxwell-Stuart: The Occult in Early Modern Europe: A Documentary 

History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 59. 

13 The Lap nation of northern Scandinavia did not embrace Christianity until the seventeenth century, practicing pagan 

rituals led by their priests called the Noaides. See “The Nomads of Arctic Lapland” by Clyde Fisher in National 

Geographic (November 1939): 654-655. In 1065 AD, King Sweyn Estriden of Denmark describes the Germanic Baltic 

coast city of Vineta as a trading town where, “in fact, all its inhabitants still blunder about in pagan rites.” See Shareen 

Blair Brysac, “Atlantis of the Baltic,” Archaeology (July-August 2003): 62-66. The natives of the Shetland Islands 

celebrate an annual ritual called Up Helly Aa held in Lerwick including a bonfire on the last Tuesday in January. The 

festival with a torch lit parade, bonfire and revelry with participants in Viking-era Norse costumes originates with the 

pagan Norse midwinter festival. See Karl W. Gullers, “Viking Festival in the Shetlands,” National Geographic 

(December 1954): 853-862. The Csángós of Romania have a tradition of sorcerers and magic that predates Christianity 

and continues to the present day in a fusion with Catholic rites. See Frank Viaviano “Song of the Csángós,” National 

Geographic (June 2005): 66-83. Erla Zwingle, “Italy Before the Romans,” National Geographic (January 2005): 56-73. 

MARK PIPER

Ex Post Facto 5 

communion with the dead and Catholic imagery of witchcraft. 14 Again and again, 

European persecutions of witchcraft focused on practices of folklore, often times 

traceable to antecedent Celtic and Roman religions, practices demonized by Christianity 

as sorcery, heresy, superstition or witchcraft for allowing access to supernatural powers 

or to knowledge termed by Christianity as demonic. 15 The archives of the European 

Inquisición trials do not clearly state that acculturation of pre-Roman Europe was a goal, 

and this may be a particularism not applicable in the context of those times. Still, the 

Inquisicións prosecuted, punished and banned cultural and religious practices, ancient or 

modern, that countered religious Christian orthodoxy. 

The indigenous gods of the Americas were quickly termed by the Spanish priests 

as “devils,” and their worship idolatry. Supernatural indigenous rituals such as divination, 

communion with the dead, and healings were demonized as sorceries, artifice, and tricks 

employed by indigenous priests used by the Devil to deceive them because they had “no 

knowledge of the Catholic faith.” 16 Early Spanish chronicler Father Bartolomé de las 

Casas defined the indigenous pagan priests of the Americas as “priest, prophet or 

sorcerer” and as “theologians, prophets and soothsayers.” 17 The Spanish also demonized 

indigenous rituals as artifice and tricks employed by indigenous priests used by the Devil 

to deceive the indigenous “because they have no knowledge of our holy faith.” 18 The 

Spanish came to understand the indigenous rituals in the Americas as similar to those of 

the barbarous past that had been discredited and eradicated in Europe. 19 The Spanish 

Crown decided by 1511 that the indigenous peoples they conquered were to be converted 

to the Catholic faith. 20 When they refused or reverted to pagan indigenous practices, the 

narratives and actions of the Spanish priests such as Diego de Landa, and archives of the 

Holy Office in Mexico, clearly support the argument that Inquisición trials and 

punishment of the indigenous for idolatry, sorcery and witchcraft were used as a state 

tool to enforce religious orthodoxy and European acculturation in the Indies. 21 In turn, the 

Spanish Crown controlled the Spanish clergy by virtue of the papal bull Universalis 

Ecclesiae of 28 July 1508, issued by Pope Julius II and reconfirmed in subsequent bulls 

of 1523, 1530 and 1543. These papal bulls gave the Spanish Crown authority to appoint a 

religious hierarchy in Spain and in the New World, as well as to receive and distribute 

14 

Samhain is a Celtic idiom, combing the words for “summer” and “end.” See Mara Freeman, Kindling the Celtic 

Spirit (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2000), 297-8. 

15 

Baroja, The World of Witches, 17-131. 

16 

Fernando Colombo, Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo; nelle qualis’ha particolare & vera relatione della vita & 

de’fatti dell’Ammiraglio D. Christoforo Colombo, suo padre, quoted in An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, 

trans. José Juan Arrom (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 44: Father Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities 

of the Indians [1498] trans. José Juan Arrom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 21, 26. 

17 

Father Bartolomé de las Casas, Apologética Historia de las Indias, [1550] Chapter 120, quoted in An Account of the 

Antiquities of the Indians, trans. José Juan Arrom (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 57. 

18 

Father Bartolomé de las Casas, Apologética Historia de las Indias, 59. 

19 

de las Casas, Apologética Historia de las Indias, 63. 

20 

In Apologética Historia de las Indias, Bartolomé de las Casas quotes a letter King Ferdinand wrote to the indigenous 

of the island of Hispañola demanding their conversion to Christianity. He does not date the letter but it is included in 

his narrative for the period after 1511. Because Juana, King Ferdinand’s daughter, is named as co-regent in the text, it 

is assumed the letter dates after 1504, when Queen Isabela died. 

21 

Father Diego de Landa, An Account of the Things of Yucatan [1560], trans. David Castledine (Mexico: Monclem 

Ediciones, 2000), 60 & Greenleaf, “The Mexican Inquisición and the Indians,” 337-44. 

The Holy Office of the Inquisición in the New World


tithes; his authority came to be known as the patronato real. 22 It is a common historical 

fallacy that the Holy Office in Mexico was not present until 1571, and that it never had 

authority over the indigenous. The Holy Office archives in Mexico, researched by 

Greenleaf, tell a different story. As early as 1522, monastic Inquisicións against the 

indigenous were held in Mexico. The Spanish priests based their authority to conduct 

tribunals on the papal bull Exponi nobis (known in Spanish as the Omnímoda) of 10 May 

1522, by Pope Adrian IV. This bull empowered priests more than two days distant from a 

resident bishop with almost all powers except ordination. In 1535, the Crown named 

Bishop Juan de Zumárraga as apostolic inquisitor, and he conducted investigations and 

tribunals. His harshness with the indigenous was criticized, and he was replaced in 1543. 

Zumárraga’s replacements also conducted tribunals against the indigenous until 1571, 

when the Holy Office of the Inquisición was formally established in Mexico. 23 

Hampering the application of orthodoxy in the New World was the legal status of the 

indigenous, finally determined in 1537 by Pope Paul III to be “rational beings with 

souls.” 24 When established in 1571, the Holy Office was specifically denied jurisdiction 

over the indigenous, which were instead subject to the bishop’s or archbishop’s office 

under the care of a Provisor (Vicar General). However, the mixed-blood mestizos were 

within the jurisdiction of the Holy Office regardless of whether they retained indigenous 

habits. Jurisdiction really meant little, since the Holy Office conducted Provisorate 

investigations and administered the discipline of the indigenous. Both institutions 

conducted tribunals with the goal of eradicating indigenous religious practices. A review 

of the Holy Office and Provisorate processes given by Greenleaf does not show the 

Provisorate with less zeal or more leniency in punishment. As in Spain, the Inquisición 

tribunals were conducted with investigations, sworn testimony, hearings, and sentences. 25 

The Holy Office or Provisor delegated arrests and punishment to the civil authorities. 

However, the arrested were held in cells at monasteries of the Franciscan, Dominican, 

and Augustine orders in the New World. 26 

Conversion and acculturation of the indigenous peoples became the goal of 

Admiral Christopher Columbus soon after the discovery of the New World. In 1494, 

Columbus wrote a letter to the Spanish monarchs while preparing for his second voyage 

to the New World. In his letter, Columbus promises “that there shall be a church, and 

parish priests or friars to administer the sacraments, to perform divine worship, and for 

the conversion of the Indians” in the newly discovered territories. 27 After his return to the 

New World in 1494, Admiral Columbus commissioned Father Pané to live amongst the 

22 John Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 36, 

cited in Rafael E. Tarragó: Experiencias politicas de los cubanos en la Cuba Española: 1512-1898 (Barcelona: Puvill 

Libros, S.A., 1996), 22. 

23 Greenleaf, “The Mexican Inquisición and the Indian,” 139-41. 

24 Bartolomé de las Casas: The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, 1542, trans. Herma Briffault (Baltimore: 

John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 6. 

25 Greenleaf, “The Inquisición and the Indians of New Spain: A Study in Jurisdictional Confusion,” The Americas Vol. 

22, No. 2, (October 1965): 138, 141. 

26 Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 

1969), 7 : Jacinto de la Serna, Manual de Ministros de Indios para el Conocimiento de sus Idolatrias y Extirpación de 

Ellas, [1650], published as Tratado de las Idolatrias, Vol. 2, 2nd Ed. (Mexico: Ediciones Fuente Cultural, 1951), 204-5 

27 Admiral Christopher Columbus: “Columbus’ letter to the King and Queen of Spain: 1494,” in Medieval Sourcebook, 

ed. Paul Halsall (Fordham: Fordham University, 1996) accessed 4 May 2005. Available from 

. 

MARK PIPER


indigenous Caribbean Taíno of the Guarionex nation, in what today is known as Haiti. 

His mission was to “discover and understand of the beliefs and idolatries of the Indians, 

and how they worship their gods.” 28 By 1498, Pané prepared a narrative that focused on 

the myths and religious practices of the Taíno. In his narrative, Father Pané also describes 

the initial conversion and acculturation of indigenous Taíno, with the converts accepting 

Christian names, learning the Catholic prayers, caring for the religious icons and chapels 

set up by the Catholic fathers, and participating in the ritual of baptism. 29 After 1511, 

conversion to Catholicism gained legal force with the letter of King Ferdinand of Spain to 

the peoples of the Indies. The letter stated that the Pope had granted the American lands 

to the authority of the Spanish Crown, and warns those indigenous natives that do not 

accept the Catholic faith: 

Should you fail to comply, or delay maliciously in so doing, we assure you that 

with the help of God we shall use force against you, declaring war upon you from 

all sides and with all possible means, and we shall bring you to the yoke of the 

Church … we shall enslave your persons, wives and sons, sell you or dispose of 

you as the King sees fit; we shall seize your possessions and harm you as much 

as we can as disobedient and resisting vassals. 30 

As ordered by the Spanish Crown, the Spanish priests were to lead the conversion of the 

Indians, and to establish parishes in every township established by the conquerors. 31 

Conquerors and settlers using indigenous labor known as “encomienda” were also 

charged with the conversion of the indigenous laborers under their charge. 32 The Holy 

Office investigated those Spanish who were accused of insufficient vigor in conversion of 

the indigenous for whom they were responsible. 33 They were also to convert pagan 

African slaves brought to the New World. Owners were charged with the responsibility 

of conversion and observance of the Catholic rituals. 34 Acculturation in the New World 

also meant the imposition of the Spanish language as the official language and the 

adoption of Eurocentric apparel and technologies. 35 

28 

Admiral Christopher Columbus. 

29 

Pané, The Antiquities of the Indians, 3, 32-8. 

30 

King Ferdinand of Spain: Letter to the Indies in Bartolomé de las Casas, Apologética Historia de las Indias, Book 3, 

Chapter 57. 

31 

Eduardo Torres-Cuevas & Oscar Loyola Vega, Historia de Cuba 1492-1898: Formación y Liberación de la Nación, 

2d ed. (La Habana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 2002), 52-3. 

32 

Encomienda is an archaic Spanish term whose closest English translation is ‘to place in charge of’ such as one would 

do when assigning the care of a child or assets to another. After the conquest of the New World, the territories became 

Crown property to be distributed or operated as the Crown dictated. The conquered indigenous natives, as subjects of 

the Crown, were free but subject to pay tribute to the Crown in the form of goods, or they could be compelled to labor 

to satisfy this obligation. The Crown rewarded conquerors and prominent colonists with land grants and or 

encomiendas consisting of tribute in the form of goods or labor due the Crown from its indigenous subjects. In return, 

the recipients of encomienda licenses were bound to render military service to the Crown if needed and were to provide 

for the conversion of the indigenous laborers they used. See Charles Gibson, Spain in America [1966] (New York: 

Harper Touchbooks, 1967), 48-52 & Francisco Perez de la Riva: Origen y Regimen de la Propiedad Territorial en 

Cuba (Havana: Academia de la Historia de Cuba, 1946), 25. 

33 

Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 22. 

34 

Robert Edgard Conrad, Children of God’s Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 156-9. 

35 

Father Diego de Landa: An Account of the Things of Yucatan, 59; new technologies include wheel thrown glazed 

pottery vs. unglazed coiled, blown glass, and single crop vs. multi-crop cultivation. See Patricia Fournier, “La cerámica 

colonial del Templo Mayor,” Arqueología Mexicana (Mayo-Junio 1998): 52-9; Ana Maria L. Velasco Lozano, “El 

Jardín de Iztapalapa,” Arqueología Mexicana (Septiembre-Octubre 2002): 26-33. 



Religious conversion over time created new Catholic myths, some intentional and 

others not, that cemented the foundations of the new Catholic faith in the New World. 

The Spanish priests learned the indigenous languages to enable conversion, though a lack 

of fluency was blamed at times for an unintentional mixing of indigenous and Catholic 

religious concepts. 36 The creation of new myths incorporating elements of pre-Christian 

religions into Catholic rituals had previously happened in Europe. Roman emperor 

Aurelian designated the December 25th celebration for the winter solstice and this pagan 

Roman celebration of lights was later adopted by the Christian faith as the date of the 

birth of the child Jesus. 37 Similarly, Miguel Sanchez in 1648 and Jesuit priest Francisco 

de Florencia in 1688 described the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a ‘brown’ 

Virgin, as protector of the Indians on Tepeyac Hill in northern reaches of the Mexica 

capital in 1531. 38 They located this apparition at a venerated indigenous shrine to the 

Mexica Earth Mother goddess Tonatzin. 39 None of the chroniclers of the time mention 

the miraculous apparition, giving credence to the argument that the Virgin of Guadalupe 

was a syncretic myth created by the Spanish priests to further evangelization. 40 An 

important step in conversion was baptism, and the adoption of European names to replace 

the indigenous composite names based on religious calendars. 41 In Mesoamerica, an 

astronomical calendar of eighteen months of twenty days (365 days) concurrent with a 

sacred calendar of thirteen months of twenty days (260 days) was used for the timing of 

indigenous rituals, including the naming of children. 42 This was replaced after the 

conquest, first by the Julian and later by the Gregorian calendar used in Europe. The 

Andean calendar, based on an eight-day week and timed to astronomical observations, 

was also eradicated. 43 The Catholic Church dedicated each day of the calendar to a saint 

or feast of the Church. In the New World, in a syncretic practice, children were given 

European names matching the Catholic patron saint for the day on which they were born, 

a practice still common in Latin America. 

The indigenous themselves fused Catholic icons to their indigenous religions, a 

practice that the Spanish priests fought against with varying success. 44 For example, the 

36 

Francisco Morales Valerio, “Fray Jacobo de Tastera (1490-1542): Un notable misionero en Tabasco,” Arqueología 

Mexicana (Mayo-Junio 2003): 58-60; Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 124: Kenneth J. 

Andrien, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and Consciousness under Spanish Rule 1532-1825 

(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 167. 

37 

Anthony F. Aveni, “The Star of Bethlehem,” Archaeology (November-December 1998): 42. 

38 

The Meseoamerican civilization known in the western world as Aztec in fact called itself Mexica. At the time of the 

Spanish Conquest in 1521, the Mexica had conquered a number of regions and city-states extending from central 

Mexico to the Mayan lands of Central America. The Mexica governed the conquered nations and city-states as vassal 

states, and introduced the Mexica language, Nahuatl, as a common regional language. See Jacques Soustelle: Daily 

Life of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest, [1955] trans. Patrick O’Brian (Stanford: Stanford University 

Press, 2000), xiii, and Miguel León-Portilla: Aztec Thought and Culture, trans. Jack Emory Davis [1963] (Norman: 

University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), xix-xxi, 

39 

Sylvia R. Santaballa, “Writing the Virgin of Guadalupe in Francisco de Florencia’s La estrella del norte de Mexico,” 

Colonial Latin American Review, Vol. 7 Issue 1 (June 1998): 83. 

40 

Margaret Zires, “Los mitos de la Virgen de Guadalupe: Su proceso de construcción y reinterpretación en el México 

pasado y contemporaneo,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Summer 1994): 286. 

41 

Bernardo García Martínez, “La conversión de 7 Mono a don Domingo de Guzmán,” Arqueología Mexicana (Julio- 

Agosto 1997): 56. 

42 

Johanna Broda, “Ciclos de fiestas y calendario solar mexica,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero-Febrero 2000): 48-55. 

43 

Darrell S. Gundrum, “Fabric of Time,” Archeology (March-April 2000): 47-8. 

44 

Jacinto de la Serna, Tratado de las Idolatrias, 64-7. 

MARK PIPER


syncretic rituals in Central Mexico for the feast of Archangel Michael, on 28 September, 

combine the blessing of harvests and thanks giving for rain with pagan elements 

associated with the same day in the ancient Mesoamerican calendar. 45 Other indigenous 

festival days were similarly fused to Catholic rites–the Day of the Dead celebrations held 

on 2 November correlate with the veneration of ancestors that was part of the tepeihuitl 

(harvest) celebrations dedicated to Tlaloc, the Mesoamerican god of rain. 46 In the remote 

Cora nation of western Mexico, the traditional pageants of Catholicism for Holy Week 

were combined with indigenous rituals and the use of the hallucinogen peyote. 47 A 

similar syncreticism can be seen in the Holy Week procession in the city of Iztapalapa 

that includes a Catholic reenactment of the walk of Christ to Calvary Hill and a pagan 

sacrificial aspect with the crucifixion of a penitent. 48 Not surprisingly, excavations since 

2004 at the site where the Holy Week crucifixion is performed have revealed an 

indigenous temple buried underneath. 49 

In the process of religious conversion, the mythology of indigenous religions was 

also subject to revision–the myth of Quetzalcoatl given by Sahagún in the Florentine 

Codex includes a description of Quetzalcoatl as a monarch who condemned human 

sacrificials, and who would return by sea from the East. 50 Later he gained Caucasian 

attributes including pale skin and a beard because of his syncretic association with St. 

45 

The day 28 September celebrated as the Feast of Archangel Michael corresponds to the Mexica calendar for the 11th 

month of Ochpanztli (harvest), day 1 Atl (water), though the Catholic calendar celebrates the Feast on the 29th of 

September. Similarly in Catholic liturgy, the Archangel Michael is attributed to agricultural concerns and rain. See 

Dora Sierra Carrillo, “San Miguel Arcángel en los rituales agrícolas,” Arqueología Mexicana (Julio-Agosto 2004): 74- 

79. The correlation of Gregorian and Mexica calendars was done using the conversion table given in “El calendario 

meseoamericano” by Rafael Tena in Arqueología Mexicana (January-February 2000): 6-7. 

46 

Broda, “Ciclos de fiestas y calendario solar mexica,” 53. 

47 

Johannes Neurarth, “La Semana Santa cora en Nayarit: ritual de tradición prehispánica,” Arqueología Mexicana 

(Noviembre-Diciembre 2001): 72-7. 

48 

Iztapalapa is located in the Valley of Mexico and was one of the vassal city-states of the Mexica Empire. 

49 

The Iztapalapa Holy Week procession is known throughout Mexico. The last Iztapalapa celebration occurred during 

Holy Week 2006, which was rebroadcast from Mexican TV Azteca on San Francisco KDTV on 16 April 2006. 

50 

In one Mexica myth, Quetzalcoatl was the king of the city-state of Tollán, a place that the Mexica nation attributed to 

their origin. After Quetzalcoatl died, he was deified in myth, and the name Quetzalcoatl was also adopted as a title of 

nobility. Conquistador Juan Cano, who married a daughter of the Mexica emperor Mocetezuma, told this myth in 

Relación de la geneologia y linaje de los senores que han señoreado en esta tierra de la Nueva España published by J. 

Garcia Icazbalceta in Nueva Colección de documentos para la historia de Mexico [1891], 263-281 cited in Soustelle, 

Daily Life of the Aztecs, 87-88. Quetzalcoatl in Mexica religion was also the god who brought the bones of previous 

creations to earth, ground these and mixed this with blood from his penis, creating mankind. This myth is part of the 

Legend of the Suns and is recorded in the Codice Chimalpopoca: Anales de Cuauhtitlán y Leyenda de los Soles, see 

Walter Lehmann: Die Geschichte der Konigreiche von Colhuacan und Mexico, Vol.1 in Quellenwerke zur alten 

Geschichte Amerikas. (Stuttgart, 1938), cited in León-Portilla: 107-9. According to some historians such as Camilla 

Townsend, it was chronicler Francisco Lopez de Gomara in 1552 that first created the new myth that the Mexica had 

taken the Spanish as gods. See Lesley Byrd Simpson, Cortes: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary (Berkeley: 

University of California Press, 1965), 137, cited in Camilla Townsend, “Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on 

the Conquest of Mexico,” The American Historical Review Vol. 108, No. 3, (June 2003): 659. The Spanish later 

created another myth, with Quetzalcoatl as a ruler of Tollán who refused to observe human sacrificials, was exiled from 

his kingdom and left the prophecy that he would return by sea from the East to reclaim his kingdom. According to 

Spanish chronicler Sahagún, the Spanish were taken to be the return of Quetzalcoatl, which created great fear in the 

Mexica ruler Motecuzoma and which allowed the Mexica defeat. See Stuart B. Schwartz, Victors and Vanquished: 

Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 10, 93. Father Pané’s 

narrative also includes a prophecy in the Taíno world that clothed men would arrive that would cause the extermination 

of the Taíno. See Pané, The Antiquities of the Indians, 31. Pedro de Cieza de León documented a similar myth about 

Viracocha in Peru. Whether these examples support or weaken Townsend’s argument is a topic that needs further 

study. 



Thomas. 51 After 1550, Pedro de Cieza de León and Juan de Betanzos documented a 

similar revision in Peru, with descriptions of the Inca god Viracocha as a “tall man who 

had a white robe reaching down to his feet … a white man, large of stature, whose air and 

person aroused great respect and veneration.” 52 

In 1614, Franciscan Father Francisco Pareja gave an idealized vision of the 

eradication of the indigenous pagan religions, stating, “the Indians do not even remember 

them … so much so that the younger generation which has been nourished by the milk of 

the Gospel derides and laughs at some old men and women.” 53 However, the reality was 

quite different. Writing in the 1650’s, over one hundred years after the conquest of 

Mexico, Father Jacinto de la Serna wrote in reference to indigenous rituals still observed 

in the Valley of Mexico that “[a]fter so much light, preaching and work … in them is 

discovered acts of true idolatry ... as their forefathers practiced … that they hold and have 

held, and which they have never forsaken.” As early as 1496, the indigenous Taíno on 

Hispanola had shown resistance to religious conversion and acculturation. In 1524, a 

group of indigenous leaders and priests of the Mexica told the Spanish friars that “[w]e 

cannot be tranquil, and yet we certainly do not believe; we do not accept your teachings 

as truth, even though this may offend you. Were we to remain in this place, we could be 

made prisoners. Do with us as you please.” 54 The Holy Office condemned resistors to 

conversion as “dogmatizers.” 55 This was not the first time that the Catholic Church had 

encountered resistance to conversion from an indigenous population. As early as the 

fourth century, St. Martin of Tours destroyed pagan shrines in Gallic France and in 782 

Charlemagne ordered the killing of 4,500 Saxon prisoners who refused religious 

conversion. 56 In 1561, Jean Gay wrote that “[t]hese people have revived the ancient 

superstitions of the auguries and divinations of ancient idolaters…” 57 The Catholic 

Church had used aggressive means of conversion in the past to eradicate pagan religions 

and impose Christianity in Europe, and it did so again in the New World. In its fifteen 

centuries of history, the Catholic Church had battled and won over Roman, Celtic, 

Germanic, Baltic and Russian indigenous paganism, and had battled against Judaism and 

Islam. 58 As was done in Europe earlier, the indigenous “idolaters” and “dogmatizers” of 

the New World who resisted conversion were prosecuted, tortured and sentenced to 

corporal punishments, fines or death not only by Inquisiciónal trials, but at times also in 

an extra-judicial manner by parish priests and even private individuals. 59 

51 Townsend, “Burying the White Gods,” 669. 

52 Pedro de Cieza de León, The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León [1553], trans. Harriet de Onis, ed. Victor W. von 

Hagen (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1959), 27-9: Augustinian (attributed to Juan de San Pedro), Relación 

de la religion y ritos del Peru hecha por los primeros religiosos augustinos [1560] in D. Joaquín F. Pacheco, Francisco 

de Cardenas & Luis Torres de Mendoza , eds.,Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista 

y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceania sacadas en su mayor parte del Real Archivo de 

Indias, eds., [1865] Vol. 3, 5-58 cited in John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas, (New York: Harcourt Brace 

Jovanovich, Inc., 1970), 98. 

53 Jerald T. Milanich, “Laboring in the Fields of the Lord,” Archaeology (January-February 1996): 66. 

54 Pané, The Antiquities of the Indians, 34-5; Walter Lehmann: Sterbende Gotter und Christliche Heilsbotschft, 

Wechselreden Indianischer Vornehmer und Spanischer Glaubenapostel in Mexiko [1524] (Colloquies and Christian 

Doctrine), Spanish and Mexican text with German translation. Stuttgart, 1949, cited in Miguel León-Portilla, 66. 

55 Greenleaf, “The Mexican Inquisición and the Indians,” 319. 

56 Prudence Jones and Nigel Pennick, A History of Pagan Europe (London: Routledge, 1995), 97, 127. 

57 Jean Gay, Historie de scismes et heresies des Albigeois [1561] cited in P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, 168. 

58 Jones and Pennick, A History of Pagan Europe, 1. 

59 Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 9, 120-1 

MARK PIPER


The policy of eradication of the indigenous religions was based on the biblical 

Ten Commandments, given in the book of Exodus, chapter 20. Exodus specifically 

banned the worship of other gods, the making of idols, and the worship of idols as gods. 60 

The 1511 letter of King Ferdinand of Spain and subsequent edicts, such as the 1552 First 

Church Council of Lima, all of which call for the burning of idols and temples and their 

replacement with Christian temples or crosses, were used to justify the destruction of 

indigenous temples and idols in the Americas. 61 Unlike early modern Europe, where pre- 

Christian pagan practices consisted of half forgotten rituals, the Spanish priests in the 

New World found indigenous pagan cultures in full zenith. Also unlike Europe, where in 

many places those accused of sorcery and witchcraft were up to eighty percent women, in 

the Americas they were mostly men—the priests and political leaders of the indigenous 

world. 

Eradication of the pagan religions of the Indies began with Admiral Columbus, 

who wrote that the Taíno on Hispanola would hide their idols in fear of their being taken 

by the Spanish conquerors. Rapid depopulation of the Caribbean islands, caused by the 

introduction of diseases unknown in the Americas before contact and mistreatment, 

effected eradication of indigenous religions and their believers in the Caribbean. 62 In 

1519, a group of Spanish explorers led by Hernán Cortés arrived from Cuba, landing in 

the Veracruz region in the Gulf of Mexico. During their two-year campaign to conquer 

the Mexica nation, the Spanish saw repeated examples of human sacrifices. Bernal Díaz 

del Castillo wrote that the Mexica regions “were full of sacrifices and wickedness.” 63 

After the conquest of the Mexica capital in the Valley of Mexico, conqueror Hernán 

Cortés ordered the razing of the ceremonial temple complex, building the new Catholic 

Cathedral upon what once was the Mexica temple to the Sun God and the ceremonial ball 

court. 64 The great temple to Quetzalcoatl at Cholula, renowned in Mexica times as a site 

of pilgrimage, was demolished, and the Catholic Church of the Miracles was built atop 

the remains of the Mexica temple. 65 In each area conquered by the Spanish, the idols 

were destroyed, buried or hidden away and subjugated indigenous leaders were forced to 

provide labor to dismantle the indigenous temples and construct new temples to the 

Christian faith. Conqueror Hernán Cortés also banned the use and cultivation of the 

indigenous cereal grain huautli (amaranth) in Mexico because of its use in indigenous 

60 

Exodus 20: 3-5 KJV. 

61 

Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatal y Guadalupe: La formación de la conciencia nacional en México (Mexico: Fondo de 

Cultura Económica, 1977), 308, cited in Margaret Zires, “Los Mitos de la Virgen,” 283. 

62 

Colombo, Historie del S.D. Fernando Colombo, 4: Torres-Cuevas & Loyola Vega: Historia de Cuba 1492-1898, 57- 

9. 

63 

Bernal Díaz de Castillo participated with Cortes in the conquest of Mexico. Afterwards he settled in Guatemala, 

where he wrote a narrative of the Spanish conquest and the Mexica world that existed prior to the conquest. See Bernal 

Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de La Nueva España [1565] trans. Joaquín Ramírez Cabana 

(Mexico: Editorial Porrua, 1968), 359. 

64 

Tenochtitlan was the island-city center of Mexica political power and religion. The Mexica believed the highest order 

of sacrificial were captured foes; to obtain captives the Mexica waged wars against other city-states. As the Mexica 

Empire grew, more captives were needed, in an ever-increasing never-ceasing cycle. See Soustelle, Daily Life of the 

Aztecs, 9, 12, 98-102. Human sacrificial rituals were performed in the temples, and these were the first the Spanish 

ordered dismantled after the Conquest. The material from the temples was used to build the nucleus of the new City of 

Mexico. See, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, Francisco Hinojosa and J. Alvaro Barrera Rivera, “Excavaciones 

arqueológicas en la Catedral de México,” Arqueología Mexicana (Mayo-Junio 1998): 15. 

65 

María del Carmen Solanes Carraro, “Cholula,” Arqueología Mexicana (Mayo-Junio 1995): 27-8. 



rituals that combined amaranth flour with human sacrificial blood to make idols. 66 

Eradication continued, due to both resistance to conversion and to reversion to pagan 

practices. In the 1540s, Inquisición tribunals prosecuted Mixteca leaders in Oaxaca for 

participating in human sacrificials. 67 In 1562, Franciscan bishop Diego de Landa ordered 

an investigation of reports of idolatry among the Maya in Maní, in the Yucatan peninsula. 

Over three months, 4,500 Mayans were arrested and tortured with whippings. The idols 

and books that the victims produced under torture were burned. Landa later wrote that 

“[a]n auto-de-fe was held, when many were put on scaffolds, with conical hats showing 

their crimes. Many Indians were whipped and their hair shorn.” 68 Landa also wrote, “We 

found a large number of these books in these characters, and, as they contained nothing in 

which there was not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, [emphasis mine] we 

burned them all.” 69 In South America, the main temple at the Inca capital at Cuzco, the 

Coricancha, was stripped of its gold foil wall coverings and partially demolished. The 

Catholic Church and Convent of St. Dominic were built using the remains of this Inca 

temple as the foundations of the new buildings. 70 The Inca venerated their ancestors, 

preserving them as mummies that were thought to be able to partake in rituals with the 

living. During the conquest, the Inca hid the mummies from the Spanish conquerors but 

they were tracked down and burned. The Spanish also hunted down the precious Inca 

representation of the sun, the Punchao, until it was recovered in 1572 and broken down 

for bullion. 71 After the Third Lima Church Council in 1582, quipus were linked to 

idolatry and a call was made for their destruction. In 1610, Father Joan Antonio Cumis 

66 Amaranth is a grain that in Mexica times was highly valued for its resistance to drought and for its high nutritional 

value. Amaranth also was part of ritual celebrations. Amaranth flour was mixed with human sacrificial blood to make 

representations of Mexica deities. After the festivities, the deities were broken up and consumed by the public attending 

the festival. Cortés, as Marquis of the Valley of Mexico after the Conquest, deemed the practice to be a perversion of 

the Catholic Eucharist, and banned the use or cultivation of amaranth, with the penalty of amputation of the hands for 

those guilty of violating his edict. Cultivation was limited in colonial times to remote areas. In modern times, the use of 

amaranth in Mexico returned with the annual Day of the Dead celebrations; amaranth flour skull-shaped pastries called 

‘alegrias’ [meaning laughter as a noun] are sold - amaranth in a syncretic Mexica-Catholic religious usage. See Monica 

del Villar K., “Del maíz al banquete de Moctezuma II,” Arqueología Mexicana (Octubre-Noviembre 1993): 55; Jacinto 

de la Serna, Tratado de las Idolatrias, 233-4. 


68 “Auto de fé” means an “act of faith” and consisted of a public event where those judged guilty by Inquisición 

tribunals were punished in an act to inspire faith by the destruction of sin. Punishments included the public wearing of 

penitential garb–conical duncecap hats with banners describing the wearer’s offense, called a coroza, and the sanbenito 

(derived from saco bendito, holy robe). The garb consisted of a yellow robe, with a red cross on the front. After the 

penitence was finished, the sanbenito was displayed at the church with the name of the offender for all to see. See 

Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 32, 96, 166. Other punishments included shearing of hair, 

whippings, and immolation in a bonfire. 

69 The Maya wrote their literature on folded strips of paper producing multi-page foldout pamphlets called codices. The 

surviving examples are religious calendars that allow the calculations of festival dates for the Maya deities. These were 

also used in other rituals, such as in the calendrical naming of children, and in divination. The 1562 Landa auto de fé 

destroyed many Mayan books and caused their disappearance–only four examples, most of them in European 

collections, are known today. The same fate met the pictograph books, the tonalamatl, of the other Mesoamerican 

nations. See Father Diego de Landa, An Account of the Things of Yucatan [1560], trans. David Castledine (Mexico: 

Monclem Ediciones, 2000), 60; Greenleaf, “The Mexican Inquisición and the Indians,” 318: Colleen P. Popson, “Gods 

of Yucatan,” Archaeology (January-February 2003): 64. 

70 Inca is the common Western descriptive for the Andean civilization conquered by the Spanish after 1532. 

Tawantinsuyo, the land of the four corners, was the name they gave themselves; the word Inca itself was the Quechua 

word for ruler. The Coricancha (golden courtyard) was the holiest temple of the Inca nation; from there the Inca 

divided their world into four quadrants. In this indigenous world-making, world-centering, world-renewal concept, 

Cuzco and the Coricancha were the “navel of the world.” See Rebecca Stone-Miller: Art of the Andes: from Chavin to 

Inca (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 195-7. 

71 John Hemming, The Conquest of the Incas (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 127, 450. 

MARK PIPER


wrote “these royals quipus do not exist anymore; they were burned by the Spaniards out 

of ignorance.” 72 In 1623, the Holy Office investigated reports in Zapotitlán of 

performances of prohibited dances such as the Tum Teleche, which reenacted human 

sacrifices. Participants were to be punished with two hundred lashes and three years of 

banishment. 73 Other indigenous festivals such as the Rabinal Achí in Guatemala and the 

balsería in Panama were also banned, forcing the festivals to be held covertly. 74 

Across the Americas, the indigenous towns and cities were demolished by the 

Spanish using indigenous labor, and new Spanish towns were built over the remains. The 

temples and shrines of the indigenous past were covered with new Christian structures 

such as churches and convents. Both in early modern Europe and in the conquered 

Americas, depopulations due to war, disease, and famine also significantly reduced 

indigenous populations, no doubt easing the imposition of Christianity. The Spanish 

policy of pagan eradication in the New World followed patterns established earlier by 

Christianity in Europe. In Europe, the construction of many early modern towns such as 

London, Rome and Paris covered earlier pagan towns. Christianity imposed Latin, and 

vernacular language in Europe and pre-Christian languages such as Basque disappeared 

or were diminished to remote pockets. The eradication of Ogam as a writing form for 

Celtic languages and its replacement with Christian Roman letters after the seventh 

century was later duplicated in the New World with the imposition of the Roman 

alphabet and the eradication of indigenous formats, with indigenous languages surviving 

only in remote pockets. 75 The Julian and later the Gregorian calendars, timed to events of 

the Christian faith, replaced the pre-Christian astronomical-religious calendars both in 

Celtic Europe and later in the Americas. 76 In the New World, state-controlled eradication 

of indigenous cultures continued to the end of the colonial period. 

72 

Quipu is Andean Quechua word that translates in English as knot, as in thread. Spanish chroniclers document that the 

Incas used an accounting system using knots in threads hanging from a central cord. The accepted history is that the 

Andean nations had no form of writing, and that the quipu was only used for numerical calculations–a sort of abacus in 

thread. In 1996, an article in Archaeology makes a strong case for the use the quipu to also record language–poetry, 

lineage and religious secrets. This would explain the almost complete eradication of quipu by the Spanish after 1582–if 

the quipu were used solely for numerical purposes, it would seem unlikely the Spanish would have taken such effort to 

eradicate them. Examples in museums come from Incan burials untouched by the Spanish. The Archaeology article 

described an Andean colonial document, Historia et Rudimenta Lengua, written between 1610 and 1637 by two Italian 

Jesuits that deciphers an Inca poem using a quipu. See Viviano Domenici & Davide Domenici, “Talking Knots of the 

Inka,” Archeology (November-December 1996): 52; Kenneth J. Andrien, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, 

and Consciousness Under Spanish rule, 1532-1825 (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 2001), 113. 

73 

Archive General de la Nación [Mexico], Inquisición, Tomo 303, folios 357-65, cited in Greenleaf, “The Inquisición 

and the Indians,” 143-4. 

74 

Dennis Tedlock, “The Last Drink of a Prisoner of War,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero-Febrero 2003): 85; Matthew 

W. Stirling, “Exploring the Past in Panama,” National Geographic (March 1949): 397-9. 

75 

Simon James, The World of the Celts (London: Thames & Hudson, 1993), 163. 

The post-conquest adoption of the Roman alphabet for writing indigenous languages can be seen in the 1554-1558 

Quiche version of the Popul Vuh, in numerous post-conquest Mexica codices and in the Quechua texts of the 1615 El 

primer nueva cronica y buen gobierno by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in the Andes. See Tedlock, Popul Vuh, 26,56; 

de Landa, An Account of the Things of Yucatan, 59; Perla Valle, “Codices coloniales,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero- 

Feb. 1997): 69; Andrien: Andean Worlds, 121. 

76 

The Celtic calendar had four festivals: 1 February for Imbolc, 1 May for Beltain, 1 August for Lughnasa and 1 

November for Samhain, which are survived as the Feast of St. Brigid, Whitsunday, and Martinmas or All Hallows Day. 

Curiously the Meseoamerican calendar marked similar major festivals on 2 February, 3 May, 15 August and 2 

November and these also survived in syncretic form after the conquest as the Feast of the Virgin of Candelaria on 2 

Februrary, Feast of the Holy Cross on 3 May, Feast of the Assumption on 15 August, and All Saints Day on 2 



The physical eradication of indigenous pagan religions was completed quickly, 

taking advantage of superior technology and extreme depopulation. However, the 

eradication of the intangible system of pagan beliefs proved to be much more difficult to 

achieve. The Catholic conversion of the indigenous peoples was voluntary, but the 

Spanish priests quickly noted that the conversions were less than sincere, with frequent 

reversion to indigenous paganism. 77 Resistance to religious conversion by indigenous 

leaders was termed as “dogmatizing” against Christian conversion, and because the 

dogmatizers were often prominent indigenous nobility, such a challenge could not be 

tolerated. 78 The monastic Inquisicións were the initial suppression of indigenous 

resistance to evangelization. In 1522, the first Franciscan monastic Inquisición tribunal 

tried Marcos de Alcohuacan for concubinage, and in 1524, four Tlaxcalan natives were 

tried and executed for idolatry and human sacrifices. 79 The civil and criminal jurisdiction 

of the monastic inquisitors came under question in July 1525, when Franciscan prelate 

Father Toribio de Motolinía was summoned before the council of aldermen in Mexico 

City and told that until an edict was issued by the Spanish Crown giving authority, the 

priests were to refrain from conducting Inquisición tribunals. Later Inquisición records 

indicate many early documents from the 1520s were lost by 1574, but the remaining 

evidence indicates monastic Inquisicións continued. In 1528, Father Vicente de Santa 

Maria tried Juan Fernández del Castillo for “encouraging the Indians to practice 

idolatry.” The first auto de fé in Mexico was held on 17 October 1528. On 27 June 1535, 

Juan de Zumárraga was named as apostolic inquisitor. Zumárraga believed that the 

Inquisición needed to punish Indians accused of idolatry and sorcery to achieve 

eradication of paganism in the Indies. To this end, Zumárraga held nineteen trials 

prosecuting seventy-five prominent Mexica including Chichimecatecotl, the Mexica chief 

of Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico in 1539, which resulted in his execution and burning. 

Reports of Zumárraga’s actions in Mexico filtered back to the Spanish Crown, who 

reprimanded Zumárraga for his severity and removed his title of apostolic inquisitor in 

1543. 80 The Spanish crown had received numerous reports detailing abuses of the 

indigenous peoples as the cause of the extreme indigenous depopulation, dramatically 

reducing the available labor pool for encomiendas and profitability of operating land 

grants. The new apostolic inquisitor, Tello de Sandoval, punished indigenous paganism 

less severely, with fines. 81 A number of reasons made eradication of indigenous pagan 

religions in the New World difficult, ineffective, and never-ending. Geographically, the 

terrain was difficult to traverse and control. The minority Spanish presence could only 

control the indigenous populations in colonial urban areas. Beyond those areas, 

indigenous pagan practices continued in an illicit manner, many times in syncretic form, 

November, just as they had in Europe. See James: The World of the Celts, 90, 155; Jones and Pennick: A History of 

Pagan Europe, 90-91, 122-124; Broda, “Ciclos de Fiestas,” 54-5. 

77 

Greenleaf, “The Inquisición and the Indians,” 138; de Landa, 60. 

78 

Greenleaf, “Persistence of Native Values,” 353. 

79 

Concubinage is a term used by the Spanish inquisitors to describe to practice of multiple wives or consorts among the 

Indian nobilities, also known as polygamy, a common practice among the indigenous elite. 

80 

Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century 10, 11, 32, 37, 74-5: “Proceso de Oficio de la justicia 

eclesiástica contra Juan Fernández de Castillo, escribano por acusarle de que había hecho idolatrar a los Indios” [1528] 

AGN, Inquisición, Tomo 40, exp. 3-bis-a, cited in p. 39. 

81 

Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 75-81. 

MARK PIPER


as denounced by a number of colonial authors including Father Jacinto de la Serna. 82 The 

abusive and punitive behavior of the Spanish created popular resistance. Most 

importantly, the indigenous priests passed their knowledge to future indigenous and 

mestizo descendants. 83 

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, eradication of indigenous religion began with the 

demolition of Inca temples such as the Coricancha and lesser shrines, known as huacas, 

with new Christian temples built on the remains. Personal deities, known as conopas, also 

became target of eradication–in 1617, three Jesuits priests claimed to have confiscated 

more than 2,500 conopas in the Chancay region. The venerated ancestor mummies, the 

mallquis, and the quipu records were burned. In 1609, the first organized campaign to 

eradicate the indigenous religions of the Andean region began, following the discovery of 

indigenous rituals performed under the guise of the Catholic Feast the Assumption in 

Huarochirí. On 20 December 1609 an auto de fé was held in the central square of Lima, 

with the public burning of idols and mummies. Hernando Pauccar, convicted of serving 

as a priest for the indigenous Chaupi Nanca religion, was given two hundred lashes, 

shorn, and sentenced to exile. Visiting tribunals continued persecuting Andean religious 

practices in Incan and vassal territories until 1750. 84 

The eradication of pagan practices also extended to Spanish immigrants and the 

African slaves brought to the Spanish colonies. In 1650, Cathalina de Miranda, a resident 

of the city of Valladolid, was tried for witchcraft. She is described as a single female 

Spanish subject, arriving from Spain via Sevilla, Santo Domingo and Veracruz. She was 

accused by nine witnesses of keeping human skulls, placing flowers on her breasts to 

determine whether men were interested in her, and cooking up love potions with roses. 

She told others her actions were not a sin. Her punishment was a fine of 100 gold pesos, 

to be satisfied by the seizure of her assets. 85 In 1704, the eighty-year old African mulatto 

and freewoman, Magdalena Durango of Mazagua, Guatemala, was tried for witchcraft. 86 

On folio twenty three of her Inquisición archive, she was accused of “making a beverage 

to stupefy the people, which she makes with the leaves of a tree called San Juan that has 

white leaves, and with this she makes a beverage or is put in chocolate or in food, and 

takes effect.” 87 She was accused by Maria Candelaria, a free girl of Alto Pueblo of 

“killing her husband with a beverage.” 88 Another witness, Lucia García, testified that she 

saw Durango and other women “after eight o’clock at night, under a ceiba tree in the 

82 Jacinto de la Serna, Tratado de las Idolatrias, vol. 1, 240-56. 

83 Greenleaf, “Persistence of Native Values,” 351-3. 

84 Andrien: Andean Worlds, 113, 159, 172-3, 183. 

85 A gold peso, later known as a castellano, was a monetary weight rather than coinage, with each unit containing 

approximately 4.18 grams of 22 karat gold, worth sixteen pieces of eight or 128 reales of silver. A fine of 200 gold 

pesos was a considerable amount. In 1547, the price of a rabbit was worth one-twentieth of a real and a slave could be 

purchased for one half real. The comparative monetary equivalents given here are in La Moneda Mexicana by José 

Manuel Sobrino (Mexico: Banco Nacional de Mexico, 1972), 9, 10, 28, 29. Holy Office of the Inquisición: “Processo y 

Causa Criminal contra Cathalina de Miranda”, Mexico City, [1650], BANC MSS 72/57M, box 5, Special Collections, 

Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. Hereafter cited as Holy Office. 

86 In colonial Mexico, the word mulatto referred exclusively to racial mixtures with black Africans; racial mixtures with 

the Indians were referred to as mestizo. See Peter Bakewell, A History of Latin America, 2nd ed., (Malden: Blackwell 

Publishing, 2004), 164, 172. 

87 Holy Office: “Processo y Causa Criminal contra Magdalena Durango,” Mexico [1704], 23. 




town plaza and the women took off all their clothes, and they prayed behind the ceiba 

[tree], about eight paces apart, and they said, ‘buxxe, buxxe’ … this I saw two times.” 89 

She later states she did not know if Durango had made “a pact with the devil in order to 

take animal form.” 90 Durango was fined 200 gold pesos. 91 The 1711 trial of Josepha de 

Balcazar from San Juan del Río, Querétaro, described as a white mulatto in her 

Inquisición archive, accused her of witchcraft as well. She was accused of keeping idols 

in a box in her home, including one spiked with thorns, of drinking intoxicating pulque, 

and of having a pouch with roots called “cola de rata” and tufts of hair that she kept 

under her pillow when she slept. Luis de Almaraz testitied that “[o]n one occasion in the 

cazadero [estate], going to the chapel, he saw lit on the altar a dark candle, and he saw 

Josepha on her knees alone in chapel.” 92 The Inquisición trial of Petra de García in 

Guichiapa describes García “invoking the Devil to her aid, taking in her hand the doll 

cleaved with maguey needles in the lower part and another maguey thorn near the 

abdomen as she was ordered by another Indian,” actions that the inquisitor determined to 

be maleficium. 93 The dedication of trees to animist spirits and the use of dolls to effect 

harm were rituals unknown in the Americas before the conquest and more common to the 

West African Yoruba and Angolan religious traditions that were brought by slaves from 

Africa. The rituals described in the Mexican Inquisición trials of mulattos in 

Mesoamerica reflect West African animist traditions brought from Africa by slaves, at 

times mixed with Indian rituals and using Indian ingredients. A similar syncretic 

European witchcraft with indigenous elements can be seen in proceedings against 

subsequent generations of Europeans in the New World, such as the February, 1709 

investigation of Isabel de Tovar in Mexico and the 1740 investigation of Maria Antonia 

Gallegos in Guadalajara. However, their punishments were admonishments. 94 

A similar pattern can be seen in the Caribbean on the island of Cuba, where the 

majority of those accused of witchcraft and sorcery were African slaves or mixed blood 

mulattos practicing West African animist traditions. In 1625, Francisco Angola, an 

African slave, was tried for sorcery. In 1628, Ana de Mena, a mulatto, was tried for 

distributing herbal love potions; Antón Cababalí, an African slave, was also tried for 

sorcery for distributing herbal potions for sexual gratification. In 1655-57, Antonio, a 

black slave from El Cobre, was convicted of heresy, and María Sebastiana, Tomasa 

Pérez, Juana de Vera, and María Enríquez were convicted of sorcery. In 1657, María de 

Rivera, Ana de Brito, and Tomasa de los Reyes were also convicted of sorcery. 

Inquisiciónal tribunals in Cuba were mandated to Santo Domingo (1516-1519), San Juan, 




92 Pulque is an intoxicating beverage made from the fermented sap of the maguey plant (Acacia angustissima). It was a 

traditional ritual drink with a long tradition in Meseoamerica. The Spanish Crown banned the production of pulque by 

royal decree on 24 August 1542, without success. In colonial times, pulque became the common wine of the lower 

classes; it is a frothy drink that is compared to pineapple-flavored beer. See Jacinto de la Serna, Tratado de las 

Idolatrias, Vol. 2, 212 & Patricia R. Anwalt, “Los conejos y la embriaguez,” Arqueología Mexicana (Mayo-Junio 

1998): 66-73. 

Holy Office: “Processo y Causa Criminal contra Josepha de Balcazar”, Mexico City [1711], folio page 4, 7, 15, 18. 

93 Holy Office: “Processo y Causa Criminal contra Petra de Garcia”, Mexico [1718], folio page 3. 

94 Ruth Behar, “Sex, Sin, Witchcraft and the Devil in Late-Colonial Mexico,” American Ethnologist, Vol. 14, No.1, 

(February 1987): 36-40. 

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Puerto Rico (1519-1569), Mexico (1569-1610), and Cartagena de las Indias, Colombia 

(1610-1820). 95 

An important category in the eradication of the indigenous religions is the 

demonization of, and later Holy Office ban on the use of plants that induced altered 

trance states, a consistent factor in indigenous religious rituals. 96 The Spanish first 

encountered the use of mind-altering plants in Hispanola, where Father Ramón Pané 

documented the use of cohoba to induce trance states to permit divination, healing and 

communion with the dead: 

They take a certain powder called cohoba, inhaling it through the nose, which 

inebriates them in such a fashion that they do not know what they are doing; and 

thus they say many senseless things, affirming therein that they are speaking with 

the zemis. [Emphasis mine]. 

Father Pané was also the first to describe the effects of the American 

hallucinogens as “inebriation.” 97 The Spanish were very disturbed by the effects of the 

mind-altering plants used in indigenous rituals, referring to the effects observed as 

“drunkenness.” Unlike the fantastical herbal concoctions presented to the Spanish 

Inquisición during the Basque witch trials of 1609-1614, the herbs of the Americas truly 

did have mind-altering properties. In Pánuco, in central Mexico, Bernal Díaz describes 

drunkenness and the use of enemas–“they funnel themselves in the rear with tubes, and 

stuffed their entrails with wine, of the type made among them, as when we administer a 

medicine.” 98 Father de Landa wrote that the Maya of the Yucatán “lost themselves to 

drunkenness” with wine made from “honey, water and the root of a certain tree they 

cultivate for this purpose.” 99 Landa also tells us that the Maya “held that drunkenness and 

sacrifices were the most pleasing to the idols …” 100 In Mexico, Father Diego Durán also 

described the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms by the Aztec nobility as part of a human 

sacrificial ceremony called the Festival of the Revelations as “inebriation.” 

Their flesh [of the human sacrificial] was eaten and a banquet was prepared with 

it after the hearts had been offered to the Devil. When the sacrifice was finished 

and the steps and courtyard were bathed with human blood, everyone went to eat 

95 

Carlos Manuel Trilles y Govin, “La Inquisición en Cuba desde 1518 hasta 1610,” Revista Bimestre Cubana 26 

(1935): 46-49; María del Carmen Victoria Ramos: Entre Brujas, Picaros y Consejas (La Habana: Editorial José Martí, 

1997), 30-2, 41-3. 

96 

Earliest usage of hallucinogens in Mesoamerica is difficult to define, though scholar Peter T Furst and others cite the 

bones of a toxic frog—Bufus marinus—which is totally inedible, found in the excavation of the Olmec site of San 

Lorenzo, Veracruz, dated to as early as 900 B.C.E., and the number of Olmec jade spoons as evidence of the practice of 

snuffing hallucinogenics or tobacco, which was later observed by Spanish chroniclers. For more see, Peter T. Furst, 

“Shamanism, Transformation, and Olmec Art,” in The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership (Princeton: The Art 

Museum, Princeton University, 2004), 29, 106-7. 

97 

Father Pané describes cohoba as a powdered snuff made from the powdered seeds of the tree (Anadenanthera 

peregrina). The use of cohoba, or yopo as it is known in Amazonia, has been documented in a large region of the 

Caribbean islands, and the length of the southern Caribbean coast of Panama to Venezuela. Zemí is a Taíno word that 

Pané applied to the intangible forces that the Taíno worshipped as gods. See Pané, The Antiquities of the Indians, 14-6, 

21. 

98 

Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate, 297-300.Díaz del Castillo, Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de La 

Nueva España, 359. 

99 

de Landa: An Account of theThings of Yucatán, 67. 

100 

de Landa: An Account of theThings of Yucatán, 104. 



raw mushrooms. With this food they went out of their minds and were in a worse 

state than if they had drunk a great quantity of wine … With the strength of these 

mushrooms they saw visions and had revelations about the future, since the Devil 

spoke to them in their madness. [Emphasis mine]. 101 

Between 1558 and 1577, Father Bernardino de Sahagún wrote the twelve-volume 

Historia de las cosas de Nueva España, that detailed the history, socio-political 

organization, religion, commerce, and customs of the Mexica nation, based on numerous 

interviews with the Mexica of the Valley of Mexico. Even though the Sahagún’s Historia 

did not reach a wide audience, it does gives the opinion of the Catholic priests in Mexico 

on the use of mind-altering plants as demonic inebriation that caused supernatural 

divination. 102 Book eleven, chapter seven of Sahagún’s work focuses on the herbs of the 

Mexica used to induce mind-altering trance states. Sahagún’s work describes 

hallucinogenic plants used by the Mexica. In each instance the hallucinogenic effects are 

described as demonic drunkenness and madness. South America and the Caribbean had 

coca, yopo (cohoba), ayahuasca, and the San Pedro cactus, The Spanish also demonized 

these plants. Hemp (Cannabis sativa), brought from Europe to grow cordage fiber in 

Mexico, was later adopted by the indigenous as a topical analgesic applied in poultices or 

smoked to produce a relaxed euphoria. Cultivation of hemp in Mexico was reduced after 

1550, when the Spanish authorities realized that the indigenous were using it as a drug. 

The Spanish feared this use could provoke a rebellion or degrade the workers. 103 

Sahagún’s descriptions make it clear that he disapproves of the use of the “many different 

herbs which perturb one, madden one.” 104 Modern research has shown that all these 

plants possess alkaloids that induce altered trance states. Archeological work at 

Teotihuacan has shown that use of plants dates back far in time. 105 Ethnographic studies 

and interviews with twentieth century indigenous healers and priests show that the 

properties of plants were identified by a “doctrine of signatures” based on the color of the 

plant, its flower, or its seed. Plants identified as ‘white,’ such as toloache or mushrooms, 

usually indicate death or poison; in diluted form, some of these are used as 

hallucinogens. 106 The indigenous named plants to reflect their use or properties. Thus, 

several different species can bear the same name. 107 

The trumpet-shaped purple or white flowers of the morning glory vine (Ipomoea 

violacea or Turbina corymbosa) produce the hallucinogen ololiuhqui. The seeds are 

steeped in a tea taken to induce a powerful altered state, used for divination and ritual 

101 Father Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain [1581], trans. Doris Heyden and Fernando Horcasitas 

(New York: Orion Press, 1964), 225. 

102 Father Bernardino Sahagún: Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España (Codex Florentine), [1577] trans. 

Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1959), 129-130. 

103 Luis Díaz, “Las plantas mágicas y la consciencia visionaria,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero-Febrero 2003): 24; 

Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York: Picador St Martin’s Press, 2005), 38. 

104 Sahagún, Historia General, 129. 

105 Díaz, “Las plantas mágicas” 19; Xavier Loyoza, “Un paraíso de plantas medicinales,” Arqueología Mexicana 

(Septiembre-Octubre 1999): 20-1. 

106 Angela M. H. Schuster, “On the Healer’s Path: A Journey Through the Maya Rain Forest,” Archeology (July- 

August 2001): 35. 

107 The easiest way to illustrate this concept is the current definition of jade, which can be one of two different minerals 

with similar properties – nephrite, a silicate of calcium and magnesium, and jadeite, a silicate of sodium and aluminum. 

See Fred Ward, “Jade: Stone of Heaven,” National Geographic (September 1987): 288. 

MARK PIPER


healings. 108 Sahagún informs us that “[i]t makes one besotted; it deranged one, troubles 

one, maddens one, makes one possessed.” 109 As late as 1625, Father Fernando de Porras 

of Chiautla, in the Villa Alta region of Oaxaca, tried and convicted a Zapotec Indian for 

using ololiuhqui. He was sentenced to wear penitential garb at Mass, and was given fifty 

lashes afterwards. 110 In 1650’s Father Jacinto de la Serna also reported continued use of 

ololiuhqui in the Valley of Mexico. He describes its use as a tea taken to induce a trance 

state to permit divination, stating that ololiuhqui “is consulted as an oracle for the many 

illnesses they pretend to cure, for whatever things they want to know, be they lost or 

hidden and those things beyond human knowledge; to know the origin of illness.” 111 He 

also tells us that “they [the indigenous] hold ololiuhqui in great veneration, as if it were a 

god; they light candles to it and keep it in special cases or boxes for this purpose, and 

they place offerings to it, and place it on the altars of their rituals.” 112 In colonial Mexico, 

ololiuhqui acquired a syncretic name in Spanish—manto de la Virgen [Virgin’s Veil] 

referring to the Virgin Mary. The name may well be an oblique reference to the visions 

the Virgin Mary received from God prior to the birth of the Christ child, described in the 

Gospel of Saint Luke. Usage in rural areas of Oaxaca continued in the colonial era in 

spite of repeated persecution against the practice. 113 

Peyotl, commonly known as peyote (Lophophora williamsii), is a cactus native to 

the desert regions of northeastern Mexico. The cactus produces growths in the shape of 

circular buttons, which are broken off. The dried buttons are chewed or steeped in tea to 

produce a hallucinogenic trance state. Father Sahagún writes that peyote was discovered 

by the northern Mexican desert nations known as the Chichimeca, who “esteemed it 

above wine or mushrooms.” 114 Sahagún describes peyote as having “effects like 

mushrooms” that last a day to two days, adding that “[h]owever, it harms one, troubles 

one, makes one besotted, takes effect on one.” 115 After the Mexica conquest, the 

Inquisición banned the use of peyote because of its hallucinogenic properties. Father de la 

Serna described the use of peyote and its effects as similar to ololiuhqui. 116 Researchers 

Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán and William B. Taylor have identified ninety-two Inquisiciónal 

or Provisorate tribunals prosecuting usage of peyote between 1614 and 1779. In the 

colonial era, use of peyote was persecuted as far away as Manila and was adopted for 

hallucinogenic and medicinal use by many indigenous North American nations such as 

the Wichita, Delaware, Kiowa, Kickapoo, Shawnee, and Comanche in the United States. 

In the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the Court of Indian 

Offenses in 1883. This was the American version of the Inquisición, persecuting 

”performances of ‘old heathenish dances’ or ceremonies such as the Sun Dance and the 

Scalp Dance; plural marriage (concubinage); the usual ritual practices of the so-called 

108 

Xavier Lozoya, “Plantas del Alma,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero-Febrero 2003): 62. 

109 

Sahagún, Historia General, 129. 

110 

Archivo General de la Nación [Mexico], Inquisición, Tome 510, folio 133, cited in Greenleaf, “The Mexican 

Inquisición and the Indians,” 145-6. 

111 de la Serna, Tratado de Idolatrias, 234. 

112 de la Serna, Tratado de Idolatrias, 234-6. 

113 Lozoya, “Plantas del Alma,” 62. 

114 Sahagún, Historia General, 173. 

115 Sahagún, Historia General, 129, 173. 

116 de la Serna, Tratado de Idolatrias, 234-9. 



medicine men; destruction of property at a burial; or the use of any intoxicants.” 117 By 

1909 American prohibitionists cut off shipments of peyote from Mexico based on the 

1897 Prohibition Law that prohibited alcohol among the indigenous natives, and in 1912 

they attempted to enact federal legislation against peyote. Arrests and persecution on a 

state level continued until 1955, while the Native American Church claimed the use of 

peyote as a constitutionally protected practice of religion. The state ban in Texas was 

tested in March 1968. Judge E. James Kazan dismissed the case, leading to the creation 

of the Texas Narcotic Law of 1969 that exempted indigenous users from prosecution. 

Other states have since followed suit. 118 

Sahagún describes another hallucinogen as tolohuaxihuitl, known in Mexico as 

toloache,and known to the Western world as datura (Datura stramonium, D. inoxia, D. 

metel). The showy fragrant white or yellow trumpet-shaped flowers of the datura vine 

(tlapatl) or tree (tzintzintlaptal) produce spiny round pods with black seeds. Powdered or 

steeped as a tea, the seeds provide a powerful hallucinogenic experience. 119 Sahagún tells 

us “[i] t harms one, take’s [sic] away one’s appetite, maddens one, makes one besotted. 

He who eats it will no longer desire food until he shall die. And if he eats it moderately, 

he will forever be disturbed, maddened; he will always be possessed, no longer 

tranquil.” 120 The colonial herbal Codice Badiano lists medicinal uses for toloache as a 

sedative. 121 Sahagún lists tzitzintlapatl as “just like tlapatl” (toloache); today this plant 

bears a syncretic Spanish name–hoja de pastora (the shepherdess’ leaf) that appears to 

imply its role [as] a spiritual shepherd or “guide.” 122 The Holy Office itself issued a 

report in 1698 that described the harmful effects of pipizizintle (tzitzintlapatl). 123 Its 

botanical name (Salvia divinorum) today also infers its hallucinogenic qualities. Sahagún 

also lists one other plant, “another herb that is called mixitl. Its [name] means to be 

insane, as if one eats this herb … it is small and stands up straight. It is green and bears 

seed … and if it is eaten or drunk, it does not give a bad flavor; but later it takes all the 

strength from your body.” The 1959 Dibble and Anderson translation of Sahagún’s work 

identifies mixitl as Datura stramonium but because Sahagún identifies it separately, and 

its image is different, it is likely that mixitl is a plant that has not been properly 

identified. 124 The use of toloache for divination, initiation rites, and medicinal purposes 

continued in the colonial era among the indigenous in the remoter areas of northern 

Mexico, including the Cahuilla, Cupeno Paipai, and Kumiai nation of Southern 

California. 125 In the twentieth century colonial era, toloache could be found in markets in 

117 

Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 21-24, 213-27, 

239-48. 

118 

Omer C. Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (Norman OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 21-24, 120-9, 

138-40, 213-27, 239-48. 

119 

Lozoya, “Plantas del Alma,” 59. 

120 


121 

Xavier Lozoyo, “Fuentes del Siglo XVI: Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Librito de las yerbas 

medicinales de los indios) o Codice Badiano” & Elaboración del Códice Badiano (Siglo XVI),” Arqueología 

Mexicana, (Septiembre-Octubre 1999): 22-3. 

122 

Treviño, “Usos de las plantas medicinales mexicanas,” 35. 

123 

Archivo General de la Nación [Mexico], Inquisición, Tomo 706, exp. 27, cited in Greenleaf, “The Mexican 

Inquisición and the Indians,” 327. 

124 

Sahagún, 130; Sahagún [1989], Vol 2. , 747-8, cited in José Luis Díaz, “Las plantas mágicas,” 21. 

125 

Elisa Ramirez, “Toloache or Devil’s Herb,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero-Febrero 2003): 56. 

MARK PIPER


the rural regions of the Valley of Mexico. 126 Use of toloache has continued in current 

times. In 2003, three students in Berkeley, California ate datura flowers after being told 

that ingesting the flowers would produce a legal “high.” The flowers are poisonous, and 

the students ended up in the hospital. 127 

The Mexica called a number of species of mushrooms teonanacatl. The Nahuatl 

word teonanacatl means “flesh of the god.” Mushrooms were eaten with honey, smoked, 

or ground into powder, and their ingestion induced visions. Botanists have identified a 

number of mushrooms used as hallucinogens, including Panaeolus (campanulatus, 

sphinctrinus), as well as species of Conocybe, Psathyrella, Stropharia, and Psilocybe 

(aztecorum, mexicana, muliercula, wassoni). Most reports of usage come from the 

Mexica regions. However, the Maya also practiced similar sacrificials while consuming 

intoxicating beverages and images show Classic Mayan elite smoking in the context of 

visions, in order to commune with ancestors. 128 In Pre-Classic Maya highland sites, a 

number of mushroom-shaped pestles have been found, dating to 1000 BC. 129 Curiously, 

among Quiche Maya, kaqulja is the word used for thunderbolt and the poisonous 

mushroom Amanita muscaria. 130 Sahagún wrote, “It makes one besotted; it deranges one, 

troubles one. It is a remedy for fever, for gout. Only two [or] three can be eaten. It 

saddens, depresses, troubles one; it makes one flee, frightens one, makes one hide. He 

who eats many of them sees many things which make him afraid, or make him laugh. He 

flees, hangs himself, hurls himself from a cliff, cries out, takes fright. One eats it in 

honey.” 131 As with the other hallucinogens, use was limited to a ceremonial and religious 

context, though Sahagún also hinted at the abuse of mushrooms when he wrote that “[o]f 

one who is haughty, presumptuous, vain, of him it is said: ‘He mushrooms himself.’” 132 

Elsewhere, Sahagún tells us mushrooms “even provoke lust” and describes a Mexica 

harlot as “rude, drunk, shameless—eating mushrooms.” 133 In the 1650s, Father de la 

Serna described continued use of hallucinogenic mushrooms called quautlan nanacatl in 

the Tlaxcala region, which he denounced as a way for Satan to give his sacrament in food 

and drink; that Satan does this out of hate for the Christians; and that during use, animal 

sacrificials are also conducted. 134 In spite of persecution, use of hallucinogenic 

mushrooms continued in the colonial era. Not until 1955, when Mazatecan sorceress 

María Sabina invited Western researcher R. Gordon Wasson to a “velada” ritual did 

teonanacatl emerge from the shadows of Christian persecution. 135 

126 Isabel Romero Juárez, personal communication with the author. 2006. 

127 “Kids Eating Park Plants for High,” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 August 2003. 

128 de Landa, Account of the Things of Yucatán, 81-84; Robert Bye & Edelmora Linares, “Plantas medicinales del 

México prehispánico,” Arqueología Mexicana, (Septiembre-Octubre 1999), 5, 7, 11. 

129 Carlos Alvarez Asomoza, “Sacred Mushrooms in Teotenango, State of Mexico,” Arqueología Mexicana (Enero- 

Febrero 2003): 84. 

130 Dennis Tedlock, Popul Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods 

and Kings (New York: Touchstone Books, 1996), 294. 





133 Sahagún, Historia General, 55, 129. 

134 de la Serna, Tratado de las Idolatrias, 100, 234. 

135 Velada is a Spanish word that implies a vigil or celebration held by candlelight (vela) that is a common feature of 

syncretic indigenous divinatory ololiuhqui rituals. The lit candles are syncretic signs of respect for the hallucinogen 

itself, which is considered an entity that instructs and heals. Díaz, “Las plantas mágicas,” 21. 



Testimony given in 1544 against indigenous nobles of Yanhuitlán, Oaxaca stated 

they were “drunk during the ceremonies, when they invoked the Devil, [emphasis mine] 

while they sacrificed …” during rituals dedicated to the rain god. 136 In 1547, testimony 

against Don Juan, chief of the Teutalco, stated that he “kept an idol called Ometochtli in 

his home and he regularly offered sacrifices to the god, getting drunk and dancing as part 

of the ceremonies.” 137 In book ten, chapter fifteen, Sahagún makes the curious 

observation of a Mexica harlot, whom he describes as one “who sells her body– 

repeatedly sells her body,” a “lascivious old woman, of the itching buttocks” and one 

”who is shameless–eating mushrooms.” 138 In describing an example of a bad Mexica 

noblewoman, Sahagún writes, “The bad noblewoman [is] infamous, very audacious, 

stern, proud, very stupid, brazen, besotted, drunk. She goes about besotted; she goes 

about demented; she goes about eating mushrooms.” 139 The Christian Bible disapproves 

of drunkenness, which is blamed for shameful and sinful behavior. The narrative in the 

book of Genesis of Noah being seen by his sons in a drunken naked stupor sets the 

biblical standard against drunkenness. 140 In the New Testament, St. John used 

drunkenness as an analogy of sin, when he wrote that “Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that 

great city, because she made all the nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her 

fornication.” 141 The intoxicated divinatory state produced with hallucinogens was 

demonized with the negative descriptive of drunkenness and association with pagan 

sacrificials. 

In South America, other plants were used to induce altered trance states. The 

Caribbean was the first location that yopo, known there as cohoba, was observed. Rapid 

depopulation of the Caribbean islands facilitated the eradication of the use of cohoba. 

However, its use continued in South America among isolated Amazonian tribes, where 

ethnologist William Safford rediscovered it in 1916. 142 Ayahuasca (Banisteriopsis caapi), 

the Andean “vine of the soul,” is another hallucinogenic from Amazonia with a long 

history of use in South America, in indigenous divinatory and healing rituals. Ayahuasca 

is steeped in a tea, and is ingested by a healer called an ayahuasquero, who in a trance 

state acts as an oracle. 143 South America has its own hallucinogenic cactus, huachama, 

also known as the San Pedro cactus (Trichocereus pachanoi). Its use has been identified 

136 


137 

Archivo General de la Nación (AGN) [Mexico]: Proceso del Fiscal del Santo Oficio contra Don Francisco y 

Domingo, indios del pueblo de Yanhuitlán por idolatries[1544-1547]; Proceso contra los indios de Yanhuitlán [1546]; 

Razon del Proceso que se hizo en el santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Don Domingo Cacique de Yanhuitlán [1545]; 

Probanza de Fiscal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Don Francisco y Don Domingo y Don Juan, Cacique y 

Gobernadores de Yanhuitlán [1546], Inquisición, Tomo 37, exps. 7, 8, 9, 10, & Proceso del Santo Oficio de la 

Inquisición contra Don Juan Gobernador del Pueblo de Teutalco por idolatría [1546-1547] Inquisición, Tomo 37, exp. 

10, cited in Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 76, 80. 

138 

Ernesto E. Tabio: Arqueologia: Agricultura Aborigen Antillana, 31. 

139 

Sahagún, Historia General, 49, 55. 

140 

Genesis 9. 20-7 KJV. 

141 

Revelations 14. 9 KJV. 

142 

William E. Safford, “Identity of Cohoba, the Narcotic Stuff of Ancient Haiti” Journal of the Washington Academy 

of Sciences, Vol. 6, no. 15 [1916], 547,562, cited in Ernesto E. Tabio, Arqueologia Agricultura Antillana, (Havana, 

Editora de Ciencias Politicas, 1989), 31-3. 

143 

Fred Katz and Marlene Dobkin de Rios, “Hallucinogenic Music: An Analysis of the Role of Whistling in Peruvian 

Ayahuasca Healing Sessions,” Journal of American Folklore Vol. 84, No. 333 (July-Sept 1971), 321-2. 

MARK PIPER


as early as the Chavin culture (900-200 BCE). 144 Healers identify seven varieties of the 

tall horizontal cactus. The four-ribbed variety, the San Pedro of the Four Winds cactus, is 

most valued for its links with the four-quadrant Andean universe. Use of ayahuasca and 

the San Pedro cactus continued during the colonial era in areas outside direct control of 

the Spanish authorities, where indigenous healers continue to use it. 145 

Two other New World plant intoxicants received different treatment from the 

Inquisición. When Admiral Columbus reached the island of Cuba on 28 October 1492, he 

sent Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres to reconnoiter the island. They returned to 

report the island was populated. The natives had the curious habit of smoking the dried 

leaves of a local plant, “which dulls their flesh and as it were intoxicates and so they say 

that they do not feel weariness…” 146 The rolled up leaves were called “tabaco.” Tobacco 

(Nicotiana rustica and tabacum) originally came from the Amazonian region of South 

America. It had been domesticated no later than 2,500 B.C.E., and its use and cultivation 

spread throughout the Americas. 147 Tobacco was used ritually as well as for pleasure. 

The Mexica prepared elaborate cigars with tobacco, sometimes mixed with aromatic 

flowers or mushrooms. 148 Even remote peoples such as the Tlingit of the Alaskan 

peninsula, who practiced a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture, took time to cultivate 

tobacco. The Spanish explorers grew to like tobacco and the effects of its active agent, 

nicotine, and took it back to Europe. Originally, the Catholic Church termed tobacco 

usage as a vice. It came to be called the henbane of Peru. An ecclesiastical decree issued 

in Lima in 1588 dictated that “[i]t is forbidden under penalty of eternal damnation for 

priests, about to administer the sacraments, either to take the smoke of … tobacco into 

the mouth or the powder of tobacco into the nose, even under the guise of medicine, 

before the service of mass.” The British acquired tobacco in third party trade, and piracy, 

with Spain and it became quickly popular. King James I struggled to eradicate the use of 

tobacco, denouncing its use in a pamphlet, titled Counterblaste to Tobacco. 

Unsuccessful, he then turned instead to taxing tobacco as a commodity, with better 

success. An independent source of tobacco is one reason England also took to the ocean 

to establish its own colonies in the Americas. Popular demand had caused the initial 

prohibitions in Europe to be dismissed, to allow profit from the cultivation of tobacco. 149 

Something similar happened with coca (Erythroxylum coca and varieties). It also 

received initial condemnation from the Catholic Church. Cultivation of coca, another 

Amazonian native, is dated as far back as 2500 BCE. The indigenous Andeans use coca 

as a stimulant. Cocaine is chewed with powdered lime or ash to release the active agents 

in the leaves. The Taíno of Hispanola were recorded using gueio in rites to commune 

with the dead. Taíno authority Sven Loven postulates that gueio was in fact coca. Pané 

described gueio as resembling European basil, which in fact coca does. 150 On his fourth 

144 

Stone-Miller, Art of the Andes, 30-3. 

145 

Marlene Dobkin de Rios, “Folk Curing With a Psychedelic Cactus in Northern Peru,” International Journal of 

Social Psychiatry, 15 (1968), 23-32. 

146 

Admiral Christopher Columbus. 

147 

Tabio, Arqueologia: Agricultura Aborigen Antillana, 30-1. 

148 


149 

Iain Gately, Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization, (New York: Grove Press, 

2001), 2, 24-5, 36, 67-9. 

150 Tabio, Arqueologia Aborigen Antillana, 33-4. 



voyage, Admiral Columbus described an encounter at the Urisa River, writing that “[t]his 

cacique and his chief man never ceased putting dry herb unto their mouths, which they 

chewed, and sometimes they took a sort of powder, which they carried along with that 

herb.” 151 Coca was the most important offering the Andean nations offered their gods. 

Spanish noble Diego de Robles called coca “a plant that the Devil invented for the total 

destruction of the natives.” 152 The First Church Council of Lima in 1552 petitioned the 

Spanish Crown to ban coca, but because of the economic value of Spanish cultivation of 

coca, this request was declined. Coca production had become profitable for the Spanish 

cultivators in Peru, who sold it to mining operations. Mining operations to extract silver 

and mercury used indigenous mita labor that refused to work without coca as a stimulant 

to overcome the extreme conditions in the mines. The Second Council of Lima in 1567 

also requested a ban on coca and Spanish monarch Phillip I again declined but instead 

appointed a new viceroy for Peru, Francisco de Toledo, to institute reforms to reduce the 

exploitation of indigenous labor. But the Inquisición never banned coca, and production 

continued throughout the colonial era. 153 

While the Spanish priests had not encountered intoxicating plants such as those 

found in the New World, Christianity had battled plants before. Mistletoe (Viscum album) 

was banned by the British bishops in the Middle Ages because of its links with Celtic 

religion. Roman historian Pliny gave a description of mistletoe in a religious sacrificial 

context, but it is unclear how it was used. Later Norse legends also linked mistletoe to 

death. One legend has the Norse god Loki using mistletoe to kill Balder, the son of 

Odin. 154 Mandrake (Mandrogora officinarium) was linked in German folklore with 

Alrune, “a devil spirit and magic root in the form of a human, which when questioned 

revealed all secret things …” 155 Plants that produced hallucinogenic effects, known in the 

European world to cause hallucinations, were valued as medicinal pain suppressants for 

millennia and were not banned because they all had a long historiography as beneficent. 

The eleventh century medical compilations by Constantinus Africanus edited at the 

Monte Cassino Abbey in Italy gave a recipe for a soporific sponge to be used during 

surgery, which was soaked in a solution of water, henbane, hemlock, opium, and 

mandrake. This was used to induce anesthesia during surgery. 156 In 1529, Franciscan 

father Martin de Castañega wrote a study on sorcery and witchcraft that was skeptical of 

the demonization of medicine men, writing that “[i] t is therefore necessary to note that 

many natural curative powers are so hidden from human understanding in this life that 

many times we see marvelous cures and we do not know the reason for them.” 

Unfortunately, not many shared Castañega’s views and his treatise was not published 

again until 1946. 157 The hallucinogenic plants of the New World, even if they possessed 

151 

Dominic Streatfield: Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (New York: Picador, 2001), 23. 

152 

Streatfield, 31. 

153 

Streatfield, 2, 8, 11, 23, 31-3. 

154 

James, The World of the Celts, 95. 

155 

H. F. Clark, “The Mandrake Fiend,” Folklore Vol. 73, No. 4 (Winter 1962): 262. 

156 

Crisciani C Agrini J, Charité et assistance dans la civilisation chrétienne médiévale, Histoire de la pensée médicale 

en occident. Ed. M. Grmek (Paris: Le Seuil, 1995), 151-74, cited in Philippe Juvin, MD and Jean Marie Desmonts, 

“The Ancestors of Inhalational Anesthesia: The Soporific Sponges (XIth – XVIIth Centuries,” Anesthesiology Vol. 93 

(2000): 266. 

157 

Martín de Casteñega: Tratado de las supersticiones y hechicerias, [1529] ed. Agustin G. de Amezúa (Madrid: 

Sociedad de Bibliofilos Españoles, 1946), cited in David H. Darst, “Witchcraft in Spain: The Testimony of Martin de 

MARK PIPER


proven medical use, were demonized and banned for facilitating contact with 

supernatural forces. 

On 29 June 1620, the Holy Office in the City of Mexico, by virtue of apostolic 

authority, issued an edict that banned the use of peyote or other herbs that produced 

similar intoxicating effects. The use of peyote or other herbs “for the purpose of detecting 

thefts, of divining other happenings, and of foretelling future events” is condemned as an 

“act of superstition.” 158 The Devil is called the “real author of this vice, who first avails 

himself of the natural credulity of the Indians and their tendency to idolatry …” 159 The 

edict was posted on church doors in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Yucatan, Veracruz, 

Honduras, the Caribbean, and the Philippine Islands: 

We order that henceforth no person of whatever rank or social condition can or 

may make use of the said herb, Peyote, nor of any other kind under any name or 

appearance for the same or similar purposes … with the further warning that 

disobedience to these decrees shall cause us … to take action against such 

disobedient and recalcitrant persons as we would against those suspected of 

heresy to our Holy Catholic Faith. 160 

The 1620 edict against peyote eradicated common use in areas under Spanish control. In 

Latin American Spanish parlance, the users of hallucinogens were labeled as [brujo(a)s] 

in a syncretic adaptation of the original Italian word. Independence from Spain after 1820 

eliminated the religious tribunals. Secular persecution in Mexico was uncommon. Use of 

hallucinogens slowly regained validity in the twentieth century. 161 

Along with the conversion to Christianity, acculturation to European culture, and 

eradication of indigenous religions, the subjugation of the indigenous socio-political 

leadership using Inquisición tribunals was a necessary policy for the survival of the 

Spanish colonization. Political motivations for Inquisicións in Europe had a long history. 

In 1311, King Philip IV of France used the Inquisición to convict Pope Boniface VIII of 

blasphemy, heresy, and ritual magic in order to gain control the French church. Earlier in 

1307, a bankrupt Philip had gone after the wealthy Knights Templar, leading accusations 

against them for idolatry, sodomy, and blasphemy. For his efforts, when the Templars 

were dissolved, Philip received a share of the confiscated assets. 162 The process of the 

Inquisición was also used in Mexico as a political instrument, to discredit prominent 

Spanish colonists and merchants with accusations of blasphemy and Judaism. 163 An 

added incentive to Inquisiciónal abuse was the fact that the Holy Office relied on 

Castanega’s Treatise on Superstition and Witchcraft,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society Vol. 123, 

No. 5 (15 Oct 1979): 298, 307-8. 

158 Archivo General de la Nación [México] (Inquisición) Tomo 289, exp. 2, cited in Irving A. Leónard, “Peyote and the 

Mexican Inquisición, 1620,” American Anthropologist 44 (April – June 1942): 326. 


Mexican Inquisición, 1620,” American Anthropologist 44 (April – June 1942): 326. 


Mexican Inquisición, 1620,” American Anthropologist 44 (April/June 1942): 326. 

161 Stewart: Peyote Religion: A History, 21-4. 

162 Waite, Heresy, Magic and Witchcraft in early Modern Europe, 27-8. 

163 Greenleaf, “Francisco Millan before the Mexican Inquisición: 1538-1539,” The Americas Vol. 21, No. 2 (October 

1964), 184. 



revenues from fines to fund its operations. 164 In a letter to the Spanish monarch in 1561, 

apostolic inquisitor Alonso de Montúfar described how the parish clergy was conducting 

autos de fé independent of the Holy Office, targeting the indigenous leadership. 165 By 

1640, the Inquisición had confiscated over 300 million pesos in assets. Bishop Juan de 

Palafox charged that the Holy Office “terrorized the community by arresting prominent 

priests and citizens …” 166 In the initial phase of conquest, the Spanish frequently 

slaughtered the native leadership of a region, in order to incapacitate and conquer the 

indigenous nations. 167 Converted indigenous leaders remained after conquest to aid in 

governance, because of the small Spanish presence in a continent with millions of 

inhabitants. However, indigenous leaders were also feared since they could easily 

organize rebellions against the Spanish. When indigenous leaders resisted conversion, 

they were accused of dogmatizing and were prosecuted by the Inquisición. Greenleaf 

explains the political implication of the indigenous Inquisitorial prosecutions as–an 

imperative to “[s]tay within the bounds of orthodoxy or be punished with the full force of 

the law.” 168 

The cases of the Mixteca chief Seven Monkey and of Chichimecatecotl, the 

Mexica chief of the city-state of Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico in 1539, both illustrate 

this tactic. In 1529, the Franciscan fathers had baptized Seven Monkey with the Spanish 

name Domingo de Guzmán, and he was allowed to remain as the indigenous leader of the 

Yanhuitlán region of Oaxaca. In spite of his conversion to Catholicism, between 1544 

and 1547, Don Domingo and three other leaders were arrested and tried for idolatry and 

offering human sacrifices. 169 Don Francisco, the Governor of Yanhuititlán claimed “he 

was the victim of a native plot against his authority.” 170 Don Domingo and the others 

eventually were freed after paying substantial fines. The subliminal political message 

given by the Inquisición’s prosecution was that the Spanish colonial authorities would be 

more lenient with compliant indigenous rulers. Properly chastised, from 1550 to 1575 

Don Domingo built one of the largest convents in Mexico, and his lineage remained in 

power until 1629. 171 Punishments inflicted by the Mexican Inquisición, such as 

substantial fines, penitential garb, and lashings, were clearly meant to discredit and 

impoverish indigenous leaders that resisted Spanish authority. 

164 Greenleaf, “The Great Visitas of the Mexican Holy Office,” The Americas Vol. 44, No. 4, (April 1988): 399. 

165 AGI, [Mexico] “Carta a Su Magestad del Arzobispo de Mexico, de cuatro de febrero de 1561”, Legajo 2978, folios 

650-656, cited in Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 120. 

166 Maria Asuncion Herrera Sotillo: Ortodoxia y Control Social en Mexico en El Siglo XVII: El Tribunal del Santo 

Oficio (Madrid:Universidad Complusente de Madrid, 1982), 156-57 & AGS, Patronato Real [Mexico] Inquisición, 

Legajo 2928, cited in Greenleaf, “The Great Visitas”: 399,405. 

167 de las Casas: The Devastation of the Indies, 37,39,40,45,62,68-69; Solanes Carraro, “Cholula,” 27-8. 

168 Greenleaf, “Persistence of Native Values,” 353, 355, 357, 363. 

169 Archivo General de la Nación [Mexico]: Proceso del Fiscal del Santo Oficio contra Don Francisco y Domingo, 

indios del pueblo de Yanhuitlán por idolatries[1544-1547]; Proceso contra los indios de Yanhuitlán [1546]; Razon del 

Proceso que se hizo en el santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Don Domingo Cacique de Yanhuitlán [1545]; Probanza 

de Fiscal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Don Franicsco y Don Domingo y Don Juan, Cacique y 

Gobernadores de Yanhuitlán [1546], Inquisición, Tomo 37, exps. 7, 8, 9, 10, cited in Greenleaf, “Persistence of Native 

Values,” 65-366. 


171 García Martínez, “La conversión de 7 Mono a don Domingo de Guzmán,” 56, 58. 

MARK PIPER


In 1539, Don Carlos Chichimecatecotl, the Mexica chief of the city-state of 

Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico, was tried by Inquisitor Zumárraga for idolatry, 

sacrifice, concubinage, and dogmatizing, for the purpose of undermining the authority of 

the Catholic Church and Spanish colonial authority. 172 Texcoco had been a vassal citystate 

of the Mexica kingdom in the Valley of Mexico. In Mexica times Texcoco was 

considered an influential center of intellectual and academic knowledge, and a powerful 

military force in the Mexica Triple Alliance. In 1437, Don Carlos’ grandfather, 

Nezahualcoyotl, had led the enthronement of the Mexica king Motecuzoma 

Ilhuicamina. 173 Don Carlos was investigated after a speech he gave at Chiconautla in 

which he asked, “[w]ho are those that undo us and disturb us and live on us and we have 

them on our backs and they subjugate us?” An indigenous leader that expressed such 

views could easily incite a rebellion against the Spanish. Curiously, Don Carlos was 

convicted of dogmatizing, while found innocent of the other charges. 174 Don Carlos was 

burned on 30 November 1539, sending a clear message that defiance of the Spanish rule 

was not an option. Between June 1536, and December 1539, the famous sorcerer Ocelotl 

(Martin Ucelo), Don Baltasar, chief of Culoacan, Marcos and Francisco of Tlatelolco, 

and the elders of the town of Azcapotzalco were all convicted of dogmatizing for publicly 

denouncing the Spanish religion and conversion. 175 It is curious that rarely was the 

common man prosecuted, but instead every defendant was a prominent indigenous 

political and religious leader. Another Inquisiciónal charge used to prosecute indigenous 

leaders was that of concubinage. Polygamy was an accepted privilege of the nobility of 

the indigenous nations of the Americas, with multiple wives many times sealing political 

pacts between nations. In the 1590s, in the Florida peninsula, Father Alonso Escobedo 

reported that when the son of the Guale chief disobeyed the religious ban on 

concubinage, the Spanish priests appointed another noble as chief. 176 In 1522 the 

Inquisición tribunal tried Marcos de Alcohuacan for concubinage. In 1557, the Holy 

Office tried Tomás and Maria of Tecoaloya for the same offense. In those cases, 

substantial fines were imposed. 177 Other times, such as with the 1539 Don Carlos 

Chichimecatecotl tribunal, the charge appears to have been added to an indictment to 

ensure a conviction or a fine to benefit the Holy Office. 

172 

Archivo General de la Nación [Mexico]: Proceso Criminal del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición y del fiscal en su 

nombre contra Don Carlos indio principal de Texcoco por idolatría [1539], Inquisición, Tomo 16, exp. 11, cited in 

Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth Century, 74. 

173 

José Luis Martínez, “Nezahualcoyotl, ‘Coyote Hambriento’ (1402-1472),” Arqueología Mexicana (Noviembre– 

Diciembre 2002): 23 & Patrick Johansson K., “La imagen de Nezahualcoyotl en los códices nahuas,” Arqueología 

Mexicana (Noviembre–Diciembre 2002): 36-7. 

174 

Greenleaf, “Persistence of Native Values,” 357, 359. 

175 

Archivo General de la Nación [Mexico]: Inventario de bienes de Martin Ucelo [1536], Inquisición, Tomo 37, exp. 4; 

Proceso del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Don Baltazar, Cacique de Culoacán por idolatría y oculatar ídolos 

[1539], Inquisición, Tomo 42, exp. 18; Proceso del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Marcos y Francisco, indios, 

por haber hablado en contra de las doctrinas predicadas por los frailes [1539], Inquisición, Tomo 42, exp. 18; Proceso 

de Santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra los indios de Atzcapozalco por idolatrías [1538], Inquisición, Tomo 37, exp. 

2.; cited in Greenleaf, “Persistence of Native Values,” 355. 

176 

Father Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo, La Florida, trans. A. F. Falcones (St. Petersburg, FL: Great Outdoors 

Publishing Company, 1963), 28, 39, 59. 

177 

Archivo General de la Nacion [Mexico]: Causa del Santo Oficio de la Inquisición contra Tomás, indio natural de 

Tecoaloya y María india con quien se había casado antes de la conquista conforme a los ritos de su gentilidad, acusados 

de mancebía [1547], Inquisición, Tomo 34, exp. 6, cited in Greenleaf, The Mexican Inquisición of the Sixteenth 

Century, 10, 81. 



As early as 1493, one goal of the Spanish conquest of the Indies was the 

eradication of the indigenous pagan religions. The 1511 “Letter to the Indies” by King 

Ferdinand of Spain, and subsequent Catholic edicts, all empowered the destruction of the 

indigenous idols and temples and ordered the religious conversion of the Indians to the 

Catholic faith with the threat of war, destruction, and enslavement. As we have seen, 

religious Inquisicións came to the New World in 1522, in the form of Episcopalian or 

monastic tribunals. With the appointment of Father Juan de Zumárraga as apostolic 

inquisitor in 1535, the Holy Office became a state-controlled device of the Spanish 

Crown, used to enforce indigenous conversion and acculturation to the Catholic faith and 

European culture. The establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisición and 

Provisorate tribunals in Mexico, in 1571, continued this work. The narratives of Spanish 

priests of Pané, Sahagún, Durán, and others, all describe how the conversion and 

acculturation was done by force, with the demonization of indigenous religions. Yet the 

indigenous and their descendants resisted conversion. Trance-inducing plants used in 

indigenous rituals were also countered with demonization, and with the 1620 Inquisición 

edict banning their use. The Inquisición charges were also meant to ensure political 

compliance in order to empower the Spanish colonization. The archives of the Holy 

Office in Mexico also clearly show that those indigenous leaders who publicly resisted 

conversion faced Inquisición trials and punishment. Christianity had employed similar 

tactics in the past in its battles against Roman, Celt, Germanic, Russian and Baltic 

pagans, as well as against Judaism and Islam. The efforts of the Holy Office did not 

completely eradicate the indigenous religious beliefs and customs in Europe; instead, 

syncretism, intentional or not, incorporated and accommodated elements of the pagan 

indigenous religions. The same process occurred in the New World, allowing indigenous 

pagan religions to survive in syncretic form into the current era. 

MARK PIPER

A merican Can Save Greece 

World War II Relief Mobilization 

of the Greek Diaspora and 

the American Public 

Tracy Dodge

eeks abroad, as always, remembered the mother-land,” observed Homer 

Davis, president of Athens College, commending the creation of the Greek War Relief 

Association. 1 Nowhere was this more accurate than in North America, where young 

Greek men had come, in search of economic opportunities since the turn of the twentieth 

century. 2 They left the poverty of their agricultural villages with the goal of temporarily 

working as laborers, and eventually becoming small business owners, in order to save 

money. These immigrants settled mainly in American cities where they founded Greek 

Orthodox Churches and local societies. 3 Within two decades, the largest Greek-American 

colonies were located in New York, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco, respectively. 4 

A government report, published in 1932, estimated that at least 500,000 Greeks had 

immigrated to the United States. 5 

By 1940 Americanization had made some inroads among the Greek-American 

population, but the diaspora still maintained connections to its Hellenic identity. 6 As 

Greece faced fascist invasions, a brutal Axis occupation, and a heroic resistance on the 

side of the Allies, Greek-Americans rallied on behalf of their country of origin while 

supporting their country of residence. This paper argues that Greek-Americans used the 

ethnic and religious resources of their communities and the relationship between their 

ancient Greek heritage and American values to gain support for the Greek War Relief 

effort. 

World War II and the Greek War Relief Association 

On 28 October 1940, Mussolini’s ambassador demanded the entry of Italian 

troops into certain areas of Greece. Considering the ultimatum a declaration of war, the 

reaction of Premier Ioannis Metaxas was “Okhi,” meaning “no.” 7 He called on the Greek 

people “to fight for the independence, the integrity and the honor of Greece,” and the 

* “America Can Save Greece” is taken from a Greek War Relief Association (GWRA) pamphlet of the same title, n.d., 

Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

1 Homer W. Davis, Greek War Relief and the Greek Spirit (Cincinnati: Convention of Order of Ahepa, August 18, 

1941), Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

2 Although the Greek-American diaspora dominated the World War II relief movement, the GWRA worked with the 

Greek War Relief Fund of Canada and the Greek-Canadian population made a significant contribution relative to its 

size of about 12,000 people. The GWRA also received donations from Greeks living in Mexico. GWRA, Destination: 

Greece. n.d. [c. 1946], Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

3 Theodore Saloutos, The Greeks in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 30, 44-7, 70, 75-6. 

4 George P. Daskarolis, San Francisco’s Greek Colony: The Evolution of an Ethnic Community (Minneapolis: Light 

and Life Publishing, 1995), 5. 

5 Saloutos, The Greeks in the United States, 44. The GWRA estimated the Greek-American population at 700,000 

people. 

6 In this paper, I use Greek-Americans to refer to those born in Greece who lived in the United States, as well as their 

children and subsequent generations. I use the term diaspora in a broad sense to mean the Greek-American community 

in the United States. 

7 In his desire to maintain political order, King George II supported General Metaxas as the quasi-fascist dictator of 

Greece (1936–1941). Termed “authoritarian paternalism” by historian Thomas Gallant, Metaxas was not the leader of a 

popular movement in the vein of Hitler and Mussolini. Although his rule was oppressive, particularly against 

communists, he also initiated reforms and his military foresight would prove to be keen with the outbreak of World 

War II. Thomas W. Gallant, Modern Greece (London: Arnold, 2001), 157-8.


Greek army quickly forced the Italians back into Albania. 8 This victory led to the German 

and Bulgarian invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia in April 1941. Within two months the 

Axis powers divided and brutally occupied Greece. The communists coordinated a 

strong, popular resistance movement called EAM-ELAS (the National Liberation Front 

and the National People’s Liberation Army, respectively), and the nationalists formed a 

smaller group known as EDES (National Republican Greek League). Although there was 

some cooperation between the two factions, conflicts arose between EAM-ELAS and 

EDES as early as 1943. Increasing violence and repression of leftists characterized the 

period following liberation in October 1944, was characterized by increasing violence 

and repression of leftists until it escalated into a civil war lasting from 1946-1949. 9 

Throughout this decade of occupation and war, the Greek people desperately 

needed food, clothing, and medical care. Greek-Americans anticipated this need and 

recognized the advantages of coordinating their relief activities; thus, just over a week 

after the Italian invasion, they created the Greek War Relief Association (GWRA), with 

influential entrepreneur, Spyros Skouras, as president, and prominent San Francisco 

business owner, Peter Boudoures, as western regional director. 10 By the beginning of the 

occupation, the GWRA had supplied $3,819,393 worth of aid to Greece. 11 At this point, 

Peter Boudoures emphasized the increased need of the Greek people and the necessity of 

Greek-Americans to continue their efforts “to alleviate suffering” in Greece. 12 What 

followed was a creative marketing campaign to win over the hearts—and donations—of 

Americans, and a skillful behind-the-scenes negotiation to put those dollars to work in 

occupied Greece. 

The occupation and the Nazi policy of economic exploitation, the British 

blockade, and an anemic harvest led to mass starvation following the fall of Greece in 

April 1941. 13 The Greek-language press initiated a letter writing campaign among the 

Greek-American diaspora with the goal of encouraging Washington to pressure the 

British to alter the blockade. The GWRA developed a plan, acceptable to both U.S. and 

British governments, that allowed the Association to purchase food in Turkey, ship it to 

Greece, and have the International Red Cross supervise its distribution beginning in 

October 1941. The Axis did not interfere with the shipments of food and medical 

8 

Ioannis Metaxas, “Proclamation of the Prime Minister to the Greek People,” October 28, 1940, in GWRA, Lest We 

Forget that Noble and Immortal Nation Greece, 1943, http://ahistoryofgreece.com/press/lestweforget/ 

9 

Gallant, ch. 8, “The Terrible Decade: Occupation and Civil War 1940—1950,” 160-77. 

10 

Spyros Skouras immigrated to the United States in 1911 and within a few years was running a theater with his 

brothers in St. Louis. By the beginning of World War II, he was president of the National Theaters Company and 

shortly thereafter he became president of Twentieth Century Fox. Saloutos, 278-80. Peter Boudoures began life in 

America as a laborer at age seventeen and eventually opened a successful restaurant in San Francisco, which also 

served as a meeting place for the politically active Ahepans. Daskarolis, 25-8, 82. 

11 

GWRA, $12,000,000, 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

12 

GWRA, Pacific Region Report on Examination, November 15, 1940 to April 30, 1941, Historical Committee, 

Ascension Cathedral. 

13 

Historian Alexandros K. Kyrou analyzes the diplomatic and logistic activities of the GWRA in negotiating its relief 

plans with the International Red Cross and state powers prior to liberation. See Alexandros K. Kyrou, “Ethnicity As 

Humanitarianism: The Greek American Relief Campaign for Occupied Greece, 1941-1944,” in New Directions in 

Greek American Studies, eds. Dan Georgakas and Charles C. Moskos (New York: Pella Publishing, 1991), and 

“Operation Blockade: Greek-American Humanitarianism During World War II,” in Greece’s Pivotal Role in World 

War II and Its Importance to the U.S. Today, ed. Eugene Rossides (Washington, DC: American Hellenic Institute 

Foundation, 2002). 

TRACY DODGE


supplies, which continued until January 1942 when Turkey’s wheat reserves became 

low. 14 

At this point, the famine in Greece reached a critical point with 1,000 deaths per 

day in Athens and more in other areas. The Greek-American communities stepped up 

their lobbying efforts and the U.S. government began making inquiries to London. After 

the British agreed to lift the blockade in February 1942, an emergency shipment was sent 

to Greece, and the GWRA developed a plan whereby a neutral nation, Sweden, would act 

as an intermediary to transport humanitarian aid to Greece. 15 Regular shipments began in 

August 1942, preventing the one million deaths predicted for each of the following 

winters and saving one-third of the Greek people. The GWRA estimated the monetary 

value of the Trans-Blockade program during the occupation at $100,000,000. 16 In light of 

this overwhelming success, the following analysis will attempt to explain the strategies 

the GWRA used to mobilize support for its relief campaigns. 

Greek-Americans and the Greek War Relief Association 

Following World War I, the Greek ideal of temporary migration to America gave 

way to the reality of permanent residence, as immigrants established jobs and families. 

Military service and the anti-foreign attitudes of the 1920s encouraged Americanization 

of Greek immigrants and their children. 17 Nevertheless, at the beginning of World War II, 

Greek-Americans, particularly first generation immigrants, still maintained close ties to 

the home country and their ethnic identity through their membership in Churches, 

fraternal societies, and their contact with friends and family abroad. This emotional and 

familial connection to Greece inspired a sense of responsibility among Greek-Americans 

to the Greek war relief effort. In the program for a 1942 Hellenic Community of Oakland 

fundraiser, Peter Boudoures referred to the audience as “devoted sons and daughters of 

Greece” dedicated to “our revered Homeland.” James Nitson, district governor of the 

American Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA), emphasized the role 

of the fundraiser to “assist our beloved ones back in our Motherland” and the pride 

Greek-Americans felt in the bravery of “our people.” 18 Greek-Americans’ identification 

with the home country and their emotional connection to its aid influenced their patterns 

of giving. A Cretan woman in Florida “insisted” that two hand woven blankets, passed 

down from mother to daughter for 125 years, “must go to Greece.” 19 It was these 

emotional and ethnic ties that Greek-American communities utilized for the cause of 

Greek war relief. 

The formation of Greek communities in the United States meant the establishment 

of a community council, a church, and societies. The councils ran the Greek Orthodox 

Churches, which functioned as centers of Greek identity. Ethnic and regional societies 

14 

Kyrou, “Ethnicity As Humanitarianism,” 112-9. 

15 

Kyrou, “Operation Blockade,” 120–2. 

16 

GWRA, $12,000,000, and Kyrou, “Operation Blockade,” 125-6. 

17 

Saloutos, 44-5, 232. 

18 

Hellenic Community of Oakland. The Voice of Greece: A Dramatic Interpretation of the War (Oakland: Scottish Rite 

Temple, 11 April 1942), Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

19 

GWRA, “We Thank The American People,” Greek War Relief Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 10, October 20, 1943, 

Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

“America Can Save Greece”


served the needs of immigrants from particular locales in Greece and provided aid to their 

home provinces. 20 The organization of Greek-American communities around the Church 

and societies meant that when the time came to mobilize Greek-Americans for 

humanitarian campaigns there was already an existing infrastructure in place. 21 A GWRA 

document, written in approximately 1946, outlines the important role Greek-American 

societies played in the Association. As the largest group, AHEPA had “a special 

relationship” to the GWRA, with many people serving in both organizations. 22 At the 

same time, local GWRA chapters sought to maintain balance and harmony between the 

different societies by not giving special consideration to one over another. Bebe Lafka, 

secretary of the Oakland chapter, requested in a 1944 letter to Sam Anastas that the 

clothing drive appeal printed in AHEPA’s publication be worded as coming from 

AHEPA so that other organizations would not “feel slighted.” 23 In this way, the Greek- 

American societies and Church organizations provided the labor and publicity needed to 

make Greek war relief a success. 

The Church and the societies were also fundamental to the humanitarian 

campaigns as sources of funds. The GWRA Pacific Region Report, covering the period 

from 15 November 1940 to 30 April 1941, listed the Bay Area organizations that 

collected contributions. For the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, these included 

AHEPA, GAPA, Philoptohos Societies (Friends of the Poor), Church and Sunday school 

communities, groups representing specific regions of Greece, and the Greek-language 

press, for a total of approximately $145,000 in contributions. 24 Societies, such as the 

Hellenic American Progressive Association in Mobile, Alabama, turned over their entire 

treasuries to the Greek War Relief Association. 25 Other societies funded projects related 

to medical aid in the post-liberation period. 26 Churches, Philoptohos Societies, and 

regional organizations paid for mobile medical units, many of which were placed in their 

particular regions. 27 Some of the more extensive projects were the GWRA partnerships 

for the establishment of hospitals and health centers in Greece. The Pan-Arcadian Charity 

20 Saloutos, 74-7, 96-7, 118. 

21 See also Kyrou, “Operation Blockade,” 126. 

22 GWRA, Relations with Greek Societies [c. 1946], Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. The American 

Hellenic Educational Progressive Association (AHEPA) was created in 1922 in Atlanta in response to the antiimmigrant 

activities of the Ku Klux Klan. National, nonpartisan, and nonsectarian, the organization was geared toward 

the middle-class, U.S. citizens, and English-speakers. By the end of the decade, AHEPA shifted away from strict 

Americanism and became interested in maintaining Hellenism for the children of immigrants. Saloutos, 246-56. 

23 Bebe Lafka, letter to Sam P. Anastas, September 25, 1944, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. Many 

factions existed in Greek-American communities over different issues at one time or another. An example is the rivalry 

between AHEPA and the Greek American Progressive Association (GAPA), formed in 1923, as a response to the 

Americanization policies of AHEPA, to preserve the Greek language, traditions, and Church. Saloutos, 246-56. 

24 GWRA, Pacific Region Report. 

25 GWRA, “Mobile Merchants Donate $5,146 for Orphan Support,” Greek War Relief Newsletter Vol. 6, No. 3, April 

1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

26 GWRA sources mention only post-occupation rehabilitation, and not the civil war, as the reason for their continued 

work in Greece, see for example the booklet $12,000,000. One reason for this could be the contradiction the civil war 

presented to the image the GWRA promoted in their campaigns of a democratic Greece and American values (to be 

discussed later). Another reason is likely the strong non-partisanship of the GWRA and AHEPA, with which it had 

close ties. The president of AHEPA, in 1944, acknowledged the responsibility of Greek-Americans to aid Greece, but 

also asserted the Order’s non-sectarianism and the right of Greece to self-determination. George Vournas, quoted in 

Saloutos, 358. 

27 GWRA, “Fourteen Organizations Purchase Mobile Units for Greek Rural Areas,” Greek War Relief Newsletter Vol. 

VI, No. 5, July 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

TRACY DODGE


Fund and the GWRA planned a 250-bed hospital and nursing school in Tripolis, Arcadia 

in the Peloponnesos. 28 AHEPA worked with the GWRA and the Economic Cooperation 

Administration on hospital projects in Athens and Thessaloniki and health centers in 

other areas of Greece. 29 These examples show the great impact of the Greek-American 

societies on humanitarian aid in Greece. 

According to a GWRA report, its achievements during the occupation of Greece 

“would have been utterly impossible without the outstanding and unfailing support of the 

Greek communities of America.” 30 After the Axis invasion in April 1941, Peter 

Boudoures emphasized the responsibility of “those of us of Greek birth or extraction” to 

provide relief to Greece. 31 The minutes of the GWRA Oakland chapter from this period 

reveal that the main office expected “every possible dollar [to] be obtained from 

everyone of Greek extraction.” 32 In the 1947 $12,000,000 campaign, Greek-Americans 

were still expected to give to their fullest capacity. Although the Churches and societies 

formed the first line of solicitation, their contributions did “not relieve the personal 

responsibility of the individuals.” 33 Greek-American donations were expected to account 

for 35 to 50 percent of local campaign goals, with wealthy individuals expected to make 

up the majority. 34 Far from being simply rhetorical strategies, Greek-American ethnic 

identity and community affiliation were mobilized at the grassroots level for fundraising 

purposes. 

The personal and familial ties between Greeks of the home country and those 

living in the United States were not always advantageous to the GWRA fundraising 

efforts. A GWRA document written in 1946 revealed that “one of the greatest 

difficulties” in soliciting funds was the priority Greek-Americans gave to “the 

unfortunate people of [their] own village or nomos.” In response, the GWRA developed 

an orphan support program organized by nomos so that this “administrative 

handicap…would become perhaps the greatest single inducement in securing immediate 

and sustained contributions and personal interest in the work of the Association.” 35 Along 

these lines, the GWRA ran other programs that enabled Greek-Americans to provide 

direct aid to their friends and relatives in Greece. The “Give an Animal” campaign was a 

way for Americans to buy and send farm animals at discounted prices to Greek farmers, 

and prepared packages of food were also available through the GWRA for purchase and 

shipment to individuals in Greece. 36 In the post-liberation period, these programs allowed 

28 GWRA, “Pan-Arcadian Group and GWRA to Erect Complete 250 Bed Hospital at Tripolis,” Greek War Relief 

Newsletter Vol. VI, No. 5, July 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. See also GWRA, Relations 

with Greek Societies. 

29 Saloutos, 364-5. 

30 GWRA, Destination: Greece. 

31 GWRA, Pacific Region Report. 

32 GWRA, Oakland chapter minutes, April 30, 1941, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

33 GWRA, Campaign Plan, 1947, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, GWRA, Instructions to Greek 

Field Representatives, n.d. [c. 1946/47], Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

34 GWRA, Instructions to Greek Field Representatives. 

35 GWRA, Proposed Plan for Orphan Support in Greece, February 8, 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford 

University. 

36 GWRA, “GWRA Launches Campaign to Provide 10,000 Animals for Greek Farmers,” Greek War Relief Newsletter 

Vol. 6, No. 2, February 1946, and “GWRA Offers Prepared Food Parcels at All-inclusive Price of $12.75 for 35 lbs.,” 

Greek War Relief Newsletter Vol. VI, No. 3, April 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. Built into 



the GWRA to take greater advantage of the personal and familial ties between Greeks 

and the Greek-American diaspora. 

Americans and the Greek War Relief Association 

In the Greek war relief campaigns, members of the Greek diaspora in the United 

States emphasized their status as Americans. At an early 1941 GWRA chapter meeting in 

Oakland, a legal adviser “suggested that in letters written to the American papers” 

individuals refer to themselves as “American citizens of Hellenic extraction.” 37 This 

negotiation of Greek and American identity sometimes required a balancing act on the 

parts of local GWRA chapters. The GWRA was affiliated with other humanitarian 

organizations such as the Red Cross and the Community Chests and Councils, and on 

more than one occasion, the Oakland chapter was asked to defer their activities to these 

organizations. 38 In both cases, the contention revolved around the celebration of Greek 

Independence Day. John Young, the assistant director of the GWRA, advised chapters to 

support the annual American Red Cross campaign in March 1944. 39 The following year, 

Bebe Lafka requested that Peter Boudoures clarify the suggestion “that our War Chest 

affiliations made it unadvisable to mention Greek War Relief in connection with the 

annual 25 th of March celebration.” 40 The response she received from Margaret 

Thompson, publicity director at the New York headquarters, asserted that such benefits, 

while “permissible,” should be approved by the local Community War Chest. 41 These 

examples show that in the competition between Greek and American affiliations, the 

GWRA often emphasized the latter as a way to gain broader public support. 

Despite the unprecedented support of the Greek-American diaspora, its relatively 

small size meant that it was limited in its ability to finance Greek war relief on its own, 

making the participation of non-Greeks an absolute necessity. 42 The Association thus 

brought Americans into the fold whenever possible and highlighted the contributions of 

non-Greeks. 43 The local Citizens’ Committees of the $12,000,000 campaign were 

expected to be made up mostly “of a cross-section of prominent American citizens of the 

community.” 44 The Greek War Relief Newsletter often portrayed the pan-American 

character of the Association. The clothing drive was one example of the emphasis on 

these programs was a system for matching Americans with families in Greece who were not personally connected to 

the American diaspora. For example, the adult Sunday School class at First Presbyterian Church in Oakland adopted 

the Papaconstantinou family from the island of Mytilene (Lesvos). Florence M. Bass and Bebe Lafka correspondence, 

September 1946 to April 1947, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. Sending cash remittances was 

disadvantageous during this time because of the exchange rate on the black market. Saloutos, 363. 

37 

GWRA, Oakland chapter minutes, January 15, 1941, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

38 

The GWRA was a member agency of the National War Fund (NWF), which was run under the auspices of the 

Community Chests and Councils (a predecessor of the United Way) from 1943 to 1947. The purpose of the NWF was 

to consolidate the fundraising activities of war relief organizations for Allied nations “in order to fashion a better 

weapon for victory,” “conserve effort and cost,” and “raise more money.” Harold J. Seymour, Design for Giving: The 

Story of the National War Fund, Inc. 1943–1947 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947), 110. 

39 

He also recognized the significance of Independence Day for local communities and the possibility it provided for 

raising awareness of Greek war relief. John H. Young, letter to GWRA chapters, March 7, 1944, Historical Committee, 

Ascension Cathedral. 

40 

Bebe Lafka, letter to Peter Boudoures, February 22, 1945, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

41 

Margaret Thompson, letter to GWRA Oakland, March 24, 1945, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

42 

GWRA, Here Are the Answers, n.d. [c. 1946], Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

43 

See also Kyrou, “Operation Blockade,” 111-2. 

44 

GWRA, Instructions to Field Representatives, n.d. [c. 1946/47], Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

TRACY DODGE


American support of Greek war relief. Inspired by a letter of appreciation from a Greek 

man who had received a Benson and Rixon jacket but whose family still had “nothing to 

wear,” the Chicago clothing store, working with the GWRA, organized a publicity 

display and set up collection bins for the clothing drive. 45 Another example of the 

American aspect of the Association was the S.S. Adelphic, bought by the GWRA to 

transport supplies to islands in Greece, Although christened with a Greek-inspired name 

(translated as friendly) by the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of North and South America, 

the S.S. Adelphic was an all-American ship: “She [flew] the American flag, [sailed] under 

American registry and [was] manned by an American crew.” 46 The stress the GWRA 

placed on American participation was one way in which the Association expanded its 

outreach beyond the Greek-American communities. 

In order to achieve the goal of full American involvement in Greek war relief, the 

GWRA tried to tap into the “tremendous latent sympathy and admiration” Americans felt 

“for the Greek people.” Greece was, after all, “the best merchandise in the world.” 47 The 

ancient heritage was one angle from which Greece was promoted. Ancient ruins such as 

the Parthenon were often used as visual representations of Greece on posters and 

pamphlets. One GWRA poster with the slogan “HELP GREECE NOW” featured a marble 

statue, the Parthenon, and a woman with a baby; another poster with the same caption 

portrayed a mother and child in the forefront and the Parthenon in the background. 48 

Ancient imagery, both rhetorical and visual, was used on pamphlet covers even when the 

content referred to strictly contemporary problems. An example was The Ancient Glory 

of Immortal Greece, which showed archaeological ruins on the front and inside described 

the war-time suffering of the Greek people and the work of the GWRA. 49 The aim of this 

type of war relief publicity material was to associate ancient Greece with the modern 

nation in the minds of Americans, many of whom were likely more familiar with 

Greece’s classical past and triumphs than its modern history. 

In addition to connecting ancient and modern Greece through symbols of ancient 

glory, the GWRA and the American press made direct parallels between ancient and 

contemporary events. In 1943, the GWRA compiled a collection of newspaper articles, 

editorials, and cartoons into a pamphlet called Lest We Forget that Noble and Immortal 

Nation Greece, which featured in the forefront of its cover a prominent column and, in 

the background, the silhouette of the Acropolis. Several of the articles and cartoons 

compared the Greek resistance to the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae in the fifth 

century B.C. between the outnumbered Greeks and the Persians. The former battle, won 

by the Greeks, and the latter, won by the Persians, “became proud landmarks in Greek 

history,” according to a writer in The Christian Science Monitor, “because of the heroism 

45 

GWRA, “Chicago Store Aids Clothing Drive,” Greek War Relief Newsletter Vol. 6, No. 3, April 1946, Hoover 

Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

46 

GWRA, “Association Purchases 500 ton Vessel to Deliver Supplies to Greek Islands,” Greek War Relief Newsletter 

Vol. 6, No. 4, June 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

47 

GWRA, No Title, June 1, 1946, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 

48 

GWRA, “Help Greece Now” poster, n.d., Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral; GWRA, “Help Greece Now” 

poster, n.d., http://www.greece.gr/GLOBAL_GREECE/SPOTLIGHT/the_war_papers.stm. Similar gender motifs were 

used on Belgian relief posters in World War I. Historian Theodore Saloutos proclaims Greece as the “Belgium of 

World War Two” (Saloutos, 344). 

49 

GWRA, The Ancient Glory of Immortal Greece, n.d., Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 



of the Greek forces that took part.” 50 Many hailed the Greek resistance in Albania as a 

“second Thermopylae;” a cartoon originally published in the New York Daily Mirror was 

labeled “THERMOPYLAE 480 B.C.” and “THERMOPYLAE 1941.” 51 The GWRA described 

the ancient battle as one in which “a band of gallant Spartans, fighting beyond endurance, 

finally had to succumb to innumerable hordes,” just as “their descendants…had at last to 

yield to…the overwhelming might of the Nazi blitz machine.” 52 In these examples, the 

glory of ancient Greece was reclaimed by modern Greeks. This strategy was a vital way 

to appeal to Americans who romanticized ancient Greece and thus mobilize their support 

for Greek war relief. 

The ancient and modern parallels of Greek heroism entered the consciousness of 

Americans through the rhetoric of liberty and democracy. Ancient Greece was 

understood to be the foundation of Western civilization. Secretary of War, Henry L. 

Stimson, applauded ancient Greek culture as the birthplace of democracy and the 

“treasured heritage of modern civilization.” 53 The GWRA also promoted Greece as “the 

cradle of democracy” from which they claimed, “most of the fundamentals of civilization 

came.” 54 This Greek resistance was portrayed as another battle in the continuous struggle 

of Greek democracy covering 2,500 years from ancient Greece to World War II. A 

cartoon from the New York Journal American showed “GREECE, THE BIRTHPLACE OF 

DEMOCRACY” etching these words onto a column: “DEFENDER OF LIBERTY, BATTLE OF 

MARATHON, BATTLE OF THERMOPYLAE, BATTLE OF ALBANIA, GREECE WILL FIGHT ON!” 55 

In the same publication, a journalist wrote, “The power of Greece lay in the same force 

that moves all Americans…the power of the word LIBERTY.” 56 The association of 

Greek and American values of democracy and liberty was one more way in which the 

GWRA sold Greek war relief to the American people. 

The Greek War of Independence was another reference point for Greek- 

Americans and Philhellenes during the humanitarian campaigns. 57 The assumption was 

that Americans would relate to the allusions of independence because of their own 

Revolutionary War. A writer in the New York Evening Sun was explicit in this 

comparison: “What the Fourth of July is to patriotic Americans, the Twenty-fifth of 

March is to history-respecting Greeks.” 58 The occasion of Greek Independence Day was 

used to promote Greek war relief throughout the country. In 1941, the East Bay Unit of 

the GWRA organized a benefit entitled the Cavalcade of Greek Democracy: Celebrating 

50 “Marathon and Thermopylae,” in GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

51 GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

52 GWRA, $12,000,000. 

53 “Victory Over Tyranny,” in GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

54 GWRA, Greece Starves and Fights, n.d. [c. 1943/44], Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

55 GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

56 Benjamin DeCasseres, “The March of Events,” in GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

57 The war was against the Ottoman Empire which controlled most of Greece and the rest of the Balkans for almost 400 

years. Independence Day is celebrated as 25 March , which is also the Christian holiday of the Annunciation (the 

Archangel Gabriel’s declaration to the Virgin Mary that she would bear the son of God). According to the legend, the 

revolution was declared by the Metropolitan of Patras on this day in 1821 at the Aghia Lavra Monastery in the 

Peloponnesos. A presidency under Ioannis Kapodistrias was established in 1828, but after his assassination, the Great 

Powers negotiated treaties that created the Greek state as a monarchy in 1832 under a Bavarian king. Gallant, 19, 26, 

28. 

58 “Greek Independence Day,” in GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

TRACY DODGE


the 120 th Anniversary of Greek Independence 1821–1941. 59 In addition to the 

comparisons between the War of Independence and the World War II resistance, the 

positive response of America to both wars was highlighted. After the Nazis razed the 

Aghia Lavra monastery, a GWRA press release, dated March 25 commended the past and 

contemporary support of Americans who admired the “determination of this small nation 

to fight for its independence.” 60 The Greek War of Independence thus provided an 

intermediary step on the continuum of Greek democracy with which Americans could 

identify. The GWRA emphasized the values of freedom and democracy in Greek history 

to inspire Americans to contribute to the Greek war relief cause. 

During the Greek humanitarian campaigns, America was envisioned as the 

successor to ancient Greek civilization whose citizens had a responsibility to aid Greece 

in its struggle for democracy. Historian James Truslow Adams wrote that it was “not 

asking much” of Americans, as the heirs of ancient Greece “who also believe in 

freedom,” to assist “the small but heroic people who are fighting our battle for us against 

terrific odds.” 61 At the same time that they glorified modern Greece as the descendant of 

ancient Greece, Greeks and Philhellenes also humbly proclaimed Greece’s reliance on 

help from America as “the towering bulwark of freedom.” 62 In a speech given to the 

AHEPA convention in 1941, Homer Davis, stated his desire for Americans to know 

“with what challenging and implicit faith Greeks in every corner of the land look to 

America as the land of democracy and liberty which will not tolerate a world made 

hideous by a tyranny that destroys all liberty, decency and human dignity.” 63 Greek 

Ambassador Cimon Diamantopoulos echoed this sentiment in a response to President 

Roosevelt’s letter commemorating the second anniversary of Okhi Day. He wrote that 

“all free peoples look with fervent hope” to the U.S. and Roosevelt “for the prevalence of 

liberty and justice for which we are fighting.” 64 Greeks and Philhellenes recognized the 

necessity of American aid for the survival of Greece in World War II. Their deferment to 

America as the successor of Greek civilization also carried with it a responsibility on the 

part of Americans to help their predecessors by aiding the Greek war relief cause. 

Conclusion 

The conditions in Greece during the 1940s created an urgent need, to which 

Greeks and non-Greeks alike responded with generosity. After the Italian invasion of 

Greece on 28 October 1940, Greek-Americans immediately created the Greek War Relief 

Association and donated about ninety percent of the funds received in the first few 

months. 65 Although figures were not available on the difference between Greek and non- 

Greek contributions for later periods, based on the national Greek-American quota of 35 

percent for the $12,000,000 campaign in 1947, one may infer that Americans outside of 

the Greek-American community had responded well to GWRA appeals in the previous 

59 

GWRA, Cavalcade of Greek Democracy: Celebrating the 120th Anniversary of Greek Independence 1821–1941 

(Oakland: Civic Auditorium, March 22, 1941), Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

60 

GWRA, press release, March 25, 1943, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

61 

James Truslow Adams in GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

62 

GWRA, Greece Starves and Fights, n.d. [c. 1943/44], Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

63 

Davis, Greek War Relief. 

64 

Cimon Diamantopoulos, “The Greek Ambassador’s Reply,” October 29, 1942, in GWRA, Lest We Forget. 

65 Saloutos, 348. 



six years. During that period, the GWRA provided $25,000,000 worth of aid and 

coordinated the Trans-Blockade program, which was valued at $100,000,000. 66 The 1947 

campaign was also successful considering that the AHEPA and Pan-Arcadian hospitals 

they planned are still in operation to this day. 67 

The popularity and success of the GWRA can also be judged from a comparison 

with other National War Fund (NWF) agencies. Most ethnic relief organizations were 

limited to helping refugees during the war and were able to work in their countries of 

origin only after liberation. Greece, on the other hand, benefited from humanitarian aid 

that saved one-third of the population during the occupation. According to Harold 

Seymour, NWF general manager, “Nowhere in Europe did war strike harder, and 

nowhere has American aid striven harder to send commensurate help.” 68 NWF payments 

to the GWRA totaled $8,172,181.96, behind only those agencies aiding China 

($32,534,140.86) and Russia ($16,028,952.67). American Relief for Poland followed the 

GWRA, receiving payments of $6,880,382.81. 69 This organization, chosen by the NWF 

to represent the six million Polish-Americans in the United States, raised $11,434,985 

and helped five million people around the world between 1939 and 1948. 70 

The unique success of the GWRA, relative to other organizations, can be 

attributed to skillful leadership, successful marketing campaigns, and widespread support 

by Greek and non-Greek Americans. The diplomatic and logistic agreements the GWRA 

arranged with state powers and the International Red Cross, as described by Alexandros 

Kyrou, were underwritten by the infrastructure and ethnic loyalty of the Greek-American 

communities. The Church and societies such as AHEPA provided the networks necessary 

for the grassroots organization and fundraising of the GWRA. Personal and emotional 

ties to the home country created a sense of responsibility that influenced the generosity of 

Greek-Americans to the war relief effort. In order to provide maximum aid, the GWRA 

promoted identification with America and the connection between Greece’s heroic past 

and the values of freedom and democracy. The GWRA presented itself as a pan- 

American organization and Greek-Americans as true American citizens. The modern 

Greek state, born from a noble revolution, claimed the glory of ancient Greece’s 

achievements in architecture, democracy, and defense, which entitled them to the help of 

Americans who were also the heirs to the Western civilization Greece founded. 

At least one historian notes that one of the lessons to be taken away from the 

Greek war relief experience is the impact of the Greek-American diaspora on Greece’s 

66 

GWRA, $12,000,000. 

67 

See Projects/Committee Activities of the Pan Arcadian Federation of America, 

http://www.panarcadian.org/projects.htm, and AHEPA University Hospital, http://www.ahepahosp.gr/ 

68 

Seymour, 83; for summaries of NWF member agencies and services, see pp. 79–89. 

69 

Seymour, 70-1. 

70 

Donald E. Pienkos, “Polonia’s Humanitarian Services to Poland in the World War II Era: The Work of the Polish 

American Council (Rada Polonii Amerykanskiej),” in For Your Freedom Through Ours: Polish American Efforts on 

Poland’s Behalf, 1863-1991 (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, 

1991), 88. The experience of Polish-Americans, the largest Eastern European minority in the United States, and Greek- 

Americans, one of the smallest European minorities, paralleled each other in many ways. See Bradley E. Fels, 

“‘Whatever Your Heart Dictates and Your Pocket Permits’: Polish-American Aid to Polish Refugees during World 

War II,” Journal of American Ethnic History 22, no. 1 (2003): 3-30. 

TRACY DODGE


survival during World War II. 71 Indeed, the humanitarian campaigns speak to the 

relationship of the diaspora to the home country, but also of its relationship to its adopted 

country. As early as 1941, a British reserve officer articulated the changing perception of 

Greeks in North America, “We used to think you wore skirts [fustanellas, traditional kiltlike 

costumes] and kept restaurants…Now the English-speaking and the Grecian peoples 

are in one another’s hearts, and I hope forever.” 72 Peter Boudoures was aware of the 

ramifications of the GWRA’s success on the prestige of Greek-Americans who would be 

expected to set an example for the rest of the country. 73 Given the increasing status of 

Greek-Americans following World War II, it seems fair to conclude that Greek- 

Americans’ commitment to humanitarianism in the 1940s enabled them to prove a lasting 

synthesis of their Hellenic and American identities. 74 

71 

Kyrou, “Operation Blockade,” 127. 

72 

GWRA, Oakland chapter minutes, January 22, 1941, Historical Committee, Ascension Cathedral. 

73 

GWRA, Pacific Region Report. 

74 

See Saloutos, The Greeks in the United States, ch. 18 on “The Era of Respectability.” 


A natomy of a Crusade 

The De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi and 

the Lisbon Crusade of 1147 

Kevin Mummey

When at last they took the city [Lisbon] and routed the barbarians, the King of 

Galatia asked the crusaders to give him the unoccupied city. As allies they had 

first divided the booty among them. So was established there a colony of 

Christians which subsists even to the present day. Of all the works which the 

crusading army did, this alone proved successful. 

-Helmold of Bosau 1 

elmold of Bosau’s subdued footnote concerning the siege of Lisbon is 

detailed in comparison with other contemporary notices. The attack on Lisbon by 

Flemish, Lotharingian, and Anglo-Norman crusaders in 1147 has only recently begun to 

receive the attention it deserves. In 1936, C.W. David produced an invaluable critical 

edition of the De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi (The Siege of Lisbon, hereafter DEL). In 

addition, present-day work by Johnathan Phillips and Harold Livermore has brought the 

event into a clearer focus. In 1990, Livermore successfully identified the author of the 

DEL as the Anglo-Norman monk Raol, and this overlooked historian is the concern of 

this study. The DEL is essentially a historical narrative interspersed with speeches. This 

paper will argue that the author crafted the speeches largely after the fact, and that Raol 

was able to graft ecclesiastical crusade theory onto the siege. 2 In effect, he was able to 

marry a military success to the growing body of crusade propaganda. These speeches, 

when disentangled from Raol’s narrative, reveal the tensions that existed in twelfthcentury 

society between the celestial ideal and the temporal reality. This essential tension 

existed not only in the intellectual realm. An examination of the language of the DEL and 

its historical context reveals that this dichotomy is multi-layered. It is present in the entire 

Second Crusade, in the politics of the Reconquista, and in the formation of the state of 

Portugal. The tension between the ideal and the actual is heightened at the siege itself, 

and it is in the complex and disparate motives and actions of the crusaders, and in the 

author of the DEL, that one may better understand the world of the Second Crusade. 

After reviewing the historical background of the siege, this study will discuss the 

manuscript itself. It will then look at the narrative and the set pieces, and conclude with a 

discussion of Raol’s purpose and its importance for the Crusades, both in the twelfth 

century and the present. 

An examination of the historical processes that led up to the siege of Lisbon helps 

to explain the success of 1147. The capture of Lisbon was a key success in the formation 

of the Kingdom of Portugal. Bernard Reilly has pointed out that “moderns tend to assume 

1 

Helmold of Bosau, The Chronicle of the Slavs, trans. By F.J. Tschan (New York: Colombia University Press, 1935), 

175. 

2 

C.J. Tyerman, “Were there any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?” English History Review 110 (1995), 553-77. 

Tyerman contends, “but in many theatres of war, in Spain, the western Mediterranean and the Baltic, religious elements 

were grafted on to existing political ambitions” (565). Tyerman’s thesis that the twelfth century was Crusading's “Dark 

Ages” is overstated, but his observation that it is difficult to separate tradition and innovation during the crusades is 

important. His useful look at the DEL is at 563-5. In 1936, C.W. David expressed suspicion about the Bishop’s speech 

in the DEL, see C.W. David, “The Authorship of the De Expugnatione Lyxbonesi,” Speculum 7 (1932) 50-7. Giles 

Constable argued that “it has the appearance of being a genuine report, not a literary concoction.” Giles Constable, 

“The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 (1953), 213-79.


that the appearance of a separate and autonomous Portugal was natural and inevitable.” 

This was hardly apparent in the twelfth century. The same author has pointed out that 

“the county of Portugal had never been more than an administrative convenience of the 

kingdom of Leon-Castilla, the “land around Oporto….” In the 1090s, Alfonso VI placed 

his son-in law Raimund of Burgundy in the path of the ascendant Almoravid army. 3 By 

1094, the cities of Badajoz, Sintra, and Lisbon had fallen, and the defense of the north 

had passed to the founder of the royal house of Portugal, Henry of Burgundy. 4 

It was “as a march of the kingdom of Leon against the Muslim of Anadalusia” 

that Alfonso entrusted the county of Portugal to his son-in law Henry and daughter 

Teresa. 5 The history of the west of the Iberian Peninsula needs to be understood in the 

context of its ambiguous relationship with the ‘emperors’ of Leon-Castilla. 6 The close 

political and family relationships clouded the issue as to whether the county of Portugal 

was, as Reilly has put it, a “powerful appanage” in the west or a new Iberian monarchy. 7 

Upon Henry’s death in 1112 Teresa took over the government of Portugal, as the future 

king Affonso Henriques was no more than five years old. The transformation of Portugal 

from county to kingdom begins with Teresa, a tenacious and shrewd political operator. 

By 1117, she had begun to style herself “regina” as opposed to “infanta.” During her 

reign the county of Portugal was in a precarious position. While unable to advance on the 

Almoravids to the south, she was able to fend off her sister Urraca, the Leonese Queen, 

and to achieve a truce with the Galician nobles in the North. Threatened by Teresa’s 

liaison with the Galician noble Fernando Perez, Affonso and a coalition of northern 

barons defeated the Queen at San Mamed in 1128. 8 The future King of Portugal was 

nineteen years old. 

While Affonso was not yet a king and Portugal not yet a kingdom, the events of 

the 1130s and early 1140s witnessed the increasing independence of the county. Despite 

being defeated in Galicia in 1135 by the Leonese emperor, Alfonso VII, Affonso 

continued to intervene in Galician affairs. By 1139, he was able to direct his energies to 

the south, defeating an Almoravid offensive at Ourique. By 1140, Affonso was confident 

enough to style himself “Portugalensium rex.” The man who would be king was also 

3 

Bernard Reilly, The Conquest of Christian and Muslim Spain (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992), 142-3. The Almoravids 

(al-murrabit, possibly confederation) were a confederation of Berber tribes who followed a more literal interpretation 

of the Koran. Their emir, Yusuf Ibn Tashfin had been invited to Spain several times by the ruler of Seville, Al- 

Mu’tamid. To head off a suspected alliance between Al-Mu’tamid and Alfonso VI of León, Ibn Tashfin landed at 

Algeciras on June 30, 1086. He then proceeded to destroy Alfonso’s army at Sagrajas. The Almoravids then proceeded 

to conquer most of the territories of the ‘taifa kings,’ who had ruled Spain for most of the eleventh century. See Derek 

Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London: Longman, 1978), particularly chapter three. A good discussion of the 

Almoravid belief system and that of their successors, the Almohads, is Angus Mackay, Spain in the Middle Ages 

(London: Macmillan, 1977), 26-9. Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal (London: Longman, 1996) is the most 

thorough look at the whole period of Almoravid and Almohad influence, especially chapters 7-9. 

4 

The taifa king of the region, al-Mutawakkil of Badajoz, had given Lisbon, Sintra, and Santarem to Alfonso VI in 

return for a promise of help. It was too late. Alfonso was incapable of stopping the Almoravids, especially that far west. 

Al-Mutawakkil was himself tortured and killed in 1097 (Lomax, 72). 

5 

Reilly, Conquest, 200. 

6 

For early twelfth-century León see Reilly, The Kingdom of León Castilla Under Queen Urraca (Princeton: Princeton 

University Press, 1982). 

7 

Reilly, Conquest, 196. 

8 

Reilly, Conquest, 196; A. H. Oliviera-Marques, History of Portugal (New York: Colombia University Press, 1976), 

39. Teresa fled to Galicia, where she died in 1130. 

KEVIN MUMMEY


adept at using the Papacy when it suited his needs. In 1143, he offered himself as a 

liegeman of Pope Lucius II, and was recognized as dux Portugalensium. While not yet 

rex in the eyes of the Church, Affonso had taken another step toward establishing his 

independence. 9 Portugal was being defined not in terms of an inevitable process, but by 

the entrepreneurial initiatives of Affonso and his noble and ecclesiastical supporters. It 

was to this nascent kingdom and its opportunistic leader that the crusaders of 1147 made 

their appearance. 

Our main source for this event is the DEL. For more than eight hundred years, its 

author was misidentified. The manuscript, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Ms. 470 

was labeled “in a fine renaissance hand” as the Historia Osberni de Expeditione. 10 In 

1861, the Portuguese historian Alexandre Herculano included a transcription of the 

Historia Osberni de Expeditione in his Portugaliae Monumenta Historica: Scriptores. By 

1884 Herculano had accepted the shortened title Historia Osberni for the manuscript, and 

it appeared for the first time in Portuguese translation. The only English edition was that 

of Bishop Stubbs, who in 1864 entitled the manuscript De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi. In 

1936, C.W. David adopted the title, although for Livermore there is “no authority for 

either title or for the assumed author.” He could have also added that Lisbon in 1147 was 

the Muslim and Mozarabic Al-Ushbun, further problematizing the title. The original 

confusion regarding authorship arises from the salutation, OSB. de Baldr. R., Salutem. 

The close connection of the author of the DEL to the Glenville family led David to 

identify OSB. de Baldr. as Osbert of Bawdsey, a Glenville family priest. 11 

While David ‘provisionally conjectured’ that Osbert was the author, he correctly 

pointed out some the difficulties with this designation. 12 In 1990, in what another 

historian has called “convincing detective work,” Harold Livermore identified the author 

as the ‘R.’ of the salutation. 13 This ‘R.’ is the Anglo-Norman monk Raol, who donated 

200 silver marks to found a cemetery in Lisbon. Carefully examining the language of 

both documents, Livermore connected the ‘R.’ of the DEL to the Raol of the cemetery 

donation. He further suggested that Raol was an emissary of St. Bernard, more on which 

will be discussed below. 14 Whatever the extent of Raol’s connections, Livermore’s work 

established that a warrior priest with a formidable education was among the leaders of the 

assault on Lisbon. 

The arrival of the Second Crusade in Portugal was the product of both immediate 

political circumstances and long standing feudal, regional and commercial relationships. 

9 

Harold Livermore, A New History of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972) 53. See Oliviera- 

Marques, 42-3, for a more detailed look at Affonso’s dealing with the Papacy. Pope Alexander III finally recognized 

Affonso as king in 1179. 

10 

Livermore, “The Conquest of Lisbon and its Author,” Portuguese Studies 6 (1990) 2. Information below on the 

manuscript comes from David, 26-7. 

11 

David, 26-7. Also, see De Expugnatione Lybonensi, ed. and trans. by David (New York: Colombia University Press, 

2001) 40-6. (Hereafter referred to as DEL. David refers to his first suspicion that the author was Ranulf de Glenville 

(44). 

12 

David, “Authorship,” 55-6. 

13 

Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade and Holy War in De Expugnatione Lybonensi,” in Swanson, ed. Holy Land, Holy Lands, 

and Christian History (Suffolk: Woodbridge, 2000), 125. 

14 

Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” 6, 16. 

Anatomy of a Crusade


After the fall of Edessa in 1144, Eugenius III had responded with the crusade bull 

Quantum praedecessores, aimed largely at King Louis VII of France. 15 Unable to preach 

the crusade in person, he delegated the responsibility to his fellow Cistercian Abbot 

Bernard of Clairvaux. 16 Bernard included Flanders and the Empire in his preaching tours, 

partially to reign in the renegade monk Radulf, and to tap into the vast resources of the 

urbanized Low Countries and the Empire. Phillips has also suggested that Bernard’s 

preaching was a result of his communication with Affonso Henriques, but this letter is 

controversial and will be discussed further below. There is little doubt, however that 

many of the crusaders, especially the Flemish and Imperial contingents, were responding 

to the enthusiasm for Holy War that had been generated by the formidable Abbott 

Bernard. 

Crusade enthusiasm could go only so far in assembling a fleet of such size. Raol 

mentions that men of “divers nations” had gathered at Dartmouth in about “one hundred 

and sixty-four vessels.” 17 Such an undertaking required a great deal of planning and 

cooperation, and in the absence of great feudal magnates, was the initiative of the lower 

nobility and the rising commercial class. There is, by twelfth-century standards, a 

corporate, entrepreneurial, and even ‘democratic’ sense to the Lisbon expedition that was 

noticed at the time. Henry of Huntington, writing of the disasters in the east, commented: 

Meanwhile a naval force that was made up of ordinary, rather than powerful, 

men and was not supported by any great leader, except Almighty God, prospered 

a great deal better, because they set out in humility. For although few, with God’s 

help in their battles they gained possession from the many of a city in Spain 

which is called Lisbon, and another called Almeria,[sic] and neighbouring 

territories. Truly, ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ For the 

armies of the French king and the emperor had been more splendid and larger 

than that which had earlier conquered Jerusalem, and yet they were crushed like a 

spider’s web. 18 

15 Trans. of QP from Riley-Smith, Idea and Reality, 57-59. Rudolph Hiestand, “The Papacy and the Second 

Crusade,”in Phillips and Hoch, eds. The Second Crusade-scope and consequences (Manchester: Manchester University 

Press) discusses the connections between Eugenius, QP, and St. Bernard, concluding that “The Second Crusade was 

not Eugenius III’s but Bernard of Clairvaux’s crusade.” 

16 Phillips, “The Second Crusade in History and Research,” in Phillips and Hoch, 3. 

17 Our other primary source for the siege is the letter of the priest Winand, a participant, to the Archbishop of Cologne. 

Winand, “Lisbon Letter” found in Susan Edinburgh, “The Lisbon Letter of the Second Crusade, Historical Research 

(1996) 328-39. The “Lisbon Letter” mentions “about two hundred ships.” For more about this letter and the versions by 

Duodechin and Arnulf, see Edgington “Albert of Aachen, St. Bernard and the Second Crusade” in Phillips and Hoch, 

54-70; and “The Lisbon Letter of the Second Crusade,” The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 69 (1996) 

328-39. 

18 Interea quidam exercitus naualis uirorum non potentum, nec alicui magno duci innixi—nisi Deo omnipotenti—quia 

humiliter profecti sunt, optime profecerunt. Ciuitatem namque in Hispania que uocatur Vlixis Bona, et aliam que 

uocatur Almaria, et regiones adaiacentes, a multis pauci Deo cooperante bellis optinuerunt. Vere, ‘Deus superbis 

resistit, humilibus autem day gratiam.’ Exercitus namque regis Francorum et imperatoris et splendidor et maior fuerat 

quam ille qui prius Ierusalem conquisierat, et a paucissimus contriti sunt, et quasi tele aranearum disterminati sunt, et 

demoliti. (Henry, Archdeacon of Huntington, Historia Anglorum, ed. And trans. by Diana Greenway (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1996) 752. For Henry’s biblical allusion see I Pet. 5:5. The sieges of Almeria and Lisbon took place at 

the same time. Constable has suggested that Henry combined reports of the two in one sentence. For the siege of 

Almeria, see the Chronica Adefonsi Imperatoris, book 2 in Barton and Fletcher The World of El Cid (Manchester: 

Manchester University Press), hereafter referred to as CAI; and Caffaro of Genoa, De Captione Almeria and Tortosa in 

John Bryan Williams, “The Making of the Crusade: the Genoese anti-Muslim attacks in Spain, 1146-1148,” Journal of 

Medieval History 23 (1997), Appendix I. 

KEVIN MUMMEY


It is a passage that has attracted a great deal of attention; it seems to portray the virtue of 

a nascent, vigorous middle class. 19 Henry was probably aiming his criticism at the nobles 

of his own country who, in 1147, seemed hopelessly entangled in a civil war. Still, 

‘lesser’ men had succeeded where ‘greater’ men had failed. It is another example of the 

tension between ideal and reality presented by the Lisbon expedition. 

Raol begins his narrative with a description of the expedition’s leaders. Arnold of 

Aerschot led a Lotharingian contingent, and Christian of Giselles led the crusaders of 

Flanders and Boulogne. The English were led by Hervey de Glanville, Simon ‘of Dover,’ 

Saher of Archelle, and “Andrew,” who led the Londoners. 20 Glanville and Archelle were 

clearly of the nobility. Nothing is known of Simon. Round suggested that Andrew may 

have been of the Buccuinte family, who were prominent London merchants, and Stubbs 

suggested that Andrew was justiciar of London in 1137. 21 This list is not unusual. The 

surviving section of the Poem of Almeria is largely a list of the leaders involved in that 

siege. 22 What is unusual is that later in the narrative, participants express confusion as to 

who the leaders of the expedition really are. Raol reports that Affonso sought leaders 

from among the crusaders. He is “briefly informed that such and such were our chief 

men…but that we had not yet decided on anyone on whom authority should be conferred 

to make answer for all.” 23 Furthermore, non-noble families play an important role in the 

narrative but, conspicuously, are omitted from the opening roll call. William Viel is not 

mentioned as one of the leaders of the expedition, but he exerted a great deal of influence. 

In the DEL he is depicted as being in favor of piratical activity instead of staying in 

Lisbon. 24 The Viel family had close ties to the Angevins, and is found in the latter half of 

the twelfth century accepting shipping contracts from Angevin nobles, including the 

court. 25 It appears that there were representatives of the merchant class on the expedition. 

They inclined toward practical and profitable solutions to problems presented en route to 

19 

Beginning with the work of John Horace Round, The Commune of London and other Studies (Westminster: 

Constable & Co., 1889), 97-113. 

20 

Hervey was the father of Henry II’s justiciar Ranulf. Hervey held fief in Bawdsey, where the addressee of the DEL 

was the son of the priest. R. Mortimer, “The Family of Ranulf de Glanville,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical 

Research 54 (1981), 3. 

21 

DEL, 53-56 and esp. footnotes. In fn. 5, 57-58, David claims that “the Lisbon crusade seems to have been organized 

on a more broadly democratic basis than any analogous enterprise of which we possess adequate knowledge.” While 

his use of the term democratic is misleading, the regulation of life aboard the ships does reflect the practical expertise 

of the sailors on board. Their organization may have impressed Raol, who does not display any familiarity with 

seafaring. Round’s dialogue with Stubbs is mentioned in the DEL, fn. 1, 56. 

22 

Poem of Almeria, in the CAI, 250-63. 

23 

The entire quotation reads: breviter responsum est nos primates habere hos et hos, et quorum precipue actus it 

consilia preminerent, sed nondum deliberatum cui responsionis officia committerent. DEL, 98. The lack of clear 

leadership may also indicate the “corporate” nature of the expedition. There is no indication here that many of the 

crusaders were in the pay of a great feudal magnate whom they would have identified as a leader. 

24 

DEL, 101-103 and fn. 1, 100-103. 

25 

DEL, fn. 1, 100-103. The absence of the Pipe Rolls in the 1130s and 1140s makes the composition and activities of 

the commune of London difficult to trace. It is possible that leading families of London may have felt it prudent to send 

a member on crusade. The late 1140s were still a dangerous time in England, and merchant families may have 

perceived the benefit of having their property protected by Papal decree. Also, the DEL mentions a contingent from 

Boulogne, the home of Stephen’s queen Matilda. Matilda and Stephen had considerable property and connections in 

London. Some members of the commune may have received the message of the crusade from their connections in 

Boulogne. Interestingly, there is no mention of any strife in the crusader camp related to the civil war. St. Bernard was 

certainly aware of the merchant families. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. B.S. 

James (Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998). See, section 5 of Letter 391, “To the English,” begins with St. Bernard’s appeal 

“…to those of you who are merchants, men quick to seek a bargain, let me point out the advantages of this great 

opportunity. Take up the sign of the Cross and you will find indulgence for all the sins you humbly confess. The cost is 

small, the reward is great” (Clairvaux, 460). 



Jerusalem. This inclination is disagreeable to Raol, and the ‘commercial’ element is often 

the antagonist of the narrative, representing the lust for profit instead of the higher 

purpose that is at the heart of Raol’s sermons. 

The first sermon, attributed to Bishop Peter Pitoes of Oporto, puts higher motives 

at the core of the crusade. Although it is difficult to separate the Bishop’s words from 

Raol’s, the circumstances and language of the sermon give cause to suspect that this 

version was written later. The sermon holds a central position in the narrative, but even 

Raol admits that the Bishop received a lukewarm reception from the crusaders. As 

Linehan has noted, “horny handed warriors not renowned for their ability to distinguish 

pilgrimage from brigandage were unlikely to be much impressed by the proposition that 

‘the sin was not in waging war, but in waging war for the sake of plunder.’” 26 At the end 

of the speech, the crusaders decided to wait “to hear from the king in person the 

proposals which had been made to us by commission in his absence.” 27 This is hardly an 

endorsement of the Bishop’s power of persuasion. The second problem with the depiction 

of the speech is Raol’s staging of the event. The crusaders are described as hearing mass 

in an overflowing church, with an overflow crowd on a hill. At best, a few elite crusaders 

would have heard the sermon, a few more might have heard about it, and most would not 

have heard it, or even cared to. Raol mentioned that the sermon was given in Latin so that 

it could be translated, ostensibly into the vernacular of the gathered crusaders. 28 It is a 

curious notice, possibly an indication that Raol was anticipating objections from his 

readers who would have needed to know how the soldiers understood the speech. A third 

issue is the mechanics of how such a sermon was transcribed. It seems unlikely that Raol 

was reporting what the Bishop said by memory. The detailed and sophisticated nature of 

the theological and philosophical arguments of the sermon indicates that it was composed 

and edited later. 29 Finally, it has been assumed that the Bishop of Oporto’s speech is an 

early example of a war sermon. 30 However, the sermon hardly enticed the crusaders to 

immediate action. Before leaving Oporto to parley with the King, they waited for the 

arrival of the Archbishop of Braga. Peter Pitoes’ oration apparently carried little weight 

with the crusaders. 31 Raol may well have written this speech later, to graft contemporary 

crusading theory onto the narrative of a successful crusading mission. There is a tension 

between Raol’s understated description of the event and his motives for including such a 

26 Peter Linehan, History and the Historians of Medieval Spain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 245. 

27 ut illinc a rege illorum audiremus presentes, que absentibus mandabantur. DEL, 84. The Flemish leader Christian of 

Giselles and the count of Aerschot were not at the original negations in Oporto. Their ships had scattered and didn’t 

arrive for another eleven days. It is also intriguing that the crusaders waited for the arrival of John Peculiar, the 

Archbishop of Braga, who they took with them to London along with Peter Pitoes. John was appointed Bishop of 

Oporto in 1136 and Archbishop in 1138. He may have had prior dealings with the crusaders, who knew of his influence 

with Affonso. In any case, the Bishop of Oporto does not seem to have earned the respect of the crusading mission. For 

John Peculiar see Livermore, 51. 

28 For the physical description of the sermon, see the DEL, 68, 70. 

29 A thorough, indispensable analysis of the Bishop’s speech is found in Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade.” Phillips remarks 

that the repetition of themes indicates “the likelihood that Raol manipulated the text” (132). 

30 For a review of preaching in Portugal see P.A. Obder de Baubeta, “Towards a History of Preaching in Medieval 

Portugal,” Portuguese Studies 7 (1991) 1-18. Obder de Baubeta refers to the sermons in the DEL, 5. as “army 

sermons.” She also questioned the accuracy of the transcriptions and asks whether the chronicler embellished them (12- 

15). 

31 The crusaders may have surmised that the Bishop of Oporto was not influential enough to make guarantees for the 

division of spoils. Some of the English who had come in 1142 may have had dealings with the Archbishop, and would 

have known of the influence he had with Affonso I. 

KEVIN MUMMEY


detailed, sophisticated sermon in his narrative. The ‘persuasion’ of the Bishop, and his 

exhortation to a higher purpose, were probably an afterthought. Oporto in May of 1147 

was full of crusaders as yet unsure of their next destination. 

The Bishop’s speech also has raised a more fundamental question of motive, i.e. 

whether the crusaders ever intended to go to Portugal at all. At his first meeting with the 

crusaders, as well as in the conclusion of his sermon, the Bishop indicates that he and 

King Affonso had known of their coming. 32 Affonso also reveals later that he 

“understood” that the crusaders were “brave and strenuous men of great industry.” 33 The 

argument that the Portuguese had prior knowledge of the expedition rests largely on St. 

Bernard’s letter to ‘Alphonsus, King of Portugal.’ 34 St. Bernard indicated that he had 

been in contact with Affonso’s brother Pedro, who had “passed through France” and 

would “soon be fighting in the armies of the Lord.” Livermore concluded that Pedro was 

going to fight in Iberia in 1147. 35 Bernard also indicated that he had “with promptitude” 

complied with a request of Affonso, and that his messenger was bringing “documents that 

set forth the liberality of the Holy See.” This letter has been questioned since its first 

publication by Brito in 1602, and has been dismissed as a forgery as recently as 1994. 36 

For now we will accept Phillips’ and Livermore’s arguments that the letter is authentic, 

though more work needs to be done to firmly establish this connection. 37 Phillips has 

placed Bernard in the Low Countries between July 1146 and February 1147, and it is 

possible that he could have preached an Iberian crusade. 38 A simpler explanation of the 

king’s foreknowledge may be found in the DEL. Before Affonso’s speech Raol reveals 

that the king “learned in advance of our coming from some of our people who had been 

attached from our association in five ships.” 39 They had arrived a week before the other 

crusaders, having made the trip in five days. The speed of the voyage indicates the 

presence of skilled sailors, and it seems more likely that the advance guard was an 

initiative not of the crusade, but of the shipping families of the English ports. The crucial 

question remains as to what degree the Lisbon crusaders were part of a grand Papal 

strategy, making Lisbon the flank of what Bishko has called the “western theater of 

Catholic Europe’s war against Islam.” 40 There are undoubtedly connections between 

32 DEL, 69, 85. 

33 DEL, 99. Scimus satis et compertum habemus vos fortes et strenuos magneque industrie viros fore… 

34 Clairvaux, “Letter 308” in the Mabillon edition of 1719. In James’ recent translation, it is numbered 397. “Letters,” 

469. The words in quotation below are from this translation. 

35 Livermore, “The Conquest of Lisbon,” 12. 

36 Alan J. Forey, “The second Crusade: Scope and Objectives,” Durham University Journal 55 (1994) 170. 

37 Livermore, “The Conquest of Lisbon,” 9-12. Phillips, “St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the Low Countries and the Lisbon 

Letter of the Second Crusade,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997), 485-97. Giles Constable has pointed out the 

influence of St. Bernard’s rule for the Templars in the shipboard regulations, and in the Bishop of Oporto’s speech. 

Neither piece of evidence connects Bernard directly to the Lisbon expedition. Raol was apparently a stranger to 

seafaring. His descriptions of the voyage often lapse into classical allusions, and this may have been his first experience 

with justice at sea. Like the speeches, the details of the regulations may be a combination of the actual agreement and 

later additions couched in monastic language more familiar to Raol. Raol’s use of Bernard further supports Phillips 

arguments of the connection between the two men, but again, not to Lisbon. 

38 Phillips, “St. Bernard,” 488. Phillips is in no doubt about the connection between St. Bernard and Lisbon. “In other 

words it [the Lisbon expedition] had been discussed and planned in northern Europe before the fleet set out and 

Bernard of Clairvaux played a leading role in organizing it” (494). 

39 DEL, 99. Audierat enim per nostros de nostro adventu, qui, in navibus V. a nostra societate segregate. 

40 C.J. Bishko, “The Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest, 1095-1492” Studies in Medieval Spanish Frontier History 

(London: Variorum Reprints, 1980), 399. Also, see Hiestand, “The Papacy,” who calls the second crusade a ‘global 



Bernard’s crusade and the expedition that sailed from Dartmouth, but there is no clear 

evidence that they intended to take Lisbon. The decision to fight there was a product of 

negotiation between commercial interests, crusaders, and the Portuguese monarchy. 

Raol’s writing does not indicate a concern for external contexts. For him, the 

struggle is immediate and internal. The theme that runs through the Bishop’s sermon, the 

king’s negotiation, the Muslim’s defense, and the priest’s exhortation, is the appeal to 

piety over riches. The Bishop’s speech begins with a parable of a young man who was 

told by Christ to sell all he had, for his riches were the source of his sadness. 41 They are 

reminded of their sacrifice, of leaving behind their wives and children. Yet this sacrifice 

is a victory over sin, and the reward is the “joy of all those present who present a more 

cheerful face to hardships and pain than we do, we who, alas are vegetating here in 

slothful idleness. 42 This will become a common theme for the war sermon, and it will 

echo in King Henry V’s battle speech at Agincourt. But in the twelfth century, the 

righteousness of the foreign adventure was still finding its voice. Here, right intention 

begins with action, and the answer to the call to arms is a victory over sin. If Raol were 

indeed writing these sermons after the fact, as an appeal to the next generation of the 

Glenville family to take the cross, this would have been an attractive image. The Bishop’s 

speech also contains a warning against envy, and is illuminative of Raol’s theme of 

internal struggle. He is trying to warn his audience that the welfare of the crusader and 

his associates is one. Perhaps Raol had seen plenty of the damage of discord in his 

experience on crusade. His admonition uses siege imagery. The “entrance to the mind 

must be guarded with sagacious care,” as envy “the more stealthily creeps in at the 

moment of temptation.” 43 Phillips has pointed out that Fulcher of Chartres and Orderic 

Vitalis used the themes of envy, pride, and gluttony to explain the disasters of 1107-8. 44 

Here Raol uses the same themes to explain a success. Before the siege begins, he has the 

Bishop warn his crusaders of the dangers, and he points out the spiritual opportunities of 

their sacrifice. In doing so, Raol was able to weave his didactic purposes into his 

narrative. 

The struggle between the temporal and the spiritual is reflected in the narrative’s 

most famous quote. Raol describes how the Spanish Church has been attacked, the cities 

destroyed, the people placed under a “yoke of grievous servitude.” 45 His reliance here on 

Biblical allusions and rhetorical devices betrays Raol’s unfamiliarity with the specifics of 

the Portuguese situation. He needs, however, to accentuate the damage done by the 

enemy, in order to build his case for just war. It is in this segment of the speech that Raol 

reveals the depth of his education. The teachings of St. Augustine, Jerome, Bernard, 

Ambrose, and Isidore, et.al., are used to buttress his argument. Mother Church cries out 

for vengeance, and She can be avenged on the coast of Spain. “Therefore be not seduced 

enterprise,’ (37). He also points out the increased activity in Papal chancery charters in 1147 and 1148, significant 

numbers of which focus on Iberia. 

41 

DEL, 71. 

42 

DEL, 72. The whole quotation reads, “O quanta omnium hilaritas, quibus ad laborem et penam facies iocundior 

quam nobis, qui hic heu torpentes segni vacamus otio!” 

43 

DEL, 74. Sollerti igitur custodia muniendus est mentis aditus, et eo observandum callidius quanto in ipso 

temptationis articulo fallacius surreptit. 

44 

Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” 128. 

45 

DEL, 77, which includes an inaccurate description the population of Oporto. See p. 77, fn. 4. 

KEVIN MUMMEY


by the desire to press on with the journey you have begun, for the praiseworthy thing is 

not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life on the way…” 46 It was 

noticed as early as the nineteenth century that this passage is a play on words from a 

letter of St. Jerome to Paulinus, and it was also used by Augustine and other ecclesiastical 

writers. 47 More importantly, it was used by his contemporary, Peter the Venerable, in a 

letter to Hugh of Chalons. 48 It appears to be a straightforward case for right intention. 

Raol quotes Ambrose on the crusaders’ duty to their fellow men and Isidore of 

Seville’s doctrine of just war as “that which is waged after a declaration, to recover 

property, or to repulse enemies.” 49 Raol’s argument is careful, and it had to be. He is, in 

effect, as Phillips has noticed, making the case for Lisbon as the spiritual Jerusalem. 50 

There is a sense that he is explaining the diversion of the crusade to himself. 51 During a 

storm in the Bay of Biscay, he admits the possibility that God is punishing them for this 

“perversion of their pilgrimage.” 52 Despite the strength of Raol’s argument, this is some 

fancy footwork. What has been overlooked in this passage is that the desire to go to 

Jerusalem is portrayed as a seduction. The world of the First Crusade has been turned 

upside-down, and the desire to liberate the Holy Land is a symptom of wanderlust. 53 Raol 

and his contemporaries had no idea what a Pandora’s Box they were opening. If there 

were a ‘spiritual Jerusalem’ in Lisbon, there could be many, and they would be sought in 

Lithuania, in Constantinople, in the Languedoc. The question of what it was ‘to have 

lived a good life on the way’ would never, and could never be answered. The spiritual 

ideal was inextricably bound with the historical context; it could never wriggle away 

from the immediacy of the situation. 

The immediate need of the Lisbon expedition was the negotiating skills of King 

Affonso. The crusaders, apparently unmoved by whatever case was pleaded with them in 

Oporto, sailed for Lisbon to hear what the King had to offer. They had taken with them as 

hostages the Bishop of Oporto and the Archbishop of Braga, John (Joao) Peculiar. 54 

46 DEL, 79. Nulla ergo itineris incepti vos festinationis seducat occasio, quia non Iherosilimis fuisse sed bene interim 

invixisse laudabile est. For a detailed description of this passage in the context of Holy War theory, see Phillips, “Ideas 

of Crusade,” 132-3. 

47 DEL, 78, fn. 3. Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” 131. 

48 Phillips “Ideas of Crusade,” 131, who dates the letter 1146-7. A possible source for Raol’s knowledge of Islam may 

have been the work of this influential Cluniac Abbott, who was the first Westerner to translate the Koran. Peter had 

gone to Spain to collect information on Islam, and an Englishman, Robert of Ketton, had translated much of the 

‘Toledan Collection.’ Some of the earliest information on Islam was circulating in geographical areas and intellectual 

circles familiar to Raol. For Peter’s life and work, see James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (London: 

Longman, 1996). 

49 DEL, 80 quod ex indicato geritur de rebus repetendis aut hostium pulsandorum causa… 

50 Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” 131-2. “What Raol had done by using Jerome was, in effect, to fit the diversion to 

Lisbon into existing crusade theory by making it a meritorious part of a penitential journey which could popularly be 

described as being to the spiritual as well as the earthly Jerusalem.” This is a brilliant analysis, but Phillips stops short 

of suggesting that this is the work of a man who is reflecting on the crusade experience as a whole, and is using the 

Lisbon success as a way to inspire the next generation of crusaders. 

51 R.A. Fletcher attributes the sermon to the Bishop of Oporto but suggested that it was “the sermon of a man who had 

his doubts about crusading.” R.A. Fletcher, “Reconquest and Crusade in Spain, 1050-1150,” Transactions of the Royal 

Historical Society 5 (1987), 44. I would argue that Raol is not in doubt about crusading, but about how to explain the 

success of a crusade that was clearly diverted from the Holy Land. 

52 DEL, 61 

53 DEL, 72, Videte ne iterum post concupiscentias vestras abieritis. 

54 See above, 8 and fn. 



Excited crusaders prematurely disembarked and attacked the western suburb of the city 

until Saher of Archelle recalled them. 55 The pace of events was accelerating, threatening 

to get out of control. That night a nervous watch was kept, as only the tents of Archelle 

and Glenville, with a thirty-nine-man contingent, were left on shore. This is our best 

evidence of Raol as a fighting priest. He is a member of this vanguard, and they 

celebrated the vigil of St. Peter “with their corslets on.” 56 Affonso arrived on the scene, 

accompanied by his bishops. After flattering the crusaders on their wealth, he pleaded his 

own poverty—he could not offer the kind of money that his contemporary, Alfonso VII, 

could offer to the Genoese. 57 His letter of introduction said “we will promise money to 

your forces so far as the resources of the royal treasury will permit.” 58 His offer in person 

was somewhat different, promising to deliver to the crusaders “whatever the land 

possesses,” assumedly what land and treasure they could acquire through combat. Then 

Raol’s theme resurfaces, when the King hoped that beyond what he had promised, “we 

feel certain that your piety will invite you to the labor and exertion of so great an 

enterprise more than the promise of our money will encite you to the recompense of 

booty.” 59 

Raol’s description of the crusaders’ response gives us an insight into his feudal, 

Anglo-Norman background. Not all of the crusaders were invited by their piety. In fact, it 

appears that the King’s plea of poverty fell on deaf ears, if it fell on many at all. Shouting 

arose from the mass of gathered crusaders. Affonso Henriques, perhaps wary of this 

quarrelsome mob, called again for a council of leaders to convene, “lest our discourse be 

disturbed by the shouting of your people.” 60 After the King discussed his terms, the 

crusaders reconvened to discuss them. Raol was disdainful, both of this council meeting 

and of the debate that followed it. Accustomed to the ordered world of the Church and 

the rigidity of the feudal hierarchy, he recoiled at the boisterous exchange of opinions. 

His Anglo-Norman bias is also revealed in this episode—the Flemings, feeling the pinch 

55 

As R. Rogers has put it, the first attack took place “as much out of enthusiasm as out of planning” on June 30th. R. 

Rogers, Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) 183. The military details of the 

siege are outside the scope of this paper. See Rogers, 182-188 for the most useful summary of the military aspects. 

Rogers’ work also contains valuable summations of other sieges taking place on the Peninsula during the Second 

Crusade era. Also see Matthew Bennett, “Military Aspects of the Conquest of Lisbon, 1147,” in Phillips and Hoch, 71- 

89. Bennett incorporates political and logistical considerations of the siege. 

56 

DEL, 97. 

57 

Valuable sources exist for contemporary sieges taking place on the Iberian Peninsula. For the siege of Almeria, see 

the “Poem of Almeria” in CAI, 250-63. The De Captione Almerie et Turtuose of the Genoese consul Caffaro is 

especially useful. Richard Face has called him “the first secular historian in Western Europe,”and his businesslike 

reporting of the siege stands in marked contrast to the DEL. In the De Captione, Caffaro mentions that the Genoese 

netted 60,000 gold morabetinos, as well as booty and slaves. While indicating that the Genoese were also fired with 

crusade enthusiasm, the ‘corporate’ nature of the expeditions to Almeria and Tortosa, particularly their planning and 

execution, stand in marked contrast to the Lisbon adventure (169). For other contemporary Iberian sieges see Simon 

Barton, “A Forgotten Crusade: Alfonso VII of León-Castile and the Campaign for Jaen (1148),” Historical Research 

73 (2000) 312-20; and Nikolas Jaspert, “Capta est Dertosa, clavis Christianorum: Tortosa and the Crusades,” in 

Phillips and Hoch, 90-110. 

58 

DEL, 84, peccunie vero sponsionem, si vobis placet, proinde facturi vestris, prout fisci regie potestatis facultas 

sequeter. 

59 

DEL, 99. Certi vero hiis, quod vos magis pietas vestra ad laborem studiumque tanti operis invitabit, quam nostre 

sponsio peccunie ad premium provocabit. 

60 

DEL, 98. Sed ne populorum conclamationibus vestrorum nostra turbetur oratio… 

KEVIN MUMMEY


of want, made a surreptitious deal with the King. 61 The debate continued, and a more 

serious threat to the expedition arose. William Viel, his brother Ralph, 

and almost all the men of Southampton and Hastings, together with those who 

had come to besiege Lisbon five years before this, all with one voice declared 

that they took the king’s promise to be nothing but treachery. 62 

Evidence for this previous expedition is sparse, although there is mention of it the 

Chronica Gothorum. It is generally accepted that Affonso had attacked Lisbon in 1142 or 

1143 with the help of a fleet of crusaders. 63 It appears that English sailing families had 

participated in this affair and dealt with Affonso, and that their familiarity had bred 

contempt. They were also aware that opportunities for booty were available further south, 

at much less cost than that of helping Affonso take Lisbon. Raol’s language demonizes 

the Viels, as when he characterized William as breathing out “threatenings and piratical 

slaughter.” 64 Yet Raol was a thorough enough reporter to note that the sailors reminded 

the expedition that this was the time that favorable winds would carry them to Jerusalem. 

The experiences of the English maritime families were an important component of the 

pre-siege maneuvering. 65 Again, the crusade ideal was turned on its head, as those who 

argued to press on to Jerusalem were depicted as greedy and piratical. Raol, family priest 

to a feudal magnate, had little understanding of families like the Viels. 

However, Raol did understand the Glenville family, whom he served, and it is not 

surprising that a speech of Hervey de Glenville was included in the DEL. 66 He is depicted 

as uniting the discordant Anglo-Norman contingent. (The Flemish and Lotharingians had 

already taken up their positions on the east side of the city walls.) Whether or not he 

made such a speech, its inclusion in the narrative served Raol’s later purpose of inspiring 

another generation of Glenvilles to take the cross. There are two themes in this speech, 

one which appeals to Norman racial pride, and another that lays out the doctrine of 

crusading as an act of love. Hervey extolled the virtue of activity as a remedy to the vice 

of sloth, recalling the Bishop’s speech. He appealed to Norman pride, when he noted that 

even the Scots, whom nobody would deny are barbarians, had faithfully cooperated with 

the enterprise! 67 Those who had objected were cowards and sinners for violating the 

terms of their association, and thus their desire for booty had brought them dishonor. In 

the second part, Raol had Hervey plead his own ignorance and inexperience at public 

speaking, and then had him weave a rather eloquent argument for the virtue of a 

pilgrimage founded on charity and love, an argument that parallels the writings of St. 

61 DEL, 101. Not surprisingly, this deal is not mentioned in the “Lisbon Letter” of Winand to the Bishop of Cologne. 

62 DEL, 102, et omnes fere Hamtunenses et Hastingenses, cum hiis qui ante hoc quinquennium urbem Ulyxbonam 

obsidendam convinerant, omnes uno ore regis [s]ponsionem accipere nichil aliud quam proditionem aiebant. 

63 DEL, intro pp. 15-26 gives a history of previous naval activity. For the attack of 1142, see Bishko, 40 Also see 

Carole Hillenbrand, “A Neglected Episode of the Reconquista,” Revue des etudes islamiques 54 (1986) 165; 

Livermore, New History, 54-5, esp. 55, fn. 1; and Bennett, 72. 

64 DEL, 103. 

65 They would also play an important role in other crusading adventures in Portugal. For a primary source account of 

the capture of the southern Portuguese port of Silves in 1189. See Narratio de Itinere Navali Pergrinorum 

Hierosolyman Tendentium et Silviam Capientum, ed. David, American Philosophical Society 81 (1939), 592-676. 

66 For the Glenville family, see R. Mortimer, “The Family of Ranulf de Glanville,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical 

Research 54 (1981) 1-18. Hervey is mentioned on page 3. 

67 DEL, 107, Quis enim Scottos barbaros esse negit? 



Augustine. He then called on his fellow Normans to resist the seduction of the promise of 

future profits, and to forego coveting the goods of others. This is a repetition of themes 

that Raol had already established in the speech of the Bishop of Oporto. The speech of 

Hervey de Glenville reveals the feudal aspect of Raol’s personality, and the 

sophistication of the arguments and repetition of themes hint at his authorship. 

A unique feature of the DEL is that Raol chose to include a Muslim point of view, 

or at least his understanding of it. In reply to an opening parley, ‘a Muslim elder’ 

responded to the crusaders. 68 Phillips has pointed out that he attacked the vices of “greed, 

glory, and ambition, the same vices that both the Bishop of Oporto and Hervey de 

Glenville had earlier warned against.” 69 The crusaders, claimed the elder, “interfere with 

our destiny.” He continued that in “labeling your ambition [a] zeal for righteousness, you 

misrepresent vices for virtues.” 70 This is suspiciously similar to the Bishop’s warning that 

“vices often steal in under the guise of virtues.” 71 The elder also reminded the crusaders 

that they had been defeated many times previously, and that God would this time 

determine the winner. 72 His trial-by-battle theme is time-honored, an example of what 

Tyerman has seen as the confusion of novelty and tradition, the difficulty of 

distinguishing old practices, motives, and beliefs from the ‘new’ customs of the 

crusade. 73 The crusaders may have been offered an opportunity at spiritual rebirth, but the 

road to redemption was paved with ancient stones. While the elder was certain of Divine 

Justice, he was less certain about the people with whom he was dealing. The restlessness 

and avarice of the crusaders, their inability to remain at home, honestly befuddled the 

elder. To him, their actions were insane. “Surely your frequent going and coming is proof 

of an innate mental instability,” he claimed, “for he who is unable to arrest the flight of 

the body cannot control the mind.” 74 While the themes of the speech were Raol’s, he had 

also made an astute observation regarding the inhabitants of Al-Ushbun. They must have 

wondered why God had sent this accursed army from overseas. The Muslim’s speech was 

a powerful literary and teaching device. Raol had put into the mouth of the enemy his 

own warnings about wrong intention. It was a reminder to his audience that the desires of 

the body for pleasure and gain will run wild if the mind were not attuned to the higher 

purpose. 

68 While Islamic politics on the peninsula are unfortunately outside of the size limitations of this paper, it should be 

mentioned that changes in the Iberian Islam contributed significantly to the capture of Al-Ushbun. The Almoravids had 

ruled Portugal from Seville until the 1140s, when they were overthrown in a series of popular uprisings. They were 

replaced by a series of short-lived taifa kings, to one of whom, Ibn Ben-Wazir, the besieged of Al-Ushbun had 

appealed for help. The Almohads, a confederation of Berber tribes led by Ibn Tumart and sharing similar 

fundamentalist views of Islam to the Almoravids, were eventually to sweep into Spain. By the early 1150s, the border 

of Christian and Muslim Portugal was again the Tagus. But in 1147, the Almohads were preoccupied in taking 

Marrakesh, the last Almoravid stronghold in North Africa. See Hugh Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal (London: 

Longman, 1978), chapters 7-10. A Muslim account of Ibn Tumart is included in Constable, Medieval Iberia, 185-9, and 

is followed by an Almohad creed of 1189, 190-197. 

69 Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” 136, whose discussion is followed here. Phillips has pointed out that Raol does not 

mention how this speech was translated. 

70 Both quotes from the DEL, 121. 

71 Phillips, “Ideas of Crusade,” 136. The Bishop’s quote is from the DEL, 76, nam sepe pro virtutibus vitia surrepunt. 

72 DEL, 123. 

73 Tyerman, “Were There any Crusades,” 563. 

74 DEL, 121. Et certa frequens migratio vestra innata animi instabilitate fore convincitur, quia nec animum continere 

qui nec corporis fugam sistere valet. 

KEVIN MUMMEY


Raol displayed an awareness of Muslim criticism of Christianity, with what 

Benjamin Kedar calls “remarkable accuracy.” 75 The besieged were making their first 

attempts to repel the attack, making offensive sorties through the still open portas of the 

citadel, taunting the crusaders from the walls. Those on the battlements attacked such 

tenets of the faith as the veneration of Mary, the idea behind the Trinity, and the Christian 

belief of Jesus as the greatest of the prophets. Lest the more unsophisticated in his 

audience fail to follow the theological arguments, Raol castigated the Muslims for 

defiling the cross with excrement and body fluids and hurling it at the crusaders. 76 

Scatological literary devices notwithstanding, where did Raol get access to the Muslim 

perspective? Knowing nothing of Raol outside the DEL and the cemetery donation, it is 

impossible to tell. But the mid-twelfth century had seen a rise in interest in Islam, most 

noticeably in the work of Abbott Peter of Cluny. 77 If Raol were an influential ecclesiast, 

as Phillips has suggested, he could have had access to Peter’s manuscripts. Another 

possibility is that Raol could have learned something of Islam from his stay in Lisbon, 

where information would have been far more plentiful than in the Anglo-Norman realm. 

A third possibility is that Raol made it to the Holy Land, and there obtained his 

information. 78 In any case his, knowledge of Islam reveals a mind that was, by the 

standards of twelfth-century Europe, unusually well informed and worldly. 

The last speech is likely a transcription of a battle sermon that Raol preached 

himself. He wrote that the sermon was delivered “by a certain priest, holding a bit of the 

sacred wood of the cross in his hands.” 79 It was preached after the final positioning of the 

Anglo-Norman siege tower on the western wall, where Raol had described himself as a 

combatant. 80 In the speech, he returned to his themes of the dangers of pride and envy. 

He also pointed out that to combat these tools of the Devil, “corrective rather than 

destructive punishment” had been allotted to man, echoing his references to the teachings 

of Isidore and Augustine. 81 The theme of the repentant nature of the crusade reappears, 

and even the last battle is a chance for rebirth. “Therefore show yourselves once more in 

this undertaking such men as you were when you first arrived here,” Raol continued, 

“and I confidently promise you that you will shatter the power of your enemies.” 82 He 

further revealed his own role in the siege, when he reminded his comrades that he had 

been “a participant in your trials and labors, and a sharer in your rewards…" 83 He was 

also holding a piece of the true cross while spurring his charges forward, and Phillips 

75 B.Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission, (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 103-4. Kedar’s examination of medieval 

historians and their role in Christian-Muslim relations are a valuable contribution. 

76 DEL, 132. 

77 See above, fn. 39. Also see Kedar—especially his discussion of the conversion motif, 99-112. Peter of Cluny was the 

first westerner to have commissioned a translation of the Koran. Kritzek, Peter the Venerable, especially the first 

chapter. 

78 For the route of the crusaders after the siege see Constable, “A Note on the Route of the Anglo-Flemish Crusaders of 

1147,” Speculum 28 (1953), 525-6. 

79 DEL, 147. 

80 Cf. DEL, 135-7 ,where Raol gives a detailed, first hand account of the fighting. 

81 DEL, 155. This last sermon also contains a refutation of Islamic criticism, and is discussed by Phillips, “Ideas of 

Crusade,” 136. 

82 DEL, 155, Exhibite ergo vos iterum ad hoc negotium, quales huc advenistis, et secure promitto vobis hostium 

vestrorum potentias frangere. Contrast this with the bishop of Oporto, who says to the crusaders that “[y]ou were 

employed with arms and the sword; you were committing acts of pillage and other misdeeds of soldiers, concerning 

which there is no need now to speak in detail.” 

83 DEL, 157. 



claims that his possession of such a powerful relic further connects him to the highest 

ecclesiastical authorities, namely St. Bernard. 84 Much of the last sermon in the DEL 

connects us to the previous speeches, and may further connect Raol to the Anglo-Norman 

ecclesiastical elite. 

The siege ended in November of 1147, and little of the conclusion of the narrative 

displays the crusaders’ sense of higher purpose. Fights ensued between the Flemish and 

Norman factions. Pillaging got out of hand, murder and avarice ran rampant. The mutual 

distrust of the crusaders and Affonso I flared. Appalled by the slaughter, Raol concluded 

the DEL with a prayer for mercy. “Spare now Lord, spare the work of thine hands,” he 

lamented. “It is indeed enough that thou hast fought for us thus far against them.” 85 Kedar 

has seen the final prayer as a “thinly veiled disapproval of the Lord’s doings at Lisbon.” 86 

This may be the case, but if indeed Raol wrote much of the DEL in the 1160s, this may 

be the prayer of a man who has seen his share of senseless slaughter, repenting the part he 

played in it. Raol must have been aware that the leaders of the Church had started a 

violent process that often proved difficult to control. 

Giles Constable has conceded that “it would be hopeless to expect that in the 

twelfth any more than in the twentieth [century], contemporary writers could express 

completely the motives of the men whose actions they describe. Many factors other than 

those they [the chroniclers] mention must have played an essential part…in the 

campaigns of 1146-8. Moreover, like all medieval sources, these must be studied in the 

light both of the information available to the writer and ‘the sense of responsibility’ with 

which he approached the task.” (Italics, Constable.) 87 Constable’s enviable observation 

applies directly to a study of the DEL. Hopeless as the task of discovering motive may be, 

the DEL is an overlooked vantage point from which to view the conflicts and tensions of 

the age. Indeed, many factors played a part in the European capture of Al-Ushbun. The 

initiative of first Teresa and then Affonso I in building the state of Portugal; the renewed 

energy of the Reconquista; the struggle of the Almohads, Almoravids, and taifa kings; 

and the Second Crusade all played a part in the Siege. But historical contexts and long 

term processes did not often concern the chronicler, and they did not concern Raol. For 

him, the struggle was internal. He was concerned with the hearts and minds of the 

crusaders, and he used the entire arsenal of teachings at his disposal to harness their 

potential for savagery. This paper has argued that his later editing of the DEL reflects his 

‘sense of responsibility’ to the next generation of crusaders in the Glenville family. But 

the struggle he undertook as he edited his manuscript was not only with his crusader 

audience, it was with himself. Raol is an embodiment of the contradictory aspects of 

twelfth-century existence. He was at once a warrior, a priest, a servant of a feudal 

household, and an influential ecclesiastical thinker. He was grappling with the 

consequences of violence, with sin, and with right intention, that elusive and tenuous 

doctrine that was being developed as the philosophical and theological bulwark of the 

crusade. It is not in the great movements of armies, but in the mind of this too long 

84 See above, n. 14. 

85 DEL, 185. 

86 Kedar, Crusade and Mission, 104. 

87 Constable, “The Second Crusade,” 215. He is quoted at length because of the brilliance of his summation, evidence 

as to why this 1953 article is still required reading for anyone interested in medieval historiography. 

KEVIN MUMMEY


ignored historian that valuable insights into the personal, as well as the political, struggles 

of the twelfth century are to be found. 


R oyal Culpability 

King James VI and the Scottish 

Witch Craze of the 1590s 

Jared Taylor

he episodic witchcraft hysteria, which swept through Scotland during the 

1590s, was the ultimate result of King James VI’s personal interests in witchcraft, and his 

subsequent political maneuvering within the legal system of Scotland. Laws, pamphlets, 

letters, and books based on superstition and politics were some of the tools James VI used 

to secure his interests and his kingship. The most powerful device at James’ disposal, 

however, came in the form of his personal participation in various witch trials and his 

sole right as king to set up commissions to investigate witchcraft cases. James’ 

definitively direct connection to the North Berwick and Aberdeenshire trials, as well as 

his fascination with the occult, put all of these devices into proper perspective. Witchcraft 

trials were the perfect means for carrying out his personal and political aspirations. Other 

forms of popular media and verbal church dogma in the form of moving sermons during 

and after James’ reign as both king of Scotland and England also helped to reinforce his 

views, and win the support of the populace. The result was an institutionalization of 

witchcraft that led to the legitimization of the mass burnings within the minds of the 

people. 

Acts issued by Scottish monarchs, trial procedures, popular literature, and 

decisions made by the Privy Council are some examples of useful evidence not directly 

tied to the King that easily lend themselves to an examination of the witch hysteria in 

Scotland. 1 Many historians have attempted to use these and other sources of evidence to 

demonstrate the nature of witch-hunting in Scotland and its relation to the Crown. This 

has usually been in regard to King James VI and his involvement in the North Berwick 

and Aberdeenshire panics of the 1590s, and the resulting witch craze that lasted from 

1591 until 1598. James’ exact involvement and responsibility have been debated by 

numerous historical scholars. The most prominent of these historians are Christina 

Larner, Julian Goodare, Lawrence Normand, Gareth Roberts and P.G. Maxwell-Stuart. 

While quite varied, all of the interpretations of these authors can be used in conjunction 

to build a coherent historiography on the subject, as well as explicate the exact nature of 

King James’ involvement in the witch craze of the 1590s. 

The debate concerning the connection between James and witchcraft has its roots 

in the work of the five historians mentioned. Dividing the hypotheses of these historians 

into two groups provides a useful starting point for an examination of their significance. 

Larner and Goodare see James’ culpability in the episodic witch craze of the 1590s as an 

ultimate explanation for the panic. His direct participation in the trials, as well as his 

publications and speeches, are the focus of their studies. James is seen as the instigator of 

widespread interest in witches. Normand, Roberts and Maxwell-Stuart, on the other hand, 

regard James as merely one of the proximate explanations of the witch craze. His 

culpability lies in being one piece of a much larger puzzle of causation. The beliefs of the 

common people, decisions and actions by local judges and commissions, and trial 

1 The Privy Council was a permanent central government council of professional judges granted special commission by 

the Crown to try serious local criminal cases, including witchcraft.


procedures are the main foci of these historians. Each of the variables is seen by these 

writers as being interconnected and equal in terms of causation. Finding a common link 

between these authors’ investigations in order to synthesize a balance between their 

views will be shown to be historically useful in determining James’ guilt, and backed by 

the actual data. 

Public speeches given by the king, books authored by James, popular pamphlets, 

trial documents including transcripts and dittays, royal grants for legal commissions to 

hunt witches, and James’ reputation as seen in the work of popular writers of the time, 

make up the bulk of historical evidence available on this particular subject. James’ 

speeches at both trials and courtly social events demonstrate his immense interest in 

witchcraft. The publications of both of James’ books, Daemonologie and The Trew Lawe 

of Free Monarchies, are evidence of his obsession with his divine right being in potential 

jeopardy at the hands of diabolical and political agents. Popular pamphlets, such as News 

for Scotland, helped to fuel the hunting appetite of the commoners, as well as elevate the 

King’s person to the rank of the divine’s beloved. Grants for commissions to hunt 

witches show how his will was done. The works of various authors, including 

Shakespeare, help to prove that his reputation as a witchmonger was well known at the 

time. The extent and exact nature of this aspect of the King’s character is undeniable. All 

of the data taken together support the contention that James was the ultimate cause of the 

1590s witch craze in Scotland. A search for connections between ultimate (James’ 

aspirations) and proximate (popular superstition and local influence) factors that led to 

the explosion of witchcraft cases in the 1590s must be empirical. Actual evidence must 

be compared with the scenarios put forth by historians of the subject. Understanding a 

complicated maze of causation is not an easy task. A careful juxtaposition of current 

historical research and the available evidence will provide the necessary framework for a 

study of King James VI and Scottish witchcraft. 

The historical work done on James and the witch craze of Scotland has been as 

varied as it has been prolific. Many historians have at least touched on the topic, but none 

have arrived at a completely satisfactory explanation of the issue of his exact 

involvement in the 1591-98 craze. The five historians worth examining divide into those 

that see a culpable king as an ultimate explanation and those that see a culpable king as 

only one of many proximate explanations. These views have been heavily argued and 

defended over the years, which has resulted in a serious scholastic debate full of both 

insightful historical work and professional mudslinging. Christina Larner has done some 

of the best work on this subject. She is recognized by most historians as the leading 

expert on Scottish witchcraft. Larner’s importance to this discussion lies in her placement 

of James as the undeniable, perhaps sole, ultimate cause for the 1590s’ witch craze. She 

not only claims this, but also argues that James is responsible for the nature of Scottish 

beliefs on witchcraft after the treason trials in 1590-1, in which he took part. 2 Although 

James did not create the belief in witches and their craft, he helped to reshape cultural 

definitions of them. There were anti-witch laws and scattered trials before this time, but 

2 Christina Larner, Enemies of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981) and Witchcraft and Religion: 

The Politics of Popular Belief (New York: Basil Blackwell Publisher Ltd, 1984). In both of these works, Larner argues 

that James obtained his notions on witchcraft during his visit to the Danish court in the early part of the 1590s. 

JARED TAYLOR


these were not in relation to satanic pacts and the punishments were usually mild. 3 

However, the involvement of King James finally tipped the scale. By 1591, his intense 

interest and fear in witchcraft had begun and sustained the hunt, through royal example at 

the very least. 

Once many of the accused confessed to a diabolical plot against the King, and 

James was convinced of its truth, the madness began. The result was that accusations and 

trials became much more common, and were easily justified. Commoners were more 

likely to make accusations due to royal sanction. A centrally controlled commission 

actively searching for witches resulted in the outbreak of a craze. This central 

commission, under James’ leadership, did most of the damage. James’ interest in 

demonology and his fear of treason combined with other, less prominent, factors to create 

an increase in the unique, but dangerous legal situations. Witchcraft trials became treason 

trials, and the “tenacity” of the trials and interrogations increased as a result. 4 By equating 

treason with witchcraft, James was able to harvest public fear and at the same time 

cement his divine right in the minds of the people. 

Julian Goodare agrees with a limited version of this assertion. He argues that 

James was directly responsible for the hunting peaks in 1591 and 1597; focusing on the 

latter. 5 He relies almost exclusively on the work of Larner for information on the 1591 

outbreak, seemingly accepting Larner’s assertions at face value. The 1597 outbreak, 

however, is discussed in painstaking detail in at least three separate works, all of which 

advocate that James was largely responsible for the panic of 1597. 6 The main point of 

separation for these two authors concerns the nature of the craze in between the two 

major series of events in 1591 and 1597. Goodare places blame on the aspirations of local 

government officials during this time. He claims that a special central commission did 

exist, but was quickly set up and disbanded by the Crown during two largely unrelated 

witch panics. This theory is consistent with how witchcraft was treated in Scotland, both 

before and after the 1590s. The trials in between the two panics were controlled by local 

commissions with limited power. 7 In other words, Goodare sees two distinct witchcraft 

trial outbreaks. More specifically, he argues that the nature of witch-hunting during the 

time lapsed between these events is not much different then those that took place before 

and after the North Berwick and Aberdeenshire panics. He goes on to claim that the rest 

of the burnings of the decade were fueled by peasant interests. This was due to the power 

of trial being handed over to local authorities in addition to their own political games and 

aspirations. 8 James began the craze but others carried it through until 1597, when the king 

3 

Buckland, Raymond. The Witch Book: The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft, Wicca, and Neo-paganism (Michigan: Visible 

Ink Press, 2002), 423-9. 

4 

Larner, Witchcraft, 10. 

5 

Goodare, Julian, The Scottish Witch-Hunt in Context (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 11. Goodare’s 

explanation of James’ book, Deamonolgie, illustrates his view well. He claims, “James had composed his book...as a 

response to the previous witchcraft panic of 1590-1, but revised and published it in 1597 as a contribution to the 

debates generated by the events of that year.” 

6 

These works include Goodare’s “The Aberdeenshire Witchcraft Panic of 1597,” Northern Scotland 21 (2001): 17-37; 

“The Framework for Scottish Witch-Hunting in the 1590's,” The Scottish Historical Journal 81.2 (October 2002): 240- 

250; and Witch-hunt in Context, 51, 62. 

7 

Goodare, “Framework.” These local commissions are falsely said to have acted purely in their own self-interest. 

8 Goodare, “Aberdeenshire.” 

Royal Culpability


was once again intimately involved. Such an assertion, though largely inaccurate, leads 

well into a discussion of the historians that argue that James was only one of many 

proximate explanations for the burnings. 

A discussion and examination of the argument for James VI as a proximate cause 

of the Scottish witch craze during the 1590s must begin with the work of Normand and 

Roberts. Their collection and commentary on the craze in Scotland is some of the best 

work on the subject. These historians argue that James was part of the cause in an indirect 

way. They state that responsibility for the 1591 witch hunt “cannot be attributed to one 

man, even if he was a king [James VI]. In the North Berwick witch hunt, as in most 

European witch hunts, there was also coalescence between longstanding popular beliefs 

and the agencies for enforcing social and religious conformity.” 9 Furthermore, Normand 

and Roberts argue that the witch craze had its cause in the personage of the King, as well 

as in other things, including traditional beliefs and power-hungry local officials. They 

are correct in that more than one cause existed for the witch craze, and that King James 

was one of them. Additionally, they argue that the trials were conducted through a 

network of political elites under the King. James delegated power out and had a keen 

interest in the outcome of numerous trials, but most of the details of the hunts were 

orchestrated by governmental commissions, which in turn handed power over to local 

nobles and barons. 10 These views merely set James up as only piece of the larger picture. 

James’ interest and own fear sparked the craze, but the craze was fueled by a 

conglomeration of factors, including local beliefs and the behavior of barons and other 

low-level elites. However, mapping out a hierarchy or chain of causation, beginning with 

the instigation of the events and ending with the social justification used to alleviate 

them, is what is needed to arrive at a proper historical explanation of the killings. Local 

commissions may have done a significant amount of the damage between the two major 

peaks of the craze, but it was always at the behest of the Crown. 

Maxwell-Stuart’s historical work on this issue is markedly different from all the 

other historians presented. His closest connection is to Normand and Roberts, but only on 

the grounds that he too gives James a proximate place in the cause of the witch craze in 

Scotland. This is perhaps due to the fact that he spends much more time on the events 

surrounding 1597, which did not completely focus on the King in terms of plots against 

him. Maxwell-Stuart argues that the local elites of the Kirk rather than James or his book 

fostered and ignited the trials of 1597. 11 He argues that the leaders of the Kirk used 

peasant fears of witchcraft to get the Crown’s attention and subsequent approval. 

Winning the King’s favor meant more money and power for local rulers. This may have 

been part of how the craze developed, but does not detract from the fact that James began 

craze in 1591 and that his interest in witchcraft kept the craze alive. 

9 

Lawrence Normand and Gareth Roberts, eds. Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland: James VI’s Demonology and the 

North Berwick Witches (Exeter, Great Britain: Short Run Press, 2000), 4. 

10 

Normand and Roberts, eds. Witchcraft, 89-106. This entire chapter covers the legal processes under James at the time 

of the North Berwick panic. 

11 

Some argument has been put forth regarding the use and meaning of this word in order to discredit certain views. 

This author’s research suggests that this term refers to the politico-social elites of the country-side, or nobles outside of 

the direct pay of the royal court. P.G. Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy: Magic and Witchcraft in Sixteenth-Century 

Scotland (London, 2001). The book reference is to Daemonolgie and its connection to the peak of 1597, which he 

adamantly denies, despite the evidence. 

JARED TAYLOR


The most unusual departure Maxwell-Stuart takes from most other historians is in 

the idea that there actually was a cult of witches in operation in Aberdeenshire and 

elsewhere. 12 He offers an assortment of weak evidence on this fact. He merely dances 

around the issue with lofty talk of the details from confessions as though they are 

completely reliable, factual accounts. Talk of elaborate drug use to produce 

hallucinations and secret meetings with wild dancing, drinking and sex are supposed 

events that are discussed uncritically by the author. 13 This notion is rightly mocked by 

almost all respectable historians; there is simply no real evidence to support it. He also 

makes the dubious claim that the 1597 craze was not a craze at all but rather part of a 

constant level of persecutions around this time. 14 No other historian agrees with 

Maxwell-Stuart on this issue because it is a gross misunderstanding of the data. The 

evidence of an increase in the number of trials during this year is enormous and valid. 15 

A synthesis of the different histories explained must be created to put the role of 

James into proper perspective. Building a coherent juxtaposition of these hypotheses will 

result in a better explanation of the Scottish witch craze of the 1590s. Larner provides a 

foundation and starting point for James as the ultimate cause. She offers a guide through 

the happenings of the craze, and the evidence used to support it all points to James as 

instigator. Goodare connects the ultimate to the proximate in terms of James’ obsession 

and local interest. His explanation consists of seeing the causation of the craze switching 

back and forth between the Crown and local elites. Each cause both ignited and 

responded to commoner accusations and hysteria. James can be seen as a ringleader of a 

witch-crazed circus. Normand and Roberts provide a useful foil in relation to local 

judicial procedure and influence. James is merely another part of the larger 

conglomeration of factors including traditional peasant fears and specific legal 

procedures. Detailed explanations of how power diffused from the King sheds light on 

his role in the hierarchy of causation. Maxwell-Stuart agrees that James was involved in 

the witch trials of the 1590s, but was not the cause of the hysteria of the time. The 

supposed existence of the witch sects is instead alluded to. 

None of these historians outright deny James’ connection to the issues. The 

debate centers on the depth of his culpability and the exact nature of the legal procedures. 

A careful juxtaposition of these hypotheses suggests that James’ personal and political 

interests and behavior began, as well as justified, the craze, and that it continued with the 

actions of the local Kirk officials, whose aspirations were shaped by the legal procedures 

and common beliefs already in place before the 1590s. In order to make complete sense 

12 Margaret Murray and Raymond Buckland are the only exceptions this author is familiar with. The latter has been 

used in this discussion for his work on Scottish witchcraft in general and James in particular, but also due to his 

expertise on actual witchcraft practice and its possible connection to these events, regardless of whether an actual 

historical connection exists or if the links were dreamed up after the fact. 

13 Maxwell-Stuart, Satan’s Conspiracy: Magic and Witchcraft in Sixteenth-Century Scotland (London, 2001). 

14 Maxwell-Stuart, “Witchcraft and the Kirk in Aberdeenshire, 1596-97." Northern Scotland. 18 (1998): 13. 

15 Larner provides quantitative tables of trials in Enemies of God that show a peak in 1597 during the larger craze. 

George Black has also compiled case documents that show the same increase in his work, A Calendar of Witchcraft in 

Scotland, 1510-1727 (New York: Arno Press Inc, 1971). There are also other primary sources that contain collections 

of trials that disprove this claim, such as the Miscellany of the Spalding Club. 

Royal Culpability


of the differences and similarities between these ideas, and to formulate an argument in 

favor of James as an ultimate cause, one must look to the actual evidence. 

It is not exactly clear when James first became interested in witches. Evidence 

suggests that he was first introduced to demonology during his trip to Denmark to receive 

his wife. The hysteria over witches in Denmark coincided with his stay, hence he learned 

about the continental ideas on demonology, such as diabolical magic and the supposed 

connection witches had with Satan. 16 Conflicting views have been put forth by different 

historians that suggest his interest in witchcraft began in childhood, but little proof has 

been offered. For the most part, all historians agree that when James returned from his 

trip and heard about the rumors of a group of witches planning his assassination, he 

immediately became fascinated with the subject. The trouble began when a North 

Berwick woman, Geillis Duncan, confessed under torture that she and others had been 

working together against the king. Her implication of the local schoolmaster, John Fian, 

and his subsequent confession, caught the whole kingdom’s attention. 17 

The trial of Fian took place on December 26, 1590. His confession reads, “filed 

for assembling himself with Satan at the king’s returning from Denmark, where Satan 

promised to raise a mist and cast the king’s Majesty in England.” 18 Both of these trials 

had James fairly concerned, but he was not convinced of the power of witches to truly 

harm him. He may have been afraid for his kingship, but probably not for his life. This is 

evidenced by the fact that James accused the witches of lying in early January of 1591. 

However, another witch named in the plot, Agnes Simpson, turned the tide of his belief. 

James was present at her confession and was unconvinced of the truth of her story until 

she whispered details of his wedding night to him. 19 Once James was convinced that her 

story was true, and that witchcraft was a powerful and potentially deadly force, he 

became much more intimately involved in the trials. 

Fian and Sampson also implicated the Earl of Bothwell, the king’s cousin, in the 

plot to kill him, claiming that he was the head master of the coven of witches. Bothwell 

proved difficult to control and punish by escaping from prison and mounting efforts to 

usurp the King’s power. He was finally dealt with years after the fact. In his trial, 

Bothwell was accused of plotting against the king through treacherous and diabolical 

means, was found guilty of treason and exiled. 20 The involvement of Bothwell and his 

obvious intention to usurp the throne pushed James’ interest in witchcraft into new 

directions, and the conduction of the trials with a new enthusiasm that meant more blood 

would be shed. 

16 

Larner, Enemies, 13. It has been suggested that James’ meeting with the Danish theologian and witch-hunter, 

Hemmingius, helped peak his intrigue into the occult. 

17 

Buckland, 425. 

18 

Normand and Roberts, 228. The transcripts provided by these authors are highly detailed, edited and referenced. The 

case of Dr. Fian is also covered extensively in News from Scotland. Also see, J. Stuart, ed., Miscellany of the Spalding 

Club (Aberdeen, Scotland, 1841). 

19 

Henry Charles Lea, Materials Towards A History of Witchcraft (New York: Thomas Yoseloff Ltd, 1957), vol. 1-3, 

1331. 

20 

Black, A Calendar, 24; and Normand and Roberts, 21-4, 281-7. 

JARED TAYLOR


The whole of the North Berwick situation peaked James’ interest tremendously, 

causing him to become obsessed with witches and demonology for the next six to seven 

years. He quickly became the principal overseer of the trials, tortures, and confessions of 

numerous witches. James felt that his divine right as king had, and was continuing to be, 

threatened. In a speech at the trial of Barbara Napier he explained to jurors that they must 

take the crime of witchcraft very seriously by following his lead and equating it with 

treason. As king, James believed that his judgment was to be respected and understood. 

He stated, “God hath made me a King and judge to judge righteous judgement.” 21 Later 

on in his speech, James continued, “as for them who thinke these witchcraftes to be 

fantacyes, I remmyt them to be catechised and instructed in these most evident 

poyntes.” 22 Evidence of his involvement also comes from his public announcements such 

as, “whatsoever hath bene gotten from them (witches) hath bene done by me my selfe.” 23 

Bragging of this sort fits well with the idea that he was obsessed with his divine right as 

King and as a warrior for the Almighty. Handing out verdicts, or at least demanding 

them, and the speeches given at certain trials, directly link James to the hysteria of the 

1590s. As James became more deeply involved in the trials, his personal interest in 

witchcraft grew into political motive. 

King James VI’s political maneuvering within the legal system of Scotland began 

with the passing of new legislation. This new legislation was mostly in the form of 

commissions set up to hunt witches. These commissions usually divvied out power to 

bureaucratic authorities to seek out and capture suspected witches. A letter written by a 

Scottish government official in February 1591 discusses a commissioner sent to England 

to locate escaped witches, “the King desires their apprehension and offers to send David 

Seaton of Treanent, who knows them, to search them out.” 24 This same official wrote 

another letter in March, concerning another group of witches, “the witches lately taken in 

Ingland and comytted to safe custody in Barwicke is delyvered into Scotland agreeable to 

the King’s desyre; wherewith the King is well pleased.” 25 These letters undoubtedly 

demonstrate James’ concern with hunting witches. Further powers and responsibilities for 

prosecuting witches were also granted to the Privy Council. 

The King allowed the Privy Council, with the help of the parliament and the 

church, to establish edicts, acts, and laws to deal with witch accusations. In response, the 

council created numerous commissions on how to conduct witch hunts and trials. 26 

However, it has been argued that most of the commissions gave power directly to local 

nobles and barons to find possible suspects, and that this resulted in their aspirations 

21 

Larner, Enemies, 13-14. The real significance of this trial and speech document reprinted by Larner is that the jurors 

originally found Napier not guilty. James did not agree with this verdict and over turned it. 

22 

James Craigie, ed., Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons Ltd., 

1981), 191. The points he refers to are the beliefs in the diabolical nature of witchcraft that was becoming the norm in 

Scotland since his return from Denmark. He called on people to believe, convict and to support his judgment. 

23 

Stuart Clark, ed., “King James’s Daemonolgie: Witchcraft and Kingship,” in The Damned Art (London: Routledge 

and Kegan Paul, 1977), 159. This quote is directly cited from Clark’s text, where he used it to prove the same point. 

However, the name of the person whose trial this was announced at is omitted. 

24 

Black, 24. Seaton was an influential sheriff who was friendly with the King. 

25 

Black, 24. 

26 

Goodare, “Framework,” 241-2. These were always approved by the Crown before being put into affect. 

Royal Culpability


being the most important fuel behind the burnings. 27 Whether or not direct local or 

central control ruled the day in most cases, such forms of legislation as set up by the 

Crown proved useful in keeping the witch hunts under some type of central governmental 

control. These legal changes, however, were not enough to necessarily convince the 

public or shire legal officials and sheriffs that the trials and executions were justified. 

It would be both public and personal publications that would allow James to 

completely ignite the fire of persecution. The publication of the pamphlet, News from 

Scotland, was directly aimed at persuading the public to adhere to and participate in the 

hunting and trying of witches. It paints a picture of James as a godly man with a deep 

concern for witchcraft and the work of the devil. James’ excitement and fascination with 

witchcraft was illustrated by descriptions of his participation in certain trials, “these 

confessions made the King in a wonderful admiration, and sent for ye said Geillis 

Duncane, who vpon the like Trump did playe the said daunce before the Kings Maiestie, 

who in respect of the strangenes of these matters, tooke great delight to be present at their 

examinations.” 28 This certainly would have had the effect of justifying witch hunting by 

royal sanction in the minds of the average Scot. 

Designed to be a propaganda tool by also casting James in the light of a righteous 

and godly man who fights against the legions of the devil, this pamphlet easily inflamed 

the passions of the people. 29 The sensationalism that accompanied the idea of Satan 

himself in combat with James was enough to drive the populace into justified frenzies. 

Another excerpt from News from Scotland puts the purpose of this publication into proper 

perspective: 

And trulie the whole scope of this treatise dooth so plainely laie open the 

wonderfull prouidence of the Almightie, that if he had not bene defended by his 

omnipotencie and power, his Highness had neuer returned aliue in his voiage fro 

Denmarke; so that there is no doubt but God woulde as well defend him on the 

land as on the sea, where they pretended their damnable practise. 30 

The propaganda in this publication shows how King James used everything at his 

disposal to make sure he was respected and obeyed. The influence of this pamphlet on the 

people of Scotland was certainly one that portrayed James as the rightful and divinely 

inspired leader of Scotland, and perhaps the whole of Britain. People began to see their 

king as more than a man: he was not only a servant of God, he was also a vessel of 

holiness. This document was not the only instrumental publication to convince people of 

the seriousness of witchcraft. 

King James VI’s treatise on demonology, witchcraft, and the devil, the 

Deamonologie, was one of the most unique and influential books ever produced by a 

27 

Normand and Roberts, 92-4. 

28 

G.B. Harrison, ed., King James the First, Daemonologie (1597), News from Scotland (1591). (New York: Barnes and 

Noble Inc., 1966), 14. 

29 

Normand and Roberts, 290, 306. Other historians who agree with this notion include Clark, Larner, and Jenny 

Wormald. See Wormald, Court, Kirk, and Community: Scotland 1470-1625 (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 

1981). 

30 

Harrison, 29. 

JARED TAYLOR


European monarch. The nature of the work is quite illuminating by proving James 

preoccupation with witchcraft. Published in 1597, the book’s purposes were to refute 

skeptics of witchcraft’s power, prove the witchcraft-treason connection, and to 

demonstrate James’s intellectual strength and religious importance. 31 James does all of 

this and promotes his authority illustrated in a passage from his Deamonologie: “but in 

the end to spare the life, and not strike when God bids strike, and so seuerelie punish in 

so odious a fault & treason against God, it is not only vnlawful but doubtlesse no less a 

sin. . . And so comparable to the sin of Witch-craft it selfe.” 32 Witchcraft is exclaimed as 

treason, and without a doubt—this was a crime. God and his divine servant, the King, 

would save the people from this threat as long as they believed and remained obedient. 

The obviousness of James’ attempt at controlling the public’s interest in order to 

stir their fury is an important example of how he used witchcraft to further his political 

agenda. His book is a prime example of an attempt at creating a complete hegemony of 

knowledge on demonic matters. Royal sanction in all its forms paved the way for 

increased public suspicion. The resulting hysterias suggest that the populace was loyal to 

the King and quick to accept scapegoats. The influence of the Deamonologie was 

apparently so strong that in the city of Aberdeen a wave of turmoil caused the deaths of 

twenty-three suspects as a result of the book’s publication. 33 By advocating his 

importance and explaining how witchcraft was an element of treason, James easily turned 

the attention of the public to witches rather than to himself directly. He became a victim 

and a divine ruler at the same time. 

James’ deep concern with the legitimacy of his rule caused him to write another 

important book, The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies. 34 In this short treatise, he attempted 

to explain the power and place of kings over their subjects. He wanted to emphasize the 

divine right of kings, and its subsequent meaning in terms of locally controlled power 

and/or the growing concern over the necessity of a secularized ruling system. The King 

saw himself as directly connected to God. To him, “monarchie [was] the true pattern of 

Diuinitie.” 35 This bold statement set him up as divine ruler. James basically used his book 

to spread ideas that granted him further authority in all matters of state and law. He 

writes: 

Out of the Law of God the duety, and allegeance of the people to their lawful 

King, their obedience, I say, ought to be to him, as to God’s Lieutenant in earth, 

obeying his commands in all things, except directly against God, as the 

commands of Gods minister, acknowledge him as a Judge set by God ouer them, 

hauing power/to judge them, but be judged onely by God, whome to onelie he 

must guie count of his judgement; fearing him as their judge; louing as their 

father, praying for him as their protector; for his continuance, if he be good; for 

31 This is admitted by James himself in the opening of Daemonologie in regard to Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of 

Witchcraft. Many historians including those discussed have picked up on this as evidence of the book’s main purpose. 

For more on Scot’s The Discoverie, see Harrison. Also see, Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 156-7. 

32 Harrison, 78. 

33 Michael Kerrigan, The Instruments of Torture (London: Amber Books Ltd, 2001), 78. Both Larner and Goodare 

seem to support this claim in their discussions on the book. 

34 The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies was published in 1598, only one year after Deamonologie. 

35 Craigie, 60. James claimed that this authority came straight from scripture. 

Royal Culpability


his amendment, if hee bee wicked; following and obeying his vnlawfull, without 

resistance, but by sobbes and tears to God. 36 

This long passage sums up the entire position of James on his divine right as King and 

protector of the people. People are to obey, love and acknowledge their King without 

question, regardless of his behavior. Scots could overcome doubt and social guilt for 

killing witches by taking these words and their meanings seriously. This powerful 

statement was the final justification needed to follow the royal example in all things, 

including witch hunting, as advocated by the King in the previous years. 37 

Other tools of persuasion and proof of James’ influence and reputation come in 

the form of popular sermons and literature. A 1591 sermon advocated the King’s right to 

execute justice on witches, but warned that it might be a hazard to his health and well 

being. 38 People recognized James’ fascination with, and the danger of, witchcraft. As a 

result, this could easily be used to create particular ideas in the minds of the populace. 

Fiery speeches from the local pulpit have a long history of such influence. Such notions 

were then used to James’ advantage by continuing to encourage the idea of his divine 

right and the people’s obligation to help capture and try suspected witches. 

The reputation of James as a witchmonger had also reached England. It has been 

suggested that Shakespeare’s inclusion of witches and their craft in Macbeth may have 

been an attempt to please his new King, and that the playwright actually drew on James’ 

experiences in 1591 to help create his drama. 39 However, this is not known for sure, and 

is merely a speculation based on the date, content and history of James’ and 

Shakespeare’s works. The personal crises of James’ life mirrored those of both Scotland 

and England, hence his popular reputation. By being a hands-on ruler in terms of the 

certain political and social issues of his time, including witchcraft, religious dissent and 

economic unrest, James was unlike any other previous monarch. He is the perfect 

representation of rationalistic ideology fused with religious fury in the minds of Scottish 

witchmongers, because he helped to create and proliferate it. To discover the roots of the 

witch beliefs that James reshaped, as well as the reasons for the later branching out of his 

ideas, a brief regression into the Scottish treatment of witchcraft before and after James 

must be discussed. 

Scotland’s witchcraft hysteria began late in comparison to the rest of Europe. The 

earliest cases on record come from the mid 1400s. This is probably about the same time 

that the belief in magical witches reached Scotland from the European mainland. 

However, there were only a few isolated trials and executions until the beginning of the 

sixteenth century. 40 It was not until the 1560s that a rise in the number of systematic trials 

began. This rise was undoubtedly linked to acts passed or supported by the Scottish 

36 

Craigie, 69. 

37 

It should be noted that the lower, illiterate classes would still have been aware of James’ publications and its’ 

contents. Information was spread throughout towns by gossip and Sunday sermons. The work of all the historians 

discussed demonstrate this well. 

38 

Larner, Witchcraft, 8. Protestant church leaders promoted James’ witch policy during and after the 1590s craze. 

39 

James became King of England in 1603.Marion Gibson, Witchcraft and Society in England and America, 1550-1750 

(New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 113. 

40 

Buckland, 423-4. Larner agrees with this, see Witchcraft, 23. 

JARED TAYLOR


crown. The Witchcraft Act of 1563 was ratified by Queen Mary in 1565. This act was a 

collection of a number of articles put together by the Scottish Assembly. The act called 

the practice of witchcraft a horrible crime and equated it with sorcery and enchantment. 41 

In addition, the Witchcraft Act was apparently modeled after the Continental Witchcraft 

Doctrine that identified a witch as anyone who had entered into a secret pact with the 

devil. 42 However, few prosecutions took place before James came to the throne. The 

endorsement of the belief in magical witches, and their connection to the devil by the 

Scottish government, helped to stir the public’s fear and mistrust of strange persons. 

James’ own Witchcraft Act of 1604 solidified this in the minds of his subjects. 43 

The result of James’ mixed character and his strong conviction of the evil of 

witchcraft was the creation of a social institution against witchcraft. This belief became 

instilled in Scottish culture. Witches were seen as the ultimate enemy of both God and the 

emerging state. These new ideas were further instilled into society by the church through 

the actions of individual priests. The 1626 publication of the Compendium Maleficarum 

is one example of a church document against witchcraft that became popular in Scotland, 

although it was not produced there. 44 It was most likely used as a how-to guide for 

conducting trials. The book promoted the belief that witches were devil worshipers and 

worked magic. It also included directions on how to identify, capture, punish, and remove 

the spells of a witch. 45 The use of this religious work was often accompanied by moving 

sermons. These sermons, by local priests, were the most important external tools that 

helped James’ beliefs to be resounded and his political resolutions to be accomplished 

even after his death. 

Moving sermons were just as important in the continuation of the episodic witch 

hysteria of Scotland many years after James’ rule as they were during his reign. A sermon 

in 1697 by an important and renowned priest is a great example of the church promoting 

the witchcraft hysteria in Scotland. In the sermon the speaker draws a correlation between 

treason and witchcraft, “whatever Lawfull means may be used to bring a person guilty of 

treason against the King to a confession the same is necessary to bring a witch to 

confession.” 46 This source shows the powerful influence James had on the church and, in 

turn, the church on his subjects. The trend begun by James and carried on by the church 

had an enormous impact on the people of Scotland. More than a hundred years later his 

claims were still being used as examples, and the public was still willing to murder out of 

fear and superstition. This is especially evident in the episodic hysterias that broke out 

after James had died. 

41 

Black, 21. This was before James became King of England, but it still had a tremendous influence on how witchcraft 

was seen in both kingdoms. 

42 

Larner, Witchcraft, 24. 

43 

Gary K. Waite, Heresy, Magic, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 

176-7. This revision worked in the idea of treason. However, once King of England, James paid little attention to 

witchcraft cases, due to most having nothing to do with the new addition. 

44 

Buckland, 94, 426-8. 

45 

Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (Secaucus: University Books, 1974). 

46 

Geo Neilson, ed., “A Sermon on Witchcraft in 1697,” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology: Witchcraft in 

Scotland (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1992), 378-7, 398. Sermons similar to this were espoused throughout the 

kingdom before, during and after James’ reign. Unfortunately, few were recorded or have survived. 

Royal Culpability


The worst outbreaks of violence and madness occurred in the 1620s and 1660s. In 

the 1620s there were more than 170 witchcraft cases recorded. 47 However, it was during 

the early 1660s that Scotland experienced the worst witch hunt in its history, with more 

than 206 accusations. The panic started in Edinburgh and quickly spread to the rest of 

Scotland. 48 Trials took place across all of Scotland and were almost exclusively presided 

over by the Privy Council at this point. The installation of treason into the crime of 

witchcraft by King James was undoubtedly an important aspect of why these frenetic 

witch hunts happened as they did. The Privy Council played a large role in administering 

trials and handing down judgments as James had sequestered them to do years earlier. 49 

An indictment of a witch would usually begin with the accused’s supposed crimes laid 

out, such as this example from 1633: “Intrat upon pannell Marion Richart, alias Layland, 

for the pointis of witchcraft, sorcerie, and divination, and utheris uderwrittin.” 50 The 

indictment then goes on to discuss in detail the exact crimes that the accused had 

committed, and how she was to be punished. The continued centralization of the 

prosecution process is more evidence of James’ lasting influence on Scottish legal 

protocol in terms of witchcraft. The trials became the political tools of the Privy Council 

just as they had been for King James. The actions of the council prove that witch hunts 

were almost always centrally controlled in Scotland after James’ reign. 

King James’ role in the persecutions of witches is obvious when the evidence is 

scrutinized. The witchcraft hysteria that took place in Scotland in the 1590s was almost 

solely the fault of the King. His speeches, books, commissions, and participation in the 

trials of several suspected witches helps to prove this connection. The periodic witch 

hunts that followed over the next hundred years can also be traced back to James and his 

concern for his health and his kingship. The idea of treason and witchcraft as equal to one 

another was probably the most significant contribution of James to Scotland’s view of 

witches and witchcraft. His strange fascination with the practice of demonology and 

paganism produced terrible consequences. The murder of hundreds of people, coupled 

with mass fear and hysteria were directly caused and/or inspired by King James’ wellknown 

obsessions. Personal and public publications, along with the attitudes of popular 

church clergy members, helped to justify his attitudes and the hysteria. 

King James VI was the final agency for enforcing conformity to secure his own 

ends. Every possible chain of causation for the 1590s panic ultimately leads back to the 

king. James’ direct connection to and involvement in the witch trials strongly indicate 

that he was ultimately responsible for the Scottish witch craze. However, a 

conglomeration of factors were involved, with some more important than others, 

including local officials’ ambitions and the traditional supernatural beliefs of the Scots. 

47 Black. There are certainly more cases whose trial transcripts have been lost, or were not conducted legally. 

48 Brian P. Levack, “The Great Scottish Witch-Hunt of 1661-1662,” Articles on Witchcraft, Magic, and Demonology: 

Witchcraft in Scotland (New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc, 1992), 256-8. 

49 Black, 34-45. Also see Michael Wasser, “The Privy Council and the Witches: The Curtailment of Witchcraft 

Prosecutions in Scotland, 1597-1628,” The Scottish Historical Review. 82.1 (April 2003): 20-5. This evidence comes 

from the commissions themselves, thereby demonstrating the change in the control of the trials by this time. The role of 

the Privy Council in the witch hysterias of Scotland is somewhat conflicting. The Council seems to have both 

supported and discouraged the zealous accusations against people without direct evidence of guilt. 

50 “A Scottish Indictment,” in C. L’estrange Ewen, ed., Witch Hunting and Witch Trials (New York: Barnes & Noble 

Inc, 1971), 286-90. 

JARED TAYLOR


Both the King and his subjects perceived their misfortunes in terms of diabolical agents. 

Additionally, they were interested in political security and economic prosperity. These 

facts combine with the direct historical evidence to show that the panic of the 1590s was 

sparked by James and was continuous due to his publications, speeches and his support 

from the Protestant establishment. A new definition of witches and their craft, created by 

King James VI, was the perfect excuse for the king, the bureaucracy and the common 

people to hunt and kill suspected evildoers. 

Continued research emphasizing a synthesis of all the ideas on this topic in 

reference to the available evidence and current historical and historiographical work is 

needed to arrive at a more formal conclusion on the nature of the witch hysteria in 

Scotland. Information on James VI is of great importance to early modern history. He 

was unique among monarchs both publicly and privately. An exploration of his character 

and behavior will provide a more accurate picture of sixteenth century Scottish beliefs. 

Empathy for those murdered can be used to grasp a better understanding of the political 

organization under James VI, the nature of humanity, and the consequences of the 

unknown in history. 

Royal Culpability

Trials and Troubles 

Organization, Cooperation, and 

Administration in the Arvin 

Migratory Labor Camp 

Thomas Dorrance 

GRADUATE WINNER OF THE JOHN MULLIN PRIZE

erhaps the most visible element of California’s Depression Era experience, 

migrants from Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas came to represent a generalized 

experience of hardship victimization symbolized by their constructed moniker of “Okie.” 

This epitaph contained within its layered meanings converging historical forces of race, 

time and location. The oppressive realities of California’s agricultural labor system did 

not emerge in response to this influx of desperate workers. Instead these migrants simply 

became the most visible participants of an agricultural system, which had long been the 

hidden underbelly of California’s remarkable prosperity. Walter Stein argues that these 

migrants “intruded upon an agricultural system that contravened every myth in the 

Jeffersonian pantheon, and they served as unwitting publicists for those who found 

California’s agriculture and its social effects unsound.” 1 Products of the Great 

Depression, these migrants also became victims of an already established economic 

system. 

Derided, glorified, and patronized, this heterogeneous group actively participated 

in a dynamic process of assimilation and identity formation. This process acted at a 

heightened level in the government’s migrant labor camps, operating between 1935 and 

1940. All of the conflicting currents of thought that formed the Okie epitaph converged 

within the physical space of the government camps. 2 The camp at Arvin operated 

throughout the period of migrant fervor and its changing dynamics illustrate the complex 

reactions to the migrant problem exhibited by federal and state reformers and by the 

migrants themselves. Administrative officers and camp managers wrestled with questions 

concerning the nature of the camps and of migratory labor. These questions never found 

resolution, as camp programs varied from those designed to limit tenancy to those aimed 

at establishing some level of stability within the camp’s confines. The migrants residing 

in the camps reacted to an evolving administrative structure and to different camp 

managers in a manner reflective of their diverse character. Some embraced the traditional 

values that James Gregory refers to as “Plain-Folk Americanism,” while others flirted 

with the radical possibilities of an organized agricultural proletariat. 3 The camp itself 

withstood these divergent forces and incorporated them into an evolving institutional 

structure sensitive to the changing personalities of its participants. The campers, camp 

managers, and federal and regional directors operated in dialogue with each other. 

Ideally, these three groups existed in symbiotic balance. Changes in personnel and 

administrative purpose upset this balance and the ensuing tensions shaped the camp’s 

development over time. Although it did not progress toward any singular goal, the 

resulting narrative illustrates a nuanced process of compromise and conflict. 

1 Walter Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973), xi. 

2 I use the term “Okie” here to represent the stereotypical characteristics attached to the southwestern migrants by those 

reacting to their presence in California. For the remainder of the article I will use the term “migrant” to describe the 

peoples escaping the dust bowl conditions of the Southwest as a term that lacks the pejorative connotations associated 

with “Okies.” 

3 James N. Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (New York: Oxford 

University Press, 1989), 139.


An investigation of California’s experience during the Great Depression helps to 

move the focus of examination away from federal deliberations of relief in Washington, 

D.C. and toward the implementation of those programs in local settings. California 

remained relatively immune to the industrial strife of the Great Depression. However, the 

impact of the Depression on the agricultural sector of California’s economy created an 

indelible image of suffering that challenged the very core of the American dream. 

Extremist responses to the influx of migrant farmers emerged from both sides of the 

political spectrum. This interplay of responses exemplifies the political volatility that 

characterized the general climate of the Depression Era United States. 4 This regional 

context does not further an exceptionalist depiction of California during the Great 

Depression, but instead demonstrates the plasticity of New Deal relief during its 

implementation within the specifics of various local climates. The migrant camp program 

emerged in response to the unique demands California faced during the Depression and 

evolved, in part, according to its increasing integration into the federal relief program. 

One of two camps originally created as demonstrations for a more elaborate 

government camp system, Arvin became a model for all later camps. Constructed in the 

later half of 1935 on forty acres of land in Kern County, Arvin offered a healthy 

sanctuary to migrants who would otherwise have resided in private grower camps or 

roadside squatter camps. Originally the camp consisted of tent spaces built around 

common sanitary facilities that provided hot water for showers and sinks for laundry. The 

government later constructed tin houses that provided more protection from rain and 

wind but became uncomfortably warm during the hot summer months. 5 The camp also 

provided such common facilities as a first aid center, a community building, and an 

outdoor dance floor. Arvin had its faults; camp life certainly compared unfavorably to 

living in one’s own home, but it did mitigate some of the harsher features of the migrant 

labor system in California. 

Historians have found it difficult to resist judging the migratory labor camp 

program as either a success or a failure. Most have pointed to displays of apathy by the 

campers, attitudes of condescension among reformers, or the inability of its 

administrators to radically mobilize the migrants as signs of failure. Each of these 

elements surfaced periodically during the camp’s operation, but none sufficiently 

encapsulate the nature of camp culture. Whether researching from the top down or 

constructing the migrant experience from the bottom up, historians have frequently 

depicted Arvin’s diverse population as monolithic. This tendency masks the conflict that 

lies at the heart of Arvin. 

Walter Stein’s California and the Dust Bowl Migration exemplifies the top down 

approach. His work remains fundamental to any understanding of the interaction between 

4 

Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 

vii-viii. 

5 

For a good overview of daily life in the camps see Brian Q. Cannon, “’Keep on a-going’: Life and Social Interaction 

in a New Deal Farm Labor Camp (Arvin Migratory Labor Camp, Kern County, California)” Agricultural History 70, 1 

(1996). 

THOMAS DORRANCE


the federal and state administrators of migrant relief. Stein shows that the decentralized 

structure of the Resettlement Administration (which later evolved into the Farm Security 

Administration) allowed the local administrators of Region IX to construct a relief 

program that more closely fit the unique conditions of California’s agricultural structure. 

Stein remarks, “By extending RA’s specific goals to the program’s larger implied 

meaning, the directors of Region IX turned from the problems of tenantry and rural 

poverty to that of migratory labor in California.” 6 Stein, however, does not extend this 

nuanced analysis to the actual migrants who benefited from the camp. These migrants 

were instead “pawns,” acted upon by the liberal and conservative forces in California. 7 

Within this context, Stein portrays a general decline in camp activity emerging from an 

apathetic camper population as proof of the camp’s “unsuccessful experiment in ‘planned 

democracy.’” 8 The camp’s greatest contribution was as an important vehicle of 

assimilation that allowed those in the neighboring towns to see the migrants as more 

human than the miserable forms that had earlier camped on their roadsides. 9 

Striving to explore the middle ground between elite impressions of migrant 

culture and the actual culture, Charles Shindo’s Dust Bowl Migrants in the American 

Imagination offers another perspective on those administering relief and chronicling the 

lives of the migrants. 10 However, instead of exploring the dialogue between these groups, 

Shindo attempts to amplify the manner in which the migrants were acted upon to create 

an image of generalized Depression victims. Shindo relies almost exclusively on James 

Gregory’s depiction of migrant culture in American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration 

and Okie Culture in California, as evidence of the gulf between reformers and migrants. 

However, Gregory is after something more elusive than a simple demonstration that all 

migrants subscribed to a belief in “Plain-Folk Americanism.” He argues instead that this 

was a dominant cultural trait that evolved through the interplay of Southwestern values 

and the external pressures of a hostile California environment. 11 Gregory adds depth to 

the more superficial descriptions of Dust Bowl migrants, showing that migrant culture 

emerged through a range of responses to the unique circumstances this diverse group 

faced in the agricultural regions of Depression Era California. Gregory aspires to more 

than a simple investigation of the relationships in one government camp, and he succeeds 

in presenting a balance to Stein’s comprehensive study. However, a more focused 

examination of the camp at Arvin can provide a bridge between these two works by 

illustrating the connections between reformers’ intentions and migrant culture. 

These larger works must make practical decisions that sacrifice complexity at 

times in order to construct a more general narrative. Because these authors do not focus 

on the camps themselves, they tend to evaluate the camps according to more overarching 

goals. Gregory points to paternalist and condescending attitudes among camp workers as 

contributing to the sense of “otherness and inferiority” that characterized California’s 

6 Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, 149. 

7 Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, xi. 



10 Charles J. Shindo, Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1997). 

11 Gregory, American Exodus, 142. 

Trials & Troubles


reaction to the migrants. 12 All these elements can be found in the camps to various 

degrees at various times, but as part of a larger whole. 

Brian Cannon, recognizing the important role of Arvin in California’s response to 

the Great Depression, focuses primarily on the living conditions at Arvin in an attempt to 

reconstruct the migrant experience. Cannon argues that the close proximity in which 

migrants lived with each other magnified individual differences and prevented the 

emergence of any kind of communal sentiment. Though investigating migrant life, 

Cannon still uses the reformers’ goal of a cooperative community to measure success at 

Arvin. Cannon states, “Occupying small lots with only walls of canvas or tin to separate 

them from their neighbors and sharing the same sanitary and laundry facilities, neighbors 

readily discovered how different they were from each other and how greatly those 

differences mattered in such an intimate setting.” 13 Cannon views the decrease of 

communal activity as a linear decline away from its ideal as the novelty of the camp’s 

facilities and organization diminished in the eyes of the campers. 

To be fair, Cannon is not investigating change over time but instead seeking to 

identify those elements within the camper population which produced internal divisions 

and became sources of tension. The manner in which the camp’s government mediated 

conflict and created community standards changed over time as a function of evolving 

dynamics between campers and managers. A regional administrator, Eric Thomsen, used 

the term “Functional Democracy” to describe the ideal operational structure of the camp. 

This organizational structure promoted involvement among the migrants through a wide 

spectrum of camp activities as its fundamental purpose. Stein recognized that the 

majority of the activities in which the migrants participated in were of a “trivial” nature, 

including organizing ice cream feeds and deciding which band would play at the weekly 

dances. 14 However “trivial” this participation may have been, the involvement of a large 

segment of the population in camp activities channeled the internal tensions identified by 

Cannon into an institutional structure that alleviated the divisive potential of natural 

differences. Although this relationship served more as an ideal than the norm for most of 

the camp’s history, an analysis of the changing dynamics of this institutional structure 

illustrates the complex relationship between administrators and recipients of relief at 

Arvin. Assuming that measurements of the camp’s successes and failures are relative to 

the different perspectives of those interacting within Arvin’s larger institutional structure, 

it becomes apparent that the camp did not emerge from or progress towards any 

consensus ideal but instead vacillated according to changes within its administrative 

structure, between camp managers, and according to the shifting population of the 

migrant campers. 

The idea of a migratory camp system originated in 1935 with Harry Drobisch, 

state director of Rural Rehabilitation, a division of the State Emergency Relief 

Administration. 15 Shortly thereafter, Drobisch and his program fell under the jurisdiction 


13 Brian Q. Cannon, “’Keep on a-goin:’’ Life and Social Interaction in a New Deal Farm Labor Camp,” 7. 



THOMAS DORRANCE


of the Federal Resettlement Division under Rexford Tugwell. Originally constructed to 

demonstrate the potential of a larger network of migratory camps, Arvin began operation 

in December of 1935 with Thomas Collins serving as its first Camp Manager. From its 

inception, no consensus existed regarding the camp’s primary purpose. The question 

revolved around the issue of tenancy: should the camps be reserved exclusively for the 

use of workers following the seasonal patterns of harvest or as a more semi-permanent 

home for workers remaining in the area after the harvest? Drobisch conceived of the 

camp program as an “immediate palliative rather than long-range curative action,” 16 

while Collins felt the camps could do both. He advocated a platform of unlimited tenancy 

for semi-permanent workers arguing that by “refusing the ‘semi-permanent workers’ 

unlimited tenancy we are merely aiding and abetting the continuance, and probably, the 

growth of the terrible squatter camp menace.” 17 The question of tenancy remained 

unsettled throughout the first year of Arvin’s operation. 

Collins combined paternalist sympathies with an absolute commitment to selfgovernment 

in the camps. In one report, he relayed a compliment paid to the camp by one 

of its residents, “Now I kin go any place I wants ter wuk, and if he don’t pay rite I kin tell 

him ‘nufin doin’ and go sum place else. At the govmnt camp I is a free citizen.” 18 

Identifying himself as a great emancipator, Collins mused, “We wonder if the blacks of 

those days did not use the VERY SAME LANGUAGE contained in this quotation from 

our very own camper?” 19 He did not approach his task with the humility of a minor 

public servant, but went about his work with a mixture of egotism, dedication, 

condescension, and compassion. His ideal arrangement was to reduce the need for any 

kind of management; “They feel the camps a civil unit of its own. This pride has made it 

possible to operate the camp at a high degree of efficiency and with a minimum of ‘donts 

and shall nots.[sic] 20 ’” However, his ideal simultaneously reaffirmed the important role 

of the manager in freeing the migrants from the chains of ignorance and oppression. 

Steinbeck relied heavily upon Collins for information while working on a series 

of articles for the San Francisco News about California’s migrant situation in 1936. Later 

published in a collection called The Harvest Gypsies, these reports formed the factual 

basis for his major work, The Grapes of Wrath. Indeed, John Steinbeck dedicatated 

Grapes of Wrath to Collins: “To Tom who lived it.” In his discussion of the camps, 

Steinbeck asserted that the restoration of dignity remained the manager’s primary 

intention. Steinbeck defines his use of dignity stating, “It has been used not as some 

attitude of self-importance, but simply as a register of a man’s responsibility to the 

community.” 21 This connection between dignity and community had many purposes in 

Collin’s camp structure. First, on a practical level it served the manager best to stay 

16 

Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration, 150. 

17 

Thomas Collins, “Weekly Report for February 8, 1936,” Box 22, Series 2, Farm Security Administration Collection, 

National Archives San Bruno, Record Group 96. 

18 

Collins, “Weekly Report, 2/8/36,” Box 22, FSA. Camp managers frequently attempted to recreate migrant speech in 

their weekly reports. Whenever it seems apparent that the writer is attempting to mimic the phonetic patterns of speech 

I have transcribed the passage complete with spelling errors. 

19 

Collins, “Weekly Report, 2/8/36,” Box 22, FSA. 

20 

Collins, “Weekly Report, 2/29/36,” Box 22, FSA. 

21 

John Steinbeck, The Harvest Gypsies (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1988), originally published in 1936 by San 

Francisco News, 39. 

Trials & Troubles


above the day-to-day conflicts and enforcement of rules that remained a regular feature of 

camp life. Second, it helped to create and stabilize a self-contained community within the 

camp boundaries. Finally, participation in a functioning democracy helped to prepare 

migrants, whom reformers believed to be socially underdeveloped, for participation in 

society. This structure worked both to promote stability within the camp and to help the 

camp become a more effective steppingstone for integration into the larger society. 

Collins stated in a report, “The self-governing community of which they are a part 

compensates, to a degree, for the lack of the essentials required for proper living and 

which their meager earnings prohibit them from procuring.” 22 Collins approached the 

migrant situation as an idealist and through a deep reservoir of energy and charisma 

swept both campers and administrators into a swirl of activity. Collins’s term as camp 

manager represents the high water mark of functional democracy in the camps. In 

addition to personal abilities, Collins also enjoyed an unobtrusive administrative structure 

and strong relationships with campers who believed in and became models for this type 

of structure. 

In particular, the camper Sherman Easton leaps out from the records, a figure 

almost as dynamic as Collins himself. Easton left a powerful impression on Arthur 

Lundin, another camp administrator who personified the paternalist attitude of camp 

workers depicted by Gregory in his description of the majority of the campers, “[t]hese 

characteristics make the people seem almost child-like at times, as indeed they are.” 23 

However, Lundin described his encounter with Easton after being introduced as a 

potential camp manager to the Camp Council in an entirely different manner: 

I had been told of his frankness and directness. He asks the questions the only way 

he knows—directly and to the point. The man has the bearing of a Middle Western 

Pioneer, of medium height, slender build, with a lean, bronzed face that speaks of a 

simple and a hard life close to the soil. As one person said, “Easton doesn’t need to 

carry a gun. He packs two of them in his face.” All the time Easton was speaking 

and I was answering his questions, his eyes kept boring into my face, never 

wavering. His voice was low and hard. He was the master, and I had come to be 

judged. 24 

Collins could create a community standard based on cooperation at Arvin because 

campers like Easton took responsibility for policing those standards. Easton’s name 

appears prominently on camp flyers calling for increased attention to cleaning duties and 

adherence to camp rules. 25 Camp administrators could display a condescending attitude to 

migrants in general but they also fully appreciated the democratic abilities of individuals, 

like Easton. The patronizing attitude among of camp administrators described by Stein 

and Gregory did exist, and Collins certainly saw himself as giving the gift of democracy 

to the migrants. However, the presence of strong individuals such as Easton among the 

22 

Collins, “Weekly report, 2/29/36,” box 22, FSA. 

23 

Arthur Lundin, “Observations made during stay at the Arvin Migratory Labor Camp, July 10 to July 17, 1936,” Box 

22, FSA and Gregory, American Exodus ,108. 

24 

Lundin, “Observations,” Box 20, FSA. Parts of this report appear in two separate boxes in the FSA collection. 

25 

See “To all Camp Residents,” 6/25/36, and “From Camp Committeeman S.E. Easton,” no date, Box 18, FSA. 

THOMAS DORRANCE


camp population demonstrates that the migrants were not a passive body acted upon by 

government reformers. 

At the end of 1936, Collins left Arvin to implement his system in other camps. 

Robert Hardie took over as the new camp manager, Easton still served on the camp 

committee, and Thomsen remained at his post in the administration. Hardie benefited 

from these continuities and his administration showed many similarities to Collins’s term. 

However, during this period the camp began to emerge from its embryonic state. As its 

organizational structure became more defined, divisions emerged between the different 

levels of participants, restricting the open channels of interaction that had characterized 

Collins’s tenure. 

An emotional recall election involving a member of the women’s Garden Club, 

shortly after Wallace’s visit illustrates the importance of the committees in settling 

internal disputes. One member of the camp, Mrs. Stout, organized a campaign to remove 

a committee member, Mrs. McBride, from the Garden Club. McBride, who according to 

Collins weighed nearly 200 pounds and had an explosive personality, responded violently 

to the campaign against her and in response to her violent behavior, the committee voted 

to evict her from the camp. In a letter to Thomsen, Collins hinted that religious 

differences may also have played a role in this dispute. He felt that McBride should have 

been recalled much earlier and connected her disruptive presence to other “revitalizing 

meetings” at his new camp. Cannon, in his description of the event, also claims that Stout 

used family and religious connections to initiate the campaign against McBride. 26 

Gregory shows that relocation to California both disrupted and intensified religious 

sentiment among the migrants. 27 In the camps, different denominations and varying 

conceptions of morality had the potential to become sources of tension within the 

population. Because these tensions existed internally, the camp committees played an 

important role in their resolution. 

By dealing with the problem themselves rather than forcing the manager to 

arbitrate the dispute, the committee channeled the conflict into the institutional structure 

of the camp government and allowed Hardie to remain above the internal squabble. 

Hardie, in a letter to Collins, celebrated the event as an indication of the camp’s 

democratic strength: 

Tom, I really feel damn bad about this recall coming up just as soon as you stepped 

out—my one consolation is that there is a real expression of the “people”—real 

democracy—people fighting for their civic rights. Fights of this nature I believe are 

like growing pains—their worth it (sic)—and only through them may we grow. We 

seem like pregnant women—at times we must grow worse in order to grow better. 

That’s my consolation. 28 

26 Letter, Hardie to Collins, 12/15/36; Letter, Collins to Thomsen, 12/17/36 Box 19, FSA; and Cannon, “’Keep on A- 

Goin,’” 9. 


28 Hardie to Collins, 12/15/36, Box19, FSA. 

Trials & Troubles


This seems to have been an especially difficult trial; any interference by Hardie would 

have upset the governmental framework established by Collins. As proof that the camp 

continued along the same path, Easton and another camper, D.K., sent along a greeting to 

Collins in Hardie’s letter, “Sherman and D.K. are here as I write this—say to tell you that 

everythin’ is a runnin’ smooth cept for the recall and thet dont amount to anything.” 29 

When the campers and manager operated on somewhat equal terms, the camp 

government could function smoothly. However, as the camper population turned 

increasingly transitory due to later administrative directives, this balance became upset. 

In 1937, the RA evolved into the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Placed 

under the control of the Department of Agriculture, the FSA operated with a tight budget 

and under closer congressional supervision. 30 Some congressmen questioned whether a 

permanent camp program operated more as a long-term subsidy to the big corporate 

farms in California than as relief for the migrant workers. 31 In April 1937, an 

administrative decision limiting tenancy positioned the camps as intermediary stops along 

a path to more general assimilation. Administrators hoped that tenancy limits would 

allow the camps to accommodate newer families and encourage its long-term residents to 

move to houses within the community. 32 Hardie told Thomsen that while there was talk 

that some of the older families threatened not to move, none stated it directly to him. 

Hardie also claimed some of the families had already found homes within the outlying 

community. 33 Word did come to Hardie that the issue came under discussion at a local 

labor meeting of the Agricultural Workers Union in Bakersfield. He stated that the 

“Union as a whole backed an action that the situation should be discussed with those 

‘higher up’ in the Resettlement Administration.” 34 Hardie felt this situation emerged 

largely through misunderstanding, but did not want to proceed without clearance from the 

regional office. 

The emergence of the Agricultural Workers Union, as a third party in the 

relationship between the manager and campers further illustrates the divisions beginning 

to emerge at Arvin. The increasingly rigid institutional structure forced managers to 

assume a more conspicuous position in the camp’s administration. While it is unclear 

whether this new regulation forced all long-term families off of the camp, the records do 

indicate that a relatively equal number of families entered and exited the camp each 

month. The transitory nature of the camp’s population eroded the stability of the camp’s 

committees and caused a decrease in the camp activities so vital to the functioning of its 

government. These two developments tipped the balance between managers and campers 

resulting in an increase in managerial involvement in the enforcement of community 

standards. 

Perhaps a manager with a delicate touch and an intuitive understanding of human 

interaction could have maintained the level of community involvement during this period 

29 Hardie to Collins, 12/15/36 Box 19, FSA. 



32 Letter, Hardie to Thomsen, 4/19/37 Box 18, FSA. 

33 Hardie to Thomsen, 4/19/37, Box 18, FSA. 

34 Hardie to Thomsen, 4/19/37, Box 18, FSA. 

THOMAS DORRANCE


of transition. Unfortunately, a string of ineffectual managers rotated through the position 

between 1937 and 1939. The camp did not collapse during this period, nor was it torn 

apart by the inability of the different levels of organization to interact as before. Instead, 

the camp simply persevered without any shining examples of enlightened democratic 

citizenry to celebrate. Norman Corse, the manager in April 1937, described the level of 

community participation at camp: 

We are aware of an indifference to elections etc. and translate the attitude as a result of the 

fact that many of our families are too new to be acquainted and the old families, realizing 

that they are soon to move, are not particularly interested in the outcome. WE look for a 

healthier attitude when the new become acclimated and the old are gone. 35 

The absence of an energetic Camp Council voted in by an involved population 

signaled a rupture in the maintenance of community norms. Easton is absent from the 

records at this point. In 1940, a camper who remembered Easton as the inspiration for 

Tom Joad in the Grapes of Wrath, said he had moved to Winters, California. 36 No other 

individual camper stands out in the records as prominently as Easton did. This absence of 

camper leadership further testifies to the erosion of the Camp Council’s power to enforce 

community standards during this period. The lack of a strong institutional committee 

structure to absorb internal conflict, such as the one that handled the Garden Club recall 

conflict during Hardie’s tenure, required Corse to step into the void. Instead of 

strengthening the community’s government, Corse’s enforcement of community 

standards contributed to a more adversarial relationship between manager and campers 

than had existed before. 

During one week in June 1937, Corse expelled two groups. The first was a family 

whose children, he claimed, seemed to “be at the bottom of every bit of devilment which 

occurred not only in their own unit but anywhere in camp.” 37 After the parents refused to 

discipline their children, Corse felt compelled to move the family from the camp. The 

second dismissal involved a man found guilty of buying liquor for underage children. 

(Some of these children belonged to the other family dismissed.) Because the man 

accused was the sole wage earner for a family of two children, the fathers of the children 

who had purchased the alcohol decided to drop the charges. However, Corse felt that 

“because the man had lied and tried to defend himself at the expense of a group of small 

though misguided boys we felt that dismissal was indicated and followed through.” 38 

Corse’s actions present a stark contrast to Hardie’s claim that the Camp representatives 

seemed to “treat offenders in the camp much more harshly than he could ever think of 

doing.” 39 The differences between the two managers’ disciplinary styles reflect more than 

just the personal abilities of each individual. The lack of participation by the campers in 

community government also helped to reduce Arvin’s democracy to one of form rather 

than function. 

35 

Norman Corse, “Weekly Report,” 4/24/37, Box 19, FSA. 

36 

Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin, “Fieldnotes,” U.S. Library of Congress, American Memory: Voices from the 

Dust Bowl, < http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/afctshtml/tshome.html> [May 25, 2005], 4. 

37 

Corse, “Weekly Report,” 6/19/37 Box 19, FSA. 

38 

Corse, “Weekly Report,” 6/19/37 Box 19, FSA. 

39 

Inspection of Arvin Migratory Camp, 2/24/37 Box 18, FSA. 

Trials & Troubles


At this same time, union activity emerged as a more prominent feature of camp 

life. Unions had maintained some presence on the camps for much of its operation, but in 

the fall of 1938, a cotton strike made union solidarity an important issue in camp 

discussions. The strike caused a great deal of division among the campers as many 

continued to work while others held out. Some statements published in the newly 

established newspaper expressed a certain degree of ambivalence about the situation. In 

an article entitled “To whom this may concern,” one camper remarked: 

In regards to the strike, the people all know well by this time that we struck from 75 

cents to $1.00 per hundred for cotton picking, and some came out and stayed out for 

a few days, and then went back. Some would step out and some would go back but I 

don’t know whether to call them scabs or not. I and my family aim to stay out until 

the strike is over. I have got as large a family as there is in camp, and need to work 

very bad, but I don’t think it is fair for the scabs to go and get relief and then go back 

to picking cotton. 40 

These expressions of ambivalence concealed a great amount of tension caused by the 

strike. One week after “To Whom This May Concern” appeared, Brisby published a 

piece reminding campers to respect differences of opinion and demanding order in the 

camp. “We must insist that no camper molest or threaten another. If this request is not 

lived up to, we will be forced to take action.” 41 Enforcing order through threat, Brisby’s 

statement illustrates the inability of the campers to channel conflict internally through a 

democratic structure. The strike concluded with no increase in cotton wages. The union 

remained a source of discord and presented a challenge to the authority of the manager 

and council. In April 1939, the council, with the approval of manager Harold Teft, 

banned all union material from the camp bulletin boards and prohibited any meetings on 

camp property. 42 

This ban lasted about as long as Teft’s term as manager. When Fred Ross took 

over in August 1939, he attempted to orchestrate a return to the level of camper 

participation characteristic of the first years of Arvin’s operations. Ross, who later 

worked very closely with Cesar Chavez organizing farm workers, tried to close the gap 

between migrants and managers by consciously adapting a more colloquial style. When 

Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin visited the camp in 1940 to record migrant folk songs, 

Ross performed a song that he had written in a migrant vernacular entitled, “Cotton 

Fever.” He also admitted to writing other poems and stories in the camp newspaper. 43 In 

his first weekly report, Ross anticipated an overhaul of the existing Camp Council in 

favor of a more active administrative body. He also used camp funds to restore recreation 

equipment that had fallen into disrepair. He hoped an increase in activity would serve as a 

release for tensions among campers. Reflecting on this program he stated, “On the whole, 

however, from the looks of things at present, we seem to have achieved a modicum of 

40 W.A.J., “To Whom This May Concern,” Weedpatch Cultivator, 10/21/38, 1. 

41 Brisby, “Clean-up,” Weedpatch Cultivator, 10/28/38, 1. 

42 “Committee Minutes,” WeedPatch Cultivator, 4/21/39, 2. 

43 Todd and Sonkin, “Field notes,” U.S. Library of Congress, American Memory: Voices from the Dust Bowl, 6, 12. 

THOMAS DORRANCE


success in diverting camp energy from argumentation to recreation.” 44 The records of 

Ross’s term as manager contain a higher overall degree of energy compared to previous 

managers. The desire for increased camper involvement, no matter what the activity, 

guided the majority of Ross’s actions as manager. 

After less than six months with Ross as manager, Arvin had activities for campers 

every night of the week. These activities ranged from boxing and wrestling on Monday 

night to religious services and Sunday school on Sunday afternoons. 45 Ross hoped these 

activities would increase the sense of community in the camp. He felt that the failure to 

generate interest in camp government resulted from the campers’ inability “to see 

themselves as inter-related parts of a whole.” Through increased activity, Ross tried to 

instill a sense of involvement among the campers reminiscent of the camp’s earlier years. 

Though most of his programs concerned recreational activities, Ross also supported 

social activism among the campers, thus channeling it into another avenue promoting 

solidarity. 

Union activity became a more accepted part of camp life. Two consecutive editors 

of the newspaper, Charlie Spurlock and Sam Birkhimer, both continuously expressed 

pro-union opinions in regular articles. Spurlock, in an announcement for a C.I.O. 

informational meeting, illustrated a level of cooperation between management and union 

activity that perhaps had not always existed. As an addendum to the announcement he 

stated, “Incidentally, this meeting is not being called to discuss or cuss management of 

the camp, or anything in or about camp. That’s all gone and forgotten.” 46 By cooperating 

with pro-union campers, Ross diminished the threat union activity presented to earlier 

managers. Birkhimer took time in each issue of the newspaper to explain a different 

dimension of union activity and to set out the pro-union argument for collective action. 

Ross also published pieces in the newspaper promoting cooperation. Through his 

colloquial alter-ego, “The Feller,” he used a caricatured reproduction of the migrant’s 

speech patterns to promote pro-union cooperation: 

As the feller sez, it ain’t so much how much you’re a’hankerin’ to cooperate, as it is 

who you’re hankerin’ to cooperate with…What I seen was hundreds a’hungry, cold, 

people settin’ right next to miles an’ miles a’pure white cotton a’ spoilin for pickin’, 

‘an them not pickin’ a boll. They’d jus’ come to the decision all by themselves ‘an 

they wroon’t budgin’ for no .80cents cotton…When a group a workin’ people get 

organized together and stick together for the main purpose a better’n their own 

condition and livin’ decent, that’s COOPERATION. 47 

Ross donned his “Feller” alter-ego for more than just promoting the union cause. He 

used his regular column in the newspaper as a forum to help create a community standard 

in tune with his expectations for the campers in regards to rent payments and cleanliness. 

Elements of frustration leak through in some of his public statements as he attempted to 

stimulate a greater sense of communal responsibility among the campers. He began one 

44 Fred Ross, “Weekly Report,” 7/19/39, Box 22, FSA. 

45 Ross, “Weekly Report,” 7/19/39, Box 22, FSA: Ross, “Weekly Report,” 1/17/40, FSA. 

46 “C.I.O. Tonight,” Towsack Tattler, 8/24/39. 

47 “As The Feller Sez,” Towsack Tattler, 11/4/39. 

Trials & Troubles


article stating, “I sort of hoped that you could reason with people and show them that 

certain things just had to be done around Camp for the benefit of every one living in 

Camp,—and then everybody would go ahead and do those things, sort of natural—like.” 

Unsuccessful in cajoling the campers to cooperate, Ross proceeded to remind them that 

they indeed lived on a government camp and must accept its authority or else they should 

simply leave the property. 48 The frequency of these articles suggests that Ross’s efforts 

met with a limited amount of success. 

There still existed a certain amount of friction between Ross and some of the 

campers. Ross had a specific idea of how he thought the camp should function and at 

times took an authoritative stance while enforcing his vision. Todd and Sonkin 

discovered that one family moved just outside of camp partly because they believed Ross 

had worked to deny another camper’s promotion within the community. 49 Some 

inhabitants of the camp when interviewed in 1981 about their experiences during the 

Depression remembered the conflict that arose between managers and independently 

minded campers as managers attempted to enforce community regulations. Bobby 

Russell recalled that his father was blackballed from the camps mainly because “he 

wouldn’t take any crap from the camp managers.” Russell stated that other campers also 

felt that the manager should just “manage the camp and not the people.” 50 Hattye Shields 

remarked that this friction emerged naturally from the necessity of having to impose 

community regulations upon a group of individuals used to living independently in their 

own homes. 51 The Camp Council’s ability to allow campers to enforce their own 

community standards had ceased to function properly. Though it usually contributed to 

an adversarial relationship between managers and campers, when conflicts emerged it 

remained the manager’s responsibility to find a solution. 

The importance of cooperation between campers, managers, and administrators is best 

illustrated in times of dysfunction. Lacking a stable camper population committed to selfgovernment, 

camp managers had to assume a more active role in enforcing community 

standards. This produced an adversarial relationship between campers and managers and 

created an even greater distance between the ideal of self-government and the reality 

operating within the camps. The functional democracy created by Collins rested on a 

precarious balance between camper, manager, and administrator. This system emerged 

through the cooperative efforts of Easton, Collins, and Thomsen. Without a balance of 

strength, this system fell into dysfunction and hindered the ability of each level to operate 

at its ideal. Though government officials identified Arvin as a reform project, within the 

camp boundaries administrators and migrants formed a community. Conflict and 

compromise drove the formation process operating at the heart of Arvin as individuals, 

connected through their position in the camp’s institutional structure, pursued specific 

interests in relation to their place within the wider climate of Depression Era California. 

48 Ross, Towsack Tattler, 10/6/39. 

49 Todd and Sonkin, “Field notes,” 66. 

50 Bobby Russell, interview by Judith Gannon, February 3 and 10, 1981, interview 107, transcript, California Odyssey 

Project, California State University, Bakersfield, , 28. 

51 Hattye Shields, interview by Judith Gannon, May 24, 1981, interview 209, transcript, Odyssey Project, 10. 

THOMAS DORRANCE

Coming to Terms with Cannabis 

A Discursive History of the 1937 

Marihuana Tax Act 

Ari Cushner

Constructing the “Killer Weed” 

Marijuana is the same as Indian hemp, hashish, or cannabis. Marijuana is the 

Mexican term. The plant was known to the Greeks as nepenthe. Its use in Egypt 

has been common since ancient times and has continued down to the present. The 

natives of Malay Peninsula while under its effect have been known to engage in 

violent and bloody deeds with complete disregard for their personal safety.” 

-Chief Paul E. Madden, California Division of Narcotic Control, 1940 1 

n the night of 6 October 1937, Denver field agents of the Federal Bureau of 

Narcotics (FBN) apprehended Samuel R. Caldwell on suspicion of cannabis peddling. 

Caldwell was the first accused violator of the newly passed Marihuana Tax Act which 

made it a federal crime, as of 1 October 1937, to handle cannabis-hemp without first 

registering and paying a fee to the United States Treasury Department. Harry J. 

Anslinger, Commissioner of the Treasury’s seven year-old Bureau of Narcotics, claimed 

to have witnessed the 58 year-old man’s arrest, which he said involved “gunplay.” 2 Fortyeight 

hours later, a grand jury swiftly indicted Caldwell, and a court soon convicted, 

sentencing him to four years at Leavenworth Penitentiary plus a $1,000 fine. Presiding 

U.S. District Judge J. Foster Symes expressed his opinion during sentencing, where once 

again Anslinger was present, that “Marihuana destroys life itself.” 3 

Two months earlier, in August 1937, Newsweek magazine featured an article 

about the case of Victor Licata, “a Florida youngster [who] put the axe to his mother and 

father” while supposedly under the influence of marihuana. 4 This horror story was 

accompanied by a statement that, despite the uses of cannabis in fiber, varnish oil, 

birdseed, and medicine, Representative Robert L. Doughton (D-North Carolina), the 

Marihuana Tax Act’s Congressional sponsor, “was interested in Cannabis sativa because 

it is a dangerous and devastating narcotic known to the Orient as hashish, to the Occident 

as marihuana.” 5 

Thus after several thousand years of benign, unimpeded cultivation and 

consumption throughout the world, cannabis-hemp came under sustained assault in the 

first half of the twentieth century. With roots in the Temperance/Prohibition movement, 

Commissioner Anslinger’s drug criminalization regime rhetorically redefined cannabishemp 

as a lethal scourge imported by nefarious, nonwhite, non-Christian or non-Western 

1 

California Division of Narcotic Enforcement, Marihuana: Our Newest Narcotic Menace (Sacramento: California State 

Printing Office, 1940), 3. 

2 

“Marihuana Conference,” Shaffer Library of Drug Policy. 25 May 2005. 

. 

3 

John C. McWilliams, The Protectors: Harry J. Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1930-1962 (Newark: 

University of Delaware Press, 1990), 77-8. 

4 

“Federal Tax Hits Dealings in Potent Weed,” Newsweek, 14 August 1937, in Steven R. Belenko, ed., Drugs and Drug 

Policy in America, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000), 154-5. 

5 

“Federal Tax Hits Dealings in Potent Weed,” 154-5.


others, particularly Mexican and Latino immigrants. Using a Mexican colloquialism 

translated to English as “maryjane,” Treasury Department and FBN policymakers 

deliberately renamed cannabis “marihuana” and reclassified the ancient commodity as a 

new and deadly “narcotic.” 6 

The FBN promoted use of propagandistic rather than scientific phraseology in 

order to facilitate the weed’s linguistic conversion into an unknown yet dangerous 

“drug,” while highlighting its supposedly foreign and “un-American” nature. This 

terminological preference was embedded within a larger discursive matrix centered on 

the convoluted etymological and mythological associations between “cannabis,” 

“assassin” and “hashish,” an orally ingested preparation of resin extracted from dried 

cannabis flowers. This unique etym-mythology discursively linked an eleventh century 

Persian military sect—the notorious Hashishin, or Assassins—with the hashish they 

allegedly consumed before or after obediently murdering the enemies of their master, 

Sheik Hassan Sabah, known prominently in European folklore as the Old Man of the 

Mountain. 7 

Having transposed the etym-mythological derivation of “assassin” from Crusade 

folklore into the eighteenth and nineteenth century European colonial context, 

policymakers and their allies cleverly grafted its racialist connotations onto the Mexican 

“marijuana menace” of early twentieth century United States sociopolitical discourse. 

During the buildup to federal cannabis legislation, periodical articles, bureaucratic 

conferences, and congressional deliberations filled a discursive space that was 

ideologically constructed around the haunting specter of the “oriental” Other. In this 

6 For more on this, see Associated Press, “House Approves Curb On Use of Marihuana,” Washington Post, 15 June 

1937, 11. The report announces the details of the proposed legislation while repeating a House Ways and Means 

Committee conclusion that cannabis, regardless of its established industrial applications, “is being used ‘by hardened 

criminals to steel them to commit violent crimes’ and that unscrupulous persons peddle it to high school children.” 

7 One of the original sources of information about the Hashishin was the Marco Polo text “Concerning the Old Man of 

the Mountain.” According to this tale, Sheik Hassan Sabbah, the Old Man, recruits young fighters into an Edenic 

garden where he intoxicates them with hashish and then orders his essentially hypnotized Assassins to go out and kill 

his political opponents. It is unclear in the multifarious versions of the story whether the Sheik used hashish in order to 

disorient his men, sustain their ability to commit murder, or reward them for successful assassinations. Neither is it 

certain that the intoxicant employed by Sabbah was even hashish at all and not opium, for instance, or how widely it 

was distributed. The basic sources and details of this folkloric Crusade discourse will be discussed further in the essay, 

yet the important point here is that the word “assassin” developed into its current English language usage through this 

etym-mythological process whereby the Sheik’s notorious fighters were labeled by Europeans as the “Hashishin.” Thus 

arose the fundamentally intertwined development of a European ideological mindset associating hashish not only with 

its direct linguistic progeny-assassination, but also numerous other forms of depravity that were inscribed into the 

discourse during the colonial era, and re-inscribed in the course of early twentieth century, US-led international 

narcotics control. While the Washington Post’s ‘”unscrupulous” schoolyard marihuana peddlers bear a haunting 

resemblance to the mythologized image of Hassan Sabbah using hashish to lure young men into his hilltop fortress, an 

equally vivid connection exists between the original Assassin discourse and contemporary depictions of hypnotized 

assassins such as in the Manchurian Candidate films (1962, 2004) or the parody on television’s The Simpsons in 2001. 

For that matter, the unremitting allegations that Robert F. Kennendy’s 1968 assassination was carried out through 

Central Intelligence Agency operatives who hypnotized Palestinian-born Sirhan Sirhan, currently imprisoned for the 

presidential candidate’s murder, is strikingly consonant with the concept of assassination popularized through the 

evolving etym-mythology initiated through “The Old Man of the Mountain.” For more on this, see Robert Zepezauer, 

The CIA’s Greatest Hits (Monroe, Maine: Odonian/Common Courage Press, 1994), 36-7. For a particularly 

demonstrative example of how the Assassin discourse interfaced with nineteenth century European imperial policy 

from Persia to Malaysia and beyond, see: Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: U.C. Press, 1991) 117-8. 

ARI CUSHNER


space, nonwhite or non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant marijuana smokers in the New World 

fulfilled the mythic role of hashish eating Muslim Assassins. 

Thus began a decades-long demonization of cannabis-hemp on the basis that it 

leads to violent criminality, despite its use for millennia as an intoxicant, a medicine, and 

an agricultural commodity. Without substantiated evidence of cannabis’ reputedly 

hazardous physiological effects, leading anti-cannabis crusaders like Commissioner 

Anslinger depended on a discursive and linguistic transference of cannabis from the 

context of “oriental” hashish to “occidental” marihuana. 

This process proved to be a crucial factor in the justification of the Marihuana Tax 

Act as a public safety measure and the propagandistic association between cannabis and 

murderous insanity. The following analysis of the etym-mythological construction of the 

“Killer Weed” utilizes a theoretical toolbox that includes the work of Antonio Gramsci, 

Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Stuart Hall in order to deconstruct the hegemonic, 

disciplinary power of the Hashish-Assassin discursive formation in relation to the 

sociopolitical and economic conditions presaging federal cannabis legislation in 1937. 

Historicizing the Marihuana Tax Act 

Shortly after Harry Anslinger’s retirement, sociologists Howard Becker (1963), 

Alfred R. Lindesmith (1965), and Donald T. Dickson (1968) initiated academic discourse 

regarding the origins of federal cannabis legislation. These brief studies were followed by 

more in-depth analysis in the writing of psychiatrist and historian David F. Musto (1973) 

and law-professors Richard J. Bonnie and Charles H. Whitebread (1974). Sociologists 

John F. Gallihner and Allyn Walker (1977) and Jerome L. Himmelstein (1983) also 

contributed significantly to the debate. They were followed by criminologist John C. 

McWilliams (1990). Sociologist Michael C. Elsner (1994) and History M.A. candidate 

John Craig Lupien (1995) have made important additions to the literature as well. While 

not an exhaustive list, the work of these authors constitutes the essential scope of 

scholarly inquiry into the subject. They were printed thirteen times between 1985 and 

2000, in addition to Jack Herer’s popular and highly polemical work. 8 

It is sufficient in this context to briefly sketch the interconnected set of 

developments that authors have established and debated as contributory factors in the 

passage of the 1937 Marihuana Tax Act. The seminal 1960s literature focused on the 

8 Howard S. Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (London: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1963); 

Alfred R. Lindesmith, The Addict and the Law (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1965); Donald T. 

Dickson, “Bureaucracy and Morality: An Organizational Perspective on a Moral Crusade,” Social Problems 16 (1968); 

David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New York: Oxford University Press,1973); 

Richard Bonnie and Charles Whitebread II, The Marijuana Conviction: A History of Marijuana Prohibition in the 

United States (New York: The Lindesmith Center, 1999); John F. Galliher, Allynn Walker, “The Puzzle of the Social 

Origins of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937,” Social Problems 24 (1977); Jerome L. Himmelstein, The Strange Career 

of Marihuana: Politics and Ideology of Drug Control in America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983); 

John Craig Lupien, “Unraveling an American Dilemma: The Demonization of Marihuana,” (M.A. thesis, Pepperdine 

University, 1995); Michael C. Elsner, “The Sociology of Reefer Madness: The Criminalization of Marijuana in the 

United States,” in P.J. Venturelli, ed., Drug Use in America: Social, Cultural and Political Perspectives (Boston: Jones 

and Bartlett, 1994); Jack Herer, The Emperor Wears No Clothes: The Authoritative Historical Record of Cannabis and 

the Conspiracy Against Marijuana…and How Hemp Can Save the World! (Van Nuys, California: AH HA Publishing, 

2000), 26-7. 

Coming to Terms with Cannabis


bureaucratic need for uniformity of existing state laws and expansion of state-level 

reform, as well as the powerful administrative role of Anslinger and the Federal Bureau 

of Narcotics’ publicity and propaganda campaign. The 1970s studies added another 

dimension to this story by exposing the xenophobia among politicians and law 

enforcement officials in Southwestern states where Mexican and Latin American 

immigration deeply affected social and economic relations. Musto, Bonnie and 

Whitebread began interrogating the influence of Anslinger’s involvement with 

international narcotics control efforts through the League of Nations and the general 

influence of Depression-era politics, including the failed prohibition of alcohol in the 

development of federal anti-cannabis legislation. Authors Herer and Lupien, meanwhile, 

examine the provocative yet thinly supported hypothesis that the forces of Treasury 

Secretary Andrew Mellon, William Randolph Hearst, and I.E. Du Pont De Nemours & 

Company were at the center of a conspiracy involving Anslinger to create a legislative 

pretext for eliminating hemp production as a competitor of the lumber and emergent 

synthetic textiles industries. Not enough attention has thus far been paid to the specific 

function of a discursive apparatus which became constitutionally embedded within the 

twentieth century anti-cannabis matrix. This discourse was rooted in the explosive 

interaction between Shiite soldiers and their Crusader counterparts, a discourse which 

evolved throughout time into an etym-mythology of hashish-smoking Muslim “assassins” 

that terrorized the imagination of Christendom. 

Historicizing the Hashish-Assassin Etym-Mythology 

Only authors McWilliams, Bonnie, and Whitebread discuss the importance of the 

“assassin” etymology at any length, yet both texts fail to grasp that, although 

based in mythologized developments, the etymological derivation of “assassin” is 

firmly rooted in the word “hashish.” 9 While these works offer an entryway into 

more comprehensive investigation of the discourse connecting “hashish” and 

“assassin” as it was applied in twentieth century cannabis prohibition, their 

efforts require revision and expansion. Far from being a discredited or purely 

mythological construct, as John Ayto writes, “Etymologically, an assassin is an 

‘eater or smoker of hashish,’ the drug cannabis.” 10 

The etymological trajectory of “assassin” is corroborated by at least three scholars 

in the fields of medieval history and linguistics. 11 A brief consultation of these and similar 

9 McWilliams cites writings by Dr. A. E. Fossier and New Orleans District Attorney Eugene Stanley who “related the 

myth (since discredited) of the military and religious sect of the Assassins of Persia that in 1090 A.D. ‘committed 

secret murders in blind obedience to the chief after [becoming] intoxicated with hashish.’” McWilliams adds that 

Commissioner Anslinger “related the same tired story of marijuana having originated with the Assassins of Persia a 

thousand years ago” (McWilliams, 48-9). Bonnie and Whitebread, while also disputing the veracity of the story, 

observe that “Nevertheless, throughout the period of marihuana prohibition, medical journals, pharmacology texts, 

popular articles, official government statements, newspaper reports, and legislative testimony all recounted a version of 

this tale,” adding that “no small role in this [linkage between crime and cannabis use] was played by the alleged 

etymology of the word ‘assassin’” (Bonnie and Whitebread, 143-5). 

10 John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1990), 39. 

11 Charles E. Nowell, “The Old Man of the Mountain,” Speculum 22 (1947); Kevin M. McCarthy, “The Origin of 

Assassin,” American Speech 48 (1973); Juliette Wood, “The Old Man of the Mountain in Medieval Folklore,” Folklore 

99 (1988). Nowell argues that “Presumably the dagger-men of Hassan’s sect were given this [hashish] as a stimulant to 

their murderous work. But the connection between hashish and ‘Assassin’ was slow to penetrate the European 

mind”(499). Mcarthy contends that “[t]he generally accepted etymology of assassin has recently been 

ARI CUSHNER


sources reveals that the convoluted authenticity of the hashish-assassin etymological 

connection, however distorted and mythologized, highlights the manner in which anticannabis 

discourse was molded and implemented during the 1930s, and underscores the 

historical significance of this unique terminological and discursive constellation. 12 

Cannabis in World Historical Context: 2700 B.C.E.-1900 C.E. 

The reefers and muggles [marihuana] of today are of the same origin as the 

bhang of the Arabian Nights and the hashish of certain nineteenth century 

voluptuaries. Parts of the Indian hemp plant have been known as intoxicant since 

earliest times, and its abuse had been practiced widely throughout the 

Mediterranean littoral and in India. Depravity has always been and still is the 

only motive for its habitual use. 

-Fred T. Merrill, Foreign Policy Association, 1938 13 

Cannabis-hemp was likely first cultivated for fiber in western China several 

millennia before the Common Era. From China, the plant diffused rapidly throughout the 

Afro-Eurasian landmass, first appearing in western Europe as early as 1500 B.C.E. In the 

ancient Mediterranean world, the Greeks and Israelites were both familiar with cannabisusing 

cultures, yet Judeo-Christian communities continued to use cannabis-hemp 

primarily for agricultural purposes. Many researchers have contended that the Old 

Testament of the Christian Bible (Hebrew Torah) makes numerous references to 

cannabis, such as the “honeycomb” mentioned in the Song of Solomon 5:1, and 

elsewhere as “calamus.” 14 

Hindus established the use of cannabis as an intoxicant throughout India as early 

as 1,000 B.C.E., and from there it spread into Arab and Mediterranean vectors by 10 

C.E., through southern Russia, Assyria, and Persia. According to Edward Brecher, 

cannabis was cultivated widely for fiber in Europe by the seventeenth century, while 

“[t]he first definite record of the marijuana plant in the New World dates from 1545 C.E. 

when Spaniards introduced it into Chile.” Brecher adds that “[i]t has been suggested, 

however, that African slaves…brought the seeds with them to Brazil even earlier in the 

sixteenth century.” There is no doubt that Jamestown colonists brought cannabis-hemp 

challenged…[yet] assassin can be derived from Arabic hashashin, as the OED [Oxford English Dictionary] states” (77). 

Meanwhile, Wood contends that “[t]he use of hashish was incorporated into the practices of the Assassin sect. In 

actuality, it was probably not used too frequently, but its place in the legendary material attached to the Hashishin is 

very important”(79). 

12 Nowell’s article provides the basis for sophisticated examination of the historical realities of the infamous Assassins, 

from their founding in the eleventh century at Sabbah’s castle, Alamut, to their subsequent division into two Shiite 

branches based in Syria and Persia (Iran) fighting against Sunni Arab rivals as well as Christian Crusaders. Considering 

the Assassins equivalent to Crusade secret societies such as the Knights Templar, Nowell establishes that “[n]ot until 

the first part of the nineteenth century did the orientalist, Sivestre de Sacy, work out the etymology of ‘Assassin’ so 

thoroughly that no doubt has remained” (500). This is particularly significant given that “orientalism,” as discussed by 

Edward Said, pervaded the discourse surrounding the Assassin and hashish use generally from the nineteenth century 

through to Nowell’s 1947 article, with a distinctly racialist undertone, to Wood’s 1988 subtly prejudiced conclusion 

that the terrorist activities of the Assassins are frequently cited in Arabic chronicles” (78). 

13 Frederick T. Merrill, “The Marihuana Problem,” New York Times, 11 December 1938, 134. 

14 Edward M. Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972). 398-412. 



with them to the New World in 1619, where it became a valuable American crop 

especially useful as a fiber for the rigging on ships. 15 

In the nineteenth century, the value of hemp and the strength of its industry went 

into decline with the invention of the cotton gin. By the mid-nineteenth century, people in 

the United States were surrounded by hemp, both cultivated and wild, throughout states 

such as Mississippi, Georgia, California, South Carolina, Nebraska, New York, and 

Kentucky. Extractum Cannabis was listed as an official medicine in the United States 

Pharmacopeia from 1850-1942. 16 The noticeable practice of marijuana smoking did not 

develop north of the Mexican border until the early twentieth century, although cannabis 

was used for religious or recreational purposes as early as 1856—mainly in the form of 

hashish, with secretive hash-smoking dens arising in large cities such as New York by 

1881. 17 Regarding this unique physical and linguistic diffusion of cannabis-hemp 

throughout the world, John Ayto explains that: 

Hemp is ultimately the same word as cannabis (as, bizarrely, is canvas, which 

was originally made from hemp). Both go back to a common ancestor which 

produced Persian kanab, Russian konóplya, Greek kánnabis (source of English 

cannabis), and prehistoric Germanic *khanipiz or *khanapiz. From the latter are 

descended German hanf, Dutch hannep, Swedish hampa, Danish hamp, and 

English hemp. 18 

Emergence of the Marihuana Menace: 1900-1930 

Despite its ancient historical roots, cannabis-hemp did not appear significantly in 

the United States public consciousness until the turn of the twentieth century, when 

policy-makers facilitated its rhetorical transplantation from the hashish of the Assassins 

to the marijuana associated with Latino dissidents like the Mexican revolutionary soldiers 

of Pancho Villa and the rebel forces of Simón Bolivar. 19 

A 1905 Washington Post article, “Terrors of Marihuana,” encapsulates the 

irreverent attitude of the press towards cannabis, stating that “[c]uriosity has often been 

expressed as to the cause of the peculiar mental traits of Latin-American warriors and 

revolutionists which lead them to view ‘North America’ as a monster of hideous shape 

and ungovernable appetite.” 20 The reason for these rebellious delusions “is found in… a 

strange weed which flourishes in Venezuela. This plant is the marihuana.” 21 Admonishing 

Venezuelan president General Cipriano Castro and his adviser Col. Lamedo, who “in 

seeking trouble with the United States are a manifestation of this mysterious trait,” the 

15 Brecher, 398-412. Also based on Brecher’s account, George Washington not only grew cannabis-hemp at Mt. 

Vernon, but apparently indicated in diary entries that he separated his male and female plants (403). By today’s 

standards, this action would indicate intent to increase the potency of female plants by preventing their being pollinated 

by nearby male plants thus producing “sinsemilla,” or buds “without seeds.” It is thus possible, if not also likely, that 

Washington was aware of the psychoactive and medicinal properties of his crop. 

16 Brecher, 403. 

17 Bonnie and Whitebread, 1, 32; Brecher, 408-9. 

18 Ayto, 279. 

19 Bonnie and Whitebread, 5; Harvey L. Johnson, “Simon Bolivar (1783-1830),” History of Simon Bolivar, 25 May 

2005. . 

20 Johnson, “Simon Bolivar (1783-1830).” 

21 Johnson, “Simon Bolivar (1783-1830).” 

ARI CUSHNER


authors warn that “[i]f they do not break themselves of the [marijuana] habit, their visions 

may materialize in the shape of ironclad monsters belching fire and nickel-nosed balls in 

the heavily mortgaged harbors of the sons of Bolivar.” 22 The author thus warns that 

“[t]hey must forswear marihuana, and live cleanly, as patriots should.” 23 “The next stage 

of intoxication [after euphoria] is full of terrors,” the article continues. “Lions, tigers, 

panthers, and other wild beasts occupy his vision.” 24 Using fantastical imagery that 

recalls and signifies the Assassin discourse, the article concludes that “[t]hese wild 

animals are then attacked by hosts of devils and monsters of unheard-of shapes. The 

[marihuana] smoker becomes possessed of superhuman strength…‘It is at this stage of 

the debauch that murders are committed.’” 25 

Washington Post articles from the following year continued presenting the image 

that marijuana was wreaking havoc south of the U.S. border. A 1913 piece argued that 

“[t]he revolution in Mexico has brought with it not only the ravages of war, but also the 

degradation of the social conditions of soldiers and prisoners” through marijuana 

addiction. Continuing this theme, in 1914 the Post published an article entitled “Weeds 

That Cause Insanity: Danger to United States Troops Lurks in Vegetation of Mexico.” Its 

author argues that “[o]ne of the things to be avoided by American soldiers in Mexico is 

the seductive marihuana weed,” warning that “people addicted to marihuana finally lose 

their minds and never recover.” 26 

Disruptions in the wake of the world war and Mexican Revolution produced a 

new stream of Mexican immigrants into the United States during the 1920s, which 

triggered increased public and governmental attention to the legendary ravages of 

cannabis. In 1924 the Washington Post ran a feature story in which the author, inspired 

by discursive connections between hashish and marihuana, symbolically transplants the 

“killer weed” from the Old to the New World by indicating that “imported into Mexico 

from India and Egypt, it [marihuana] has been the scourge of the lower classes. Into the 

cities of Texas and other Southern States, the dread dope has followed the Mexican 

element, causing untold death and trouble.” 27 

To further drive home the point, the author draws a sharp yet nebulous parallel 

between the two foreign drugs, writing that “‘[h]ashish behind closed doors’ produces no 

more weird reaction than the exotic Mexican dope. This accounts for the popularity of 

Marihuana to a large extent, for the Arabians consider Hashish as the fountain of all 

voluptuousness and material pleasures.” 28 In its conflation of Japanese, Chinese, Indians, 

22 

Johnson, “Simon Bolivar (1783-1830).” 

23 

“Terrors of Marihuana,” Washington Post, 21 March 1905, 6. 

24 

“Terrors of Marihuana.” 

25 

“Plants Cause Madness: Startling Effects of Mexico’s Substitute for Tobacco,” Washington Post, 9 March 1913, 

MT3. 

26 “Weeds That Cause Insanity: Danger to United States Troops Lurks in Vegetation of Mexico,” Washington Post, 15 

June 1914, 6. 

27 “Mystery of the Strange Mexican Weed: American and Mexican Authorities Seek to Curb Growing Use of Dread 

Marihuana Drug That Stirs Its Victims to Atrocious Deeds of Violence,” Washington Post, 24 August 1924, SM7. 

28 The written text appears beneath a visually stunning array of graphics dominated by the image of a group of four 

men crowded and sprawled around a burning cauldron from which emanates the fiery image of a horned Lucifer 

looking down and pointing at the one man standing, who signifies a stereotypical Mexican by his dress accented by a 

sombrero. One of the man’s hands points towards the fire while in the other he holds what appears to be a blade. A 



and Egyptians with Mexicans as users and purveyors of the exotic and toxic drug, the 

article, entitled “Mystery of the Strange Mexican Weed,” fuses anti-marijuana with antihashish 

imagery in a manner that illuminates the etym-mythological function of public 

anti-cannabis discourse. 29 

A 1928 Washington Post article datelined from Chicago demonstrates further 

cross-fertilization between the images of hashish and marijuana. It claims that “Marijuana 

(Mary Jane) the devastating Mexican drug, is said to be wrecking members of the 

Chicago Federation of Musicians in addition to thousands of other users…It is related to 

hemp and hashish, the dope so common in India and Persia.” 30 A few months later the 

Post ran another article with a headline, placed directly above the visual of a Mexican 

marijuana patch, that read: “Widespread Indulgence Among Mexicans and Americans in 

Deadly Narcotic That Produces Hypnotic Hilarity—It Is Found in Flowered Tops of 

Indian Hemp—Another Drug Evil to be Combated.” 31 

After illustrating who grows marihuana, where, and for what purposes, the author 

traces the evil directly back to the land of “Indian Hemp” and emphasizes the etymmythological 

motif by claiming that marihuana “is an old world drug masquerading in 

the New World under a new name…In Arabia and Persia…it is known as hashish. It is 

from the hashishians, the users of hashish, that our word ‘assassins’ has come.” 32 More 

than just strategic publicity and propaganda, this racialized discourse was deeply rooted 

in prevailing sociopolitical undercurrents stretching back centuries. 

The Immediate Discursive Origins of the Marihuana Tax Act: 1930-1937 

Marihuana has no therapeutic or medicinal value that can not better be replaced 

by other drugs. It serves no legitimate purposes whatever. For thousands of years 

it has been known in Persia as hashish…from which we get the word assassin. 

Another word we get from the characteristics of this drug is the word amuck, and 

the phrase ‘running amuck.’ ‘Amok’ means kill and was the word that the native 

of Malay would shriek as he, maddened by hashish, would, dash down the street 

in a murderous frenzy. 

second man lays either dead or unconscious in the foreground while a third, obscured by shadows, stirs the devilish 

brew as a fourth man crouches frightfully in the corner. This horrific depiction of degenerate Mexicans is adjacent to a 

picture of a military infantry division dug-in at a trench in a gun battle, next to a caption describing how “[m]arihuana 

brings all the cruelty that is in a man to the fore. It gives him a desire to fight and unlimited confidence. Mexican 

generals give it to their soldiers before going into battle, and a soldier under its influence may die in his tracks but will 

never turn back.” An accompanying illustration graphically depicts a cloaked man pulling a mule next to the caption, 

“[a]t the right, a Japanese, who are said to be the greatest smugglers, is shown crossing the Rio Grande with a muleload 

of the contraband.” Readers are informed that “[s]moked like tobacco, the pungent fumes seep into the brains of the 

smokers and bring delusions of grandeur and visions of wealth, and, worst of all, uncontrolled viciousness that leads to 

fights and murders” (“Mystery of the Strange Mexican Weed,” SM7). 

29 “Mystery of the Strange Mexican Weed,” SM7. 

30 “New Drug, Not Illegal, Claiming Many Addicts: Federation of Musicians at Chicago Reports Victims in Its 

Membership: PARALYSIS IS OUTCOME,” Washington Post, 1 July 1928, 3. 

31 Nell Ray Clarke, “More ‘Mary Jane’ Laugh Addicts: Widespread Indulgence Among Mexicans and Americans in 

Deadly Narcotic That Produces Hypnotic Hilarity—It Is Found in Flowered Tops of Indian Hemp—Another Drug Evil 

to be Combated,” Washington Post, 2 September 1928, SM6. 

32 Clarke, SM6. 

ARI CUSHNER


-Clarence Beck, Kansas Attorney General, 1938 33 

In 1930 Harry J. Anslinger became the first Commissioner of Narcotics, bringing 

with him a background as foreign diplomat, spy, Prohibition agent, Mafia combatant, and 

stalwart anti-Bolshevik. 34 The Treasury Department had already elevated Anslinger in 

1929 from second-in-command of the Narcotics Division to acting head of narcotics 

enforcement after a corruption scandal in New York rocked the department and forced its 

chief, Col. Levi Nutt, to resign. Anslinger was thus already technically in charge when he 

accepted his appointment as Commissioner from the powerful Du Pont and J.P. Morgan 

affiliated banking magnate and Republican Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon, 

who also happened to be his future uncle-in-law. 35 

Having ascended the throne of Drug Czar, Anslinger was in position to weigh 

various options in regards to the federal control of cannabis. While most anti-narcotics 

enforcers and reformers favored the prohibition of marihuana, federal legislation proved 

elusive up to the early 1930s due to a combination of environmental, sociopolitical, and 

economic factors. Cannabis had been viewed as an intrastate issue not applicable to 

national and international narcotic trafficking regulations. Similarly, the plant grew wild 

throughout the country and thus, unlike poppy or coca-derived drugs, was produced 

domestically without dependence on foreign importation. Furthermore, the multiple 

industrial applications of cannabis-hemp were unique obstacles to the development of 

federal legislation. 

A 1931 Associated Press report related Anslinger’s lamentation that “the plant 

[is] being grown so easily that there is almost no interstate commerce in it,” which would 

make federal anti-cannabis legislation technically unconstitutional. 36 Thus, the best 

available option for Anslinger and the Treasury Department bureaucracy was to support 

state level control efforts and favor federal cannabis prohibition in the future, when the 

sociopolitical climate of the nation might permit it. Treasury and FBN officials thus 

facilitated the passage of state-level legislation organized through the Uniform State 

Narcotic Act. While not mandating inclusion of cannabis, Anslinger’s bureaucratic team 

offered an optional anti-cannabis clause in the legislative template the FBN advertised to 

state officials. This was likely designed as a precursor to the eventual development of a 

federal marijuana prohibition scheme. 

33 Clarence Beck, “Marijuana Menace,” Washington Post, 13 January 1938, X9. 

34 Before taking control of the new FBN, Harry Anslinger had served at many levels of government including as 

member of the State Department diplomatic corps. Fluent in both Dutch and German, Anslinger had been sent to 

inform Kaiser Wilhem II that the U.S. government did not wish for the German monarch to abdicate his throne at the 

close of World War One, fearing that Social Democrats would incite chaos if he were exiled. Anslinger, who according 

to John McWilliams “was knowledgeable in the clandestine operations of organized smuggling rings…and… 

[participated] in intelligence operations in Western Europe during World War I,” also participated during World War 

Two in the formation of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency—and 

had a “long-standing relationship” with the first CIA director, General “Wild Bill” Donnovan. Given these connections 

to intelligence and espionage, it many, upon further research, be necessary to reconsider the nature Anslinger’s role in 

crafting anti-marihuana legislation, and his potentially sinister motivations (McWilliams, 15, 21, 29). 

35 McWilliams, 28-42; Musto, 206-9. 

36 “Government Will Ask States to Ban Growing of Marijuana,” New York Times, 16 September 1931, 37. 



First in support of the Uniform State Narcotic Act, and then for what became the 

Marihuana Tax Act, Anslinger organized a network of politicians, bureaucrats, and social 

and religious reformers dedicated to uprooting the marijuana menace. 37 Often referred to 

as “Anslinger’s Army,” this veritable anti-cannabis cabal included members of the 

Women’s Christian Temperance Union, Foreign Policy Association, World Narcotics 

Defense Association, and media outlets such as the sensational Hearst Press. 38 

Aided by a backlash against nonwhite immigrants competing for increasingly 

scarce employment, the “marijuana problem” moved rather swiftly into the bureaucratic 

void created by the 1933 repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment. In a 1934 New York Times 

article concerned with the perceived use of cannabis in combination with alcohol and its 

growing influence within youth culture, the author describes how “the drug is particularly 

popular with Latin Americans and its use is rapidly spreading to include all classes.” 39 

The author suggests that individual states like Colorado, which had had an anti-cannabis 

law on the books since 1927, were mysteriously acquiescing to the foreign marijuana 

menace. The Times article adds that “[t]he seriousness of the problem, growing out of 

laxity in enforcing State laws barring the drug, is indicated by the fact that it is the same 

weed from which the Egyptian hashish is made.” 40 

This FBN directed anti-cannabis discourse purposefully exaggerated the rise of 

youth marijuana consumption in order to instill immediate outrage throughout the 

Washington D.C. political establishment and spread fear among middle-class Americans. 

In 1935 The Washington Post ran a feature article informing readers that “Marihuana—a 

habit forming drug—is a weed which was originally imported from Mexico, but which is 

now grown on this side of the Rio Grande,” adding incorrectly: “The Spanish word, 

‘marihuana,’ means in English, ‘merry widow.’ ”41 Nearby is a series of pictures including 

the headshot of a stereotypical Chinese opium addict, resting on top of a proportionally 

enlarged opium pipe, on top of a caption reading: “The type of men narcotic agents must 

deal with in their war to stamp out the drug evil.” 42 

This discursive textual linkage between marijuana and opium accentuates an 

underlying impression that cannabis, with its birthplace in China, is somehow related 

both to the threat of Mexican marihuana-smoking hordes, as well as the infamous 

“Yellow Peril” posed by opium-smoking Chinese immigrants. There is an implicit 

association between the opium derived from poppies and hashish derived from the resin 

of flowering cannabis buds grown throughout Asia and the Middle East. 

In this same manner, mythologized accounts of the Assassins were woven into the 

sensationalized anti-cannabis discourse of the 1930s. Rather than Hassan Sabbah using 

37 McWilliams, 56. 

38 Bonnie and Whitebread, 100. 

39 “Use of Marihuana Spreading In West: Poisonous Weed Is Being Sold Quite Frequently in Pool Halls and Beer 

Gardens. CHILDREN SAID TO BUY IT: Narcotics Bureau Officials Say Law Gives No Authority to Stop Traffic,” 

New York Times, 16 September 1934, B6 

40 “Use of Marihuana Spreading In West,” B6. 

41 Edward F. Atwell, “America Declares War on Dope, The Mighty Maker of Criminals: An Army of Peddlers Are At 

Work Recruiting New Addicts Among the Young,” Washington Post, 24 March 1935, F6. 

42 Atwell, F6. 

ARI CUSHNER


hashish to recruit young soldiers for political murder, shady foreign-born peddlers 

recruited school children into lives of crime and debauchery after selling them marijuana 

cigarettes, and axe-wielding maniacs like Victor Licata chopped up family members 

under the weed’s influence. Mexican and other immigrants replaced Muslims in this 

stereotyped formulation. Both posed a violent and intolerable threat, as did the plant they 

smoked. 

During the 1935 Congressional session, Senator Hatch and Congressman 

Dempsey of New Mexico introduced twin bills, S.1615 and H.R.6145, to prohibit 

cannabis in interstate and foreign commerce. While neither of these bills reached the 

floor of Congress, this was the first signal that the Treasury Department officially 

endorsed federal anti-cannabis legislation. 43 Once the necessary state laws were firmly in 

place, the Treasury commenced a series of special meetings in order to develop the 

legislation that would become the Marihuana Tax Act. 

The “Conference on Cannabis Sativa L.” 

On the morning of 14 January 1937, Harry Anslinger and his colleagues convened 

an official “Conference on Cannabis Sativa L.” Highlighting the discursive implications 

of their planning session, consulting Treasury chemist and meeting co-chair Dr. Herbert 

J. Wollner announced that their purpose was “to set up a definition of terms with 

reference to what we generically refer to as the marihuana problem, in a sufficiently clear 

style and sufficiently competent as to be significant from a law enforcement point of 

view.” 44 All those in attendance either worked for the government or functioned as 

official consultants to the Treasury Department. In addition to Anslinger and Wollner, the 

other main participants were chemists, pharmacologists, and lawyers. 

The discussion revolved generally around strategy for the most expedient and 

successful way to present their case before Congress and to preempt potential legal 

challenges. Wollner admitted to his colleagues that “in pursuit of an answer to this 

general problem of defining terms, you get very little satisfaction. For every negative 

statement made there is a positive one made to counteract it.” 45 Indeed, scientists at the 

time possessed only rudimentary knowledge of the complex chemical, biological, and 

pharmacological properties of cannabis. Wollner continued: “We haven’t a problem akin 

to the morphine or opium problem…the state of definitive knowledge [about those 

substances] does not obtain with regard to cannabinol, which, again, some people dispute 

the existence of.” Scientists did not yet know that the primary chemical agent in cannabis, 

out of approximately 400-500, is isolated in the intricate compound delta-9tetrahydrocannabinol, 

known as THC. 46 Ironically, Dr. Wollner would be largely 

responsible for this very discovery in 1942. 47 

43 Bonnie and Whitebread, 119. 

44 “Conference on Cannabis Sativa L.,” Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, 23 April 2005, 

. 

45 William E. Cohen and Darryl S. Inaba, Uppers, Downers, All Arounders: Physical and Mental Effects of 

Psychoactive Drugs, 2nd ed. (Ashland, Oregon: CNS Productions, INC., 1993), 171. 

46 Cohen and Inaba, 171. 

47 “The Positive and Negative Effects of Marijuana,” (25 May 

2005). 



Perhaps sensing Wollner’s underlying frustration, Dr. Lyster Dewey, a 

representative from the Department of Agriculture, found it necessary to give his 

colleagues some historical perspective, and in so doing, set the stage for a heated debate 

about correct terminology. “It is the oldest plant described–at least 2700 B.C. That 

description has come down without question to the present time.” 48 Thus Dr. Wollner was 

inspired to suggest avoiding stigmatized terminology, asking whether “we [can] get away 

from the use of the term marihuana?” 49 Treasury lawyer Alfred L. Tennyson responded 

that “[w]e just happened to mention it as a general term,” prompting Wollner to reply, “I 

think we would be on sounder ground if we left in the scientific name Cannabis Sativa 

Linne.” 50 Assuming that the scientists in the room might be ignorant of legal 

nomenclature, a lawyer from the General Counsel’s office, S.G Tipton, remarked that 

“[i]n a statute you can pick a term and define it as you please. Marihuana struck us as a 

good short form. Its meaning in any other regard would be of no consequence.” 51 

Tipton’s claim that the government had no interest in the propagandistic value of using 

“marihuana” rather than “cannabis” was, however, dubious. Later in the meeting, Tipton 

would reiterate to Anslinger, horror stories in the way of negative publicity. 

By the end of this exchange, Tennyson was convinced of Dr. Wollner’s position 

and asked, “[d]on’t you think, in order to be a little more scientific, we might call it 

Cannabis?” 52 Yet such moderated efforts would prove unable to match the force of 

Anslinger’s anti-cannabis propaganda campaign. 53 Wollner announced that using the term 

‘marihuana’ “is technically unsound and wrong, but that’s up to you [legal] men to 

decide.” 54 Decide they did. R.L. Pierce, a Treasury lawyer, signaled the legal team’s 

direction when he asked rhetorically, “[i]sn’t there some advantage [as far as 

sensationalizing the threat of cannabis] in using the popular term marihuana?” 55 

The draft text of the bill presented to the House of Representatives a few months 

later read in part, “[t]he term ‘marihuana’ includes all parts of the plant Cannabis Sativa 

L…the seeds thereof; the resin extracted from any part of such plant; and every 

compound, manufacture, salt, derivative, mixture, or preparation of such plant, its seeds, 

or resin.” 56 In the minds of policymakers attempting to define terms that would generate 

Congressional support for cannabis prohibition, propaganda value trumped science. 

The Congressional Hearings 

The Treasury Department’s General Counsel, Herman Oliphant, was given the 

task of drafting proposed legislation in order to craft an effective smokescreen for efforts 

48 “Conference on Cannabis Sativa L.” 








56 Committee on Ways and Means, Taxation of Marihuana: Hearings Before the House of Representatives, House of 

Representatives on H.R. 6385, 75th Cong., 1st sess., (Washington D.C.: GPO, April/May 1937), 8. (From this point 

on, I will refer to this as “Taxation of Marihuana”). 

ARI CUSHNER


to outlaw cannabis. Oliphant would incorporate a synthesis of wording from the 1914 

Harrison Narcotics Act, which “required all legitimate handlers of narcotics to register, 

pay an occupational tax, and file information regarding their use of the drugs,” and the 

1934 National Firearms Act, which stipulated “all manufacturers, dealers and importers 

of firearms [read gangsters] should register and pay special taxes ranging from $200 to 

$500.” 57 The text of the bill was then transferred to sympathetic channels in the House of 

Representatives, particularly those with jurisdiction over proposed tax measures. 

On 27 April 1937, Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, North 

Carolina Democrat Robert L. Doughton, introduced H.R.6385—The Marihuana Tax Act. 

Most, if not all, members of the committee were aware that the Department of the 

Treasury and its Bureau of Narcotics concocted the nominal revenue-generating measure 

in order to pave the legal road for the federal prohibition of cannabis. 58 The Treasury 

Department’s Assistant General Counsel, Clinton M. Hester, opened the testimony by 

introducing the bill’s technical features and reading from several newspapers. Included in 

the articles was a recent Washington Times editorial stating that “the fatal marihuana 

cigarette must be recognized as a deadly drug and American children must be protected 

against it.” 59 

Amid the hegemony of the committee hearings that took place on April 27-30 and 

May 4, the Treasury Department produced a staged-managed event where lawyers, 

chemists, and lawmen, among others, controlled the information being transmitted to the 

largely ignorant, though not wholly disinterested, legislative body. After the first day of 

hearings, the remaining time was devoted to smoothing over various wrinkles, while only 

one hostile witnessed testified. Nonetheless, certain textual elements of the hearings 

provide significant insight into the foundational role of the etym-mythological anticannabis 

discursive apparatus. Commissioner Anslinger began his testimony by stating 

that: 

The drug is as old as civilization itself. Homer wrote about it as a drug that made 

men forget their homes, and that turned them into swine. In Persia, a thousand 

years before Christ, there was a religious and military order founded which was 

called the Assassins and they derived their name from the drug called hashish 

which is now known in this country as marihuana. They were noted for their 

cruelty, and the word ‘assassin’ very aptly describes the drug. 60 

After immediately establishing a prominent link between cannabis and the hashish used 

by the legendary Muslim Assassins, Anslinger announced that “marihuana is the same as 

Indian hemp” and reiterated to members of Congress that “we seem to have adopted the 

Mexican terminology, and we call it marihuana.” 61 As if needing to legitimize to himself 

the specious yet crucial connection, Anslinger repeats later in his remarks that 

57 Taxation of Marihuana, 1. 

58 Bonnie and Whitebread, 163-4. 


60 Taxation of Marihuana, 18-9. 




“Marihuana is the same as Indian hemp, hashish.” 62 A short way into his statement, 

Anslinger read from a 1936 Washington Post health editorial column describing 

marijuana as an “intoxicant with the most vicious propensities.” 63 Then returning to his 

edifying theme, the Commissioner described how “history relates that in the eleventh 

century a remarkable sect of Mohammedans established themselves as a powerful 

military unit under the leadership of a sheik who led his marauding band to victory while 

under the influence of hemp.” 64 

Perhaps worried that the connection would somehow still be lost on lawmakers, 

Anslinger also included a reprise of the Assassin etym-mythology in his addendum of 

additional statements submitted in writing: 

The origin of the drug is very ancient. In the year 1090 A.D., the religious and 

military order or sect of the Assassins was founded in Persia and the numerous 

acts of cruelty of this sect were known not only in Asia, but in Europe as well. 

This branch of the Shiite sect, known as Ismalites, was called Hashishan, derived 

from hashish, of the confection of hemp leaves ‘marihuana.’ In fact, from Arabic 

Hashishan we have the English word ‘assassin.’ 65 

Anslinger ends this section with a related yet entirely false legend that “natives of the 

Malay Peninsula have been known, while under its [cannabis’] influence, to rush out and 

engage in violent and bloody deeds…to run ‘amok’ in the Malay Peninsula is 

synonymous with saying one is under the influence of this drug.” 66 A few paragraphs later 

Anslinger again reminds the committee that “it is said that Mohammedan leaders, 

opposing the Crusaders, utilized the services of individuals addicted to the use of hashish 

for secret murders.” 67 Anslinger concludes his additional statements with a well-traveled 

essay by New Orleans parish district attorney Eugene Stanley, “Marihuana as a 

Developer of Criminals,” which further recounts the etymological roots of “assassin.” It 

includes sensationally that “it [hashish] is mentioned in the Arabian Knights.” 68 As part 

of his reliance on the Assassin discourse, much of the supposed evidence Anslinger 

presented to Congress was from his suspiciously thin and haphazard file of drug-related 

crimes. 69 The Commissioner’s favorite tale of marihuana-induced depravity was the 

particularly gruesome case of Victor Licata: 

A twenty-one-year-old boy in FLORIDA killed his parents, two brothers and a 

sister while under the influence of a Marihuana “dream” which he later described 

to law enforcement officials. He told rambling stories of being attacked in his 

bedroom by his ‘uncle, a strange woman and two men and two women,” whom 





66 Taxation of Marihuana, 29. This confusion over the Malaysian etymology of “Amok” is, along with constant 

references to “Egyptian Hashish” and “Indian Hemp,” a further example of how the modern Euro-American 

understanding of cannabis was refashioned in line with prior colonial strategies of classification and control. 




ARI CUSHNER


he said hacked off his arms and otherwise mutilated him; later in the dream he 

saw ‘real blood’ dripping from an axe. 70 

Uninterested in evidence that the accused had a prior history of mental illness, Anslinger 

recorded the Licata story in a manner suggestive of his ingrained fascination with the 

Assassin etym-mythology. Anslinger thus set a biased tone that lawmakers willingly 

emulated. Treasury consultant, Dr. James C. Munch of Temple University, opened the 

second day of Congressional hearings, testifying as an expert witness. Once becoming 

aware, however, that Munch’s experiments had only measured the effects of cannabis on 

dogs and other animals, Representative John McCormack of Massachusetts found it 

appropriate to steer his line of questioning in another direction: 

Mr. McCormack: I understand this drug came in from, or was originally grown 

in, Mexico and Latin American countries. 

Dr. Munch: ‘Marihuana’ is the name for Cannabis in the Mexican 

Pharmacopeia. It was originally grown in Asia. 

Mr. McCormack: That was way back in the oriental days. The word “assassin” 

is derived from an oriental word or name by which the drug was called; is not 

that true? 

Dr. Munch: Yes, sir. 

Mr. McCormack: So, it goes way back to those years when hashish was just a 

species of the same class which is identified by the English translation of an 

oriental word; that is, the word ‘assassin’; is that right? 

Dr. Munch: That is my understanding. 71 

Rep. McCormack’s somewhat confused reasoning is illustrative of how continual 

reverberation of the hashish-Assassin discourse mesmerized bureaucrats, lawmakers, and 

public commentators alike. 

On 4 May, the final day of committee hearings, legislative council to the 

American Medical Association, Dr. William C. Woodward, gave singularly hostile 

testimony against passage of the bill, arguing that it would encumber future medical 

research while unfairly burdening doctors. Woodward was harangued by the committee 

for favoring amendment of the 1914 Harrison Narcotics Act to include cannabis, yet still 

managed to deploy an enlightened condemnation of the government’s nefarious use of 

propagandistic language: 

I use the term “Cannabis” in preference to the word ‘marihuana’, because 

cannabis is the correct term for describing the plant and its products. The term 

“marihuana” is a mongrel word that has crept into this country over the Mexican 

border and has no general meaning, except as it relates to the use of Cannabis 

preparations for smoking. It is not recognized in medicine, and I might say that it 

is hardly even recognized in the Treasury Department. 72 

Treasury Department officials were perfectly deliberate in their decision to use modern 

Mexican slang rather than the long-established scientific terminology. Allies in Congress 


71 Taxation of Marihuana, 47-9, 51. 




and elsewhere happily followed the Treasury’s script. 73 The Marihuana Tax Act sailed 

through the House Ways and Means Committee without objection, after minor 

modifications at the behest of the birdseed and paint industries. As H.R.6909, the bill 

moved up to the full House of Representatives where, in hearings on 10 June, lawmakers 

displayed their ignorance and acceptance of dogma: 

Mr. Snell: What is the bill? 

Mr. Rayburn: I believe it has something to do with something that is called 

marihuana. I believe it is a narcotic of some kind. 

Mr. Fred. F. Vinson: Marihuana is the same as hashish. 74 

The House then dutifully sent the bill into a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on 

Finance. On 12 July the subcommittee, heard and approved an updated version of the 

Act. 75 This formulaic session foreshadowed the unanimous senatorial consent that would 

deliver the bill to President Roosevelt’s desk the following month. The man who 

orchestrated the New Deal was probably pleased about signing the Marihuana Tax Act 

into law on 2 August 1937. 

Assassinating the “Killer Weed” 

In July 1937 The American Magazine ran an article co-authored by Commissioner 

Anslinger and Courtney Cooper entitled “Marihuana, Assassin of Youth.” 76 Anslinger 

and Cooper began their rhetorical attack with a familiar sounding etym-mythological 

refrain establishing the drug’s lethality: 

The sprawled body of a young girl lay crushed on the sidewalk the other day 

after a plunge from the fifth story of a Chicago apartment house. Everyone called 

it suicide, but actually it was murder. The killer was a narcotic known to America 

as marijuana, and to history as hashish. 77 

The authors reminded readers that marijuana “was introduced into the United States from 

Mexico, and swept across America with incredible speed…a record of murder and terror 

running through the centuries.” 78 Perhaps most prescient of all is their final admonition 

that “America now faces a condition in which a new, although ancient, narcotic has come 

73 Attached at the very end of the committee transcripts was a letter authored by Elizabeth Wright, the widow of Dr. 

Hamilton Wright, former U.S. Opium Commissioner and acknowledged progenitor of domestic narcotics legislation 

Mrs. Wright bore the title of Special Representative to the Bureau of Narcotics. Congressmen would read her letter, if 

they chose, as the very last word on the marijuana matter. She wrote: “I am surprised there should be any opposition to 

the Doughton bill…Marihuana is the American form of the familiar and insidious hashish or Indian hemp which has 

been associated in the Orient with crime for many centuries. We know it as the ordinary hempweed which can be 

grown in any backyard in any State in the Union. Its use as a stimulant or narcotic is, however, of recent date. It was 

introduced about 10 years ago by Mexican peddlers in the form of cigarettes. Its use has spread like wildfire and is 

associated with crime in its most vicious aspects” (Taxation of Marihuana, 124). 

74 Bonnie and Whitebread, 173-4. 

75 Subcomittee of the Committee on Finance United States Senate, Taxation of Marihuana, Hearings Before the 

Subcomittee of the Committee on Finance United States Senate, H.R. 6909, 75th Cong., 1st sess., (Washington D.C.: 

GPO, 12 July 1937). 

76 Harry J. Anslinger and Courtney Cooper, “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” The American Magazine (July 1937), 19, 

150. 

77 Anslinger and Cooper, 19, 150. 

78 Anslinger and Cooper, 19, 150. 

ARI CUSHNER


to live next door to us.” 79 Just as Sheik Sabbah reputedly enticed his Assassins into his 

service, Commissioner Anslinger lulled other anti-cannabis crusaders into combat with 

repetitive use of the etym-mythological discourse. 

An interwoven set of sociopolitical and economic factors converged in the early 

twentieth century and, at the height of the Great Depression, while the international 

community mobilized for war, coalesced into a federal legislative assault on cannabishemp. 

A diffusion of propagandized information about the supposed horrors of this new 

narcotic formed the foundational discursive apparatus around which a popular image of 

the “Killer Weed” was constructed and reified. Yet lacking solid evidence of the weed’s 

dangerous effects, Commissioner Anslinger and his allies structured their discursive 

assault on cannabis around the conveniently prearranged etym-mythological constellation 

that conflated murderous ‘Orientals’ with hashish use. 

This centuries-old discourse facilitated the hegemonic amplification of racially 

prejudiced ideologies, as lawmakers exploited the fact that the same substance that 

reputedly drove Muslim infidels to kill Christians was also present within the recreational 

habits of unwanted Mexican immigrants. This highly potent discursive formation of the 

“Killer Weed” permeated various structures of power and radiated from specific 

controlling apparatuses including the press, Congress, and eventually mainstream public 

opinion. 

In 1937 the United States Treasury Department finally came to terms with its 

budding green nemesis and, at the same time, strategically set the parameters of future 

debate. 80 Liberal reformers would not begin to resurrect cannabis until after Harry J. 

Anslinger’s retirement in 1962. The etym-mythology of “assassin,” meanwhile, found its 

79 Anslinger and Cooper, 19, 150. Harry J. Anslinger and Courtney Cooper, “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth,” The 

American Magazine (July 1937), 19, 150. Tellingly, “Marihuana, The Assassin of Youth” was also the original title of 

the now cult-classic, 1937 Dwain Esper film since facetiously re-titled Reefer Madness. The now somewhat humorous 

movie was part of a series of films, including the 1936 “Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell,” directed and produced 

by Esper with apparent assistance from Harry Anslinger’s FBN. While contemporary society generally refers to the 

1930s and 1940s propaganda campaign as “Reefer Madness,” the propagandists themselves regarded cannabis as the 

“Assassin of Youth.” 

80 For instance, on 5 December 1938, in room 3003 of the Internal Revenue Building, Commissioner Anslinger and Dr. 

Wollner once again presided over a cannabis conclave, this time far more comprehensive than the 1937 strategy 

session. No lawyers were among the approximately twenty-five men who, representing a wide cross-section of 

government and officialdom, included affiliates of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Bureau of Plant Industry, 

Bureau of Customs, Public Health Service, and the New York State Chief of Drug Control. This time around, Treasury 

Department officials touted their summit on cannabis-hemp as a “Marihuana Conference.” No longer under pressure 

to make facts fit with desired federal policy, Dr. Wollner felt free to announce triumphantly that cannabis “peculiarly 

enough, had withstood competent attack for an extensive period of time.” That is, until he and his colleagues 

succeeded in vanquishing their enemy. University of Wisconsin Professor of Agronomy, A.H. Wright, also sensed the 

newfound ability to speak candidly, stating to fellow conferees that “I would like to inject this thought here for I am 

sure it will do no harm, and that is that hemp… is not a large industry. It has had its ups and downs, but it has been an 

American industry since Colonial times, and it is one of the oldest crops that we have in the United States” 

(“Marihuana 

Conference,” Schaffer Library of Drug Policy. 25 May 2005. 

(25 May 2005). Wright’s comment thus illustrates 

how the modern cannabis canvas might be colored quite differently—perhaps with the red, white, and blue of 

Washingtonian patriotism—under a different set of circumstances, as was the case briefly during the government’s 

1942 “Hemp For Victory” campaign when Midwestern farmers were encouraged to grow cannabis as a strategic 

wartime supply. 



way to the top of a CIA training manual, A Study on Assassination, apparently produced 

as a guidebook for political murder. 81 Today, amid the U.S. Government’s interconnected 

“war on drugs,” “war on terror,” and persistent concern with immigration and border 

control, society is grappling more than ever with the profound repercussions of the etymmythological 

discourse that attended passage of the 1937 Marihuana Act. 

81 “A Study of Assassination—A Transcription,” Online National Security Archive—George Washington University. 

17 March 2006. . 

ARI CUSHNER

Not One Man in America 

Believed Him 

On the Historical Misunderstanding 

of John Adams, with 

an Apologia 

Daniel Frontino Elash

ne thing becomes apparent in reading through the correspondence between 

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. As the two reconciled years of personal acrimony 

with each other, after long lives spent together involved in revolutionary politics, they 

truly felt that few really understood them anymore. As Jefferson put it in a letter to 

Adams, “…why am I dosing you with these Ante-diluvian topics? Because I am glad to 

have some one to whom they are familiar, and who will not receive them as if I dropped 

from the moon.” 1 Adams felt much the same, in a way that both caused him personal 

anguish and doggedly obscured his legacy across the centuries since his desperate last 

minute efforts to come to a common understanding with Jefferson. 2 Adams’ problem, put 

as simply as possible, was that he had one foot firmly in the classical tradition of Greece 

and Rome, and the other in a future world of an enlightened population governing itself 

in democratic republics. He thus straddled worlds that did not always make immediate 

sense to each other. This was true in his time and has only become truer ever since, as 

classical education has retreated from the core of an eighteenth century schoolboy’s 

education to a collegiate discipline involving years of exclusive study and, so often, 

accompanying years of student debt and monastic living. 3 As a result, historians have 

largely misunderstood John Adams’ legacy as a staunch believer in republican 

government, because of the central role of the classics in his thinking and writing. 

A rigorous if not necessarily exhaustive survey of works on Adams and his beliefs 

supports the assessment that scholars of American history have almost universally 

ignored classical influences on Adams’ thought. Such ignorance, willful or unwitting, has 

contributed to the propagation of the myth that Adams was a monarchist in particular, 

and pro-aristocracy in an antidemocratic sense more generally. Some historians, while 

discussing Adams, his writings, and his legacy, never mention classical factors such as 

1 Lester J. Cappon, ed., The Adams-Jefferson Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 434. 

2 Adams discussed how due to a lack of understanding of his politics, “…I and my Sons and all my Friends will be 

hated throughout New England…” in his letter to Jefferson of 3 May 1812, Cappon, Letters 303-4. He complained to 

Jefferson in his letter of 9 July 1813 that “I have been so unfortunate as never to be able to make myself understood” on 

the topic of natural aristocracy (Cappon, Letters 351-2), indeed the source of much of his bad political reputation, as 

will be discussed further on. Adams held forth at some length on the exact nature of how he was misunderstood so as to 

be construed a monarchist in his letter to Jefferson of 15 July, 1813 (Cappon, Letters 357-8). 

3 For the prevalence of the classics in American education prior to the Revolution, see for examples Clinton Rossiter, 

Seedtime of the Republic: The Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt, Brace and 

Co., 1953), 122, 356-7. For an assertion of the “undeniably important” role the classics curriculum played in fomenting 

the American Revolution on colonial college campuses, see Lewis Leónard Tucker, “Centers of Sedition: Colonial 

Colleges and the American Revolution,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 91 (1979) 16-34, page 

21. For the decline in classical education after the American Revolution, see Meyer Reinhold, Classica Americana: The 

Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1984), particularly Chapter 6, 

174-95; for opposition to classical instruction in the same time period, see Reinhold, Classica, Chapter 4, 116-37. Carl 

J. Richard contradicts Reinhold in the last chapter of his book The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the 

American Enlightenment (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 196-231, in which he describes the anticlassics 

campaign and cites evidence of use of Latin and Greek by the American Revolutionary generation as evidence 

against a decline. Of course, that does not disprove a decline in classical pedagogy after that generation, as Jefferson 

complains of to Adams in the passage cited in Footnote 1, in a letter dated 5 July 1814.


Rome or Greece, or writers such as Polybius or Livy, anywhere in their discussions. 4 This 

has the effect of propagating misunderstandings of both Adams and of his positions. 

Others will mention such influences in passing, but not credit or situate them as central to 

Adams’ thinking. 5 This has the effect of perpetuating misunderstandings of Adams’ 

4 James Truslow Adams, The Adams Family (New York: Hillary House, 1957). While absolving Adams of the 

monarchist charge (104) Truslow never mentions classical influences on his thinking. James H. Hutson, John Adams 

and the Diplomacy of the American Revolution (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1980) credits Adams’ 

Defence of the US Constitutions with being the principal architect of the US Constitution, without ever mentioning any 

of the classical materials found in it. George Gibbs, ed. Memoirs of the Administrations of Washignton and John 

Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury. 2 vol. (New York: William van der 

Norden, 1846) discusses “attacks” on Adams’ character without ever describing them (I.377-8, II.364). Ralph Adams 

Brown, The Presidency of John Adams (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1975) shows how someone can be 

generous to Adams’ legacy simply by not being harsh (12, 16), though never mentioning the classics again contributes 

to a distortion of Adams’ views on, for example, a strong executive (210-1). Stephen G. Kurtz, The Presidency of John 

Adams: The Collapse of Federalism 1795-1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957) never mentions 

the classics, offers a superficial treatment of the ideologies underlying the monarchism/aristocracy charge (402-3), and 

while acknowledging that aspersions of Adams’ opinions were mischaracterizations (98), blames this on his 

relationship with Hamilton (98-9). Catherine Drinker Bowen, John Adams and the American Revolution (Boston: 

Little, Brown and Co., 1950) does not discuss classical influences on Adams in over 600 pages. Nor does Walt Brown, 

John Adams and the American Press: Politics and Journalism at the Birth of the Republic (Jefferson NC: McFarland & 

Co. Inc., 1995), though discussing Defence and Davila (68, 102) as well as the monarchism charge (2). John Ferling, 

John Adams: A Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992) has Adams holding pro-monarchist views (306- 

7), and as reacting against the French revolution (287-290), without ever once mentioning Rome or Greece. Zoltan 

Haraszti, John Adams and the Prophets of Progress (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952) maintains that 

Adams’ views were all determined by class interest (26-34), discussing English thinkers and even Marx without ever 

mentioning Rome or Greece. He ultimately absolves Adams of being a monarchist (42), but not before presenting 

pages of discussion on the monarchist charge and implying the contrary (37-42). John R. Howe Jr., The Changing 

Political Thought of John Adams (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966) accurately discusses Adams’ views on 

“natural aristocracy” (133-7), but his attribution of those views to American economic development reveals the 

author’s own biases. That and his explanation that Adams’ bad reputation was because “…he belonged to no party” (5), 

coupled with his utter lack of reference to Rome or Greece, serve to reiterate his failure to properly understand Adams. 

While relatively nuanced, Richard Brookhiser, America’s First Dynasty: the Adamses 1735-1918 (New York: The Free 

Press, 2002) sums up Defence as being anti-unicameralist (43), and holds that Adams’ understanding of “natural 

aristocracy” was an acceptance of both aristocracy as such (43) and monarchism more generally (193). He summarizes 

Adams’ writing as “unreadable” (183), and never mentions its classical contents anywhere. Edmund S. Morgan, The 

Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University Press of 

Virginia, 1976) is dismissive of Adams generally (4), emphasizing character flaws (6-8 for examples). He discusses 

Adams’ appearance of monarchial advocacy as an embarrassment to Washington (46), but he never once mentions 

classical content or influence in any of Adams’ thought. Adrienne Koch, ed. Adams and Jefferson: ‘Posterity Must 

Judge.’ Berkeley Series in American History (Chicago: Rand McNally and Co., 1963) almost immediately 

acknowledges the loss of Adams’ legacy as a serious historical issue (2), but her examination of issues like Defence 

(25-7), monarchism (30-6), and aristocracy and equality (51-55) all attribute misunderstandings to Adams’ 

contemporary political situation, and never mention classical content or influences. 

5 For example, Correa Moylan Walsh, The Political Science of John Adams: A Study in the Theory of Mixed 

Government and the Bicameral System (New York and London: The Knickerbocker Press, 1915), holds that it took 

English political thinkers to perfect the flawed and incomplete ideas they inherited from the ancients (22-3, plus notes). 

While he does give the Roman republican system some credit where it is due (95), he disputes its overall soundness in 

quite polemic terms (38), holding it to be representative of “primitive” times (106 plus note), and he repeatedly asserts 

its defectiveness (182, 231). As for Adams’ alleged monarchism, Walsh seems to uphold and perpetuate the myth, for 

examples on pages 276, 281-2, 284. Edward Handler, America and Europe in the Political Thought of John Adams 

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964) entirely misunderstands Adams (22-9), concluding that Adams was the 

“political theorist of an American ‘restoration’” (29). His utter incomprehension of the classical influences on the 

thinking he misunderstands is apparent in his characterization of Greece and Rome as “horrors” (45), in his 

dismissiveness (54, 58), and in his doubt as to the applicability of classical models at all (61-2). Merrill D. Peterson, 

Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue, Mercer Univ. Lamar Memorial Lectures no. 19, (Athens GA: 

University of Georgia Press, 1976), while directly absolving Adams of being a monarchist (56), still holds him to be 

pro-aristocratic (63), and while he drops Cicero’s name (4, 95, 125) he never gives the classics credit for influencing 

Adams’ thought, as evidenced by lack of mention in his discussions of Discourses on Davila (38-43, 51-2). Manning 

J. Dauer, The Adams Federalists (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1953) offers an excellent treatment of Adams’ 

DANIEL FRONTINO ELASH


points of view, by ostensibly explaining him without providing the classical context that 

is critical to understand his thinking. Very few historians actually give full faith and 

credit, as it were, to the large role that Greek and Roman writers of classical history 

played in informing Adams’ and others’ thoughts on society, governance and politics. 6 

Such writers affirm that Adams is indeed properly understandable, where one chooses to 

delve into the classical components of his thought, a vital perspective without which 

Adams can truly seem as bad as his reputation alleges. 

Why have so many historians missed the mark entirely on the classical origins of 

the controversial material in Adams’ writings? The liberal use of the Latin language 

throughout important primary sources can present significant hurdles—even if much of it 

is simply quotation of classical scholars such as Cicero and Tacitus, readily available in 

conveniently-ubiquitous, English-language Penguin Classic editions. 7 At the same time, 

opinions and writings (37-43, 44, 50, 51-52, 61, 83-4, 86), while almost perfectly divorcing them from their classical 

context (41). John A. Schutz and Douglass Adair, eds., The Spur of Fame: Dialogues of John Adams and Benjamin 

Rush, 1805-1813 (San Marino: The Huntington Library, 1966), mention the classics in the context of the educational 

debate (8-9), without connecting them to Adams’ writings (8, 174, 220) or opinions (174). Even an Adams 

rehabilitationist like Gilbert Chinard, Honest John Adams (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1933), who would be well 

served by an examination of the classics in Adams’ thinking, only barely mentions them in discussion of his writings 

(ix-xi, 90, 203-14), and does so in such a bare and peripheral way as to reveal his own lack of understanding. Robert A. 

East, John Adams (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979) shows his disdain for Adams (66-7, 71) and the classics in equal 

measure, in a way that both perpetuates the monarchist smears against Adams while obscuring the classical influences 

on the writings upon which those charges were based, in the very same breath (71). David McCullough, John Adams 

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001) understands that Adams was no monarchist (375), but even his discussions of 

Adams views (409-410, 421) barely mention Cicero (375) and never Polybius. His recognition of classical influence on 

Adams is made most explicit where he says that “[t]o Adams nothing had changed about human nature since the time 

of the ancients” (377). However, he does not extend that understanding to his discussion of Adams’ views on “natural 

aristocracy” (421). Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: W.W. 

Norton and Co., 1993) discusses Defence and Davila at length without ever mentioning their classical content (145-53, 

165-73), and while the book offers a picture of a bust of Adams as an “American Cicero” (178), it never seriously 

discusses classical sources or thinkers as influences in Adams’ work. Ellis misses important classical elements 

underlying apparently topical issues; for example, in Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York: 

Alfred A. Knopf, 2001) he sees the few-versus-many debate between Adams and Jefferson in polemic terms, when in 

fact it is the republican people-senate debate stretching back to antiquity (230-3). Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New 

York: The Viking Press, 1963), barely offers a Roman allusion in a four-page discussion of the revolutionary thought 

of John Adams (114-7). Cappon makes one bare passing reference to “classics” in 18 pages of introduction to over 600 

pages rich in Latin and Greek language and reference (Cappon, Letters xxxi-xlix). 

6 J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition 

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) properly contextualizes Adams’ thinking on separation of powers in its 

classical context (128), and likewise his political thinking in general (317) and on natural aristocracy (395). He 

properly characterizes Defence as misunderstood to advocate aristocracy (526). He discusses the abandonment of virtue 

as a republican foundation (526-7), fears that the Order of the Cincinnati would become a hereditary aristocracy (527- 

8), and the Roman content of American political discourse (529). Not least, he properly characterizes Adams’ classical 

republicanism in a Roman context (531). Likewise Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American 

Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967) gives due credit to classical influences on the thinking of the 

founders generally (23-6), including on that of Thomas Jefferson (24-5) and John Adams in particular (26), though he 

does quote Johnson in agreement with his allegation that much of it generally is merely “window dressing” (24). He 

goes on to hold that the classics are more illustrative than determinative in such thinking, and credits Enlightenment 

rationalism with a more direct sort of influence (26). To contest that in its fullness is beyond the scope of this paper— 

though the assertion of a barrier between classical and Enlightenment thought is quite contestable indeed. Suffice it 

here to say that the evidence in Adams’ own writings shows that the classics are central to his thinking, whatever 

descriptor one cares to assign to their function in that thought, as this paper will proceed to illustrate. 

7 For example, see John Adams, Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, Volume 1 

(Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1979), wherein he supplies lengthy quotes in Latin without translation (226-30, 242). Adams 

does it again in his Discourses on Davila, for example see The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United 

States, Vol. 6 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), 248, 263-4. For an example from the Jefferson- 

Not One Man in America Believed Him


classicists can just as easily fail to see the very American purposes that the use of the 

classics served for its founders. Perhaps they look at these texts as sources of republican 

ideas, or at least of a learnèd gravitas, but at any rate as derivative expressions of earlier 

ideas that are purer the further back one goes. 8 This is in stark contradiction to the 

founders’ use of the classics as critical but imperfect tools that had to be adapted to the 

purposes of the American Revolution. 9 Without a wider understanding in each other’s 

fields, it is possible and perhaps even likely that both sets of scholars have missed the 

central importance of the classics to John Adams’ revolutionary thinking, and moreover, 

the significance of that thinking to the American republican experiment. 

A fuller consideration of Adams’ writings illustrates the gap between his own 

understanding of his ideas and others’ understandings of those same ideas. For example, 

counting and sorting every classical reference in the Adams-Jefferson correspondence 

clearly reveals both the large amount and the intellectual importance of the classical 

material therein. There are literally dozens of such references in their correspondence, 

particularly after 1812 when each was formally retired from public life and after years of 

bitter silence between the two. A closer look reveals that while a majority of these 

references were allusions, brief references, name-dropping, and other such comments 

made in passing or aside from the point being made, many of them were also germane to 

the topic at hand, if not the topic itself. There are at least eighty-two classical allusions 

and references in the letters. 10 Both men possessed an obviously high level of classical 

education, an education that they felt was becoming a thing of the past—an observation 

with which at least some modern scholars agree. These classical references also 

sometimes indicate a particular topic of shared interest or passion, and revealing these 

topics is a major reward for the labor of counting and sorting them. Classical references 

are strewn throughout the letters, and it may be that counting these and noting the clusters 

will likewise reveal the most fruitful areas for more in-depth work. 

Aside from education, two topics emerge as subjects of sustained interest in the 

classical components of the Adams-Jefferson correspondence: the origins and 

development of monotheism, and the origins and development of aristocracy. There are 

nineteen points in the correspondence at which Adams or Jefferson draw on or make 

classical references in the course of discussing the topic of monotheism. 11 Adams and 

Adams correspondence, see the letters of 27 June – 12 October 1813, in which they each push the other to achievement 

in Greek and Latin (Cappon, Letters, 335-86). 

8 M.N.S. Sellers discusses the situation in the introduction to his book, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in 

the United States Constitution (New York: New York University Press, 1994), in which he states that as a classics 

undergraduate who earned a Doctorate in History and went on to work in a faculty of law, he set out to write a book 

that bridges the limits of perception in each respective field, as it relates to the others (see page x of the introduction). 

9 Adams was acutely aware that past republican failures left the American project open to criticism. He countered that 

learning the lessons of the past and adapting provisions accordingly was the answer (Davila, 397-9). In fact, his whole 

Defence is aimed at the question (see Preface, i-xxii). In late 1819, Jefferson and Adams agreed that there was little of 

actual virtue in the Roman system, as evidenced by its decline into despotism (Cappon, Letters 549-51). They were also 

concerned about NapoLeón as illustrative of republican failure (Cappon, Letters 434-9, 596-7). 

10 Cappon, Letters 291, 295, 298, 308, 314-5, 317, 321-3, 325-6, 328, 337, 350-1, 356, 399, 432, 435, 438, 451-2, 455- 

6, 462, 471, 483, 486-8, 493, 498-9, 503, 509-10, 517, 522, 524-5, 533, 536-9, 542, 548-51, 559-61, 567, 569-71, 574, 

576, 580-1, 584-5, 588, 590, 599, 602, 610, 613-4. 

11 Cappon, Letters, 359-60, 363, 364, 378-86, 389-91, 394, 396, 402-6, 410-3, 428, 432-3, 445, 491, 506, 530, 568,593- 

4. 



Jefferson explored the origins of monotheism, both within and outside of the Christian 

tradition. If they did not specifically foresee a transition from a religiously-based to a 

“post-God” public sphere, they at least forecast the spreading of Enlightenment ideals 

and the decline of religious mysticism as going hand in hand. Both agreed that this was a 

most desirable goal, and even necessary for the long term success of democracy. 12 There 

are also an additional fourteen points in the correspondence at which Adams or Jefferson 

drew on or made classical references in the course of discussing the topic of aristocracy. 13 

This conversational thread offers insight into Adams’ personal theories on the existence 

of a natural aristocracy (i.e. of influence if not merit as opposed to hereditary), and its use 

as a component in the basis for republican government. 

Both the aristocracy and the monotheism threads are visibly clustered at specific 

nodes in the correspondence, whereas the allusions are spread throughout. It is worth 

noting that not all allusions are quotes of other people—both Adams and Jefferson have 

their own things to say, particularly in Latin but also in ancient Greek. All three of these 

topics directly relate to Adams’ and Jefferson’s educations and to their shared concerns 

about the establishment and governance of a viable republic (or set of republics) in 

America. Due to space and time constraints, this paper will look most closely at the 

aristocracy thread, though all three are in fact wound up together. Thus, while some of 

the classical materials in the sources fall beyond the scope of this paper, their interwoven 

nature brings up deeper questions that deserve a fuller consideration, and doing justice to 

even this limited topic requires acknowledgement of that. 

The immediate reason Adams discussed aristocracy with Jefferson was because of 

the old idea that John Adams was secretly a monarchist. Jefferson had played a major 

role in that misperception, and so it was one of the things they aimed to reconcile in their 

correspondence. It mattered very much that the issue was seriously framed and used as a 

cudgel against Adams’ character in the partisan context of the nasty presidential 

campaign Jefferson ran and won against Adams in 1799. These attacks had drawn on 

Adams’ writings, particularly Discourses on Davila and also Defence of the 

Constitutions. Adams seethed for years in the bitterness of the betrayal, not only of 

himself by an old friend, but also of the sacred mission of the American Revolution for 

which both had fought so long and hard. 14 In other words, the slanderous charges that 

Adams secretly wanted to impose a monarchy and an aristocracy on America, that he 

would crown himself and attempt to pass it on to his son John Quincy Adams, and that 

his writings were the proof, were not just an assault on him personally, but on the ideals 

he understood the founders to more or less collectively hold in common. 15 After all, the 

Defence was meant specifically to articulate the ideals upon which the American republic 

had been based at least since the Federal Constitution had replaced the dysfunctional 

Articles of Confederation in 1787. 

12 A particularly scathing indictment of organized religion’s historical obstruction of the process by Adams may be 

found in Cappon, Letters, 351. An example of Jefferson’s radical revisionism of Christianity may be found on pages 

383-6. However, he cannot do it without quoting Greek (386). In fact, he sees science as the salvation of humanity 

(391). Adams’ view on rational religion is well-articulated on pages 445-6. 

13 Cappon, Letters, 335, 337, 352, 355-6, 365-6, 370-2, 375-7, 387-8, 390-2, 401, 406, 437, 549, and 551. 

14 Ellis, Brothers, 167-70. 

15 Ellis, Brothers, 209. 



Adams mentioned Herodotus, Cicero and Tacitus in his Preface to the Defence of 

the US Constitutions as ancient authorities on mixed-government democracies. 16 

However, it is no secret that his ideas came right out of book six of Polybius’ writings. 

Two sections found in Volume 1 of Defence made this clear, complete with Adams’ own 

source citations. 17 Where Tacitus offered descriptions of various ancient systems as they 

existed, Polybius offered a holistic theory of how a cohesive government of component 

parts may be set up—much more useful to the tasks at hand of America’s founders. 18 

Polybius was a Greek political hostage and observer at Rome for some twenty years at 

the height of the Roman Republic. He set out to describe the Roman political system to 

which he was a witness. In his writings, Polybius theorized three political cycles—that of 

a monarchy, an aristocracy, and a democracy. He believed that each grew out of the 

decline of the previous one from its virtuous to its degenerate form. More specifically, he 

claimed that a monarchy would corrupt into tyranny, and at length be replaced by an 

aristocracy. The aristocracy would in time decline into an oligarchy, until it was no 

longer sufferable and was replaced by a democracy. Democracy in its turn would give 

way to mob rule, and the cycle would be completed in a curative return to monarchy. 19 

Polybius personally attributed the original implementation of the idea of a mixed 

government, in which each of these three elements coexist in the same government and 

balance power between them by providing checks on the abuse of power by each, to the 

Spartan ruler Lycurgus. 20 

Polybius maintained that the Romans drew the same conclusions from their own 

mistakes, something America’s founders were happily spared for being able to draw on 

these ancient lessons as a gift of their classical educations. 21 He went on to describe the 

Roman system as a “mixed constitution” government, in which two consuls played the 

monarchial role, while the Senate took on the role of an aristocracy, and the people held 

their own supreme powers. 22 Polybius then discussed interactions between component 

bodies of the Roman system, specifically praising the strength of the whole system. 23 It is 

very important to note here that these elements only played the roles of the respective 

social orders in a governmental system; they were not the orders themselves in society. 

The two consuls acted in the role of kings although they were not entitled to absolute 

monarchial power, and likewise with the senate in the role of an “aristocracy.” Adams 

surely thought he could not be clearer that the Senate playing the role of an aristocracy in 

a mixed-government system was not the same thing as a European-style, hereditary (and 

thus not natural, and thus corrupt) aristocracy. After all, he pointed right at the relevant 

passages in Polybius that made this clear. 24 

16 Adams, Defence, Herodotus on p. ii, Cicero and Tacitus on xix. 

17 Adams, Defence, Letters XXX and XXXI, see in particular page 169. 

18 As discussed by Adams, Defence, Letter XXXVII 

19 Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (London: Penguin Books, 1979) Book 6, Chapters 

3-9. 

20 Polybius, Rise, 6:10. Adams takes up the case of Lycurgus and Sparta (Lacedaemon) in Defense, Letter XL. 

21 Polybius, Rise, 6:10. 

22 Polybius, Rise, 6:11-4. 

23 Polybius, Rise, 6:16-7. 

24 He also makes it clear in his later correspondence with Jefferson (but not without reaching for Latin and Greek in 

illustration of his points). For examples, see Cappon, Letters, 352, 355, 365-6, and 370-2. 



Defense drew on such ancient and universally respected sources as Polybius, as 

well as those of other, more recent republics and theoreticians, to drive home the point 

that the US Constitution, far from being a “wild eyed experiment” in fact was “state of 

the art” political science backed up by millennia of thought and practice. Adams opened 

Defense with a historical summary, not only speaking for a mixed government but also 

veritably warning of the consequences of a failure to provide for one properly. “Without 

three orders, and an effectual balance between them, in every American constitution, it 

must be destined to frequent unavoidable revolutions…” noted Adams at the start of his 

work. 25 This statement hardly seems to be that of a monarchist. In addition, Adams 

noted, “it would be better for America… [to] go through all the revolutions of the 

Grecian states, rather than establish an absolute monarchy among them…” 26 

Furthermore, he continued: 

It is become a kind of fashion among writers, to admit, as a maxim, that if you 

could always be sure of a wise, active, and virtuous prince, monarchy would the 

best of governments. But this is so far from being admittable, that it will forever 

remain true, that a free government has a great advantage over a simple 

monarchy. 27 

The rest of the paragraph sang the praises of a mixed government, comprised of three 

distinct branches—an oft-reiterated theme in Adams’ writings, and most obviously not 

the stuff of crypto-monarchism. 

The first volume of Adams’ Defense was rushed off of the presses and into the 

hands of delegates arriving for the Convention that was to eventually recommend 

adoption of the Constitution. 28 The Romans were widely considered, of every historical 

and contemporary republic studied by the founders (and Adams looked at them all), to 

have been the ones to most effectively solve the very problem facing American 

constitutional framers—how to assure that a republic once established did not degenerate 

into the perpetual bloodshed and revolving dictatorships of political instability. 29 As 

Adams put it, “The institutions now made in America will never wholly wear out for 

thousands of years: it is of the last importance then that they should begin right; if they 

set out wrong, they will never be able to return, unless it be by accident, to the right 

25 Adams, Defence, vii. 

26 Adams, Defence, vii. 

27 Adams, Defence, viii. 

28 Sellers, Republicanism, 33 and 38. It is notable, however, that today we think of the tripartite division of powers of 

government in the executive, legislative and judicial, when in the mind of John Adams it was clearly in the executive 

and each chamber of Congress, the Senate playing the aristocratic role and the House that of the people, as discussed 

above. Ironically, it is the judiciary that is the most monarchial in the nature and use of its powers in the American 

constitutional system. 

29 As the Tables of Contents of all three volumes of the Defence makes clear, Adams considered everything from the 

evolution of English division of powers in Letter XX, to the little Republic of San Marino in Italy in Letter III, and all 

time periods from the ancient Greeks such as in Letters XXX-XXXIII to political theorists who were his 

contemporaries, such as Locke in Letter LIV and Montesquieu in Letter XXVIII.A warning of the dire, bloody 

consequences of the degeneration of the republic—in the form of a historical laundry list of disasters—are among the 

very first things a reader finds in Adams’ Defence, iv-vi. In other words, it is one of the first things he would have 

Convention delegates consider. 



path.” 30 It is perhaps telling that the precedent he gives for these remarkable assertions is 

the destruction of the western Roman Empire by German tribes, and the subsequent 

endurance of the idea of mixed government in Europe, degenerate as it was under 

feudalism. 31 

For their part, delegates to the Convention felt unmitigated gratitude to the 

otherwise-absent Adams, who was nevertheless omnipresent in the form of his Defense. 

As Benjamin Rush wrote to Richard Price from Philadelphia on 2 June, 1787: 

Mr. Adams's book has diffused such excellent principals amoung us, that there is 

little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compounded federal legislature. Our 

illustrious minister in this gift to his country has done us more service than if he had 

obtained alliances for us with all the nations of Europe. 32 

Meanwhile, the unresolved and yet unutterable polemic of slavery as a doubtful basis for 

a free republic was in the back of everyone’s minds. Slavery gave a stark and foreboding 

sense of perilous duty to what were, perhaps, otherwise-sanguine debates over whether 

one or two legislative chambers were preferable. 33 At least some of that foreboding was 

to come true by the 1860s, though reading the Adams-Jefferson correspondence, one 

might wonder that it was put off for so long. As Jefferson wondered to Adams in his 

letter of 22 January 1821: 

Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger? …Are we then to see 

again Athenian and Lacedaemonian confederacies? To wage another 

Peloponnesian war to settle the ascendancy between them? Or is this the tocsin of 

a merely servile war? That remains to be seen: but not I hope by you or me. 34 

Adams replied on 3 February of that year: 

Slavery in this Country I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a 

Century. …I might probably say I had seen Armies of Negroes marching and 

countermarching in the air, shining in Armour. I have been so terrified with this 

Phenomenon that I constantly said in former times to the Southern Gentlemen, I 

cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. 35 

As we all know, it turned out that the republic did survive the crisis when it came. 

Nevertheless, the stability of the republic is something Americans have never ceased 

worrying about and guarding, each party in its own ways, to this day. 36 

30 Adams, Defence, xxi. 

31 Adams, Defence, xx-xxi. 

32 Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, 4 vols., (New Haven: Yale University Press, 

1937), v.3, 33. 

33 See for example, Rufus King’s ruminations at the Convention, that “…[i]f [the Southern states] threaten to separate 

now in case injury shall be done them, will their threats be less urgent or effectual, when force shall back their 

demands. Even in the intervening period there will be no point in time at which they will not be able to say, do us 

justice or we will separate….” Farrand, Records, v.1, 596. 

34 Cappon, Letters, 570. 


36 A fine example may be found in the 2000 presidential election, unprecedented and effectively decided by a Supreme 

Court ruling, amid much talk of a constitutional crisis if the Florida ballot situation were not somehow resolved and no 



At any rate, on the cusp of dangerous times, delegates to the Constitutional 

assembly readily embraced Adams’ contribution. It is not difficult to imagine them 

skimming the book-length work among the many other materials at hand for them to 

consider, spending more time with the introduction and conclusion and glancing through 

the intervening chapters on the likes of Polybius and the Roman Republic and Greek citystates 

with a knowing nod—after all, anyone who had been to grade school had studied 

some Latin. Sellers makes the interesting point that Adams (and many other writers of the 

time) did not even feel it necessary to offer translations of their Latin quotations—one 

could look them up if not just read them, or translate them for oneself. 37 Such a rhetorical 

underpinning must have also provided a gravitas that delegates would find both useful 

and comforting as they went home and faced sharp questions from skeptical constituents 

apprehensive of a new, central government with too much power, too remote from their 

daily lives. Defence played an important role in getting the Constitution adopted. 

Everyone loved the Defence—at least everyone who embraced the Constitution, 

including Jefferson. Jefferson wrote to Adams from Paris on 6 Feb. 1787, stating “I thank 

you much for the valuable present of your book [the Defence]. The subject of it is 

interesting and I am sure it is well treated. I shall take it on my journey that I may have 

time to study it.” 38 Lest that seem mere politeness, he replied again, having read the book 

by 23 February of the same year, “I have read your book with infinite satisfaction and 

improvement. It will do great good in America. It’s [sic] learning and it’s [sic] good 

sense will I hope make it an institute for our politicians, old as well as young.” The only 

reconsideration he asked of Adams regards whether Congress be a legislative or 

diplomatic assembly. He added that he had personally taken steps to assure a goodquality 

translation into French. 39 These are hardly the words and acts of a dissenter. 

So, what exactly happened to the reputation that won Adams election as 

America’s first Vice President and second President? In short, the French Revolution 

happened. American revolutionaries were delighted—it seemed that the universal 

promise of America’s own revolution would indeed spread across the Earth, and that a 

new Age of Reason would dawn on a humanity freed from monarchial-aristocratic 

chains. It was not that Adams did not harbor these same hopes. As early as 1787 he had 

written to Jefferson that “All Europe resounds with Projects for reviving, States and 

Assemblies, I think: and France is taking the lead.—How such assemblies will mix, with 

Simple Monarchies, is the question.” 40 A propensity to mix them by bloodshed left 

Adams with grave doubts. In his 1812 note prepended to the Discourses on Davila, 

written to express those doubts, Adams wondered in writing that he himself: 

clear winner emerged. For a summary, see Christine Barbour and Gerald C. Wright, “What's at Stake in the Contested 

Presidential Election of 2000?,” Houghton Mifflin Textbook Site for “Keeping the 

Republic,” n.d. [website]; available from 

. 

37 Sellers, Republicanism, 21. 


39 Cappon, Letters, 174-5. 




…had the courage to oppose and publish his own opinions to the universal 

opinion of America, and, indeed, of all mankind. Not one man in America 

believed him. He knew not one and has not heard of one since who then believed 

him. The work, however, powerfully operated to destroy his popularity. It was 

urged as full proof, that he was an advocate for monarchy, and laboring to 

introduce a hereditary president in America. 41 

Davila was an Italian writer on French history. 42 Tracing the emergence and 

development of the French throne from its Frankish origins, Adams drew heavily on 

Davila’s work in his own, to illustrate the bloodshed by which the French monarchy had 

gained and maintained something like a political hegemony only relatively recently in 

France. Indeed it is a dull, heavy volume, brimming with obscure characters unleashing 

bloodbaths on the French population the moment they saw the slightest chance of 

advantage over rivals to the French throne. Adams wondered what would become of 

France with the removal of any semblance of mixed government in favor of rule of the 

people alone. What was to become of any people whose government suffered the 

crushing of two of the three orders by violent bloodshed? The long and gory list of battles 

was his barely-implicit answer, and in case that dire warning escaped the gentle reader 

Adams concluded that: 

It has been said, that it is extremely difficult to preserve a balance. This is no 

more than to say that it is extremely difficult to preserve liberty. To this truth all 

ages and nations attest. It is so difficult, that the very appearance of it is lost over 

the whole earth, excepting one island and North America. How long it will be 

before she returns to her native skies, and leaves the whole human race in 

slavery, will depend on the intelligence and virtue of the people. A balance, with 

all its difficulty, must be preserved, or liberty is lost forever. Perhaps a perfect 

balance, if it ever existed, has not been maintained in its perfection; yet such a 

balance as has been sufficient to liberty, has been supported in some nations for 

many centuries together; and we must come as near as we can to a perfect 

equilibrium, or all is lost. When it is once widely departed from, the departure 

increases rapidly, till the whole is lost. If the people have not understanding and 

virtue enough, and will not be persuaded to the necessity of supporting an 

independent executive authority, an independent senate, and an independent 

judiciary power, as well as an independent house of representatives, all 

pretensions to a balance are lost, and with them all hopes of security to our 

dearest interests, all hopes of liberty. 43 

What strikes one is how much like the Defence this reads, in both its general concerns 

and in its particular prescriptions. However, in the context of a critique of a then still 

fresh democratic revolution, it could be read easily enough as bemoaning the loss of a 

monarchial-aristocratic system to the rise of a democracy. Was Britain free under a king, 

while France was oppressed under popular rule? None would buy it, not in America 

anyway. 

41 Adams, Davila, 227. He refers to himself in the third person. 

42 Adams, Davila, 227 n. 1. 

43 Adams, Davila, 399. 



Adams extensively illustrated his points in several places, drawing examples from 

classical antiquity to do so. His first such use was an extensive description of the Roman 

political system. 44 In the context of government playing a rightful role in the regulation of 

human competition for glory, prestige, and social recognition, Adams queried the reader 

as to whether “there has ever been a nation who understood the human heart better than 

the Romans, or made a better use of the passion for consideration, congratulation, and 

distinction?” 45 He then went on to describe the distinctions—one might call them social 

classes or ranks—in Roman society. Adams spoke of distinctions of dress, such as 

wearing the color purple and gold rings; of symbols of power such as chairs, crowns, and 

rods; and of rituals such as triumphs and ovations. That he went on to contextualize such 

displays as “in the true spirit of republics” is a point easily enough lost if one is dwelling 

on the distinctly imperial/monarchial implications of such things as special chairs and 

crowns for heads of state. 46 Even the example that follows, of a republican Rome 

parading the defeated King Perseus, could be read with suspicion as sympathy, if not 

apology, for monarchy. 47 Adams’ use of Caesar as an example of ambition’s insatiability 

in addition to his mention of Plato in relation to kingship and his return to the exemplary 

disgrace of the Macedonian royal house by Paulus Aemilius—emphasizing the 

attachment of his followers to the king —looked suspicious to one who believed that 

Adams was attacking a revolutionary people in defense of a monarchial-aristocratic 

system. 48 For his part, Adams felt himself to be clear enough on what he did want: 

Let the rich and the poor unite in the bands of mutual affection, be mutually sensible 

of each other’s ignorance, weakness, and error, and unite in concerting measures for 

their mutual defence against each other’s vices and follies, by supporting an impartial 

mediator. 49 

On the other hand, would that “impartial mediator” happen to be a king? 

Furthermore, Adams fed the flames of his own fire by doing things like 

suggesting that the president be addressed as “His Highness” or “His Majesty” and by 

arguing that the existence of an aristocracy was both natural and inevitable. 50 Of course, 

he meant something different than the characterizations by his opponents of those 

positions, as he later made explicit to Jefferson in their correspondence. What he really 

meant was that some people were, for whatever reason, more influential than others— 

whether by birth or by beauty, wealth, intelligence or virtue—and that influence is also 

known as aristocracy. 51 Such influence was natural and thus should be accounted for, 

even harnessed for the sake of the public good. 52 Far from contradictory, this was entirely 

consistent with a republican world view. Polybius noted that in the Roman electoral 

44 

Adams, Davila, 243-4. 

45 

Adams, Davila, 243. 

46 


47 


48 

Adams, Davila, 249, 255, 261. He also mentioned Caesar on pages 263 and 275. 

49 


50 

Ellis, Brothers, 168. Adams, Davila, 245-8. 

51 

Adams, Letters, 371-2, for example. Of course by then it was years later and he was explaining himself to Jefferson. 

Note he also reached for Greek and Latin precedents with which to frame his comments—and in the original languages. 

52 

Cappon, Letters, 365-366. Again, in direct response to Greek and Latin sources. 



system, it was “the people who bestow offices on those who deserve them, and these are 

the noblest rewards of virtue the state can provide.” 53 It was not uncommon for Adams to 

express his agreement with that in aristocratic terms, for example where he stated in the 

conclusion to Defence that “Congress will always be composed of members from the 

natural and artificial aristocratical body in every state…” 54 Why did he need to make the 

distinction if he intended an “artificial” hereditary aristocracy to be instituted, as opposed 

to a “natural” one that recommended itself for public service by its public virtues, its 

persuasion by whatever means, as expressed in and validated by elections? Aristocracy, 

to Adams, was a natural organizing element and social glue to a functioning democracy, 

nothing more or nothing less. To his mind, an imposed aristocracy was a perversion of a 

natural human tendency. Government was the proper check to this natural drive. 55 

Public virtue, while ultimately replaced in the American ideological structure of 

governance with the concept of a balance of competing interest, was generally held by 

the founders as an ideal to be cultivated for the sake of the safety and health of the 

republic. 56 It was concern for this loss of virtue, as well as loss of balance in the 

government, that gave Adams cause for such grave concern in the French Revolution. 57 If 

he expressed these concerns better with the benefit of hindsight, he had every right to 

believe himself understood in Davila because of the warm reception the same ideas had 

received in Defence. However, in the case of Davila, Adams’ efforts to convey his fears 

about the French Revolution were, in turn, causing some concerns about his own 

leanings, and all the Roman republican rhetoric he could muster was not assuaging them. 

Written in 1790, Davila predates significant events in the French Revolution, events from 

which Adams would take a great deal of justification if not solace later. Meanwhile, 

Davila in and of itself was not enough to prevent his election as successor to George 

Washington in 1796. 

Neither its gentlemanly concern for proper governance, nor democratic umbrage 

with some of its tone or appearance, were the end of Davila’s continued political 

relevance. In 1799, Jefferson’s political party found it quite useful to characterize, or 

perhaps to recharacterize, those writings in its quest to capture the White House from 

Adams and the Federalists. The fact that Jefferson campaigned at all was something of a 

scandal, at least in Adams’ view. Actually competing for office was an innovation and 

spoke of an unseemly eagerness to achieve that office. Elective office in a republic was 

instead supposed to be more of a duty, something one sought deferentially. In its pursuit, 

53 Polybius, Rise, 6:14. 

54 Adams, Defence, 363. 

55 Adams, Davila, 262-3. 

56 For examples, all in John P. Kaminski and Richard Leffler, eds. Federalists and Antifederalists: The Debate Over the 

Ratification of the Constitution (Madison: Madison House, 1989): of founders relying on public virtue, see the end of 

Madison’s letter, page 62; for elections as public expression of virtue, see Coxe’s letter, pages 76-7. The anti-federalists 

tended to see virtue as insufficient public protection, see for example the end of James Monroe’s comments at the 

Virginia ratifying convention (97). For a discussion of the shift from virtue to balance of competing interests in the 

American political sphere at this time, see Gordon Wood, “The American Science of Politics,” in What Did the 

Constitution Mean to Early Americans?, ed. Edward Countryman (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999), 

particularly pages 105-7. 

57 An excellent example may be found in Cappon, Letters, 457, in which Adams describes being blamed for his early 

prediction that France would become a bloodbath. Jefferson concedes that Adams had been right and he wrong in his 

reply, pages 458-461. 



a virtuous candidate was expected to remain somewhat aloof. 58 Furthermore, running for 

office as part of a party (or “faction”) was also innovative in a way that seemed to Adams 

corrosive to the best interests of the republic. 59 In other words, his old friend seemed to 

him to be putting personal interests ahead of those of the republic, which was at least 

unvirtuous if not outright hypocritical behavior on the part of a founder. What damage 

might it cause the tender membranes of a brand new system of government? 

Davila offered Jefferson’s partisans almost ready-made political hay, and they 

made much of it. They construed Adams’ previously well-understood sentiments in favor 

of a mixed system of government in which social elements were balanced against each 

other in a separation of powers, as expressing a secret agenda to impose a king and 

nobility on an unwitting and unwary America. 60 This “spin” was vastly aided by Adams’ 

own refusal to adapt his tactics to those of a political party willing to manipulate public 

opinion for advantage at the polls. Instead, he remained virtuously above the fray of 

actually campaigning for the office for which he was standing. 61 

Adams lost the election to his now-former friend Jefferson, and the festering 

wounds took a long time to heal. The center of gravity in the stillborn attempt of Adams 

and Jefferson to re-establish correspondence in 1804 was a withering letter by Abigail 

Adams, detailing for Jefferson not only his political sins but the enduring sense of 

personal betrayal with which he had left the Adamses. 62 Not least of these, Adams had 

written his Discourses on Davila in part on Jefferson’s urging, 63 to try to express his 

republican concerns, but later it was used as propaganda to prove that he was somehow a 

monarchist by an old friend who in fact knew better. Adams was left to retire, his 

reputation in tatters, alone and raging, not only at the personal betrayal of dear old friends 

and comrades—but also at the collective betrayal of the very ideals in which the republic 

had been ostensibly vouchsafed, and all for a mess of electoral pottage. 

The correspondence in which the two men later repaired that old friendship, in the 

dusk of their lives, was famous even in its own day. 64 However, despite attempts to get 

the men to publish these letters, each wanted the letters to remain intensely personal. 65 

There were old demons to exorcise, and the betrayals of private letters published 

58 

Ellis, Brothers, 210. 

59 

Ellis, Brothers, 210. Jefferson saw it as perhaps inevitable and probably eternal, especially as it always fell along the 

same lines; see Cappon, Letters, 337-8. Adams replied that that was exactly the problem (351). 

60 


61 


62 

Cappon, Letters, 271-4. That exchange was the only one in an 11-year gap in correspondence between Jefferson and 

the Adamses; see Cappon, Letters, xv-xvi, i.e. the Table of Contents, bearing in mind that the book is the complete 

correspondence. 

63 

Cappon, Letters, 351. 

64 

Jefferson noted that he had been approached about publishing their correspondence, and speculated that postal 

carriers had made their correspondence known, Cappon, Letters, 453. He was appalled. Both Jefferson and Adams 

were deeply satisfied at having avoided such calamities as published letters (579-80). 

65 

I generally disagree with Ellis’ analysis in Brothers that each had the major goal of writing, as if past one another, to 

posterity, such as he discusses on pages 223 and 227. On the other hand, Adams did seem to be addressing non-present 

readers of their correspondence in Cappon, Letters, 346. Yet he immediately proceeded to despair of making himself 

understood to Posterity, and doubted that the effort to collect the documentation to do so was even worth it. Jefferson 

saw it as perhaps inevitable in Cappon, Letters, 349. That it was there for the two men to come to grips with did not 

therefore necessitate same as one of their main goals. 



(whether by each other or others) figured in them. 66 Rather, as two of the last of their 

generation, 67 it became increasingly important to make peace and achieve understanding, 

both for personal reasons and for the sake of intellectual companionship. As Adams 

famously put it to Jefferson, “You and I ought not to die, before we have explained 

ourselves to each other.” 68 Tellingly, it was after this breakthrough moment that the 

intellectual exchange took on the depth and breadth for which it is so remarkable, and this 

activity must have been a significant reward in itself. Posterity, while it may have been 

interested and while the two men must have known this, was an interferent in their 

relationship. They sought to minimize such static in their reclaimed relationship, as 

evidenced by their repeated assurances of discretion. 69 In fact, as shown above, the public 

stage had been a major component of the damage Adams’ and Jefferson’s relationship 

suffered, and one they were glad enough to be rid of, as retired gentlemen-farmers. They 

set about explaining themselves to each other, on every topic that had ever interested 

either. They did so with copious doses of Latin and Greek, and drew on sources in those 

languages to make their points. To reduce that to an intended, eventual public display 

misses the point, in a way not unlike considering all the Latin merely for show of 

erudition. 

The issue of a natural aristocracy, and the damage done to Adams in the general 

misunderstanding of his position on the topic, is the beating heart of the section of this 

correspondence described in the beginning of this paper as the “aristocratic thread” or 

cluster of classical referents found in this body of documents. According to Adams 

himself: 

…my “defence of the Constitutions” and “Discourses on Davila”,” laid the 

foundation of that immense Unpopula[ri]ty, which fell like the tower of Siloam 

upon me. Your steady defense of democratical Principles, and your invariable 

favorable Opinion of the french Revolution laid the foundation of your 

Unbounded Popularity… Now, I will forfeit my Life, if you can find one 

Sentence in my Defence of the Constitutions, or the Discourses on Davila, which 

by a fair construction, can favor the introduction of a hereditary Monarchy or 

Aristocracy into America. They were all written to support and strengthen the 

Constitutions of the United States. 70 

Truth be told, Jefferson in the end could not but agree “…that there is a natural 

aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” 71 In fact, the world 

and events intervened to twist his meaning, and the nature of that intervention was a 

direct result of the effects the founders themselves had had on the world. 72 With the 

benefit of hindsight, the irony was not lost on Adams and Jefferson. 

66 

See for example Cappon, Letters, 326, in which Adams warned Jefferson that a Mr. Lindsey had published some 

private letters sent him by Jefferson. Jefferson replied with concern (331) and Adams reassured him in his response 

(333). 

67 

Cappon, Letters, 326. Adams mourned in 1813 the passing of Benjamin Rush (328). The situation was dire by the 

fall of 1821(574). 

68 

Cappon, Letters, 358. 

69 

Adams expressed both desire for discretion and lack of concern for reputation and posterity in Cappon, Letters, 333. 

70 

Cappon, Letters, 356. In fact, the whole letter addressed the situation (354-6) as well as his next one (357-8). 





Jefferson’s admission that he had been wrong about the French Revolution, and 

that Adams had been correct, gave Adams immense satisfaction. The destruction of the 

French aristocracy had in fact led first to a bloodbath, and then to a dictatorship, as 

Adams had predicted. Jefferson’s concession to this truth went a long way towards giving 

Adams a sense of vindication, and also towards reestablishing a trust that had been so 

damaged in those election-driven betrayals of common understandings of shared ideals. 73 

It also made discussions of subsequent events like the deposition and exile of Napoleon 

or the restoration of the French monarchy an extremely gratifying topic of conversation 

for both men. 74 If one had been wrong about France, both had done a great deal better by 

their own country. Fears of a civil war over slavery notwithstanding, neither lived to see 

the American republic fall into the bloodbath-and-dictatorship cycle. They had every 

right to feel good about that, given European events. 75 

Another and perhaps ultimate proof that their late correspondence was not merely 

a side function of concern for their legacy in the eyes of posterity, is the persistence of the 

idea that John Adams was indeed to any degree a sympathizer with or supporter of an 

aristocratic or monarchial governmental system, and not the ardent republican to which 

his whole life gave its testimony. Rather, his “credibility gap” widened over the 

intervening decades, perhaps incidentally as the classics were relegated to increasingly 

rarified or increasingly superficial levels of the educational system. 76 After all, when 

Adams wrote the Defense, he presumed that his readers could read Latin from their grade 

school educations, which implied by extension some familiarity with the contents of 

Polybius’ writings. However, if one does not even know Polybius’ name, what is one to 

make of Adams’ views on the necessity of tripartite balances of power in a “mixed” 

government? 

This fundamental misunderstanding of John Adams has cost America much of its 

“Adamsian” legacy, as well as obscured the major role the classics played in the 

revolutionary thought of John Adams. That is both unfortunate and rectifiable, as the 

American republic continues to navigate the stormy political seas of war and 

constitutional crisis, partisan polemics and long term instability. Adams and Jefferson, in 

their peace, found room for optimism, even with the cautions appropriate to the dawning 

of the nineteenth century. 77 We might likewise profit from a reconsideration of their 

legacy in the fullness of its rich classical content. 

73 Ellis, Brothers, 237-9. 

74 For example, Cappon, Letters, JA at 435-8, 455-6, 517-8, and TJ at 441-2. 

75 Jefferson expresses that satisfaction in Cappon, Letters, 391-2. 

76 Jefferson himself bemoans the situation as early as 1814 in Cappon, Letters, 434. 

77 Adams in Cappon, Letters, 456, and Jefferson at 458. 


T he Roman Cult of Mithras 

Religious Phenomenon and Brotherhood 

Giovanna Palombo

he male [god] they worship is a cattle rustler, and his cult they relate to the 

potency of fire…united by the handshake of the illustrious Father.” 1 So wrote the 

Christian writer Firmicus Maternus about the followers of Mithras showing much 

contempt and little understanding on one of the most widespread ancient mystery 

religions–Mithraism. The worship of Mithras–a god of Persian origin–was part of the socalled 

“mystery cults” that developed in the East and rapidly spread all over the provinces 

under Roman rule, reaching its greatest extent during the second and third centuries A.D. 

The present analysis will limit its attention to three areas only. It will first consider, Italy– 

mainly Rome and Ostia where this cult was very popular–and Gallia-Germania-Noricum 

(modern France, Germany, and Austria) and third, ancient Syria (modern eastern Turkey 

and Syria) as representatives, respectively, of western provincial territories and an eastern 

province. In particular, two aspects will be the objects of investigation: Mithras’ 

iconography and inscriptions in order to identify his visual patterns, various epithets, and 

associations with other deities, and the very nature of the Mithraic religion as a mystery 

cult. The purpose of conducting an analysis of both the Mithraic image, and of what it 

may have meant for Mithras’ worshippers to be part of this mystery religion, will help 

explain the reasons for the cult’s widespread popularity. This cult became very popular, 

specifically among the Roman soldiers all over the empire, despite the fact that Mithras 

was the god of Rome’s enemies–the Parthians. I will argue that the key to understand 

Mithras’ popularity is to be found, first of all, in his iconography and not his theology, 

namely in his simple and yet powerful image. Secondly, as a mystery religion, Mithras’ 

cult not only had a votive character, but also offered an opportunity for a secret 

brotherhood–an organizational structure similar to a secret society of a Masonic type that 

must have been particularly appealing for soldiers. Finally, the syncretic and universal 

aspects of the Mithraic cult represent additional elements that can help explain the 

Parthian god’s popularity among the Roman troops. 

Before proceeding with the analysis of why Mithraism was so wide-spread 

particularly among the soldiers, it is necessary to address the problem of the sources. In 

contrast with Mithraism’s popularity and the fact that Mithraic sanctuaries can be found 

all over the Roman provinces, historians are faced with a dearth of literary source 

material on Mithras. This is not surprising and can be explained in part by the fact that, as 

a mystery cult, Mithraism had an element of secrecy. Because the written evidence on the 

cult of Roman Mithras is very scarce as few documents have survived, scholars have 

looked at evidence from material culture and, in particular, they have relied on the 

comprehensive catalogue of inscriptions and monuments which offers a valuable source 

about the Mithraic cult and its worshippers. 2 While this monumental list of epigraphical 

evidence provides information on both the patterns of nomenclature for the god Mithras 

and the people that were involved in this mystery cult, the archaeological remains–mainly 

of architectural and pictorial nature–help identify visual patterns associated with the 

Mithraic religion. The few written documents available, the epigraphical material, and the 

visual elements from material culture will constitute the main base for the evidence 

presented in this article. Among the many problems in dealing with evidence of 

1 Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Religionum, 5.2, translated by Marvin W. Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: 

A Sourcebook. Sacred Texts of the Mystery Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean World (Philadelphia, PA: 

University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 208. 

2 Maarten Jozef Vermaseren, Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae (Hagae Comitis: M. 

Nijhoff, i-ii, 1956-1960), hereafter cited as CIMRM followed by the document number. The dating of the inscriptions is 

provided when available.


archaeological nature there is the fact that images, monuments, and artifacts speak their 

own language, therefore attempting to “translate” the visual into text is a process that 

requires the help of various tools, such as an understanding of the social context and 

values of that particular past society. 3 Thus, one should keep in mind that ancient Romans 

were polytheistic and that their concept of religion and relationship with the divine 

differed from the belief system of our modern, predominately monotheistic, society. 4 In 

the case of Mithraism in particular, it is necessary to consider anthropological aspects and 

sociological significance of ancient mystery cults in order to understand the appeal of the 

cult to many ancient Romans. 

The cult of Mithras fascinated people in antiquity, and it has also raised much 

interest among modern scholars. Historians have produced a plethora of articles and 

books since 1896-1899. 5 Mithraism has attracted an enormous amount of scholarly 

attention, mainly because of the supposed link with Christianity. 6 In the last few decades, 

the focus on the cult of Mithras has been on theology, namely on deciphering the 

“mystery” behind the mystery cult. Thus, many historians have looked at the Mithraic 

iconography and from it they have extrapolated an abstract meaning–often rather 

complex–that links Mithras to a deeper astronomical and astrological paradigm. 7 Other 

analyses have pointed out a convergence of Neoplatonic ideas with the theology of 

3 Knowing the social context–and specifically the Weltanschauung and role within society of those for whom the image 

or artifact was intended–constitutes relevant information when using material culture as historical evidence. Peter 

Burke exemplifies this concept by mentioning how the painting by Tiziano entitled Sacred and Profane Love can be 

understood correctly only if viewers are aware of the changes through time in assumption about nudity. The clothed 

Venus represents the profane love, while the naked woman symbolizes the sacred love–contrarily to what our modern 

sensibility would suggest. See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, N.Y.: 

Cornell University Press, 2001), 38-9. 

4 I am referring in particular to concepts such as soul, salvation, and afterlife that, even when present in antiquity, had a 

different significance for the ancient people than the meanings attributed to those notions in modern times. For the 

pitfall of anachronism when dealing with ancient religions, see John Scheid, An Introduction to Roman Religion 

(Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2003), 18-21. 

5 These are the dates of publication of the two-volume work by the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, who is universally 

recognized as the “father” of Mithraic studies. Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra; translated from the 2nd rev. 

French ed. by Thomas J. McCormack (New York: Dover Publications, 1956). Despite the numerous studies that have 

appeared in the last three decades, the Roman cult of Mithras still presents a series of puzzling questions. In particular, 

there was an upsurge of interest in Mithras in the 1970s. See the proceedings of two major conferences on Mithraism 

held during that time: John R. Hinnells, ed., Mithraic Studies: Proceedings of the First International Congress of 

Mithraic Studies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975) and Ugo Bianchi, ed., Mysteria Mithrae: Atti del 

Seminario Internazionale su ‘La specificatà storico-religiosa dei Misteri di Mithra, con particolare riferimento alle 

fonti documentarie di Roma e Ostia’, Roma e Ostia 28-31 Marzo 1978 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979). For a detailed 

historiographical review on Mithraic studies up to the mid 1980s, see Roger Beck, “Mithraism since F. Cumont,” in 

Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.17.4 (1984), 2002-15. 

6 Many scholars have interpreted Mithras as a “savior” and perceived Mithraism as a religion of salvation and 

redemption. For an interpretation of Mithraic salvation, see Leroy A. Campbell, Mithraic Iconography and Ideology 

(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 371-93. For the soteriological nature of mystery cults in general (with particular emphasis 

on Mithraism), see also Ugo Bianchi and Maarten J. Vermaseren, eds, La Soteriologia dei Culti Orientali nell'Impero 

Romano: Atti del Colloquio Internazionale su ‘La soteriologia dei culti orientali nell'Impero Romano’, Roma 24-28 

settembre 1979 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982). Finally, see the recent study by Roger Beck, “Ritual, Myth, Doctrine, and 

Initiation in the Mysteries of Mithras: New Evidence from a Cult Vessel” in The Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000): 

145-80, which stresses the “sacramental” character of Mithraism (and the equation cult meal = Eucharist) as well as its 

similarity with Christian rituals. 

7 The studies of David Ulansey, Roger Beck, and Richard L. Gordon have emphasized an astronomical-astrological 

reading of the Mithraic cult by connecting the Mithraic bull-killing scene with the zodiac–specifically the ecliptic 

between Taurus and Scorpius. For instance, Gordon states that “it is ... quite evident from the iconography of the 

Mysteries that an astronomical idiom was employed to make theological statements.” R.L. Gordon, “Authority, 

Salvation and Mystery in the Mysteries of Mithras,” in Image and Mystery in the Roman World: Three Papers in 

Memory of Jocelyn Toynbee, edited by J. Huskinson, M. Beard, and J. Reynolds, Gloucester: A. Sutton Publishing 

(1988), 50. 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO


Mithraism. 8 In particular, a recent interpretation of the so-called “Mithras Liturgy” has 

connected the latter to the theurgy, or ritual practice of the Chaldaean Oracles. 9 

Additionally, attempts have also been made to interpret Mithras as something else or 

rather someone else, thus speculating on the symbolism of the god and proposing an 

understanding of Mithras and its cult in allegoric terms. 10 Instead of analyzing the 

Mithraic theology in order to understand the significance of Mithras and its cult, it is 

necessary to focus, respectively, on his image and on the aspect of this mystery religion 

as a social function and a bonding experience among its worshippers. 

First of all, in order to explain the god’s appeal a look at how Mithras was 

represented in mural paintings, reliefs, and statues, is instrumental. A reason for the 

popularity of Mithras’ cult was in the power of its simple and at the same time evocative 

iconography. That Mithras may have had a deeper, secondary meaning is not to be 

excluded. The various interpretations of Mithraism within an astrological context fail to 

explain why the cult became so popular, particularly among soldiers. Most likely, the 

more abstract meaning was known to very few worshippers of the cult–the patres, or 

those at the top of the cult hierarchy. However, it was in the direct perception of Mithras’ 

image–a direct reading of his iconography that was accessible to the any common 

viewer–that one can find the “mystery” of the cult’s appeal. Overall, Mithras’ 

iconography presented an image that combined new and old, simple and familiar features 

with more exotic ones. 

With very few exceptions, Mithras’ iconography is very consistent throughout the 

Roman territories. Typically, he wears Persian clothing, such as a Phrygian cap, flying 

cloak, tunic, and trousers. 11 He is represented in the act of slaughtering a bull, which he 

8 

See Richard L. Gordon, “Reality, Evocation and Boundary in the Mysteries of Mithras” in Journal of Mithraic 

Studies 3 (1980): 19-99. 

9 

The so-called “Mithras Liturgy” is a section of a fourth century A.D. Graeco-Egyptian papyrus, namely lines 475-834 

of the “Great Magical Papyrus” of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris. See Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A 

Sourcebook, 211-21. It is one of the most perplexing texts concerning the worship of Mithras. Because it mentions the 

“ascent of the soul,” many scholars have found connections between this text and Neoplatonic ideas. For an 

interpretation of how the ritual technique of ascent in the Mithras Liturgy may find its closest parallel in the theurgic 

practices of the Chaldaean Oracles (a collection of enigmatic verses from the second century quoted by Neoplatonists), 

see Radcliffe Edmonds, “Did the Mithraists Inhale? A Technique for Theurgic Ascent in the Mithras Liturgy, the 

Chaldaean Oracles, and some Mithraic Frescoes” in The Ancient World 32 (2001): 10-22. 

10 

See Michael P. Speidel, Mithras-Orion: Greek Hero and Roman Army God (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980). Speidler’s 

study provides a clear attempt to interpret Mithras as someone else and Mithraism as permeated with symbolism. He 

has formulated a complex analysis on the Mithraic cult–an analysis in which he connects Mithras to the constellation 

Orion and his myth. Speidler has suggested that Mithras was in reality the Greek deity Orion. This would explain his 

popularity in the Roman army, since Orion was a Greek hero, strong, swift, armed–in fact he was called “the 

swordbearer”–and very skilled in hunting. More importantly, as the son of Mars and a victorious military leader 

himself, “he was the epitome of manhood ... and the embodiment of a fierce warrior” (Speidel, Mithras-Orion, 38). 

According to Speidler, astral features and astrological significance would also permeate the Mithraic cult. A cosmic 

meaning would be attached to Mithras’ icon, which represents a series of equatorial constellations–such as the bull 

being the Taurus constellation, the scorpion being the zodiac sign of Scorpio and so forth. In essence, Speidler sees 

Mithraism as a Greek cosmic religion, not a Persian cult. Thus, when faced with the question “why did a truly Greek 

religion present itself in Iranian garment?” he simply dismisses it with an anachronistic statement, namely that the 

founders of the cult shared the old Greek and Roman belief that “the wisdom of the Orient was superior to their own” 

(Speidel, Mithras-Orion 46). In my opinion, it is not clear why the Romans could not have worshipped Orion directly, 

and instead they chose a “disguised” Mithras–dressed in Persian garments, but actually a Greek god!–because in reality 

they wanted to pay their devotion to Orion. 

11 

The image of Mithras does not differ much from East to West. One of the few variants is a statue found in Ostia that 

represents the god dressed like a Greek hero with the chiton (cf. CIMRM 239). Because he is not wearing the Persian 

trousers that are a key component of his eastern attire, Mithras resembles more a Greek god according to Speidler (cf. 

Speidler, Mithras-Orion, 24-5). This is one of the proofs used by Speidler to justify the connection Mithras-Orion and, 

in the end, according to the Dutch scholar, despite Mithras’ Persian garments, “Mithraism was ostensibly a Persian 

cult... [since] the myth of Mithras is largely the myth of the Greek hero Orion” (Speidler, Mithras-Orion, 3). See also 

The Roman Cult of Mithras


holds down with one hand while with the other hand he holds a dagger (Mithras 

Tauroctonos). The Latin poet Statius described the scene of Mithras slaying the bull 

precisely as it is consistently found in archaeological evidence, namely with the god 

grabbing the bull by the horns and trying to pull the animal toward the opposite 

direction. 12 As part of the bull-killing scene, one may often find a dog, a snake, a 

scorpion, a crow (raven), and two torchbearers–identified as the deities Cautes (with 

torch up) and Cautopates (with torch down). 13 Around this “standard” scene (tauroctony, 

or the bull slaying), the twelve signs of the zodiac also appear in some cases. 14 In 

addition, there are some images of a banquet between Mithras and the sun-god and 

representations of his birth from a rock. 15 His peculiar birth not only appears in 

inscriptions and is represented in statues, but it is also mentioned in Firmicus Maternus, 

who called Mithras ò , or “the god (born) from the rock,” and in Commodianus, 

who referred to the Persian god as “invictus de petra natus [...] deus” (the invincible god 

born from a rock). 16 Finally, other elements in the Mithraic imagery are the presence of 

stars on his flying cloak or around his head, and sun rays and a nimbus also around his 

head. 17 

Despite his Persian attire, Mithras’ image must have appeared very familiar and 

rather appealing to the soldiers, since the god represents a hunter–or rather a hero–and 

conveys the idea of strength, courage, and invincibility. 18 Mithras appears as “an 

energetic god, active, unconquerable, unsurpassable.” 19 The god’s image is very powerful 

in its straightforwardness. The power of Mithras’ image lies in his direct appeal: the act 

that the god is performing is not mysterious or unusual, but rather evokes a familiar 

context to soldiers, namely a fight, a struggle in order to subdue the dangerous “other” or 

the enemy. Mithras was thought to be the creator and father of all, the Demiurge, whose 

creative energy generated and still permeates the entire cosmos. The god Mithras 

struggled with the white cosmic bull, which he finally overcame and killed. 20 The bull 

represented a force that had to be subdued, like the enemies of Rome. In essence, 

previous footnote. However, it is worth noting that Mithras is depicted rather consistently in his eastern/Persian attire 

with trousers and the Phrygian cap. 

12 “Persei sub rupibus antri indignata sequi torquentem cornua Mithram.” Statius, Thebais, 1.719-720 in Paolo Scarpi, 

Le religioni dei misteri: Samotracia, Andania, Iside, Cibele e Attis, mitraismo (Milano: Mondadori, vol. 2, 2002), 358. 

13 In ancient mythology, the torchbearer Cautes was linked to the south wind, whereas Cautopates was associated with 

the north wind; Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum, 24 in Scarpi, Le religioni dei misteri, 360. However, some scholars 

hold that the two deities corresponded respectively to the rising and setting sun–ascending and descending in relation to 

the equator; see Robert Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome: Religion in Everyday Life from Archaic to Imperial Times 

(New York: Routledge, 2001), 132. 

14 Among the various examples, see CIMRM 42, Syria, Dura-Europos, approx. 168 A.D. and CIMRM 695, Rome, Italy. 

15 See CIMRM 42, Syria, Dura-Europos for an example of the banquet of Mithras and Helios. See also CIMRM 894, 

Gallia, St. Aubin: exceptional representation of Mithras’ rock-birth depicting the naked child stepping out of the piled 

up boulders, on which he leans with both hands; CIMRM 966, Gallia, Pons Saravi: Mithras’ rock-birth; CIMRM 985, 

Gallia, Augusta Treverorum: Mithras’ rock-birth. 

16 See Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Religionum, 20 and Commodianus, Instructiones Adversus Paganos, 

13.1, both quotes in Paolo Scarpi, Le religioni dei misteri, 354 and 356. 

17 CIMRM 90, Syria, Lattakieh-Tartous, first half of the second century A.D.: head of Mithras with Phrygian cap and 

surrounded by a nimbus and rays. 

18 R.L. Gordon underlies the concept of invincibility as a key component of the Mithraic image and states that Mithras 

is god, hero, and athlete at the same time. According to Gordon, “the language of ‘invincibility’, of ‘physical’ strength, 

of struggle and victory was taken over from pre-existing narrative and iconographical patterns, which served to 

familiarize the unfamiliar ‘Persian’ god, to assimilate him to a pattern of classical heroes” (Gordon, “Authority, 

Salvation and Mystery,” 49), and, I would add, of Roman gods. For an example of Mithras as hunter, see CIMRM 55, 

Syria, Dura-Europos and CIMRM 77, Syria, Sidon, 188 A.D. 

19 Richard L. Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society: Social Factors in the Explanation of Religious Changes in the 

Roman Empire” in Religion 2 (1972): 100. 

20 Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum, 6 in Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, 210-1. Porphyry describes 

Mithras as the Demiurge of the cosmos. 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO


Mithras’ image is simple and primordial as it incorporates recognizable elements (sun as 

the good force and bull as the antagonist–a strong power to fight against) and, at the same 

time, it is peculiar and unfamiliar (the god’s eastern attire). The Mithraic scene also 

portrays a scorpion, a snake, and a dog that appear to be wanting to extract the life out of 

the slaughtered bull by attacking its genitals. This image expresses a concept of cosmic 

opposites–the duality of good versus evil (Mithras versus his antagonists). Thus, Mithraic 

iconography is ultimately universal in his syncretism of old and new, familiar and 

unfamiliar, good and bad. 

Furthermore, the contrast between unfamiliar versus familiar features in Mithras’ 

representation is mirrored in his nomenclature and connection with other gods. On the 

one hand, like his attire, the god’s name is “foreign” since it is a Latinized form, through 

the Greek, of the Avestan “Mithra” that means “pact, contract, covenant.” 21 On the other 

hand, Mithras is familiar as his portrayal appears in association with other deities, such as 

Apollo, Helios, Iuppiter Dolichenus, and Hercules, hence showing that the Persian god 

was of the same “status” as long-established, well-known deities. For instance, one of the 

oldest Mithraic monuments from Roman times shows the association Apollo-Mithras- 

Helios. 22 In general, various deities are present in Mithraic sanctuaries–deities that were 

supposed to protect each grade of initiate (such as Venus for the second grade). 23 A 

strange-looking figure is often found connected to the cult of Mithras–a lion-headed god, 

who is encircled by the coils of a snake and may likely represent Aion, also identified as 

Chronos (time or cosmic eternity). 24 

More importantly, Mithras is connected with the cult of the sol invictus, or 

unconquered sun. 25 This is not surprising, since Mithras was not only linked to the idea of 

contract, but he was also the Persian god of light and justice. Although Mithras and the 

sun-god are separate in the Persian myth, yet their figures often tend to merge and 

blend. 26 Altars to sol invictus have been found in Mithraic sanctuaries along with 

inscriptions attributing that title (either sol invictus or deus sol invictus) to Mithras 

himself. 27 Undoubtedly, the appellative of “invincible” given to Mithras along with the 

21 Mithra (Μiθρō, nominative) is the Avestan form whereas Mithras or Mithres the Latin and Greek forms. 

22 See the archeological complex at Commagene (Eastern Turkey): CIMRM 28, Syria, Nemrud-Dagh, approx. 69-34 

B.C. In the sepulchral monument of King Antiochus I of Commagene among the five eight-meter high statues there is 

one representing Apollo-Mithras in a sitting posture on a throne. For an English translation of the inscription on the 

throne, see John Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 83. In 

the same monument one can also admire a relief of Apollo-Mithras-Helios. See also CIMRM 33, Syria, Samosata, same 

as above: Apollo-Mithras-Helios (same time / Antiochus of Commagene). 

23 For the Mithraic seven grades of initiation, see pages 13-14. 

24 CIMRM 78, Syria, Sidon, 188 A.D.: an entirely naked figure with a lion’s head (Aion). Beneath his wide-open mouth 

there is the head of a snake, entwining him with three large coils. CIMRM 879, Gallia, Arelata: dressed torso of a 

standing Aion, whose head and legs got lost. A serpent, winding itself in three coils round the god’s body, rests its head 

on the god’s breast. Between the coils of the snake, there are the twelve signs of the zodiac. Thus, the serpent must 

symbolize “the annual circumvolutions of the sun in the ecliptic and its passage through the different constellations.” 

Robert Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 226. 

25 The sol invictus (or El Gabal) was originally a Syrian sun deity whose worship was actively promoted in Rome by 

the emperor Elagabalus (r. 218-222). See Leslie Adkins and Roy Adkins, Dictionary of Roman Religion (Oxford: 

Oxford University Press, 2001); Gaston H. Halsberghe, The Cult of Sol Invictus (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972). 

26 Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire, 47. 

27 CIMRM 34, Syria, Dura-Europos, 168 A.D.: mithraeum with many scenes from the myth from the time of the 

emperor Septimius Severus. The inscription states “Mithras-sol invictus.” Also, CIMRM 88, Syria, Secia: deo soli 

invicto; CIMRM 897, Gallia, Bourg-Saint-Andeol: deum invictum; CIMRM 890, Gallia, Vasio: deo soli invicto Mithrae; 

CIMRM 898, Gallia, Mons Seleucus: deo soli invicto; CIMRM 907, Gallia, Lugdunum: deo invicto; CIMRM 986-987, 



persistent emphasis upon light and brightness made this god very attractive in the eyes of 

the soldiers. 28 In addition, the Mithras-sun association conferred a universal character to 

the deity, since the sun is a primordial and powerful element that was an object of 

worship in many ancient societies, both east and west. 

In addition to the iconography, a look at the Mithraic membership, the places of 

worship, the organizational structure, and at Mithraism within the context of mystery 

religions can provide useful insights into the significance of the cult, ultimately 

explaining its popularity. Mithraism was not exclusively the cult of the Roman soldiers, 

since members of the imperial administrative service, merchants, and freedmen also 

worshipped the Persian god–as it is well attested in the many Mithraic sanctuaries in the 

ancient port of Ostia. 29 Since Roman religion was a “social” religion–meaning that it was 

closely linked to the community, not to the individual–a cult may fulfill different roles 

among different social groups. 30 Roman gods usually varied according to the community 

concerned: “they were, so to speak, members of the same community as their 

worshippers.” 31 Thus, the meaning of Mithraism among the soldiers may not have been 

the same as the one among civilians. For the purpose of this analysis, the emphasis is 

placed on Mithraism as the religion of Roman troops, because the cult of Mithras was 

predominantly popular in the army and, in fact, it was the latter that had been responsible 

for bringing this religious practice all over the Roman territories–from south-east toward 

north-west. Additionally, Mithraism was confined almost exclusively to men. 32 

Therefore, one should look at what made this god so appealing to men and soldiers in 

particular. 

Since the Roman cult of Mithras was mainly linked to soldiers, a look at religions 

and cults among military men is instrumental. Mithraism can be defined overall as the 

religion of the Roman soldiers par excellence during the empire. 33 The definition 

“religion of the Roman soldiers” instead of “religion of the Roman army” is used on 

purpose and has its reason. In fact, the Roman army had official religious practices, such 

as the cult of the standards–which included the gold eagle, the images of the emperor, the 

Gallia, Augusta Treverorum: deo invicto Soli and deo invicto Mithrae, respectively. These are only some of the 

numerous examples that can be found in Syria, Gallia, and Italy. 

28 

For instance, in a mithraeum in Britain (near the fort of Carrawburgh on Hadrian’s Wall) one can see that on one of 

the altars was carved a relief of Mithras with a radiate crown, the rays of which were cut through the stones so that a 

lamp could be placed behind it with the effect of giving light to the crown like a halo. Graham Webster, The Roman 

Imperial Army of the First and Second Centuries A.D. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 278-279. 

In addition, Lane Fox states that many special effects–especially lights reflected on water and fireworks–were 

particularly vivid in the worship of Mithras, conducted in the chambers of his small, subterranean shrines. Robin Lane 

Fox, Pagans and Christians (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1995), 136. 

29 

Samuel Leuchli, ed., Mithraism in Ostia: Mystery Religion and Christianity in the Ancient Port of Rome (Evanston, 

IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 56-60. 

30 

Scheid stresses the “social” character of Roman religion, which involved individuals insofar as they were members 

of a particular community. There was not one Roman religion, but rather a series of Roman religions, “as many Roman 

religions as there were Roman social groups: the city, the legion, [...] colleges of artisans, sub-districts of the city” and 

so forth. Scheid, Roman Religion, 19. 

31 

Scheid, Roman Religion, 20. 

32 

According to traditional scholarship, Mithraism was a cult exclusively for men and the presence of women was 

forbidden. In a recent article, Jonathan David has showed some compelling evidence that women were not absolutely 

excluded from the Mithraic cult, although their participation was very limited; Jonathan David, “The Exclusion of 

Women in the Mithraic Mysteries: Ancient or Modern?” in Numen 47 (2000): 121-41. In the end, we cannot say that 

Mithraism was confined to men only, but it certainly remains a predominately male religion. 

33 

Another well-attested cult of the Roman soldiers was the worship of Jupiter Dolichenus, which reached its peak of 

popularity during the first past of the third century. Overall, it was not so widespread as Mithraism. For the cult of 

Jupiter Dolichenus (and also Jupiter Heliopolitanus) among Roman legionary centurions, see Eric Birley, “The 

Religion of the Roman Army,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.16.2 (1978): 1506-41. 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO


vexilium (flag), and the sacramentum (sacred oath). The army also celebrated various 

religious ceremonies and festivals throughout the year, as attested in the Feriale 

Duranum, a calendar found at Dura-Europos that marked the numerous religious 

observations during the entire military religious year. 34 These official religious 

observances intended to identify the life of the individual soldier and of the individual 

legion with the destiny of Rome, maintained the esprit du corps, and created a social 

structure based on values such as discipline, loyalty, and tradition. 35 Additionally, since 

most religious celebrations coincided with public festivals of the civilian population, 

these religious practices connected the Roman army–at least symbolically–to the society 

of Roman civilians. 

However, Mithraism fell under the so-called unofficial army cults and served a 

different purpose. The cult of Mithras was the soldier’s personal religion as opposed to 

the army religion that was imposed from above. 36 Roman soldiers needed something–or 

rather someone–they could identify with, and the “unconquerable” Mithras with his 

features of physical strength, courage, and victory over a dangerous antagonist fit well 

such need. Thus, soldiers must have felt drawn to this decidedly forceful god. The 

dualism of Mithraism also appealed to the soldiers, namely the struggle between good 

and evil, light and darkness, order and chaos in which Mithras was fighting on behalf of 

Rome as a good, civilized power against the disorderly barbarians. 

In addition to membership, the physical setting of the cult of Mithras helps to 

define its character and meaning, and hence its appeal. Like Mithras’ portrayals appear 

very uniform, his sanctuaries, or mithraea, also share similar features throughout the 

empire. 37 The consistency in the architectural and pictorial features of the mithraea can 

be explained in view of the fact that “the religious use of space enabled the soldier to 

orient himself... Roman soldiers often moved from place to place, and the religious use of 

space helped keep them from becoming disoriented.” 38 The mithraeum–or temple for the 

worship of Mithras–was built to resemble the cave (spelaeum) in which Mithras was 

supposed to have captured and killed the divine bull. The mithraea were small and 

tunnel-like. 39 Because it was supposed to resemble a cave, the space was rather dark and 

often underground and was often decorated with the signs of the Zodiac in order to 

represent an image of the cosmos itself. 40 The focus of the temple interior was a marble 

relief or a painting on the opposite end of the entrance, portraying Mithras killing the 

bull. 

34 For a detailed analysis of the Roman army’s religious practices–both official and unofficial ones, see John 

Helgeland, “Roman Army Religion,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt, II.16.2 (1978): 1470-1505. 

35 Helgeland, “Roman Army Religion,” 1473. 

36 “The impersonalities of state-religion could not satisfy the religious needs of the individual. For these he turned to 

the mysteries” (cf. Ferguson, The Religions of the Roman Empire, 99). 

37 In reality, mithraeum (pl. mithraea)–the standard modern term for the Mithraic cult buildings–is a recent scholarly 

invention. The ancients had no such term, but used simply templum or speleum. Mary Beard, John North, and Simon 

Price, Religions of Rome: A Sourcebook (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2, 89. 

38 Helgeland, “Roman Army Religion,” 1503. 

39 For instance, the largest mithraeum discovered in Rome–the Mithraeum Thermarum Antoninianarum, near the Baths 

of Caracalla–measures 25.15 by 10.60 yards, or 23 by 9.70 meters (cf. Adkins & Adkins, Dictionary of Roman 

Religion). 

40 The idea of the cave as an allegory of the cosmos is found in ancient philosophical writing, such as in Porphyry’s 

treatise where he analysis the Homeric cave of the nymphs and elaborates his interpretation on the basis of a mystical 

reading of the Mithraic cave. Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum, 6-7 in Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, 

210-11. Additionally, for the significance of the Mithraic cave and a platonizing perspective in the symbolism of 

Mithraism, see the study by Reinhold Merkelbach, Mithras (Königstein: Hain, 1984), 228-244. 



Two interesting elements emerge from the mithraeum spatial configuration. One 

characteristic is the small size of these temples–a peculiarity that suggests that the 

number of worshippers in any one place must have been also small. Thus, “the small 

group of men in the caves must have experienced an intimate feeling of togetherness.” 41 

Instead of building bigger sanctuaries as the cult membership grew, Mithras’ worshippers 

kept utilizing a religious space that could accommodate few devotees at once, hence 

maintaining a sense of familiarity and intimacy within each group. As a result, as they 

gathered in small groups, they were able to form a close-kin brotherhood with welldefined 

grades of membership. 42 Secondly, the mithraeum itself was an intimate space 

that resembled a dinning room with Mithras, as the host of the banquet, sitting at the head 

of the table. In fact, along the sides of the mithraeum, there were benches on which the 

worshippers reclined at ritual meals. 43 There is no reason to doubt that the allegoric scene 

representing Mithras and Helios feasting together, which is frequently present in Mithraic 

iconography, had a realistic counterpart in enjoyable banquets with plenty of food 

consumed by the devotees. The archaeological evidence confirms this. In excavated 

mithraea the remnants of animal bones of various species clearly indicate that the 

benches on the sides were not used just for praying, but also as couches on which 

substantial meals were consumed. 44 One can clearly see how the ritual became a social 

experience. Thus, “the religion was always world-affirming rather than world-denying.” 45 

However, along with Mithras’ image as a hunter or victorious fighter, and along 

with the small size of Mithraic community where devotees could closely interact with 

one another, an element that played a significant role in the popularity of Mithraism was 

its rank structure. The cult of Mithras contributed to the creation and consolidation of ties 

among the soldiers mainly because the Mithraic community was a highly structured 

organization. In fact, the worshippers were grouped according to seven levels or grades 

by which they progressed through successive stages of initiation as more of the mysteries 

of the cult were revealed to them. The seven grades were Corax (Raven), Nymphus 

(Gryphon / Griffin or Bridegroom or Embryo–scholars disagree on the translation of this 

term), Miles (Soldier), Leo (Lion), Perses (Persian), Heliodromus (Courier of the Sun), 

and Pater (Father). 46 The Mithraic hierarchy must have reminded the soldier of the army 

hierarchy; hence the idea of a well-structured order was something familiar to the 

Mithraic worshipper. It was in the highly hierarchical structure of its community that the 

cult of Mithras differed from most other mystery cults. 

Mithras’ cult presented an organizational system similar to a “church order.” 47 

Every Mithraic unit was a small face-to-face group, in which relations of authority were 

41 

Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 47. 

42 

As Gordon aptly summarized it, “to highlight the narrowly ‘religious’ elements in Mithraism does not get us far. 

‘Mithraism’ is of course not only a system of teaching about a god and the experience of the individual soul, but an 

organization, a social teaching, a cultural system that not only explains experience but patterns it” (Gordon, “Mithraism 

and Roman Society,” 112). 

43 

See the images in the mithraea at Santa Prisca on the Aventino and at San Clemente (CIMRM 476 and CIMRM 338- 

348), two of the thirteen mithraea that have survived in Rome. 

44 

See CIMRM 480/483 and Turcan, The Cults of the Roman Empire, 234. 

45 

Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 112. 

46 

The Christian scholar Jerome mentions the seven grades of the Mithraic hierarchy; Jerome, Epistulae, 107 in A.S. 

Geden, trans., Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1925), 61. 

The best depiction of the Mithraic grades can be found in the floor mosaic of the mithraeum of Felicissimo at Ostia 

contained in Samuel Laeuchli, ed., Mithraism in Ostia: Mystery Religion and Christianity in the Ancient Port of Rome 

(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), plates 22-8. For a detailed description of these seven grades and 

their significance within the Mithraic ritual, see Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His 

Mysteries (New York: Routledge, 2001), 131-40. 

47 


GIOVANNA PALOMBO


clearly defined by the seven grades and ultimately sanctioned by religious beliefs. The 

head of each group was the pater, or Father–an individual who had reached the seventh 

grade of the Mithraic hierarchy. He embodied the highest authority–all the members were 

subordinated to him–and, as emblems of his power, he carried the Phrygian cap (like 

Mithras) and Saturn’s sickle, and wore a special ring. 48 He decided whom to admit to the 

cult, supervised the rituals, and was responsible for initiations and grade promotions. 49 

Thus, Mithraism can be seen as a “divine” replication of social, “ordinary” (in this case, 

military) experience, since it reinforced hierarchy and authority. 50 

Because Mithraism had a “rank” structure in the seven grades of the cult, it 

appealed both to the soldiers working their way up through the ranks and to the officers, 

who saw the Mithraic hierarchy as a religious duplication and reaffirmation of the 

military hierarchy. 51 This made the cult of Mithras a familiar practice in the eyes of the 

soldiers and a “safe” cult for the authorities. Mithraism included both common soldiers 

and military officers, therefore it was not perceived as a suspicious club that may trigger 

revolts against the superiors. 52 As a matter of fact, there was no “revolutionary” message 

in the Mithraic cult. The typical worshipper of Mithras as depicted in paintings is young 

and strong, the image of social conformity, not of marginality. His promotion through the 

grades was achieved only by acceptance of and submission to authority. 53 There was no 

hint of any desire to break social boundaries in Mithraism. On the contrary, in its strict 

hierarchy, the entire secret ritual reinforced social boundaries. Ultimately, the cult of 

Mithras combined “the hierarchic and disciplined structures and values of its male 

members [...] with a new integrated view of the cosmos now completely structured in 

terms of masculine attributes”–a masculinity that was epitomized in the bull-slaying 

icon. 54 Since Mithraism intended to mirror the social organization in its religious 

hierarchy, this could explain the “almost” absence of women in the cult due to a 

replication of the army structure–in which women were not present–and not necessarily a 

misogynist feature of the cult. 55 It is also noteworthy that until about 195 A.D., there was 

a peculiar refusal of the Roman army to approve of the legal marriage of soldiers. 

Therefore, “the religious life of Mithraism was more closely modeled on the values of the 

camp than of the domestic hearth.” 56 

48 

For the Father’s iconography, see the mithraeum of Felicissimo at Ostia and the one in Santa Prisca. The latter is 

shown sitting on a throne and receiving homage from members of the lower grades. See, respectively, Samuel 

Laeuchli, ed., Mithraism in Ostia: Mystery Religion and Christianity in the Ancient Port of Rome (Evanston, IL: 

Northwestern University Press, 1967) and Maarten Jozef Vermaseren and C.C. van Essen, The Excavations in the 

Mithraeum of the Church of Santa Prisca in Rome (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965). 

49 

For the authority of the Mithraic Father, see R.L. Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 101. 

50 


51 

For an analysis of groups or associations characterized by a hierarchical structure, see Victor W. Turner, The Ritual 

Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago, IL: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969), 191-2: “One can instance the 

Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Elks, the Sicilian Mafia, and other kinds of secret societies and brotherhoods, with 

elaborate ritual and ceremonial, and with generally a strong religious tinge. The membership of such groups is often 

drawn from socio-political communities of similarly ranked persons, with shared egalitarian values and a similar level 

of economic consumption.” 

52 

As far as the evidence of the inscriptions regarding military membership, around 22 percent were centurions, 44 

percent occupied one of the many ranks between that of junior centurion and private, and 35 percent were private 

(some of whom may have been retired). Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 108-9. 

53 


54 

Luther H. Martin, Hellenistic Religions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 118. 

55 

Some scholars have attributed a misogynist aspect of Mithraism based on the one piece of evidence from the socalled 

Pseudo-Plutarch, who accounts how Mithras–hater of women–joined himself in sexual union with a rock. Cf. 

Pseudo-Plutarch, De Fluviis, 23.4 in Scarpi, Le religioni dei misteri, 355. 

56 




More importantly, a major factor contributing to the popularity of Mithraism is its 

very nature as a mystery cult. The diffusion of mystery religions, such as the cult of Isis, 

the Great Mother, and Mithras, was an important religious phenomenon that 

characterized the Roman Empire. 57 In ancient times, religion was the product of various 

concerns–political, social, and psychological. For the Roman soldier in particular, 

religion provided a structure that helped him distinguish between Roman and alien (“the 

other”, the enemy), between order and chaos. However, while this function was mainly 

covered by the army official cults, it was rather in a mystery cult–such as was the case of 

Mithraism–that the Roman soldiers could have found a personal, more intimate shelter 

from the hazards of military life. The army proved effective in its ability to control the 

natural fear in the soldiers’ lives by promoting religious festivals, oaths, and the signa. In 

addition, the strict military disciplina was certainly a powerful antidote against the 

unconscious impulse of fear. However, it was in ritual behavior (and mysteries had welldefined 

rituals) that soldiers found comfort for their own anxieties. 58 Thus, Mithraism as a 

mystery religion was very powerful in helping the soldiers dealing with their fears to a 

greater extent than the official army cults, because of its votive character and the fact that 

it provided protection by reinforcing ties among its adepts. 

The concept of votive religion constituted the basis of a mystery cult. 59 Most 

historians have looked at mystery cults and defined them as a form of personal religion 

aimed at some sort of salvation. Thus, many scholars have interpreted Mithraism as a 

cosmic religion of salvation. 60 If salvation of one’s soul had been indeed at the core of 

this cult, one may have a difficult time explaining why Mithraism had no funerary 

symbolism and there were no statues of the dead or Mithraic sarcophagi. 61 On the 

contrary, the cult of Mithras and mysteries in general are to be understood as personal 

religions at a more elementary level, namely as the practice of making vows. Mithraism 

shares in the general instrumental nature of Roman religion that was characterized by a 

highly developed contractual relation to the gods. 62 It may not be a coincidence that the 

name of Mithras itself indicates the idea of contract. 63 Worshippers–in this case, soldiers– 

made promises to Mithras through offerings and rituals expected protection in return, 

either because they were in danger or ill. The concept of do ut des was a means to 

57 

It is worth remembering that Roman religion was polytheistic, therefore there were gods of particular places and 

particular functions and the worshipping of different gods at once posed no spiritual conflict. In addition to allowing for 

a multiplicity of deities, Roman religion was always changing. Some rituals fell into disuse and others developed as 

Rome expanded its territorial conquests and came into contact with other cultures. 

58 

Helgeland, “Roman Army Religion,” 1501. 

59 

Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 12-29. 

60 

Various scholars stress the promise of soul immortality as a strong element of appeal for mystery cults. See, among 

the many ones, the study by David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the 

Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). In opposition to numerous interpretations of Mithraism as a 

religion of salvation and the emphasis on making it a parallel / antagonistic cult to Christianity, Burkert has stated that 

there is no clear evidence that Mithraism “guarantee[d] his followers some kind of transcendent salvation or 

immortality and the ascent to heaven from the ‘cave’ which is the cosmos.” Instead, Mithraism may in fact have been 

“heroically facing and maintaining this cosmos built on violence and sacrifice” (cf. Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 27). 

I concur with such an interpretation. 

61 


62 

Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 98-9. For the “contractual” nature of mystery religions, see also Burkert, 

Ancient Mystery Cults, 13. Burkert pointed out that “ancient mysteries were a personal, but not necessarily a spiritual, 

form of religion” (op. cit., 87), a statement which underlies the personal and practical nature of votive / contractual 

religions, such as Mithraism. 

63 

As previously mentioned, “Mithras” is comes from the Avestan “Mithra” that means “pact, contract, covenant.” 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO


appease one’s agonizing experience of distress during military campaigns. 64 Many 

Mithraic inscriptions clearly show this votive nature and express the devotee’s 

gratefulness towards the god, who had provided protection. 65 

Overall, Mithraism provided “vertical” as well as “horizontal” protection. One the 

one hand, protection came from above–from Mithras and the other deities associated with 

him, such as the protective gods of the seven grades. On the other hand, protection also 

came from the other worshippers within one’s Mithraic community–both from those of 

higher ranks and from one’s peers. Knowing that one could count on divine assistance as 

well as on companions in both combat and prayer, helped to reduce the anxieties of 

fighting in war. It is also worth noting that in his myth Mithras appears as the one 

bringing world-order, strong, invincible, and, most importantly, unlike other gods, he 

does not die. 66 The absence of death in the Mithraic myth must have provided the soldiers 

with a powerful sense of re-assurance and self-confidence vis-a-vis dangers. 

Mithraism was not only about coping with fear, seeking protection (divine or 

human), and reinforcing the notion of authority through a rigid–but at the same time 

familiar–hierarchical structure. Mithraism was also about creating ties, bonding together 

and the unconscious need to belong. Vertical ties were accompanied by equally strong 

horizontal ones. Mithraic groups emphasized their communal feeling by stressing the 

importance of the collectivity over the individual. It is worth noting that the term 

“Mithraist” is a modern scholarly creation. Instead, one name that Mithras’ worshippers 

used for themselves was syndexioi, or “those linked by the handshake.” Final admission 

into the Mithraic community was sealed by a handshake (δεξίωσις) with the pater. Last 

but not least, we know that as a group, they were jointly united by the oath. 67 A famous 

inscription, discovered in Rome on the Campus Martius and written by the pater 

Proficentius, commemorates in verses the founding of a mithraeum and refers to the 

handshake as a marker of Mithras’ worshippers: 

This spot is blessed, holy, observant and bounteous: Mithras marked it, and made 

known to Proficentius, Father of the Mysteries, That he should build a dedicate a 

Cave to him; And he has accomplished swiftly, tirelessly, this dear task That 

under such protection he began, desirous That the Hand-shaken (Lat. syndexi) 

might make their vows joyfully for ever. These poor lines Proficentius 

composed, Most worthy Father of Mithras. 68 

It is noteworthy that the “cave” is consecrated to the god Mithras so that “vows” could be 

made to him on behalf of the worshippers that are called “the Hand-shaken.” These 

64 

In essence, thanks to the themes of “placation and contract” that were at the core of a votive act, the soldiers fought 

better knowing that the gods were on their side. Graham Webster, The Roman Imperial Army of the First and Second 

Centuries A.D. (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 275. 

65 

As one of many examples see CIMRM 413 from Rome: “[De]o invicto Mithrae / [..U]lpius Paulus / ex / voto / d(ono) 

d(edit) / antistante L. Iustino / Augurio p(atr)i et Melito.” The numerous votive offerings are an indication that Mithras 

was perceived to be a successful and helpful god. 

66 

Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo 

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 235. 

67 

“The joining of the right hands promoted the initiates to syndexioi with the Father; the oath (sacramentum) made 

them sacrati or consacranei.” Maarten Jozef Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God (New York: Barnes & Nobles, 

1963), 136. See also R.L. Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 107 on the Mithraic oath. 

68 

Translation from Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries (New York: Routledge, 

2001), 42. For the original text of the Latin inscription, see CIMRM 423. 



verses reiterate three elements that characterize the Mithraic cult, namely that Mithraism 

was a religion of small groups (a fact that appears clear from the fact that most “caves” 

were incapable of hosting more than ten or twelve individuals), that the cult had a votive 

character, and that its members were tied together through a pact sealed by a handshake. 

This act of handshaking was performed not only among the cult members but also 

between Mithras and the sun-god, hence turning such action into a symbolic marker of 

this cult. A recurrent scene in Mithraist iconography is the so-called “pact of friendship”– 

an image in which Mithras and the sun-god stand in front of each other as equal partners 

and shake their right hands (sometimes in front of an altar). 69 Among the Greeks and 

Romans handshaking (iunctio dextrarum, or joining of the right hands) was not an 

everyday gesture as it is now in western societies. Rather, it was a sign of very close 

friendship. 70 Often friends who returned from a long journey were received with a 

handshake, or the same gesture was used to sanction an agreement. 71 Therefore, with the 

handshake, Mithras and the sun-god are settling a pact. 72 The pact between the deities 

was the model for the ritual handshake between the pater and the initiate. 

Bound by both an oath and a handshake, Mithras’ worshippers must have known 

one another very well and provided reciprocal help like the brothers of a Masonic lodge. 

Thus, the cult also had a sociological aspect, not just a religious one. As a cult of men and 

specifically soldiers, it had the features of a brotherhood–an organization based on 

principles such as secrecy, loyalty, and unity in the fight for mutual interests. By creating 

a boundary between “those who belonged” and the outsiders, it reinforced the idea of 

being Roman soldiers as opposed to the “others” (the enemies), hence reinforcing the 

group’s inward-looking solidarity. Additionally, the element of secrecy created strong 

cohesiveness. One should not ignore the fact that the Mithraic religious experience had 

“effects upon the earthy community, particularly in relation to the sense of mutual 

belonging.” 73 

Moreover, like any secret society of any given time, the cult of Mithras had a rite 

of initiation based on the notion of re-birth, a highly hierarchical structure, and a strong 

congregational aspect. 74 One can certainly speak of the Mithraic community as being 

based on sodalitas (companionship), a society formed by socii and amici. 75 Numerous 

69 See as an example CIMRM 1430, Virunum, Noricum, third century A.D. On a relief from Virunum, near modern 

Klagenfurt, Mithras’ right hand clasps the sun-god’s right hand in a friendly handshake. Mithras also puts his left hand 

upon Helios’ left shoulder. 

70 For the meaning of handshake in the classical world, see Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras, 152. 

71 In fact, the “joining of the right hands” was a means of solemnizing marriages. Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras. 

72 Among the various scenes that give the impression that the two gods are making an agreement, there is an 

interesting, but uncommon relief from Nersae, Italy (CIMRM 647-650). The sun-god, naked, is kneeling on one knee 

before Mithras in the vicinity of an altar. Helios is grasping Mithras’ right wrist with one hand, while with the other he 

is holding a dagger. Mithras is holding a knife in one hand. Vermaseren had suggested that “the two gods are 

presumably making a blood pact.” Vermaseren, Mithras, the Secret God, 97. 

73 See Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras, 105. Clauss also points out that “modern sociological studies have made 

plain how widespread is the need to belong, and in antiquity the case was no different.” 

74 For the concept of spiritual regeneration in Mithraism within the broader context of rites of initiation in various 

cultures, see Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth (Dallas, TX: Spring 

Publications, 1994), 93-4 and 112 and Turner, The Ritual Process. 

75 Interestingly, Scarpi has suggested a similarity between the Mithraic community and the comitatus of the German 

tribes as described by Tacitus (Germania, 13, 1-4; 14,2-3), since both structures were based on a hierarchical and 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO


inscriptions utilize the words socius and sodalicio. 76 Indeed, the devoted members must 

have spent together considerable amount of time, energy, and money for the god and for 

their fellow-initiates. Obligations similar to those of private amicitia might have included 

helping in burial and funeral, as was the case in other mystery cults–although the 

evidence for it in regard to the Mithraic cult is scarce. 77 In essence, the Mithraic 

communities were not only spiritual brotherhoods tied together by spiritual bonds, but 

they were also associations that enjoyed the right of holding property, that provided legal 

assistance to his members, and that elected officers. 78 

Thus, the aspect of the cult of Mithras as a social experience of bonding together 

makes sense especially when one considers the fact that soldiers were away from home 

and most of the time in unfamiliar environments. “The development of the associative 

phenomenon of religious matters is also characteristic of a fairly mobile population, 

where the individual was no longer part of a fixed family or a city in the traditional sense 

of the word. These cultist clubs housed in the Mithraic caverns ... gave the rootless 

immigrants to Rome [and–I would add–the soldiers as well], of every race and class, the 

feeling that they had found the comfort of a piety closer to gods and men.” 79 In essence, 

Mithraism sought to secure an “at-home” feeling by strengthening social ties. 

Additionally, the cult of Mithras also served as reinforcement of its members’ identity. 80 

Mithraism perfectly fit within the larger context of the mystery religions, because “the 

mystery discourse established sociopolitical identity for the alienated individual, whether 

rural (Eleusinian) or urban (Isiac), male (Mithraic) or female (Dionysian).” 81 

A last element that can help explain the popularity of the cult of Mithras was its 

universal and syncretic character, which stemmed from both its parthianitas and 

romanitas. The Persian origin of Mithraism is not much disputed, although there may be 

no clear relationship with the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. 82 Mithras’ origin can be 

militaristic organization and fit within the Indo-European context. “L’ampia diffusione del mitraismo tra soldati delle 

legioni romane può lasciare sospettare un’origine legata a possibili comunità iniziatiche e cultuali di uomini, fondate su 

un’etica di tipo aristicratico e guerriero, analogamente al comitatus delle tribù germaniche [...] che si inseriscono nel 

medesimo orizzonte culturale indo-europeo a cui appartiene anche la civiltà iraniana.” Scarpi, Le religioni dei misteri, 

352. 

76 CIMRM 361, Rome: “S[oli] i(nvicto M(ithrae) / et sodalicio eius ....” See also CIMRM 730, Italy: “D(eo) i(nvicto) 

M(ithrae) / et Soli soci/o sac(rum)...” as an inscription that reiterates the “pact” between Mithras and the sun-god. 

77 Members of various mystery religions helped one another in funerary arrangements (Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 

44). In the case of those worshipping Mithras the evidence is inconclusive. See, as supporting evidence, CIMRM 1021, 

Colonia Agrippina, Germany (near modern Cologne) where a sepulchral inscription in limestone has been found in the 

immediate vicinity of a mithraeum. The inscription is most likely about a Mithras’ worshipper that was buried there: 

“Have / Cimber es(sedarius) et / Pietas Ensocho / essed(ario) sodali / [b]ene merenti / [pos]uit. Vale.” Note the word 

sodali, “to the companion, or member of a club.” 

78 Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithras, 168. 

79 Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome, 134. 

80 “Ancient mysteries were a personal, but not necessarily a spiritual, form of religion” (Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 

87). 

81 Martin, Hellenistic Religions, 161. See also, “One possible function of mystery religions was to solve individual 

problems of identity” (cf. Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 94). 

82 CIMRM 28, Syria, Nemrud-Dagh: an inscription states that the Mithraic priests must dress in the Persian attire on the 

annual and monthly feasts of the cult. However, Merkelbach has advanced a unique theory about the origin of 

Mithraism. According to the German scholar, the cult may have been the creation of an individual of genius, who was 

of east Anatolian origin, well-versed in both the Persian religion tradition and the Hellenistic culture, and resided in the 

Roman imperial court. The purpose of creating this new religion was to reinforce loyalty among the soldiers. Thus, 

Mithraism was born in Rome and from there it was spread all over the empire. “Ich vermute, daß die Mithras-religion 



traced among the Indo-Aryan people. According to Plutarch, the cult was popular among 

Cilician pirates, who introduced the celebration of the Mithraic mysteries into the Roman 

world around the first century B.C. 83 After defeating the sea raiders, Pompey seems to 

have settled a good number of them in Calabria–a fact that helps explain how Mithraism 

arrived in Italy. 84 However, it was not until the end of the second century A.D. that the 

worship of Mithras became widespread first among the Roman soldiers in the east and 

then, moving westward and northward, all over the provinces. 85 Whether its point of 

origin was actually Parthia or Anatolia-Syria, Mithraism has a clear connotation of 

parthianitas, which is attested by both the god’s attire and the use of the Persian word 

“nama” (= hail! or long live...!) as a form of greeting among Mithras’ worshippers. 86 

Both Firmicus Maternus and Porphyry stressed the Persian origin of the god. 87 

Although Roman Mithras maintained Parthian attributes, his cult underwent some 

changes when it became popular among Roman troops. Before his introduction into the 

Roman world, Mithras in association with the sun-god was simply a symbol of fertility. 88 

From the bull, the plant/life was born (see the ears of grain coming out of the bull’s tail). 

His cult arrived in the western part of the Roman Empire from the Hellenized East. 89 

Even Alexander the Great is said to have been initiated into Persian Mithraism. 

According to Q. Curtius Rufus, “the king himself with his generals and staff passed 

around the ranks of the armed men, praying to the sun and Mithra and the sacred eternal 

fire to inspire them with courage worthy of their ancient fame and the monuments of their 

ancestors.” 90 When the god arrived in the West, his myth focused in particular on the 

ausgebildet worden ist von einem Mann aus der kaiserlichen Hofstaat, der ursprünglich aus dem Osten stammte, z.B. 

aus Armenien oder aus der Provinz Pontos; und daß er diese Religion geschaffen hat für die Bedürfnisse der um ihm 

lebenden Caesariani, als eine Religion der Gruppe, welche eine religiös sanktionierte Loyalität nach oben hin anbot.” 

Cf. Merkelbach, Mithras, 161. 

83 

Plutarch, Life of Pompey, 24: “[the Cilician pirates] offered strange sacrifices of their own at Olympus, where they 

celebrated secret rites or mysteries, among which were those of Mithras. These Mithraic rites, first celebrated by the 

pirates, are still celebrated today.” Cf. Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook, 204. 

84 

Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome, 131. 

85 

As mentioned above, not all scholars agree on the point of origin and beginning date of the cult of Roman Mithras. 

For instance, Beck has proposed that the mysteries of Mithras were developed in a subset of Commagene soldiers and 

family-retainers of the dynasty of Antiochus IV. On the one hand, while they were engaging in the Judaean wars, 

Commagenian military elements had extensive contact with Roman troops and were responsible for transmitting the 

mysteries to the Roman army. On the civilian side, with the deposition of Antiochus IV in 72 A.D., the eastern dynasty 

established its residence in Rome and contributed in spreading the cult throughout Italy. Thus, according to Beck, the 

foundation period of Mithraism should be moved from the first century B.C. to the first century A.D. in spite of 

Plutarch’s account. Roger Beck, “The Mysteries of Mithras: A New Account of Their Genesis” in The Journal of 

Roman Studies 88 (1998): 115-28. 

86 

Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras, 8, 133. See also the inscription on the Aventino in the mithraeum near Santa 

Prisca’s church (CIMRM 480), in which each order is greeted with the word nama: “nama Patribus; nama 

Heliodromus, nama Persis...” and so forth. 

87 

Firmicus Maternus, De Errore, 5.2 and Porphyry, De Antro Nympharum, 6 in Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A 

Sourcebook, 208 and 211, respectively. 

88 

Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 95-6. 

89 

According to Nock, “the Mithraism which reached the western world was a new thing, created by fusion in Asia 

Minor. In general, the cult was carried by pirates, soldiers, functionaries, traders, and slaves, who had learned this 

derivative of Persian belief, and it did not travel on a national basis.” Cf. “The Genius of Mithraism” in Arthur Darby 

Nock, ed., Essays on Religion and the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 

vol. 1, 108-13. 

90 

Quintus Curtius Rufus, Alexander the Great, 4.13, in A.S. Geden, trans., Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism, 27- 

8. One cannot help but notice that Mithras as god in connection with the sun appealed to military men even during 

Hellenistic times. 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO


killing of the bull, the concept of re-birth, the ideals of strength and invincibility, and the 

dualism of order-chaos. More importantly, the god’s exoticness may have made him 

attractive, in a manner similar to other “foreign” deities such as the Egyptian Isis. In 

essence, his parthianitas made him popular. His foreignness gave him a reassuring 

connotation of impartiality–a virtue that may have been very appealing to a diverse group 

such as the Roman imperial army. 

Despite the fact that the worship of Mithras had a Persian origin and maintained 

traces of its native cult, Mithraism became “utterly Roman.” 91 It was “Roman” in the 

sense that the cult had a “pragmatic” feature. The strong element of pragmatism in 

Roman society and culture influenced the Weltanschauung of its citizens in many 

aspects, including that of religion. Not only did Roman religion with its polytheistic 

character allow for the worship of many deities at the same time, but also it was 

specifically the fundamental pragmatism of ancient Romans that caused them to try other 

practices when the old rituals appeared ineffectual. 92 This opened the way to foreign 

cults, like the mystery cults. In Roman religion there was no jealousy or exclusivity when 

it came to worshipping deities, but instead a sense of inclusiveness. The pragmatic aspect 

of Mithraism can also be seen in both its previously discussed nature as a votive religion, 

as well as in its willingness to include other gods within the cult. Just as romanitas 

extended all over the provinces thorough the extension of Roman citizenship, the cult of 

Mithras integrated other deities, hence assuming a trait of universality. 

An attractive feature of Mithraism was that each grade of the hierarchy had a 

specific protective deity and associated emblems. The deities were respectively–in order 

from the first to the seventh grade–Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Moon, Sun, and 

Saturn. Therefore, the mithraeum presented itself as a sort of pantheon, a sanctuary 

including the main and best-known deities. This can help explain the appeal of the 

Mithras’ religion in the eyes of soldiers coming from a variety of different places, namely 

its universal and comprehensive character. Although centered on the figure the Mithras, 

Mithraism was more than just that god’s cult. It was a cult that included other deities and 

that also incorporated the signs of the zodiac into an all-inclusive system. 

Thus, Mithras combined elements that may have appeared exotic (his origin and 

attire) with aspects that were very familiar to the Roman world. The god remained in part 

Persian and became in part Roman–resulting in a syncretic character that made him 

universal. On the one hand, Mithras’ universality stems from his own parthianitas or the 

fact that Mithras was a Parthian, hence a foreign god that did not come from any of the 

Roman provinces. This conferred him a neutral and impartial character–and ultimately a 

universal one–making him easily accepted in an army formed by soldiers that came from 

all different parts of the empire. The idea that Mithraism stands as evidence for the 

“barbarization” of the army is to be rejected. 93 On the other hand, the cult of Mithras was 

universal in the sense that it was very Roman and all-inclusive of Roman religion. In 

essence, because of its syncretic character, Mithraism was the religion of no one place 

and of all places, of no one single god and of many gods, hence it was universal. 

Although some historians have seen Mithraism and the worship of the sun god (the latter 

91 Gordon, “Mithraism and Roman Society,” 111. 

92 Turcan, The Gods of Ancient Rome, 105. 

93 Ramsay MacMullen, Paganism in the Roman Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 118-26. 



promoted especially during the reigns of the emperors Elagabalus and Aurelian) as a 

“growing drift into monotheism,” the presence of many other gods in the Mithraic shrines 

makes Mithraism appear as the apogee of paganism (more precisely, henotheism) and of 

romanitas. 94 

In conclusion, the cult of Mithras was popular among the Roman soldiers for a 

number of reasons, including the god’s powerful image, the highly hierarchical Mithraic 

structure, the very nature of Mithraism as a mystery cult and its emphasis on votive 

character, the aspect of brotherhood that each community fostered, and the inclusiveness 

of other deities that made the religion universal. In his simplicity and direct 

iconographical representation, Mithras was very compelling for Roman soldiers, since the 

god embodied notions such as strength, invincibility, and courage, and he marked a clear 

boundary between “us” and the “other” in the dualism of good versus evil and light 

versus darkness. The rank structure provided a system that was familiar to the soldiers in 

reinforcing hierarchy, authority, and ultimately order; whereas the votive character of the 

cult helped them cope with their fears and anxieties. Most importantly, Mithras’ 

widespread popularity throughout the Roman Empire resulted from his syncretic and 

universal character, and from the nature of the Mithraic community as not only a 

religious group, but also as a brotherhood. Moreover, small mithraea meant that the 

group of worshippers that met there was also small. The space itself was utilized for 

communal ceremonial meals. Even if coated with religious ritual, the act of eating 

together was undoubtedly a social function. Vertical and horizontal ties constituted 

unifying forces that were at least as compelling–if not more–as any promise for salvation. 

Without completely discarding the significance of Mithraic theology (including its 

complex symbolism and liturgy), Mithraism was not simply a religious community, but 

rather a religion and a community. In essence, the cult of Mithras was a social and 

psychological phenomenon and not merely a religious practice, because it was about 

bonding as much as it was about spirituality. 

94 Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, 575. 

GIOVANNA PALOMBO

A Corruption of Morals 

The Boston Massacre in the Social 

Imagination of Resistance 

and Revolution 

Ryan W. Tripp

Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1676: 

Violence and death gripped the region as a conflict between Puritans and 

Algonquian Indians, later known as King Philip’s War, raged across the land. 

Neither side hesitated to commit atrocities. Puritans murdered hundreds of 

Indians in a single encampment; Indians buried Puritans alive as they begged for 

mercy. Puritan women and children ran screaming into the woods, their faces and 

bodies on fire, while Puritan men decapitated Algonquian Indians— 

Narragansetts, Nipmucks, Pocumtucks, Pequots, and Wampanoags—in 

countryside and swamp habitations. In the midst of this carnage, a Natick Indian 

awaited execution for high treason. A Protestant convert supposedly aiding 

Puritan “fathers” during the conflict, the “praying” Indian had in fact become a 

spy for the Algonquians. Death came swiftly for the Natick, easing the transition 

from life to spirit, from history to memory. 1 

Boston, March 1775: 

A doctor entered an apothecary’s shop, his servant trailing close behind. 

Once inside, he lifted a white bundle from the attendant’s arms and walked to the 

back of the building. He then “robed himself” with the cloth. His expectant 

audience, staring from the doors of the Old South Church across the street, gaped 

as the doctor exited the establishment and strode towards them, a “Ciceronian 

Toga” draped around his body. The doctor entered the church and ascended the 

pulpit. 2 

emory of the Boston Massacre unified these seemingly disparate acts, 

separated across time and geographic space in New England, by contributing to the 

perpetuation of a colonial American identity and the emergence of American nationalism. 

During the resistance movement that preceded the American Revolution, the white 

populace of New England embraced a memory of the Boston Massacre that accorded 

with popular conceptions of a white, masculine, and virtuous colonial American identity, 

first by supporting an image of Crispus Attucks as a white patriot, and then accepting his 

vilification as a half-black, half-Indian savage. As resistance developed into revolution 

and colonial identity developed into American nationalism, white men and women 

attending Boston Massacre commemorations confirmed, by crowd action in the public 

sphere, a masculine construction of national origins that excluded Attucks and conflated 

the New England past with the totality of British North American history, providing a 

foundation for a regional form of American nationalism in the early Republic. 

Histories of the Boston Massacre have focused solely on the event instead of how 

it was remembered, thereby ignoring its central role in the creation of American 

nationalism in New England. The first book-length study, Frederic Kidder’s A History of 

1 Bill Belton, “The Indian Heritage of Crispus Attucks,” Negro History Bulletin 35 (November 1972), 149-52; Jill 

Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 

71-121. 

2 New York Gazetteer, March 16, 1775.


the Boston Massacre (1870), contained both a narrative and collection of corresponding 

primary source documents. Kidder’s history, published in the centennial year of the 

Massacre, often paralleled the Boston radicals’ version of events—a dubious source at 

best because their accounts sought to rally the public into the resistance movement. 3 The 

second full-length study came in 1970 (the bicentennial of the event) with the publication 

of Hiller Zobel’s The Boston Massacre. Zobel characterized the Massacre as a 

culmination of the resistance and violence that had plagued Boston since the Stamp Act 

Crisis. He closed the study by briefly surveying events immediately after the trial, 

arguing that the Boston Massacre as an event did not incite revolutionary sentiments 

across the colonies. The apparent thoroughness of Zobel’s survey dissuaded subsequent 

historians from investigating the impact of the Boston Massacre as a remembered event 

in the public imagination. 4 Recently, however, literary analyst Sandra Gustafson studied 

the recorded bodily actions and spoken metaphors used by radicals in the Boston 

Massacre trial and in other orations in a book on early American oratory. She contends 

that, at first, patriot orators legitimated their claims to power by engaging in rational 

discourse, believing that irrational discourse corrupted society. However, bodily 

movements and symbolism in oral performances, such as the Boston Massacre orations, 

gradually became more important than rational discourse. 5 

Visual and written accounts of the Massacre remain unanalyzed, as do the 

contextual reasons for—and consequences of—Adams’s characterization of Crispus 

Attucks during the Boston Massacre trial. Such a contextual treatment, especially in 

analyzing the effects of King Philip’s War and Attucks’ Afro-Indian heritage on public 

memory, forms the first section of this paper. A study of subsequent Boston Massacre 

commemorations, the orators’ performance techniques and garb (such as a toga), their 

construction of an imaginary American past that excluded Attucks, and the concomitant 

audience reaction, comprises the second section of this essay. This analysis employs the 

early American public sphere to demonstrate the cultural negotiation between audiences 

attending the orations and radical orators who needed public affirmation to legitimate the 

imagined American nation and American nationalism. The final part investigates the 

influence of these printed and oratorical representations of the Boston Massacre on 

American nationalist rites in the early Republic. But first, by way of introduction, the 

initial section will begin not with the propaganda or trial, but with a summary of the 

Boston Massacre as an event according to eyewitness accounts and secondary sources. 

I 

The Boston Massacre resonated across New England because the skirmish came 

on the heels of a similar incident in London that confirmed colonial fears of ominous 

corruption within the British Empire. 6 On 10 May 1767, thousands of young men 

3 

Frederic Kidder, A History of the Boston Massacre (New York: Munsell Press, 1870). 

4 

Hiller Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1970). 

5 

Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 2000). 

6 

Tracts by radical republican Britons John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon that pointed to this perceived corruption, 

collected largely in volumes entitled Cato’s Letters, were widely read in the American colonies and contributed to 

colonial fears of imperial corruption. See Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 

enlarged ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1991), 1-54. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


gathered outside of a London jail to protest the imprisonment of John Wilkes, a Whig 

dissenter and pamphleteer. British troops, unable to quell their own anger in the face of 

demonstrator ridicule, fired into the crowd. As a result, a young man named William 

Allen lay dead. 7 In the days that followed, Whig opposition writers harangued the British 

ministers whom they believed to be responsible, dubbing the tragedy “The Massacre of 

St. George’s Field.” 8 Reports of the “Massacre” and subsequent trial reached American 

newspapers, always full of political news from Europe, in a few months. The merchant 

politicians and pundits of Boston—Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, and Dr. 

Joseph Warren, among others—devoured any news on the tragic event. 9 On 27 October 

1768, the Boston Newsletter published the trial narrative by a “Ministerial Hireling” who 

noticed that “the curiosity” of the Boston public had “been very much excited by the 

trial.” This “Hireling,” lamented “the venality of the times;” such a massacre—due to the 

corruption pervasive in English government—proved that “all public virtue [was] lost.” 10 

By March 1770, British troops had been stationed in Boston for two years and 

many New Englanders viewed their presence, along with the 1765 Stamp Act and the 

1767 Townshend Acts, as evidence of the same corruption that had caused the Massacre 

of St. George’s Field. This burgeoning animosity engendered conflicts between British 

troops and Bostonians that eventually culminated in the Boston Massacre. Hiller Zobel’s 

narrative offers the most accurate account of these events. On March 2, a small fight 

broke out between British soldiers seeking jobs to supplement their meager pay, and 

rope-workers who kindly offered one of the troops monetary reward to “go and clean my 

shithouse.” 11 A similar skirmish between British troops and Boston laborers erupted the 

next day. Then, on the cold, snowy evening of March 5, 1770, fights broke out between 

British troops and Boston civilians in three parts of the city: Dock Square, Murray’s 

Barracks, and King Street between the Town House and the Customs House. A church 

bell began to ring, a signal for fire in Boston for decades. People from all over the city 

stopped their tasks and armed themselves with clubs and sticks, chanting “Fire!” 

Strangely enough, no fire existed in Boston on that snowy night, suggesting some sort of 

signal. 12 

As soon as the bells began ringing, a man named Samuel Johnson quickly 

finished his supper at Thomas Symmonds’ victualing-house (a diner), seized a cordwood 

stick, and led a large group of sailors toward King Street. Meanwhile, crowds from the 

other two locales converged on King Street, pelting snowballs and yelling curses such as, 

“Lobster son of a bitch!” aimed at the British 29 th Regiment stationed in front of the 

Customs House. Thomas Preston, Captain of the Regiment, arrived on the scene and 

pleaded with the growing mob to disperse. The mob, still chanting “fire,” replied by 

surrounding and pressing in on the troops. The soldiers held their bayonets fixed in front 

7 

Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to 

Britain, 1765-1776, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1991), 172. 

8 

Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 173. 

9 

Peter Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 161. 

10 

Boston Newsletter, October 27, 1768. 

11 

Zobel, The Boston Massacre, 182. 

12 

No evidence exists explaining why the church bell rang and why different people from all over the city suddenly took 

to the streets chanting “Fire!” while armed with wooden clubs and sticks (wood does not put out fires very effectively). 

A Corruption of Morals


of them. Individual skirmishes began breaking out as any hope for reconciliation 

dissipated into the dark Boston evening. A club sailed through the air and hit Private 

Montgomery in the face. Blood ran down his face and into his eyes, spattering onto the 

fresh snow. He heaved himself back up and thrust a musket into the crowd blindly, firing 

a single shot. 13 

The shot missed, but the impetus to discharge spread like wildfire among the 

frightened troops. The blasts came almost in unison, mortally wounding Samuel Johnson 

as well as Samuel Gray, James Caldwell, Samuel Maverick, and Patrick Carr. Preston, 

shocked and enraged at his troops for firing at will, screamed at them to stand down. The 

troops, in a daze, obeyed his command. Some members of the crowd returned to the 

smoke-filled street, dragging the mortally wounded away from the scene. The next day, 

thousands of Bostonians led by Samuel Adams demanded that Royal Governor Thomas 

Hutchinson order Lt. Col. William Dalrymple, leader of the British forces, to remove the 

troops from Boston. Hutchinson could do nothing except comply with the request. 

Dalrymple and the British Regiments subsequently retired to Castle William on an island 

just off Boston Harbor. However, their compliance failed to deter Boston leaders from 

seizing the moment and characterizing the tragedy as a Massacre of St. George’s Field on 

New England soil. 14 Although they privately considered the March 5 protestors to be a 

mob acting improperly outside state authority, the radicals denounced the Boson 

Massacre in public. 15 Samuel Adams, for instance, immediately orchestrated elaborate 

funeral processions for the victims. 16 

Paul Revere, meanwhile, busily copied an incendiary image of the skirmish by 

Henry Pelham that whitened the skin of a principal victim of the Massacre: Samuel 

Johnson. Before he was thrust into historical memory, residents of Boston knew this 

former Framingham slave both by his free name of Samuel Johnson and his slave name, 

Crispus Attucks. His father had been an African, and his mother a Natick Indian named 

Nancy Attucks, granddaughter to John Attucks, a “praying” Natick executed for treason 

during King Philip’s War. Although most Bostonians did not recognize that “attuck” 

meant “deer” in the Natick language, Minister Nathaniel Emmons nevertheless 

remembered him as “that half Indian, half Negro, and altogether rowdy, who should have 

been strangled before he was born.” 17 

New England’s Afro-Indian population had increased dramatically during the 

years leading up to the American Revolution. Colonial conflicts such as King Philip’s 

War decimated the number of Indian males available for reproduction within tribal 

enclaves, while enslaved male Africans entered New England at twice the rate of African 

females. Many male blacks consequently sought sexual gratification and filial attachment 

with Indian women during the eighteenth century. As the cross-union rate continued to 

13 

Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 194-5. 

14 

Zobel, The Boston Massacre, 184-200. 

15 

Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 125-6. 

16 

L.H. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, 3 vols. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1961), I: 

349-50. 

17 

Nathaniel Emmons quoted in Patricia Bradley, Slavery, Propaganda, and the American Revolution (Jackson: 

University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 60. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


climb, legal categories of race in New England blurred into a confusing milieu of 

subjective interpretation. That is, white leaders identified “people of color” as Indian, 

black, or the ambiguous “mulatto”—the last of which hinted at the possibility of white 

ancestry, either real or imagined—according to the designator that best fit certain legal or 

rhetorical contexts. 18 

During the 1760s and early 1770s, cultural representations of blacks and Indians 

also facilitated white, masculine, and independent notions of a colonial American identity 

in New England. In plays, engravings, and broadsides, New Englanders defined a 

virtuous colonial American identity against blacks’ subservient status and perceived 

ignorance. On the other hand, white colonists often demonstrated “noble independence” 

and “almost indigenous” American roots by donning Indian garb during resistance 

activities. Actual Indians depicted in broadsides, newspapers, and other resistance 

propaganda represented “outsiders” and “vicious savages” allied with the British. 19 A 

New England discourse of colonial American identity contributed to such ignoble 

sentiments. During and after King Philip’s War, Puritans wrote war narratives that 

defined colonial Americans as virtuous, merciful, and pious against the “cruel” Spanish 

and the “savage natives.” 20 The resistance movement resurrected these war narratives in 

propaganda form, characterizing the British as even more “savage” than the Indians, yet 

reiterating the “otherness” of both groups in a new discourse on American identity. 21 

Paul Revere whitened Crispus Attucks in the March 12 Boston Gazette engraving 

and a 26 March broadside of the incident because the image of a half-black, half-Indian 

patriot contradicted New England notions of colonial American identity. 22 The 

description labeled Attucks a “mulatto,” implying the possibility of white ancestry and 

skin. The corresponding engraving, based on the earlier design by Pelham, depicted 

Captain Preston actually ordering the soldiers to fire at an unarmed crowd, some of 

whom attempted to rescue the initial victims of the alleged British onslaught. Hovering 

over the corpses, a woman draped in black mourned the fallen men, echoing the drama of 

Mary lamenting Christ’s crucifixion. In one of only two major departures from the 

Pelham print (aside from minor changes such as switching the direction of the moon and 

omitting a chimney, steeple, and townhouse sundial), Revere designated the second story 

of the Customs House, right above the British troops, as “Butcher’s Hall.” In the other 

major departure, Revere decided to color the broadside. All the men retained white faces 

and, in keeping with Pelham’s original design, white features. The only figures he chose 

to darken were two British troops with malevolent expressions and a dog. In this widely 

distributed image of the Boston Massacre, Revere transformed Attucks into a 

homogenous patriot that accorded with white, masculine, and virtuous notions of a 

colonial American identity. 

18 

John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730-1830 (Baltimore: John Hopkins 

University Press, 2003), 173-9. 

19 

Sweet, Bodies Politic, 187-193. 

20 

Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 

1998), xiv. 

21 

Lepore, The Name of War, 187-188; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 193-4. 

22 

For a copy of the engraving, please visit 

. 



John Adams, defense counsel for the British troops implicated in the 5 March 

killings, reconfigured Attucks as a counterpoint for this colonial identity by 

characterizing him as a half-black, half-Indian savage and the Massacre’s primary 

instigator. Adams argued that the mob, “under the command” of “Attucks,” emitted a 

“whistle” akin to “screaming and rending like an Indian yell,” suggesting a band of 

bloodthirsty savages similar to those found in popular narratives of King Philip’s War. 

Then this war-painted savage, “whose very looks was enough to terrify any person” and 

“whose mad behavior, in all probability, the dreadful carnage of that night is chiefly to be 

ascribed,” ordered the mob to “Kill them! Kill them! Knock them over! And he tried to 

knock their brains out.” Adams characterized the rest of the protestors as a band of 

outsiders, “a motley rabble of saucy boys, Negroes and molottoes, Irish teagues and 

outlandish jack tarrs.” The jury, frightened by the memory of King Philip’s War, quickly 

returned a verdict of acquittal. In November, Edes and Gill published a transcript of the 

trial that found wide readership. Despite a small number of burlesques written by Samuel 

Adams in December, the Massachusetts public did not actively denounce the jury’s 

decision. 23 

By the end of 1770, radicals had constructed a social memory of the Boston 

Massacre that allowed New Englanders to continue defining themselves against blacks, 

Indians, and the British. This “othering” framework formed the basis of New England 

regional nationalism during the late eighteenth century. 24 Elegizing the heterogeneous 

victims as a homogenous group that corresponded to American national identity 

subsequently proved a problematic task. When Boston Massacre commemorators did 

lament a victim, they almost always chose a white casualty. John Hancock, the only 

orator who mentioned Crispus Attucks, did so in the context of naming all the fallen men. 

By and large, the radicals refrained from describing or even referring to, any of the 

deceased protestors. Instead, they used the Massacre commemorations to espouse an 

imagined American past, fueling the fires of nationalism burning in New England. 25 

II 

Colonial American identity developed into American nationalism when radical 

resistance developed into revolution, a transformation reflected in the Boston Massacre 

orations performed within the early American public sphere. In the 1760s, radicals hoped 

that the ostensibly virtuous colonies would reform the British Empire from within the 

imperial system. Following the Boston Massacre, radicals published propaganda of the 

skirmish to voice their grievances against the Empire—propaganda that did not espouse 

revolution or an independent nation. Between 1772 and 1774, however, Royal officials 

attempted to circumvent colonial legislatures and receive their salaries directly from the 

23 John Hodgon (Shorthand Recorder), The Trial of William Weems, James Hartegan, etc., Soldiers in His Majesty’s 

29th Regiment of Foot, For the Murder of Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, James Caldwell, and 

Patrick Carr (Boston: Edes and Gill, November 1770), 170 and 175-6; Robert Smith, “What Came After? News 

Diffusion and Significance of the Boston Massacre, 1770-1775,” Journalism History 3 (August 1976): 71-5, 83. 

24 Lepore, The Name of War, xiv. 

25 John Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774 (New Haven: Thomas and Samuel Green, 1774; reprint), 8; 

John Wood Sweet argues that the “significance of race and its complex relationship to notions of nationalism in the 

years before and during the Revolution has not been fully appreciated.” See Sweet, Bodies Politic, 186. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


Crown. In response, radicals called for independence and engaged in acts that defied 

British authority, especially after passage of the Intolerable Acts, transforming resistance 

into revolution. 26 

In the midst of this transition, white men and women confirmed a “social 

imaginary” masculine past during Boston Massacre commemorations that facilitated a 

masculine “horizontal comradeship” among inhabitants of the imagined American 

nation. 27 Most of the orations began with a review of the founding of America, which 

created a definitional ambiguity between the Puritans and the original colonists, between 

America and New England. Orators then moved on to describe the “corruption of morals” 

supposedly caused by the British standing army and its effect on Bostonians’ behavior 

before and during the Boston Massacre; a tragedy which in turn served as the pretext first 

for concluding remarks on resistance measures, and later, American nationalism. 

However, these orations did not exist in a cultural vacuum. Crowds and radical orators 

across British North America began to negotiate regional national consciousness 

alongside a burgeoning national print culture. In New England, this cultural negotiation 

and approbation by upper and lower orders came in the form of applause, cheering, postoration 

festivities, and other crowd actions in the early American public sphere. This 

public sphere consisted of printed materials expressing both rational-critical and wild 

discourse, coffeehouse-tavern discussion, fetes, and commemorations where early 

American peoples created an imagined nationhood by “gate-keeping”—collective assent, 

dissent, or qualified acceptance of formal political acts. 28 

26 See Maier, From Resistance to Revolution. 

27 Inhabitants of a given geographic space such as Boston define themselves and their societies by imagining a history 

and ideology. See Cornelius Castoriadis, “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary,” in The 

Castoriadis Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1997), 330; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of 

Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 353-9. Benedict Anderson argues that the American Revolution, along with the 

revolutions in Spanish America, generated a national consciousness only among Creole functionaries primarily due to 

the paucity of print capitalist media. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and 

Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Press, 1991), 6-65. Michael Warner counters Anderson’s contentions by 

examining the dissemination of print in the early American public sphere in Michael Warner, Letters of the Republic 

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). I found that newspaper accounts of Boston crowd action indicate that the 

nationalism spawned by the American Revolution was not solely relegated to the upper orders—even without proving 

the spread of print capitalism beyond elite ranks. San Francisco State University Professor Paul Longmore also 

disagrees with Anderson and argues for an alternate definition of nationalism. See Paul Longmore, “Nationalism and 

the Coming of the American Revolution” (unpublished book, San Francisco State University, 2006). 

28 Sandra Gustafson holds that a “vernacular political oratory emerged as a formal genre with a national audience in 

tandem with the expansion of print culture.” Patriot orators “created novel modes of nationalist identity based on their 

public performances” in the “public sphere.” See Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance 

in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 169-70. The early American public sphere 

deviates from the bourgeois “rational-critical” or “facts and norms” models offered by political theorist Jurgen 

Habermas. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of 

Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 1-30; Jurgen Habermas, Between Facts and 

Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT Press, 

1996), 307-8. John Brooke provides a framework for the early American public sphere in John Brooke, “Consent, Civil 

Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey Palsey, Andrew 

Robertson, David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early 

American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 227-29; Dick Hoerder, “Boston Leaders 

and Boston Crowds,” in Alfred F. Young, ed., The American Revolution (Dekalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1976), 239- 

61. 



Every year around March or April, bells tolled in Boston during the day, while 

lanterns flickered on ghostly transparencies of white Massacre victims at sunset, awing 

children and adults alike. The crowds that attended the subsequent afternoon and early 

evening speeches included both white men and women, indicating the acceptance of an 

imagined masculine past by multiple sets of these gendered audiences—an annual and 

persistent acceptance that gave birth to New England regional nationalism. In a 1773 

diary entry, for instance, John Adams expressed his shock at the sheer diversity of the 

crowd in the Old South Church, the setting for the “invented tradition” of the Boston 

Massacre orations. “That large Church,” he wrote in wonder, “was filled and crowded in 

every Pew, Seat, Alley, and Gallery, by an Audience of several Thousands of People of 

All Ages and Characters and of both Sexes.” 29 

On 2April 1771, Minister James Lovell commenced the first of these orations, 

providing a foundation for the later nationalist orations by espousing an imagined 

colonial past, although he called for resistance measures rather than independence. After 

short remarks on the horror of the tragedy, he abruptly turned to constructing an 

American past. British North American history began not in Virginia’s Jamestown, but 

when the Puritans “left their native land, risked all the dangers of the sea, and came to 

this then-savage desert.” He proclaimed that the people of Boston “showed upon the 

alarming call for trial that their brave spirit still exists in vigor, though their legacy of 

rights is much impaired.” 30 After decrying, in the republican style, the corruption of 

standing armies and the virtues of militias, Lovell again returned to his narrative of the 

colonial past. 31 He declared the “compact” that the Puritan settlers made with the British 

king to be Massachusetts’ only true legislative authority. He chose not to “enlarge upon 

the character of those first settlers,” even if they did “defend their religion and their lives 

from the greatest inland danger of the savage natives,” as represented in popular accounts 

of King Philip’s War, because he wished to implore the audience to perpetuate Puritan 

virtues into the perilous future. 32 Republicanism could not be perpetuated by 

independence and war, but by allowing the Royal government in Boston to enjoy the 

common protection of the British Constitution. 33 Lovell finished his speech to “the 

universal Acceptance of a crowded Audience,” indicating the “Acceptance” of this 

regional construction of the American past, by a “universal” representation of Boston 

society, in the public sphere. 34 

On 5 March 1772, Dr. Joseph Warren reiterated this regional construction of the 

colonial past in the second oration. According to Warren, the American colonies would 

counteract venality with virtue and reform the British Empire. Evidence for inevitable 

29 

The Connecticut Journal, March 30, 1772; The Boston Gazette, March 9, 1772; The New Hampshire Gazette, March 

8, 1773. Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 2, 79; E.J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing 

Traditions,” in E.J. Hobsbawm, ed., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 7. 

30 

James Lovell, An Oration Delivered April 2nd 1771 (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1771), 7. 

31 

For the origins of the Atlantic republican tradition that stressed the corruption of standing armies, see J.G.A. Pocock, 

The Machiavellian Moment, second ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 361-422; for the transmission of 

these European ideas into America, see Bailyn, The Ideological Origins, 22-54; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the 

American Republic 1776-1787, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3-90. 

32 

Lovell, An Oration Delivered April 2nd 1771, 13-4. 

33 

Lovell, An Oration Delivered April 2nd 1771, 18. 

34 

Boston Evening Post, April 8, 1771. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


fulfillment of this prophecy could be found in the American colonial past—which of 

course began in the northern rather than southern colonies. He explained that the 

Puritans, after their initial settlement, secured a new charter during the British Glorious 

Revolution of 1688, which promised liberties and immunities to all British subjects. 35 

Building upon Lovell’s imagined narrative, Warren extolled Bostonians for not 

falling prey to the moral corruption of the standing army stationed in the city, despite the 

efforts of British troops to replace Boston men in the gendered patriarchy of New 

England. Resistance against growing imperial tyranny brought the arrival of an army to 

Massachusetts, engendering “a corruption of morals . . . this is one of the effects of 

quartering troops in a populous city.” 36 The republican trope of “corruption” had 

suddenly taken a sexual turn. This “baneful influence” of “standing armies” caused the 

Boston Massacre; “for, by a corruption of morals, the public happiness is immediately 

affected.” According to Warren, the standing army raped the city’s “beauteous virgins” 

who were then “exposed to all, [by] the insolence of unbridled passion.” 37 The sexual 

domination of Boston women by British troops had undermined the traditional roles of 

New England patriarchs. In response, men’s “hearts beat to arms; we snatched our 

weapons.” Fortunately, “propitious heaven forbad the bloody carnage,” for the “inbred 

affection to Great Britain” among all males prevented “an immediate recourse to the 

sword.” 38 

For now, he advised the audience to be wary of British corruption; but earlier in 

the oration, in a moment of courage, he ventured to assert that whenever government by 

consent is lost, the constitution must be destroyed. 39 He also hinted that in new 

communities, citizens freshly remembered the equality of their natural state, preventing 

people “cloathed with authority” from violating natural rights. 40 By the close of his 

speech, Warren retreated from these radical insinuations of independence, simply hoping 

to be a shining beacon of virtue in the corrupt British Empire. In three years’ time, 

Warren would attempt to legitimate his position as a leader in a new and revolutionary 

Massachusetts community by expanding the colonial past in national directions, as well 

as by literally appearing “cloathed with authority.” 41 

According to newspaper accounts, the heterogeneous crowd composed of both 

men and women confirmed this gendered construction of the American past in the public 

sphere with cheers and a unanimous declaration of gratitude. This mob, who had 

“crowded to hear the ORATION in such Numbers, that it was with much Difficulty that 

the Orator reached the pulpit [in the Old South Church],” gave him “universal applause” 

and then these “Fellow Citizens voted him their Thanks.” In the evening, the crowd met 

at “Mrs. Clapham’s in King Street” for a social gathering; the meeting was marked by a 

35 Dr. Joseph Warren, An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1772 (Boston: Edes and Gill, 1772), 9. 

36 Warren, An Oration Delivered March 5th, 1772, 12. 








“lively representation of the bloody Massacre” on her balcony that commemorated “the 

Retrospect of so horrid a Transaction.” 42 

At the end of the year, the Boston insurgency shifted its aims from resistance to 

independence, revolution, and nationalism, a transition reflected in the Boston Massacre 

commemorations. 43 In June 1772 Royal Governor Hutchinson declared that he and the 

Massachusetts judiciary would bypass colonial assemblies and receive their salaries 

directly from the British government. Incensed radicals, despite the dissolution of the 

colonial non-importation agreement and removal of troops from Boston city proper, 

continued to rouse popular resentment against the British Parliament. They also 

vociferously denounced imposition of the sole remaining Townshend duty: the tax on tea. 

Boston radicals subsequently initiated the first Committee of Correspondence, an 

organization that bequeathed formal political roles to radical leaders in outright rebellion 

against the British Empire. 44 

On 5 March 1773, in the Old South Church, Dr. Benjamin Church delivered the 

first oration that argued for a national future, signifying the demise of resistance 

sentiments and the rise of American nationalism. Church presented the American past in 

reverse chronological order, beginning with a gendered vision of the national future and 

ending with Puritan beginnings. He declared that only a masculine union could 

perpetuate the virtue of America. “The general infraction of the rights of all the colonies,” 

he argued in a footnote, “must finally reduce the discordant provinces, to a necessary 

combination for their mutual interest and defence.” He defined this, “collective power of 

the whole,” as a “state or society of men” during the actual oration, denoting the 

masculine contours of the imagined American nation. 45 

Church subsequently repeated James Lovell’s and Joseph Warren’s vision of the 

American past. After the Boston Massacre, “dire was the interval of rage, fierce was the 

conflict of the soul.” Posing a rhetorical question to unseen challengers of this 

interpretation, Church asked, “Did not the consideration of our expiring LIBERTIES, 

impel us to remorseless havock?” Fortunately, the supposed “havock” apparently 

subsided in Boston after the tragedy. In contrast to Warren’s secular explanation for this 

constructed turn of events—“the inbred affection to Great-Britain”—Church described 

“the guardian GOD of New-England” as suddenly thundering over the murderous city, 

ordering her inhabitants, “PEACE, BE STILL,” and thus “hush’d was the bursting war.” 

Like Warren, he attributed the actual cause of the Boston Massacre and the behavior of 

Bostonians to the “foul oppression, of quartering troops, in populous cities, in times of 

peace.” In keeping with the Puritan tradition of both Lovell and Warren, he reminded the 

audience that “they owed their ancestors” the duty to separate from Britain and 

perpetuate civic virtue. 46 

42 The Connecticut Journal, March 30, 1772; The Boston Gazette, March 9, 1772. 

43 Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 228-271. 

44 Richard Middleton, Colonial America: A History, 1565-1776, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 468. 

45 Dr. Benjamin Church, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1773: The Fourth Edition (Boston: J. Greenleaf, 1773), 12- 

13; This first explicit argument for union in 1773 corresponds to Pauline Maier’s findings that, between 1772 and 1774, 

resistance transformed into revolution. 

46 Church, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1773, 19-20. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


Men and women in the crowd confirmed this imagined national past and its 

gendered conception of the American nation by cheering Church and further 

commemorating the Boston Massacre that evening. He “had the universal applause of his 

Audience,” a crowd that consisted of a “great many Inhabitants, and many of the Clergy, 

not only of this, but of neighbouring Towns.” Once again, the crowd attended a social 

gathering at Mrs. Clapham’s to commemorate the tragedy with drinks and festivities. 47 If 

the sentiments of John Adams, former defender of the British troops, served as any 

indication of the audience’s confirmation of Church’s narrative, then Church had 

successfully accomplished his goals. Although Adams still believed “the Verdict of the 

Jury was exactly right,” he wrote in his diary that this “however is no Reason why the 

Town should not call the Action of that Night a Massacre.” He finished the entry with a 

republican flourish, endorsing Church’s proposition that the Boston Massacre “is the 

strongest of Proofs of the Danger of standing Armies.” 48 

Just months after Church’s oration, Boston’s Royal Governor, Thomas 

Hutchinson, thwarted attempts by insurgency leaders to bypass the tax on tea. In response 

to Hutchinson’s actions and the East India Company’s monopoly on tea distribution in 

Boston, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere, and others disguised themselves as Indians on the 

night of December 16. Radicals and their supporters boarded the ships and tossed 

approximately 10,000 British monetary pounds of East India Company tea into the 

Atlantic. 49 

John Hancock delivered the fourth commemorative oration three months after this 

Boston Tea Party. According to his version of events, the very presence of British troops 

inverted the proper, gendered roles of republican male and female citizens of Boston, a 

mark of standing army corruption. The soldiers attempted to implement a nefarious 

scheme in order “to betray our youth of one sex [males] into extravagance and 

effeminacy, and of the other [females] to infamy and ruin.” He concentrated especially on 

women, because “the female breast” protected and harbored the essence of virtue in 

Boston society. Despite the solidity of virtue in “the female breast,” however, Hancock 

bemoaned a few young ladies who had fallen prey, either by charm or by force, to the 

sexual prowess of British soldiers. 50 

Hancock reiterated the radical interpretation of the Boston Massacre, contending 

that only the extraordinary virtue of Bostonians shielded them from the corruption of 

British soldiers. If indeed America had been infected by the corrosive influence of the 

British, he asked his audience if they wondered what “with-held the ready arm of 

vengeance from executing instant justice on the vile assassins? Perhaps your feard’d 

promiscuous carnage might ensue” alongside the outbreak of sexual promiscuity. 

47 The New Hampshire Gazette, March 8, 1773. 

48 Butterfield, ed., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, vol. 2, 79. 

49 Middleton, Colonial America, 469. 

50 Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774, 6. For the gendered roles of females in republican culture and the 

public sphere, see Ruth Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800 (Berkeley: University of 

California Press, 2003), 143-4; Ruth Bloch, “Inside and Outside the Public Sphere,” WMQ 62 (January 2005): 99-106; 

Alfred F. Young, “The Women of Boston: ‘Persons of Consequence’ in the Making of the American Revolution, 1765- 

76,” in Harriet Applewhite, ed., Women and Politics in the Age of the American Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of 

Michigan Press, 1990), 203. 



Apparently, only “general compassion” emanating from “the noble bosoms of 

Americans” stifled their violent rage. 51 

He concluded the narrative by presenting the audience with a suggested national 

path, a climax that became characteristic of the orations. “Let US also be ready to take the 

field whenever danger calls,” Hancock thundered, “let us be united and strengthen the 

hands of each other, by promoting a general union among us.” Although the Committees 

of Correspondence had done much for national cohesion, only a national Congress of 

Deputies could facilitate a “uniting” of the “Inhabitants of the whole Continent.” 52 

John Hancock spurred the Boston Massacre orations to new heights: to the 

republican past and national future of America he added exemplary protagonists, 

transforming himself and other Boston men from insurgent radicals into national 

founding heroes. “Sure I am,” he bellowed, “I should not incur your displeasure, if I paid 

a respect so justly due to their much honoured characters in this public place [or public 

sphere]; but when I name an ADAMS, such a numerous host of Fellow-patriots rush 

upon my mind, that I fear it would take up too much of your time.” In any case, he 

boasted, “their revered names, in all succeeding times, shall grace the annals of America. 

From them, let us, my friends, take example.” 53 By cheering Hancock and giving him 

their “universal Approbation” after this closing statement, Boston men and women 

confirmed a gendered version of the American past and a founding patriot myth in the 

public sphere. 54 

Passage of the Intolerable Acts in late 1774 undermined radical leadership by 

circumscribing the Massachusetts governing charter, closing Boston Harbor, and 

authorizing another British occupation of the city. The British ordered the Boston 

populace to recognize the king as the ultimate political authority, not colonial Americans 

like John Hancock. Thus, radical leaders needed not only to keep the nationalist cause 

alive but simultaneously to protect their formal political roles in the public sphere from 

British encroachment. 

Joseph Warren, the next orator, attempted to accomplish this goal by altering his 

physical appearance in order to assert political authority. A letter featured in the March 

16 edition of the New York Gazeteer, by an anonymous “Spectator,” described the scene. 

The radicals, “assembled in the pulpit [of the Old South Church], which was covered 

with black, and we all sat gaping at one another above an hour expecting” the orator’s 

arrival. At long last, “a single horse chair stopped at the Apothecary’s, opposite the 

Meeting.” Joseph Warren “descended” from the traveling chair and entered the shop, 

“followed by a servant, with a bundle.” To the surprise of the “Spectator,” the “bundle” 

turned out to be a “Ciceronian Toga.” Warren strode into the Apothecary’s building 

where he evidently “robed himself.” From the open church door, the audience watched in 

fascination as he exited the shop, “proceeded across the street to the Meeting, and being 

51 Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774, 7. 

52 Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774, 13. 

53 Hancock, An Oration Delivered March 5, 1774, 14-5. 

54 New Hampshire Gazette, March 11, 1774. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


received into the pulpit, he was announced by one of his fraternity to be the person 

appointed to declaim on the occasion.” Warren raised his body to its fullest height as he 

faced the audience, “then put himself into a Demosthenian posture, with a white 

handkerchief in his right hand,” and commenced the fifth annual Boston Massacre 

oration. 55 

The spread of revolutionary sentiments across New England challenged its 

progenitors, including Joseph Warren, to assert their leadership positions in the new 

revolutionary movement. The idea of a natural aristocracy, intertwined with political 

theorist James Harrington’s belief that only propertied, independent, and therefore 

virtuous males should govern, had its roots in the Ciceronian critique of the last 

generation of the Roman Republic. Hereditary ties theoretically held no place in 

republican political systems; only complete propertied independence from potentially 

tyrannical others qualified a citizen as a virtuous potential leader. Orators, however, 

could not easily display their virtuous independence to audiences. Joseph Warren, 

though, had arrived at a solution to this dilemma: he established himself as a member of 

the American natural aristocracy by becoming Cicero. In the Old South Church stood the 

reincarnation of this original natural aristocrat, commemorating a tragedy caused by the 

corruption of standing armies, and once again critiquing a decadent government—this 

time, the once glorious British state. Nothing less than a transposition of past into present 

legitimated this audacious claim to patriarchal power. 56 

In Warren’s version of the colonial past, King Philip’s War and other Puritan 

conflicts with “savage” Indian villains became the prelude for rebellion against a corrupt 

British Empire. His imaginary story began in a familiar manner: an “English subject” 

discovered what would be “our country in 1620.” “Our ancestors,” the Puritans or 

“American forefathers,” apparently for every colony in British North America, reached 

an agreement with “King James I for certain lands in North-America,” allegedly 

purchased “legally” from the “savage natives.” Soon “the fields began to wave with 

ripening harvests.” 57 Then “the savage natives saw with wonder the delightful change and 

quickly formed a scheme to obtain that by fraud or force, which nature meant as the 

reward of industry alone.” Fortunately, the Puritans “were not less ready to take the field 

for battle than for labour; and the insidious foe was driven from their borders as often as 

he ventured to disturb them.” 58 

After reiterating the Boston Massacre “corruption of morals” narrative, he argued 

that the prospective national union remained the closing act of the “drama.” 59 This 

argument contained three contentions. First, Warren believed that colonial resistance to 

Parliamentary taxation sparked a national inquiry into the nature of constitutionalism in 

all of the colonies. Second, the Boston Port Bill had engendered “sympathetic feelings for 

a brother in distress” in a unified and masculine nation. Third, the British Empire’s 

mutilation of the Massachusetts governing charter struck fear in similar colonial 

governments, forming a national sentiment of defense. This defense would succeed, 

Warren added in a statement that contradicted his own interpretation of Boston Massacre 

55 New York Gazetteer, March 16, 1775. 

56 Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 145-89, 213-25; 

Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 25-6. 

57 Dr. Joseph Warren, An Oration Delivered March 6th 1775 (Rhode Island: S. Southwick, 1775), 7-9. 

58 Warren, An Oration Delivered March 6th 1775, 8-9. 

59 Warren, An Oration Delivered March 6th 1775, 15. 



causes, because “the exactness and beauty of [the British military’s] discipline inspire our 

youth with order and in the pursuit of military knowledge.” 60 

The toga-clad Warren had asserted his own authority to lead by transforming 

himself into a classical member of the natural aristocracy, uniting his audience by 

defining their nationalism against imaginary “savages,” and ending with a promise that 

the sanctions against Boston would spawn the militant birth of a nation. Although 

independence had not been “our aim,” he concluded, “if these pacific measures [of the 

Continental Congress] are ineffectual, and it appears that the only way to safety is, 

through fields of blood, I know you will not turn your faces from your foes.” He 

persuaded the crowd that they held a central place in this dramatic event of America’s 

past. In exchange for their presumed consent of his formal political role in the public 

sphere, Warren assured the audience that “future generations, who fired by your example, 

shall emulate your virtues, and learn from you the heavenly art of making millions 

happy.” 61 

According to the “Spectator,” Warren “was applauded by the mob,” confirming 

his version of the American past and his leadership position in New England. After the 

clamor subsided, a British officer yelled to his troops, “‘Fie, fie, fie!’—The gallerians 

apprehending fire, fire [an order to discharge] bounced out of the windows, and swarmed 

down the gutters.” Suddenly, the “43 rd Regiment, returning accidentally from exercise, 

with drums beating, threw the whole body into the utmost consternation.” For the 

audience, these British actions confirmed the radicals’ narrative account of the Boston 

Massacre. Protests against the 43 rd Regiment also represented the crowd’s rejection of 

formal British authority in the public sphere, even as they embraced Joseph Warren as 

their rightful leader. 62 

Although most of the audience applauded Warren, the “Spectator” observed that 

others “groaned” after the speech. When military conflict broke out between Minutemen 

and British troops at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, Boston radicals decided to 

silence these and other dissenting voices to their cause, revealing the fiction of nationalist 

union promoted by orators. 63 Joseph Warren led the charge on 8 May at the extra-legal 

Massachusetts Provincial Congress in Watertown. As President of the Congress, he 

signed into law a bill that ordered “the several Committees of Correspondence . . . to 

enquire into the Principles and Conduct of such suspected Persons.” These “suspected 

Persons” would have to give investigators “full and ample Assurances . . . of their 

Readiness to join their Countrymen on all Occasions, in Defence of the Rights and 

Liberties of America.” 64 

Joseph Warren next endorsed, and most likely authored, a law that closed 

provincial borders and mandated that neighbor spy on neighbor in order to validate 

radicals’ espousals of a unified front. The Provincial Congress led by Warren resolved to 

prevent any Massachusetts inhabitant from removing “themselves and Effects out of this 

Colony into the Government of Nova-Scotia, and elsewhere.” Congress proclaimed that 

“no Person” could leave Massachusetts “unless he shall obtain the Permission of the 

Committee of Correspondence of the Town he belongs to.” The bill empowered all the 





64 Massachusetts Provincial Congress, “Whereas there are…” (Watertown: Broadside, May 8, 1775). 

RYAN W. TRIPP


members of every such Committee to observe and report on “the Motions of all such 

Persons whom they have Reason to suspect.” 65 

While radicals argued that American virtue prompted all people to support 

independence, the persecution of Loyalists became a paid enterprise. The heavy losses 

that General Gage’s regiments incurred at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill in June, which took 

the life of Joseph Warren, induced the British government to replace Gage with General 

William Howe. Before Gage departed in the fall of 1775, a contingent of Massachusetts 

Loyalists pleaded with him to voice their “approbation” of “the King” when he arrived in 

England, hoping to secure protection from an increasingly hostile New England 

populace. 66 Warren’s death had evidently not stopped the crackdown on Loyalists. In 

January of 1776, the Massachusetts House of Representatives placed an advertisement in 

New England newspapers for the capture of “Dr. Samuel Gelston . . . apprehended as an 

enemy to this country.” They added that whoever, “will take up said Gelston and deliver 

him to the messenger of the House of Representatives, shall be well rewarded for his time 

and expence.” 67 

Meanwhile, Peter Thacher reiterated the American historical narrative at the next 

Boston Massacre oration on 5 March 1776. He included the “Tragedy” of Lexington and 

Concord as well as Bunker’s Hill, linking these conflicts again with the corruption of 

standing armies. 68 He then praised “General Warren” as the model “inflexible patriot.” 

Thacher lambasted Warren’s “savage enemies” that exulted over “his corpse, beautiful 

even in death,” promising “a monument to thy memory” and guaranteeing Warren’s 

central place in American historical memory “to the latest ages.” 69 He closed with a 

resounding “O GOD, LET AMERICA BE FREE!” 70 

As the war progressed, the physical exclusion of Loyalists and state seizure of 

their property facilitated the myth of consensus and thrust them alongside the British, 

blacks, and Indians as essential counterpoints for the collective sense of a now manifest 

national consciousness. Hundreds of Loyalists from the New England countryside 

streamed into Boston, hoping to elicit protection from General Howe and the British 

Regiments. On 19 April 1776, the Massachusetts House of Representatives ordered the 

Committees of Safety to “take Possession of all such estates,” both personal and real, that 

belonged to fleeing Loyalists. By 1776, the Boston radicals had devised such a familiar 

American history and collective identity in the public sphere—supported by the patriotic 

sentiments of allies in other colonies—that separation seemed an almost inevitable and 

necessary dénouement to American colonial history. That July, delegates to the Second 

Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence. 71 

III 

Doctor Thomas Welsh stood before a Boston crowd on 5 March 1783, peering 

into their eager eyes and exhausted faces. Throughout the bitter war years, radicals had 

persisted in calling for oratorical commemorations on the Boston Massacre, always 

successful in gathering crowds that consisted of every age, sex, and social rank. Welsh 

told his audience a story that day of a corrupt imperial government abridging the rights of 

65 Massachusetts Provincial Congress, “Whereas there are…” (Watertown: Broadside, May 15, 1775). 

66 Various Loyalists, An Address of the Gentlemen and Principal Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, to His Excellency 

Governor GAGE (Boston: Gage Correspondence, 1775). 

67 Massachusetts House of Representatives, “Advertisement” (Watertown: Broadside, January 26, 1776). 

68 Peter Thacher, An Oration Delivered at Watertown on March 5th 1776 (Watertown: Benjamin Edes, 1776), 9-10. 

69 Thacher, An Oration Delivered at Watertown on March 5th 1776, 11-12. 

70 Thacher, An Oration Delivered at Watertown on March 5th 1776, 15. 

71 Massachusetts House of Representatives, In the House of Representatives (Watertown: Broadside, 1776). 



a virtuous colony, forcing a standing army upon her people. Corruption sparked a 

tragedy, a massacre, but did not stir the inhabitants to violence; rather, the birthing 

“pangs” of retribution “were sharp indeed which ushered into life, a nation!” This event, 

in a single city within the vast expanse of America, gave birth to “an independent nation; 

she has now to maintain her dignity and importance among the kingdoms of the earth.” 72 

Surely, he concluded, this tragedy comprised “a manly and fortunate beginning” to a 

masculine national history. Finishing the speech, Welsh beamed at men and women in 

the audience as the last of the Boston Massacre orations came to a raucous end. 73 

American nationalism, however, continued well past the final Boston Massacre 

commemoration. In the early Republic, regions legitimated the primacy of their interests 

in the nation by associating themselves with the federal union, employing the usual 

nationalist rhetoric and patriotic festivities in the public sphere. New Englanders, for 

example, published American histories that placed themselves at the center of the 

national narrative. They also continued to define themselves against the British, but 

replaced Loyalists with southerners in this “othering” framework. In the 1790s, for 

instance, New England Federalists linked themselves with American patriotism while 

equating southern Democratic-Republicans with radical Jacobins of the French 

Revolution. 74 

Blacks and Indians continued to serve as counterpoints for a masculine American 

nationalism in New England. During the early nineteenth century, white New Englanders 

associated national identity with imagined Indian innocence and masculinity, celebrating 

indigenous people in a past Indian Golden Age. In contrast, they continued to propagate 

the subjugated status of women, while ridiculing urban free blacks for a perceived 

dysfunctional lifestyle. That is, white New Englanders defined their regional nationalism 

against “others” striving to enter the proto-capitalist economy. A black print public 

sphere attempted to counter these white male notions of national identity and citizenship, 

resurrecting Crispus Attucks as a symbol of black patriotism during the American 

Revolution. Yet, knowledge of Attucks’ Indian mother faded from American memory as 

this counter-public print placed emphasis solely on his African heritage. Moreover, by the 

late nineteenth century, New Englanders turned once again to denigrating both actual and 

imagined indigenous peoples. 75 

Social memory of the Boston Massacre thus provided a foundation for a regional 

nationalism of the early Republic. As New Englanders fashioned an exclusionary 

American identity and participated in a nationalism that defined America as New 

England, and the American past as the New England past, communities across the 

72 Dr. Thomas Welsh, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1783 (Boston: John Gill, 1783), 13. 

73 Welsh, An Oration Delivered March 5th 1783, 17. 

74 David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel 

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 251-9. For the argument that nationalism develops unevenly across 

regions, see E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge 

University Press, 1992), 12. 

75 Lepore, The Name of War, 201-202 and 224-226; Sweet, Bodies Politic, 398-409; Joanna Brooks, “The Early 

American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic” WMQ 62 (January 2005), 67-92; Stephen 

Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of 

Speech 85 (1999), 169-87; Mitch Kachun, Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American 

Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 163-4. 

RYAN W. TRIPP


country engaged in similar rites of regional nationalism. Diverse constructions of a 

masculine nation consequently vied for legitimacy in the simultaneous fragmentation and 

fusion of an imagined Union. 


Review 

Historiography 

Lucinda McCray Beier’s 

Sufferers & Healers: 

The Experience of Illness in 

Seventeenth-Century England 

reviewed by Timothy Kellogg 

Is the Origin of Capitalism 

“Eurocentric?” 

A Review of Recent Debates 

in Socio-Economic History 

by Peter S. Gray

Lucinda McCray Beier’s 

Sufferers & Healers: 

The Experience of Illness in Seventeenth-Century England 

(Routledge: London, 1987) 

Reviewed by TIMOTHY A. KELLOGG 

Before modern medicine brought 

expectations of good health and an 

illness-free existence, people living in 

seventeenth century England 

experienced health complications that 

interrupted their lives, causing 

discomfort, suffering, and premature 

death. Social historians of medicine 

commonly ask what healers and 

patients did and experienced when 

illness or injury struck. Sufferers & 

Healers: The Experience of Illness in 

Seventeenth-Century England, by 

Lucinda McCray Brier, examines this 

very question. Brier’s approach is 

neither quantitative nor epidemiologic. 

Instead, the author offers impressionistic 

conclusions regarding the experiences of 

illness in seventeenth-century England, a 

century fraught with civil war, political 

and social realignment, and recurring 

plague outbreaks. This book provides no 

demographic analysis on the types of 

illnesses present at the time, nor does it 

try to establish causal explanations to 

specific diseases or factors associated 

survival of newborn infants. Rather, the 

author’s purpose is to explore illness and 

the suffering caused by illness 

contextually. She does this by selectively 

examining the voices of those who lived 

during the period, thereby locating their 

opinions on ailments, treatments, and 

healers of the era. Moreover, Brier 

qualitatively describes popular attitudes 

on illness, the dynamic between healer 

and sufferer, and how medical decisions 

were made and who made them, all 

within the competing contexts of secular, 

religious, and supernatural approaches to 

healing. 

In her analysis, Beier utilizes a 

variety of sources in documenting the 

illness experience of both sufferer and 

healer. The conceptual foundation of the 

book is laid down by classic secondary 

sources on social and medical historical. 

Such works include Lawrence Stone’s 

The Family, Sex, and Marriage in 

England, 1500-1800 as well as Paul 

Slack’s The Impact of Plague in Tudor 

and Stuart England. Attitudes and 

opinions of practitioners and patients, 

principally from the upper and middle 

classes, come by way of the casebooks 

of physicians and surgeons who tracked 

the symptoms, therapies, and outcomes 

of their patients. Brier utilizes diaries 

and correspondence of prominent lay 

people during the time to offer accounts 

of those who were ill and who described 

their illnesses and their opinions of the 

medical practitioners who treated them. 

Popular and vernacular literature also 

provided the author the social context of 

critics who set out to undermine learned 

or empiric medicine. Although this book 

is not a demographic study of mortality, 

Brier does use the London Bills of


mortality and parish records to confirm 

outbreaks of infectious disease, such as 

the plague. 

Beier outlines three separate 

arguments. First, the field of medicine in 

early modern England was not 

completely professionalized at the time, 

although governmental and educational 

institutions did offer official licenses to 

academically trained practitioners. 

Moreover, physicians and surgeons with 

official sanction represented only a small 

minority of healers in the marketplace. 

Amateurs, barbers, barber-surgeons, 

white-witches, magicians, folk healers, 

and apothecaries, all competed together 

in a very dynamic marketplace, offering 

services on a variety of illnesses, 

conditions, and injuries. Second, within 

this milieu, medical conventions did not 

exist. No medical consensus existed on 

how certain conditions were to be 

treated. Brier argues that lay sufferers 

tended to focus on self-diagnosis and 

treatment, stimulated by the broad range 

of healing knowledge available in the 

public sphere. This knowledge came 

from a wide spectrum of sources in the 

marketplace, without clear demarcation 

between traditional and learned 

medicine. Thirdly, Brier argues that this 

diffusion of knowledge made the healing 

process a very social affair, often 

involving family members, 

communities, and patrons beyond the 

private realm of doctor and patient. This 

social care network was particularly 

evident during childbearing. 

The book follows a generalized 

structure that begins with an overview of 

the medical marketplace in seventeenthcentury 

England. In the next several 

chapters, Brier turns to the individual 

experiences of practitioners, in an 

TIMOTHY A. KELLOGG 

examination of the casebooks of 

prominent and ordinary surgeons and 

physicians, which provide a list of 

treated ailments and their outcomes. She 

also teases out practitioners’ opinions, 

both of others within their profession 

and of the patients they served. In the 

next several chapters, the author 

examines the personal correspondences, 

diaries, and autobiographies of English 

lay people, the very clients seen by 

practitioners within the medical 

marketplace. Beier’s examination of 

personal documents reveals the types 

and severity of illnesses, the 

expectations of the physicians, and the 

approaches they chose to illness 

management as seen from the sufferer’s 

point of view. In some cases, the sufferer 

assumed the role of healer themselves. 

Finally, in the last chapter, Beier 

provides a concluding discussion of 

individual illness, and its implications to 

a wider understanding of the social 

aspects of illness. That is, how does the 

experience of illness among individuals 

reach into the larger community? What 

were the natures of illness and 

caretaking networks? Brier ends the 

book with exploratory questions and 

offers some of her own explanations. 

Drawing from specific, 

individual experiences of illness, the 

author distinguishes the healer and the 

sufferer as her two conceptual 

constructs. Brier is successful in 

describing the dynamic, but not 

centralized, marketplace in which 

healers competed and negotiated their 

skills. Medicine as a profession was 

largely unregulated, without a consensus 

on treating illness. University-trained 

physicians did receive a license to 

practice a form of internal medicine, and 

were recognized by institutions like the

Anglican Church and the Royal 

Academy. However, they were only a 

small minority, competing with surgeons 

(some licensed through guilds), barbersurgeons, 

grocer-apothecaries, midwives, 

traditional and magical healers, 

and even ministers who promoted 

Godly-inspired therapy. All in this 

marketplace claimed legitimacy. Many 

distributed their own medical pamphlets 

advocating certain therapies and 

methods, and exposed the methods of 

their competitors as unsound through a 

new genre of anti-quack literature. 

Licensed physicians of the time stood 

out by fostering a learned status through 

distinctive vestments and a university 

training in Latin and the humanities. 

Practically speaking, however, there was 

very little distinction between these 

learned physicians and other healers. 

Beier argues that other healers, such as 

barbers and apothecaries, also offered 

treatment for internal ailments. Brier 

also describes effectively the battles 

healers fought to gain an advantage over 

each other, in an effort to attract 

sufferers. Such efforts include 

everything from the publication of 

individual successes among physicians, 

to the condemnation of “empirics” by 

religious healers. 

Despite her adequate description 

of the characteristics of the medical 

marketplace, Brier does not comment 

much on some of the emerging trends 

seen in the practice of medicine, even 

during the mid 1980s when this book 

was written. For example, the author 

excluded from her analysis the decline of 

magic and folk medicine as alternatives 

during the seventeenth-century, and the 

relegation of magic and supernatural 

healing to marginalized and persecuted 

activities in England by 1700. Also, 


Book Review 

despite claims of a wide-open market 

and a variety of healers, the majority of 

internal medical treatment focused on 

the medieval practice of humeral 

evacuation. Methods included bleeding, 

cupping, enemas, diuretics, and purging 

medicines. Moreover, empirical 

medicine, considered quackery by 

learned physicians trained in theology 

and humanities, continued to make 

strides during the traumatic seventeenth 

century, a time plagued by civil wars and 

revolts throughout the fractured United 

Kingdom. Wartime surgical skills and 

methods advanced considerably, 

culminating in standardized chiguries to 

treat and repair not only battlefield 

injuries, but also apostems, fistulas, and 

tumors of various kinds. Brier could 

have expanded her commentary on the 

medical marketplace to include the 

methodological differences among 

learned and empirical healers. 

Beier concentrates her analysis 

on the opinions of healers who left traces 

of their work through notes and 

casebooks. However, the inclusion of 

only a few healers results in an inability 

to generalize beyond the activities found 

in these particular sources. Undaunted, 

Brier uses the cases of one “typical” 

surgeon from London to illuminate the 

how a healer conducted his practice. 

Joseph Binns practiced in London near 

St. Bartholomew’s Hospital between the 

years 1633 to 1663. Brier concludes that 

Binns was probably typical of most 

London healers because he was a 

generalist. Brier lists sixty-seven 

different conditions in his casebook, and 

his treatments of both men and women. 

Specialists, on the other hand, tended to 

treat a single sex and only one condition 

that drew a large number of patients 

(fractured bones for example). Binns


traveled extensively to the homes of his 

patients to personally assess the status of 

care, to perform procedures if unable to 

do so in his surgery, or to administer 

treatment. Brier argues that caring for a 

patient at home supported her contention 

that a healing network within the 

household was common. When the 

therapy required complicated 

procedures, like setting a bone fracture, 

or “tenting” a large wound, or if the 

patient required a long convalescence, 

then the family, servants, friends, 

patrons, neighbors, and ministers, as 

well as the doctor, all networked 

together to care for the sufferer., What 

little detail Breier offers on such 

networks tends to the obvious, such as 

ministers providing pastoral care, 

servants attending to sickroom duties, 

and so on. The nature of these roles 

cannot be ascertained from the surgeon’s 

casebook. Furthermore, care networks as 

suggested by Brier perhaps were more 

realistic in an urban environment, such 

as in London, where the individual 

attendants are in close proximity to the 

patient. 

Through case notes and 

correspondence, Beier also touches upon 

the perceptions of learned physicians in 

contrast to the generalist surgeon Binns. 

The author chooses three provincial 

physicians outside of London. These 

physicians all sought to demarcate their 

position and role in society. They 

considered university training superior to 

the knowledge acquired by a frontline 

surgeon. Despite the apparent sense of 

superior high position of many 

physicians, Beier's illumination of their 

casebooks shows that they had to 

compete with other physicians and 

healers even in the villages surrounding 

London. They also had to justify their 

TIMOTHY A. KELLOGG 

treatments to their patients, hoping for 

vindication in their patient’s return to 

health. Although Brier does state this in 

a somewhat cryptic way, physicians 

(unlike other learned authorities such as 

ministers and lawyers) had to 

demonstrate their knowledge in a very 

concrete way—by curing people. This 

placed the physician at a disadvantage 

over other empirical healers, who did not 

claim superior knowledge, but apt 

prognoses based on their experience 

repairing individuals with similar 

illnesses. 

Like healers, sufferers of illness 

were demographically, socially, and 

medically diverse. The experience of 

illness among laypersons ranged from 

mild ague to life threatening infectious 

disease like plague and syphilis. 

Prominent diarists like Samuel Pepys 

and Robert Hooke provided the author 

with interesting but very subjective 

material on the medical conditions they 

encountered in their lives. However, 

Brier does an effective job in detailing 

experiences that may have been typical 

to the average upper middle-class 

London dweller. Both men suffered from 

various ailments, including gout. Pepys 

had life-long urological problems that 

caused testicular swelling, as well as an 

ulcerated leg that probably contributed 

to his death in 1703. Brier notes that 

both men felt it important and a duty to 

visit ailing friends and family as a source 

of comfort. Conversely, both men 

expected visits from others when they 

were ill, even during very difficult 

procedures, as when Pepys “pass[ed] a 

very difficult stone.” Such an analysis 

supports her argument that social care 

networks existed, and made the 

experience of illness more public than 

the modern, more private connection

etween sufferer and doctor. Brier’s 

analysis might have benefited had she 

compared illness visitations with other, 

non-medical forms of social gatherings, 

to see if they were indeed different. The 

diaries of Pepys and Hooke do support 

Brier’s assertion that a high degree of 

medical information permeated English 

society, although she does not expand on 

how diffuse and extensive this 

information was. Pepys and Hooke made 

clear that they sought information from 

colleagues and healers to help formulate 

their own diagnoses and determine 

treatment options. 

Brier, a feminist writer, turns to 

the role of women as both sufferers and 

healers. For Brier, women’s roles as 

sufferer included not only illnesses and 

injuries, but also the recurring cycles of 

female bodies—menstruation, 

pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and 

menopause. As healers, Brier maintains 

that women assumed a greater role in the 

provision of care as sick nurses, 

midwives, and caretaking wounds of all 

types. While many seventeenth-century 

sources clearly indicate that women had 

active roles inside the birthing chamber, 

took charge of domestic ailments within 

the household, and were the principal 

dispensers of folk medicine, it is difficult 

to accept Beier’s general claim that 

women were the principle healers in 

English society. Brier does not make 

clear the decision-making role of women 

in the general provision of care. 

Overall, the book is successful on many 

levels. Written in 1985, when medical 

and social history began to merge, the 

accounts of early-modern healers are 

useful in elucidating opinions and 

expectations of those who healed and 

those who were ill. Brier’s claims are 


Book Review 

interesting. The rise of the medical 

marketplace, the development of social 

networks to serve the ill, the influence of 

medical knowledge on independent 

healing, are all valid theories deserving 

of further study. Beier herself points to 

one intriguing expansion of independent 

healing, the rise of spa medicine and 

medicinal waters in later English society. 

The inclusion of biased and limited 

testimony is not a criticism of Beier, but 

rather an indication of the limitations of 

her sources. Certainly, those who had the 

education and leisure of writing about 

their experiences cannot be considered 

indicative, but only illustrative of their 

times. The only major flaw in Brier’s 

work is the lack of a proper overlay with 

the political and religious turmoil of 

seventeenth-century England, and how 

such structural changes impacted illness 

and the provision of medicine.

Is the Origin of Capitalism “Eurocentric?” 

A Review of Recent Debates in Socio-Economic History 

PETER S. GRAY 

At the end of the twentieth century, there has been a movement among 

intellectuals against “Eurocentrism.” This term is somewhat ambiguous, as its meaning 

can shift depending upon who is using it, but Eurocentrism generally means the 

privileging of European civilization over other civilizations based on some ascribed 

“superior” quality or qualities that it possessed and currently possesses. Critiques of 

Eurocentrism occur across a broad variety of topics. It is only natural that such critiques 

should include the debate about the origins of the modern world, since Europe is central 

to Eurocentric views on those origins. Capitalism is central to Eurocentric views of the 

origins of the modern world, because European social theorists since the nineteenth 

century have seen capitalism as a crucial aspect of modernity. In the 1990s, three major 

works appeared that mixed historical analysis with social theory, and that challenged in 

different ways Eurocentric views of the economic history of the world in the early 

modern period. These three works are Andre Gunder Frank’s Reorient, R. Bin Wong’s 

China Transformed, and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence. 1 All three sought, 

in different ways, to challenge the Eurocentric view that Europe possessed special 

qualities that other areas of the world lacked, qualities that allowed Europe to develop 

capitalism and, thus, become modern. Instead, all three argued that Europe played a 

secondary role in a world economy dominated by Asia, specifically China, before 1800. 

None of these works challenge the idea that Europe dominated the world economy from 

the nineteenth century on, but they all challenge the notion that Europe achieved this 

dominance because its civilization had some superior quality or qualities inherent to 

Europe. While there are differences among these authors, they all argue that Europe 

became dominant in the world economy for other reasons. 

These books have contributed greatly to our knowledge of the economic history 

of the world before 1800, synthesizing much work on non-European economic history 

and banishing old stereotypes about these economies, but they still contain misguided 

claims primarily due to the socio-economic theory they adopt: a Neo-Classical economics 

that has its origins in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 2 While many Eurocentric 

arguments are false and even reprehensible, the Eurocentric argument that capitalism 

originated in Britain in the three centuries prior to 1800 and spread from there around the 

world is still fundamentally correct, though the societies that became capitalist after 

Britain (primarily the United States, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan in the nineteenth 

century) did so in manners different from that of Britain. Capitalism did not develop in 

Britain because Britain was racially superior, environmentally more favorable, more 

1 Andre Gunder Frank, Reorient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); R. 

Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University 

Press, 1997); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World 

Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 

2 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (New York: The Modern Library, 1937).


rational, had better technology, or better institutions. Instead, capitalism was a unique 

outcome of developments in British society and, in that respect, Britain was no different 

from any country—all countries have unique historical developments. Britain’s 

development brought about a new way of organizing the fundamental economic relations 

of its society, a way that proved to be immensely powerful in the long run. This is 

essentially the view that Karl Marx held and Robert Brenner developed. Marx’s and 

Brenner’s ideas will be compared below with those of Smith and his epigones— 

especially Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz. Britain’s economic power was evident to nearby 

observers at the time (and one far away observer—Japan) and they sought in various 

ways both to create similar economic relations in their countries and to prevent certain 

other countries from doing the same. This view of the development of capitalism is not 

Eurocentric in any sense other than that it maintains that capitalism began first in Britain 

and then spread to Europe and Britain’s former colony, the United States. None of this is 

to deny that many have used the English and European development of capitalism and the 

resulting dominance by the West to justify notions of various kinds of innate European 

superiority. Those arguments are clearly wrong, but because those specific arguments are 

wrong, it does not follow that the British origin of capitalism is also wrong. 

A clarification is thus in order, as to what is not meant here by the argument that 

capitalism arose first in Britain and then spread elsewhere. J.M. Blaut's The Colonizer's 

View of the World maintains that capitalism was developing just about everywhere in the 

world in the centuries before 1500. 3 The European discovery of the Americas and their 

subsequent appropriation of the wealth of the Americas gave Europe the capital it needed 

to turn the tables in its favor in the world economy. 4 The first part of the argument—that 

non-European economies were capitalist and thus not stagnant—is new and a main 

feature of all three primary works discussed here. The second part of the argument is 

older, and a part of two of the three works discussed here. It was traditionally called the 

“Williams” thesis since it was first put forward by Eric Williams. 5 Since it is an older 

argument, it has also been debated, and the more so as it argues that the foundation of 

European development and modernity was, in effect, theft. The role of the appropriation 

of the wealth of the Americas is a continuing debate, most likely because how one feels 

about Europe’s colonization of the Americas (or anywhere) is deeply embedded in one’s 

worldview and clearly different worldviews are on show here. Frank’s book sides with 

Blaut on this issue, while Pomeranz integrates the Americas into a wider argument, and 

R. Bin Wong has nothing to say about the issue. 

Blaut is helpful in his delineation of various Eurocentric arguments that are either 

simply wrong or even morally reprehensible. He thus provides some clarification of 

intention when this paper critiques the arguments of Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz. Blaut 

explicates five types of arguments that are what he calls “Euro-myths:” biology, 

environment, rationality, technology, and society. 6 Blaut notes that these arguments fall 

into two categories, cultural explanations and non–cultural explanations. In the non– 

3 

J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (New York: 

The Guilford Press, 1993). 

4 

Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, 152-3. 

5 

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1944). 

6 

Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World, 61-151. 

PETER S. GRAY

Ex Post Facto Facto 

185 

cultural sphere, there are two types of biological arguments—racial arguments and 

demographic arguments—and an environmental argument. Racial arguments assert 

European biological superiority, and are essentially non-cultural. These arguments are not 

usually put forward anymore because of the disrepute that racial thinking has fallen into 

since the end of World War II. Europe has also been argued to be environmentally 

superior, which is a non-cultural argument. This argument posits that Africa and Asia had 

environments that negatively affected their economic development, Africa because of its 

tropical climate and Asia because of its arid climate. According to such arguments, 

Africa’s tropical climate had a severe effect on labor productivity and population growth 

while Asia’s arid climate led to the creation of despotic states that were required to 

undertake the massive irrigation-works need to farm in an arid climate. These despotic 

states proved to be a hindrance to economic dynamism and innovation. Demographic 

arguments assert that Europeans had a superior ability to control their population growth 

and thus avoided extreme Malthusian crises. Blaut’s identification of demographic 

arguments as non-cultural arguments is in error here, because such arguments become 

entangled in arguments about superior European rationality and institutions, particularly 

family structure, i.e. society and culture. Other arguments hold that Europe possessed 

superior technology compared to the rest of the world, accounting for its development as 

this technology accumulated over time and allowed Europe to achieve a higher level of 

productivity. Related to this argument is the idea that Europeans possessed a superior 

capacity for rationality apparently due to their cultural or ethnic background. This did not 

imply that non-Europeans were necessarily irrational, but rather that they were at a lower 

stage in the development of rational thinking. Finally, the existence of superior European 

institutions before the development of capitalism has been offered as a reason for the 

“European miracle.” These arguments usually focus on the state, the church, class, or the 

family. Institutional arguments are closely bound up with the argument that Europeans 

possessed a superior form of rationality. None of these arguments will be offered here. 

While an argument is made here based on conflict and class structures, it will not be 

argued that Britain’s class structure before the advent of capitalism was superior to or 

more rational than any other country’s. 

All of these “Euro-myths” have been used to explain the superiority of Europe 

and thus justify its dominant role in the world since as early as 1500. However, in 

economic history there are really only two theories of the origins of capitalism. Both can 

incorporate the “Euro-myths” outlined above but neither relies fundamentally on any of 

them. This may not be apparent at first, but when the works by Frank, Wong, and 

Pomeranz are analyzed, the case for this statement will be made clearer. These two 

models are not only old (the first from the late eighteenth century and the second from the 

mid-nineteenth century), but they are also products of Europeans and the European 

tradition. It will be argued below that this causes a problem, be it slight or major, for the 

anti-Eurocentrists. 

The first of these two models was put forward by Adam Smith, and is usually 

called the commercialization model. This model has been and still is the dominant 

Is the Origin of Capitalism “Eurocentric?”


explanation for the rise of capitalism in Britain. 7 As will be seen, it is the model adopted 

by Frank, Wong and Pomeranz, though each does so in different ways. The second model 

was put forward by Karl Marx, and is the main dissident model of the origins of 

capitalism (if one excludes the anti-Eurocentric authors discussed here, who consider 

themselves dissidents). In Marx, there are really two models of the origins of capitalism. 

In the early Marx of the Communist Manifesto and the German Ideology, the Smithian 

commercialization model predominates but it is articulated with Marx’s concerns with 

class (though it should be remembered that a concept of class exists in Smith’s model, 

albeit a different conception than Marx’s conception in the late 1840s). 8 After his 

intensive study of economics and British economic history in the 1850s, Marx offered a 

different model for the origins of capitalism in the first volume of Capital, but elements 

also appear in the other two volumes of Capital and in the Grundrisse. 9 Unfortunately, 

Marx did not systematize this model (Smith did not really systematize his model of 

capitalism’s origins either, but did a better job of getting his basic ideas across than Marx 

did). When this is combined with the fact that there are two models in Marx’s corpus, this 

created a great deal of confusion among later Marxists (and non-Marxists), who often did 

not recognize that there were two models. 10 This was the problem with the Dobb-Sweezy 

debate of the 1950s. 11 Dobb instinctively went with the account in Capital and Sweezy 

went with the commercial model in the German Ideology. None of the participants 

recognized that there were two different models in Marx’s thought. No wonder they 

eventually gave up—they were fundamentally confused about the theoretical issue in 

Marx’s writings to be explicated. By the 1970s Robert Brenner had realized the problem 

of the two models and offered a systematic version of the Capital model. 12 Since this is 

the most developed, systematic, and consistent statement of the mature Marxian model, 

some time will be devoted to explicating it below. 

First, however, it is necessary to explicate these models. As for Smith’s model, 

this essay will offer it in abstract form. Called the commercialization model, it has been 

‘updated’ to be more consistent with modern neo-classical economics. Thus this model 

leaves out such things as Smith’s labor theory of value and his rudimentary class 

7 A recent well argued statement of it can be found in Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early 

Modern Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 

8 Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, Collected 

Works, vol. 6 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 477-519; The German Ideology in Karl Marx and Fredrick 

Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York: International Publishers, 1976), 15-539. 

9 Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990); Capital vol. 2, trans. David Fernbach 

(New York: Penguin, 1992); Capital vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1991); Grundrisse, trans. 

Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1993). 

10 This issue is a result of a lamentable problem among Marxists that only the majority of present day Marxists have 

come to understand. Marx’s thinking developed over time and what he wrote in the 1840s is not always consistent with 

what he wrote from the late 1850s on. This issue arose with Louis Althusser in the 1970s, but there the issue was 

whether Hegel should be considered a fundamental influence on all of Marx’s thinking right up to the end or whether 

these was a “break” after which Marx definitively rejected all Hegelianism. That this had no affect on many Marxists 

way of writing about Marx is evidenced by the constant juxtaposition of a sentence from an early work and a sentence 

from Capital in the Marxist literature to prove a point. Sometimes this works because there are continuities in Marx’s 

thought, but many times it is a disaster. 

11 Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism, rev. ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1963) and 

Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978). 

12 Robert Brenner, “Bourgeois Revolution and Transition to Capitalism” in A.L. Beier, David Cannadine, and James 

Rosenheim eds., The First Modern Society: Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge: 

Cambridge University Press, 1989), 271-304. 

PETER S. GRAY


187 

analysis, both of which are anathema to neo-classical economists who usually try to 

pretend such things do not exist in Smith’s work. 13 As for Marx’s model, this essay will 

limit itself in this part to some general considerations about the mature Marxian model. 

The full mature Marxian model will be laid out when Robert Brenner’s work is discussed 

later in the essay. 

The Smithian commercialization model argues that human societies go through a 

series of stages of development with the highest stage being the commercial stage, an 

idea that originated with such ‘Scottish Enlightenment’ writers as Adam Ferguson. 14 

These stages are characterized by definite economic relations to which correlate the 

social, political, and cultural aspects of those societies (note the influence of Smith on 

Marx here). What causes the development of one stage into another is the development of 

commercial relations—relations and institutions of exchange, not production—and the 

development of internal and external markets. While the concept of commerce had a 

broader meaning for Smith in his overall thought, here his focus was on its economic 

aspect. The commercial stage represents the highest development of these commercial 

relations. For Smith, it was Britain and, to a lesser extent northwestern Europe, that had 

achieved this stage in his own time. However, that did not mean that other societies could 

not reach this stage, as the model is universal. It should be noted that when Smith wrote, 

the industrial revolution had not yet occurred. Britain in Smith’s day was 

overwhelmingly agricultural, with a healthy manufacturing sector of artisans, not 

individual wage workers. Smith did not call this society capitalist—Marx had the honor 

of naming the system. 

Smith’s commercial model, replaced by a Neo-Classical model in modern 

variants of the theory, presupposes a Smithian conception of the market economy. This 

economic model assumes that market exchange, as explicated by Smith or the Neo- 

Classical economists, is a fundamental and natural part of the human condition. The basic 

logic of the market exchange dynamic is not a product of history, but rather operates with 

the force of natural law. Indeed, Smith modeled his conception of economic relations 

after Newton’s physics, which represented in his time the pinnacle of European scientific 

thinking. In Newtonian physics, physical laws do not have a “history.” They do not 

develop over time. They were, are, and always will be present. In Smith’s economics, the 

laws of market exchange are assumed to be much the same as Newton’s physical laws. 

Even so, Smith recognized that human societies change, and so he argued that social, 

cultural and political conditions developed outside of the economic sphere. He 

maintained that this prevented the laws of market exchange from operating, as they 

naturally ought to. Thus, social, cultural, and political conditions represented a block on 

the progression of human societies to the highest stage of commercial society. Smith held 

that as of 1776, only Britain (and perhaps northwestern Europe) had successfully 

removed many but not all of these obstacles to the development of commercial society. 

The removal of these external constraints was crucial to Smith, because the development 

13 For the original statement of the commercial model, see Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book III, 356-96; a concise 

statement of the commercialization model can be found in Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer 

View, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 2002), 11-33. 

14 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Fania Oz-Salzberger ed. (Cambridge: University of 

Cambridge Press, 1995). 



of exchange led to increasing specialization and an increasing division of labor. That, 

combined with technological improvements in the instruments of production, led to an 

increase in labor productivity, which increased the wealth of the nation. 

Thus, commercial society is not so much something new but the culmination, 

once freed of social, political and cultural constraints, of these basic laws of economics, 

i.e., of this basic feature of humans and human society. It is a quantitative model of 

change rather than a qualitative model of change, as the development of commercial 

society is the outcome of the numerical expansion of the natural laws of economics 

throughout society, and the world. This model does not therefore see ‘capitalism’ (not 

Smith’s term) as having any specific differences from other economic systems, except 

that different societies have different external constraints on the development of 

commercial society and have progressed at different rates (or not progressed at all) in 

removing them. For modern Neo-Classical economists and some economic historians, 

this means that the concept of capitalism is questionable insofar as it refers to a 

historically specific set of economic relations that arose at a specific time and a specific 

place. When Smithians and Neo-Classicists talk of capitalism, they mean the ever-present 

laws of market exchange, specialization, division of labor, and so on. These same 

economic laws have basically always been with us, with “imperfections” and 

“deviations” resulting from human interference with natural laws. Modern Smithians, 

some Neo-Classical economists, and economic historians often deny any meaning to the 

term “capitalism.” Frank, the anti-Eurocentric, lists himself in their company. 

The early Marx relied heavily on the commercial model. The details of his version 

of this model will not detain us here because, as explained above, his mature model is the 

more important one. Under the influence of Hegel, Marx always thought in terms of the 

history of social processes and qualitative change. Marx came to reject many elements of 

Smith, Ricardo, and their followers precisely because their economic theories were not 

historical, i.e., because of their assumption that the basic laws of economics never 

changed. Marx’s fundamental argument was that systems of economic relationships, and 

societies as a whole, are historical and they develop qualitatively through time. Thus, the 

laws of the market postulated by Smith were not the same for all humans in all times and 

places. In his works from the late 1850s on, Marx made the distinction between 

capitalism and “pre-capitalism,” with pre-capitalism subsuming all other economic 

systems. While it is clear from the Grundrisse that Marx knew these pre-capitalist 

systems came in various forms, he never investigated any of them thoroughly. (Whether 

he could have, given the state of European knowledge about the history of non-European 

societies is another question). 15 Marx’s concern was capitalism, and he took care to make 

the point that capitalism was a unique set of economic relations—different from those 

that preceded it in Europe, and different from those outside Europe. This concern led him 

to England, which European thinkers at the time considered to have been the birthplace 

of a new form of economy, and where this new form of economy was most developed as 

of the 1850s. For Marx, any discussion of any other part of the world was a secondary 

concern. He thought that the rest of the world only showed the distinctiveness of this new 

economic system, which he was the first to call capitalism. Later Marxists and even some 

15 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, 471-513. 

PETER S. GRAY


189 

non-Marxists have turned to short abstract statements by Marx, like the 1859 preface to A 

Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, to try to construct grand theories of non- 

European economic systems and their development, because of the absence of a 

systematic explication of non-capitalist economic systems in Marx’s writings. 16 The best 

example of this is a theory of the economic history and development of India that was 

developed out of a few short newspaper articles Marx wrote in the 1850s. 17 Marx never 

explicitly warned against this practice. How could he know that some would later treat 

everything he wrote as sacred text? Nevertheless, he never clarified the issue and thus 

bore some responsibility for the situation. 

In contrast to Smith’s commercial model, the mature Marxian economic model 

rejects the argument that commercial society is created by the expansion of the operations 

of the market, in turn best stimulated by the removal of misguided human-created 

constraints on the market. Marx’s key point was that the expansion of commerce, i.e., the 

creation of wealth, was not the real factor in the origins of capitalism. He held that 

capitalism is neither the result of the previous accumulation of wealth or capital, nor the 

quantitative growth of market relations. This is why he referred to the notion of primitive 

accumulation as “so-called.” 18 Marx argued that capitalism arose due to a fundamental 

transformation of economic relationships, especially class or social property relations, 

and this is what he meant by “primitive accumulation.” According to Marx, it was social 

relationships that changed, specifically economic relationships, and this is what created 

the new economic system. A key factor in this is the relationship between the direct 

producers of the economic surplus of a society and the expropriators of that surplus. 

Every human society with the exception of “primitive” communal societies had and has a 

specific form of relationship between these two groups. Marx provided a clear if abstract 

statement of this view in the third volume of Capital: 

The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of the 

direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this 

grows directly out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a 

determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic 

community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its 

specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of 

the conditions of production to the immediate producers—a relationship whose 

particular form naturally corresponds always to a certain level of development of 

the type and manner of labour, and hence to its social productive power—in 

which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, 

and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and 

dependence, in short, the specific form of the state in each case. This does not 

prevent the same economic basis—the same in its major conditions—from 

displaying endless variations and gradations of appearance, as the result of 

innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural conditions, racial 

16 

Karl Marx, “Preface” in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One in Karl Marx and Fredrick 

Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 29 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 261-5. 

17 

The main articles are collected in Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile: Political Writings: Volume 2, ed. David Fernbach 

(New York: Penguin, 1992), 301-24. 

18 

Marx, “Part Eight: So-Called Primitive Accumulation” in Capital vol. 1, 873-940. 



relations, historical influences acting from outside, etc., and these can only be 

understood by analysing these empirically given conditions. 19 

Marx’s views on what today we would call culture are relevant here. He wrote 

that “[i]n the case of the arts, it is well known that certain periods of their flowering are 

all out of proportion to the general development of society, hence also to the material 

foundation, the skeletal structure, as it were, of its organization.” 20 Marx did not adhere to 

an economic determinism, and to read the above as a “base-superstructure” model is 

clearly inaccurate. In capitalism, these relationships take the form of wage-labor and 

capital in the most abstract sense. However, this specific articulation of direct producers 

and exploiters was the foundation of a system of imperatives of competition and profit 

maximization, a compulsion to re-invest surpluses in the production process, and the 

relentless need to improve labor productivity and develop forces of production. This 

specific transformation occurred in the English countryside over the course of three 

hundred years, and was an outcome of class struggle between landlords and their tenants. 

This struggle created those fundamental aspects of the capitalist system in England and 

eventually led to England’s economic “take-off” and the industrial revolution. 21 Robert 

Brenner, who has given the most systematic argument for the Marxist view, explains how 

this happened, as will be discussed below. All three anti-Eurocentric authors under 

consideration here argue that the features of capitalism outlined above were not distinct 

to Britain or Europe, but were present in other parts of the world before 1800—most 

notably in China. 

Two more theories need consideration before this discussion can turn to the books 

of Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz. The first of these is Immanuel Wallerstein’s 

development of the theory of the Modern World System, and the second is Robert 

Brenner’s development of a systematic Marxist explanation for the origins of capitalism. 

Both of these theories were developed at roughly the same time and the major statements 

of their views were published within a few years of each other in the mid-1970s. Both 

have been influential, Wallerstein’s more so, and both have been heavily debated. 

Wallerstein needs to be discussed because he is crucial to understanding Frank and 

Brenner, and because he is crucial for criticizing Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz. 

Wallerstein is a historical sociologist who started out studying Africa. His work 

there led him to conclude that to study Africa, one needs to situate it within a worldwide 

historical context. This led him to develop his notion of social systems, and especially 

world-systems. A social system is defined by “the existence within it of a division of 

labor, such that the various sectors or areas are dependent upon economic exchange with 

others for the smooth and continuous provisioning of the needs of the area. Such 

economic exchange can clearly exist without a common political structure and even more 

obviously without sharing the same culture.” 22 Certain key terms should be noted here— 

“division of labor” and “exchange”—and the absence of other terms—“class,” 

19 Marx, Capital vol. 3, 927-8. 

20 Marx, Grundrisse, 110. 

21 Marx, Capital vol. 1, 873-940. 

22 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative 

Analysis” in The Essential Wallerstein (New York: The New Press, 2000), 74 -5. 

PETER S. GRAY


191 

“property,” and “production.” For most of human history, what Wallerstein calls “minisystems”—“an 

entity that has within it a complete division of labor, and a simple cultural 

framework”—have existed, but they have ultimately been supplanted by world-systems. 23 

A world-system is “a unit with a single division of labor and multiple cultural systems.” 24 

World-systems come in two forms. The first form is a world empire, which is a world 

system with a common political system. The second form is a world-economy, which is a 

world-system without a common political system. A world-system need not necessarily 

encompass the entire globe. Wallerstein calls the major civilizations of pre-modern times 

such as China, Egypt, and Rome world-empires, and argues that the nineteenth century 

European empires were really “nation-states with colonial appendages operating within 

the framework of a world economy.” 25 

Wallerstein argues that redistributive economic systems characterized worldempires, 

in that the state and its formal or informal representatives appropriated the 

surplus of peasant producers and redistributed it in various ways. Merchants who 

engaged in commercial activity existed in all world-empires, but they were a minor part 

of the local economy and engaged primarily in long-distance trade. This trade was 

‘administered’ in various ways and was not Smithian free-market trade. In no way was 

market activity determinative of the development of a world-empire. This changed only 

in the sixteenth century with Europe’s creation of the modern world-economy, in which 

market trade developed and became paramount. For Wallerstein, this is capitalism. 

Wallerstein distinguished capitalism from redistributive world empires and tributary 

states by defining capitalism as “production for sale in a market in which the object is to 

realize the maximum profit. In such a system production is constantly expanded as long 

as further production is profitable, and men constantly innovate new ways of producing 

things that will expand the profit margin.” 26 Technically, this does not differentiate 

capitalists from merchants in world empires. What makes capitalism different is that the 

capitalist world system is organized around market exchange, and the redistributive 

tributary state ceases to exist. 

Wallerstein argued that the modern world system came into being between 1450 

and 1640. During this period, the “modern world economy” arose around Europe. Before 

this period most economies in the world had been based on world empires, which 

redistributed the surplus product collected either by trade or taxation, and which 

conducted only some long-distance trade. Europe instead developed a capitalist world 

economy, i.e., one based on market exchange and commerce, one which conformed to the 

above definition of capitalism. This change happened in Europe because there was a 

crisis in the late Middle Ages in its small tributary states. Wallerstein argued that this 

could have resulted in anarchy and contraction but instead, Europeans, starting with 

Portugal, expanded their political and economic control to the Americas and over time 

created an economic system based more on exchange than tribute or taxation. Western 

Europe also integrated Eastern Europe into these exchange relations at this time. Within 

23 Wallerstein, The Essential Wallerstein, 75. 






the whole system, but especially in the new areas of expansion, Europeans developed 

new forms of labor control depending on the product and the area in which it was 

produced. These economic changes led to the development of strong state machines in 

the core states of the new world economy. These states certainly taxed their populations, 

but they were neither redistributive tributary states nor world empires. While there were 

bids to turn this system into a world empire, all failed. 27 

Wallerstein has often been taken to be a Marxist, because his arguments were 

associated with the “Third World-ism” of the 1970s. In particular, his arguments were 

linked with the ‘underdevelopment’ school of thought. This school of thought blamed 

Europe for the underdevelopment of the rest of the world, arguing that Europeans had 

structured the world economy in such a way that massive amounts of wealth had been 

transferred to Europe from the ‘third world’ ever since the discovery of the Americas. It 

held that this wealth was the basis of the development of capitalism and, once capitalism 

had been established, capitalist profits. This association of Wallerstein’s thoughts with 

the underdevelopment school of thought has tended to obscure the fact that Wallerstein is 

essentially offering a variant of the commercial model. While Wallerstein was clear about 

the difference between the economics of the tributary states (and thus world empires) and 

the capitalist world economy, he still argued that there was market exchange in tributary 

states, albeit long-distance trade. Thus, one can argue that tributary states were a 

constraint on the development of commercial society. In Europe, the crisis of feudalism 

weakened these tributary states. The rise of the strong state in the core, and the failure of 

any of these states to turn the new economic system into a world empire, provided the 

basis for the expansion of commercial society. 

Not long after Wallerstein published the first volume of his Modern World 

System, Robert Brenner published two articles criticizing European historians who argued 

for the commercial model. Brenner also criticized the demographic model, which he 

considered a variant of the commercial model, and Wallerstein’s adaptation of the 

commercial model. In these articles, he put forward a detailed Marxian argument derived 

ultimately from the first volume of Capital. Brenner is a European historian who also 

occasionally focuses on other sections of the world, but only when Europe is involved. 

This has earned him a place in Blaut’s pantheon of “Eurocentric historians,” but this is 

really name-calling rather than argument. 28 

Brenner’s main argument against the commercial model, whatever its variants, is 

that the rise of market exchange in itself does not explain the origins of capitalism. One 

of his arguments has already been encountered, i.e., that the commercial model is a 

quantitative model of development and that what needs explanation are the qualitative 

changes in the European economy in late-medieval and early modern Europe. Brenner 

argued that commercial expansion does not in itself explain historical change. Instead, “it 

is the structure of class relations, of class power, which will determine the manner and 

degree to which particular demographic and commercial changes will affect long-term 

27 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I (New York: Academic, 1974). 

28 J.M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), 45-72. 

PETER S. GRAY


193 

trends in the distribution of income and economic growth—and not vice versa.” 29 This 

argument comes straight from Marx. Brenner further argues that commercial activities 

can, in varying degrees be found in many different societies at different times and places 

with widely differing class structures, but none of them developed capitalism before the 

English. In fact, production for profit in the market, i.e. commercial exchange, is 

compatible with a wide variety of differing class structures. The widely varying 

developments of these societies show that something more than production for profit on 

the market is needed for capitalism to arise. Brenner argued for the basic correctness of 

Marx’s argument that class structure and its development through class conflict is the key 

to the development of capitalism in England. 

To support this contention, Brewer discussed European developments in the latemedieval 

and early modern period. He argued that the break through from “traditional 

economy” to relatively self-sustaining economic development was predicated upon the 

emergence of a specific set of class or social property relations. This outcome depended, 

in part, upon the previous success of a two sided process of class development and class 

conflict: on the one hand, the destruction of serfdom; on the other, the short-circuiting of 

the emerging predominance of small peasant property. 30 Brewer continued, asserting that 

the economic developments of the late Middle Ages contained a: 

contradiction between the development of peasant production and the relations of 

surplus extraction [which] tended to lead to a crisis of peasant accumulation, of 

peasant productivity, and ultimately of peasant subsistence. This crisis was 

accompanied by an intensification of the class conflict inherent in the existing 

structure, but with different outcomes in different places...depending on the 

balance of forces between the contending classes. 31 

These results were not predetermined, but were indeterminate and bound up with the 

historical specificity of the areas in question—especially the relative strength of the 

different classes in different areas of Europe, which were, in turn, the results of previous 

historical developments. It turned out that in Eastern Europe, the landlords were the 

victors and re-imposed an intensified serfdom. The situation was quite the opposite in 

England, where the peasantry was strong enough to break the feudal controls that had 

existed there. In the long term, peasants were unable to establish freehold control over the 

land and landlords were able to create large farms and to lease the land to tenants, i.e., the 

former peasants. Landlords preferred and cultivated tenants who could make 

improvements on the lands they leased, i.e. invest capital in improving the land. This new 

landlord-tenant relationship was a partnership of sorts. The tenant would receive a 

reasonable share of the revenue and not have it confiscated by the landlord, in return for 

the tenant investing in the land and increasing revenues. This encouraged all kinds of 

improvements in technique and technology, as the tenant had an interest in the 

productivity of the land—but technique and technology were driven by the logic of the 

29 

Robert Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” in T.H. Aston and 

C.H.E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial 

Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 11. 

30 

Aston and Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate, 30. 

31 

Aston and Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate, 36. 



new socio-economic system, and not the other way around. (Marx and Brenner are not 

technological determinists.) Additionally, this created competitive markets in agricultural 

produce as tenants had to compete with each other to increase revenues. This process did 

not happen over night; in fact, it would take centuries. This development in agriculture 

had effects outside of that sector. Over time, agricultural improvement made it possible 

for larger numbers of the population to leave the land to enter industry. Thus, the 

development of manufacturing into industry towards the end of the eighteenth century— 

and thus the opposition of capital and wage-labor—is the result of the establishment of 

this new economic logic. Agricultural improvement also provided a growing home 

market, which was crucial to the growth of industry in England. This was well under way 

before England acquired any colonies with significant wealth. Although Brenner offers a 

complete micro-analysis, he can be criticized for not including a macro-level analysis, 

i.e., an analysis of the economic policies of the British state during this period, which are 

extremely important. Nevertheless, his micro-analysis is still valid. 

France represents a different case. Here, as in England, the peasants freed 

themselves from medieval feudalism but, unlike England, they retained effective control 

of the land. The landlords in France were never able to change this. In part, this was 

because of the development of the French monarchy. The French state did not side with 

the nobility against the peasants but instead saw the peasantry as a financial base. Thus, 

the state and property owners were competitors for the right to extract peasant surpluses. 

This meant that peasants were under relatively little pressure to operate their plots as 

profitably or effectively as possible because there was no real competitive system among 

them. French peasants did engage in exchange, but the state and the landowners still 

appropriated their surpluses. They were not tenants competing for tenancies and then 

competing to keep these tenancies. French peasants were secure on their lands because 

the state wanted them to be. Consequently, France did not become capitalist before the 

nineteenth century. 

Brenner’s argument about Europe has been discussed in detail, in order to show 

what kind of argument it is. It is not based on any “Euro-myth” but rather on concrete 

historical evidence. It shows that each set of society’s leaders governed by a specific 

socio-economic logic, which was the product of qualitative historical developments 

linked ultimately to class conflict but not excluding other factors. One can disagree with 

the theory underlying it, but then one would have to explain the fact that the three areas 

under consideration had the outcomes that Brenner delineates. No one argues any longer 

that neither France nor Eastern Europe were capitalist before the nineteenth century. 

Social position of French peasants, East European serfs, and English tenants (“yeoman 

farmers”) are all accepted facts of the early modern period. More importantly, they all 

had expanding commercial relations not only within their countries, but also with other 

parts of Europe and even the world. If the expansion of market exchange leads to 

capitalism, why is it that only England became capitalist before the nineteenth century? It 

is important to note that while the outcome of class conflict in Britain led to the creation 

of a superior economic logic (from the standpoint of productivity and economic growth), 

this argument does not presuppose that British institutions were superior before these 

developments and that this superiority caused these developments. 

PETER S. GRAY


195 

Brenner has been discussed mainly in relation to Europe, but he also argued 

against Wallerstein, and against Frank in his early incarnation as a theorist of the 

“development of underdevelopment” (a position he has subsequently rejected). Brenner 

argued in an article devoted primarily to Wallerstein that Wallerstein essentially had 

adopted a Smithian model of economic development, i.e. the commercial model, as 

discussed above. This fundamentally means that Wallerstein had abandoned Marxism, 

and class conflict and structure, as an explanation for economic development There are 

various areas of Wallerstein’s work that Brenner criticizes, but two will be focused on 

here: Wallerstein’s notion of “labor control” and the crucial use of “primitive 

accumulation” in his argument. 

Brenner’s basic argument against Wallerstein is that by adopting the commercial 

model, Wallerstein has mistaken the fundamental causal relationships. Instead of class 

conflict and class structure causing economic development or its lack, Wallerstein sees 

the expansion of the market and commercial exchange as causing economic development. 

In fact, the development of class structure in Wallerstein is an outcome of the expansion 

of commerce, i.e., changes in class structure depends on the expansion of markets. New 

forms of “labor control” emerge not from class conflict, but merely from the facilitation 

of market-induced processes of economic development and underdevelopment. 32 Indeed, 

in Wallerstein’s analysis, European capitalists impose different forms of “labor control” 

because the market dictates it. Wallerstein does not analyze whether there might have 

been class conflict in the establishment of new forms of “labor control.” Brenner argued 

that this was because Wallerstein essentially adopted a Smithian position—one that 

denied class conflict and structure in favor of a market composed of individual producers 

and consumers. 

Another issue on which Brenner criticizes Wallerstein is the notion of primitive 

accumulation. Wallerstein essentially argued for a European primitive accumulation of 

wealth derived from its exploitative control over the Americas. To him, this massive 

transfer of wealth was vital to the economic development of Europe. Brenner argued 

against this view. He did not argue that there was no transfer of wealth to Europe, or that 

exploitation was not involved. Rather he challenged the notion that this transfer had any 

qualitative effects on the European economy. Brenner saw this whole issue rooted in 

problems in Smith’s analysis of the development of commercial society. Smith’s system 

essentially presupposed capitalist relations of production. Thus, Smith needed to find a 

source for the capital required for the operation of his model, and so he postulated a 

“previous accumulation” of wealth that served as the basis for the capital required by his 

model. More importantly, Brenner argued (following Marx) that even if one were to 

specify the origin of this accumulation, the very fact of its accumulation would not turn it 

into capital. It could just as easily have been merely consumed, and not invested in 

improving productivity. Brenner instead argues that capital comes into being under 

specific historical circumstances—“certain historically-developed social-productive 

32 Robert Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review 

104 (1977) 56. 



relations.” 33 The development of a specific set of social relationships allows wealth to 

become capital, and not the other way around. Wallerstein’s argument implies that no 

amount of transfer of wealth to Europe would have created capitalist economic relations 

there. These relations arose out of class conflict in England. This is not to deny that 

wealth was appropriated from the non-European world and that some of that wealth was 

transformed into capital. No doubt some of it was simply consumed. Nevertheless, while 

this transfer of wealth may have made life more comfortable for some Europeans, it did 

not create the “modern world system.” 

There are important reasons for such a lengthy consideration of Brenner’s ideas. 

First, he offers a coherent account of the origins of capitalism in England, one that avoids 

all of Blaut’s “Euro-myths.” More importantly, Brenner’s ideas will inform subsequent 

discussion of Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz. Brenner stands as a forceful critique of Frank, 

Wong, and Pomeranz, even though his work precedes theirs by twenty years. Finally, this 

essay will culminate with some suggestions of how Brewer’s positive argument on the 

origins of capitalism can be applied to the whole world. 

Although Brenner devoted most of his essay on the origins of capitalist 

development to Wallerstein, Andre Gunder Frank was another of the “Neo-Smithian 

Marxists” that Brenner criticized. Frank’s early work on the “development of 

underdevelopment,” which he has since repudiated, was nevertheless a most important 

influence on Wallerstein. In 1998, Frank published Reorient, which was a conscious 

attempt to rewrite the history of the world economy from 1400 to 1800 from an anti- 

Eurocentric position. Frank did an impressive amount of research in secondary sources, 

work that is commendable for bringing much information together in one volume that 

before was only contained in specialist manuscripts. However, serous problems remain in 

Frank’s analysis. 

Frank argues “there already was an ongoing world economy before the Europeans 

had much to do and say in it.” 34 He derives two sub theses from this assertion, first that 

“Asia, and especially China and India, but also Southeast Asia and West Asia, were more 

active and the first three also more important to this world economy than Europe was 

until about 1800,” and second that Europe “used its American money to buy about a 

ticket on the Asian train.” 35 Thus, Frank’s aim is to challenge Eurocentric models of the 

origins of the modern world system. In doing this, he rejects almost all nineteenth- and 

twentieth-century European historical and social scientific work on the subject, including 

that of Marx, Weber, Wallerstein, and Brenner. They all are Eurocentric in Frank’s 

opinion, because in one-way or another they all privilege Europe over Asia in the early 

modern period. However, Frank gives that other European thinker, Adam Smith, a pass 

on the issue because, as we shall see, Smith’s economic theory and one of his specific 

arguments are crucial to Frank’s own argument. 

33 Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development,” 86-7 

34 Frank, Reorient, p. xxiv–xxv. 

35 Frank, Reorient, p. xxiv–xxv. 

PETER S. GRAY


197 

Frank argues that there was a world economy dating back thousands of years 

(though he focuses on the years 1400-1800), an economy characterized by regional 

trading systems linked together in a world system involving the Eurasian landmass and 

Africa. This trade was not just long-distance trade in luxury goods, but was also trade in 

staple goods. For Frank, this constitutes a true “world system” in that it incorporated the 

entire known world except the Americas (which Europe would integrate into the world 

economy after the 1500s). Wallerstein was explicit about what he considered a world 

system. He was clear that it did not literally have to encompass the entire world. At some 

point, Frank seems confused on Wallerstein’s definition of a world system, and thus he 

castigates Wallerstein for ignoring Asia in general and China in particular. Frank clearly 

has not understood Wallerstein here. Even so, Frank maintains one of Wallerstein’s 

central ideas—that a world system has a single division of labor. The underlying idea is 

the same, whether in the more geographically circumscribed Wallersteinian version or the 

global Frankian version. Frank further argues that the introduction of various forms of 

circulating money during this period integrated this world system and its single division 

of labor. Money was indispensable to the operation of this world system. The European 

conquest of the Americas gave them control over large amounts of silver and gold, thus 

allowing Europeans to buy goods from Asia that they otherwise could not afford, because 

Europeans lacked commodities Asians wanted. 

Frank argues that in this world system, with a single division of labor integrated 

by money circulation, the Europeans were not the economic leaders, that they did not 

dominate the world economy. The Asian economies, particularly China and India, were 

the major economies in terms of population, production, trade, and consumption. More 

significantly, European social scientists falsely classified them as stagnant economies. 

They were dynamic economies that “grew faster and more than Europe and maintained 

[their] economic lead over Europe in all these aspects until at least 1750.” 36 In fact, the 

Asian economies were the dominant economies in the world system before 1750. This is 

in part because Asia was in no way inferior to Europe in productivity, technology, and 

economic and financial institutions. It is commonly argued that the opposite was the case, 

i.e. that the “European miracle” was that of its superiority in these areas. Instead, Frank 

argues that there was a great deal of innovation throughout Eurasia and that, because of 

the international commercial links of the world system, these innovations were diffuse 

and adapted to local conditions. Frank argues the Europe benefited greatly from this 

diffusion. Unquestionably, many Europeans adopted and adapted non-European 

innovations, but European technological superiority is not the lynchpin of most 

arguments for European superiority. 

Ultimately, though, Frank has to address the eventual European dominance of the 

world economy, i.e. that something changed after 1750, making Europe the dominant 

region in the world economy. He first argues that Europeans were able to integrate 

themselves into this system by means of their appropriation of New World silver and 

gold, an argument he claims ultimately comes from Adam Smith. More importantly, he 

argues that cycles of growth and contraction both did and do characterize the world 

economic system and that, while the effects of each phase in the cycle are unevenly 

36 Frank, Reorient, 35. 



distributed around the world system, one can delineate general trends for the world 

system. He argues that the so-called “seventeenth-century crisis” was really a European 

crisis and not a global crisis. Thus, while Europe suffered a contraction, the world 

economy as a whole was still in its growth phase. By the end of the eighteenth century, 

though, Asia was entering a phase of contraction. Europeans, who had entered a growth 

phase at this time, were able to take advantage of Asia’s cyclical weakness because they 

were by then integrated into the world economy. 

This summary of Frank’s argument excludes much about its theoretical 

underpinnings, though these are important. Frank is essentially a Smithian, Neo-Classical 

economist. However, he differs from his colleagues’ position that no equivalent to the 

commercial society developing in Europe existed in Asia. Instead, he maintains that 

commercial society was already present around the world in 1400, and even earlier. 

Frank never talks of constraints on the rise of market exchange—when any economy is in 

a growth phase, market exchange increases. Frank is almost obsessively concerned with 

trade, especially international trade, and he never discusses the relations of production 

under which traded goods were actually produced. Even when he considers economic 

institutions, he discusses business organization and finance. The world of 1400-1800 was 

overwhelmingly agricultural and dominated by peasants, even in Europe, which affected 

the structures of its various societies and states. However, peasants and agriculture 

receive little or no mention, let alone analysis, in Frank’s book. 

Frank is so wedded to his Smithian view of economics and his anti-Eurocentrism 

that he even denies the very existence of capitalism. He suggests that capitalism is a 

Eurocentric myth designed primarily to differentiate Europe from the rest of the world, in 

order to assert European superiority. Frank thus argues that the same economic relations 

have operated in the world economy for hundreds or thousands of years, and that what 

happened between 1500 and 1800 in Europe and the world was nothing truly new. This 

places him firmly within the Smithian commercial model. 

R. Bin Wong’s goals are less ambitious then those of Frank, but he still seeks to 

downgrade Europe from its privileged position. A specialist on China, Wong wants to 

compare Europe and China to see how they were similar and different—but with the aim 

of dislodging “European state making and capitalism from their privileged positions as 

universalizing themes in world history.” 37 To do this, Wong analyzes both the economic 

history and the history of political institutions in Europe and in China. He argues that in 

the most advanced areas of Europe and China, their economic systems were largely the 

same and conformed to “Smithian dynamics”—“productivity gains accruing from the 

division of labor and specialization” with a “decentralized price system” that “widens the 

scope of the market and extends the advantages accruing from the division of labor.” 38 

Wong’s basic economic argument is that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, 

China was economically no different from Europe. Both were pre-industrial, both 

exhibited Smithian dynamics, and both were subject to occasional Malthusian crises. 39 

37 Wong, China Transformed, 7. 



PETER S. GRAY


199 

Where they did differ was in their political systems. China had a unified state that, 

while not an oriental despotism, did not develop the representative institutions of 

European polities nor the European system of interstate competition. Instead, China was 

an agrarian empire with a different political logic than that of any European state. We 

should not expect European style institutions to have developed there. European states, 

apart from developing representative institutions in some areas and being in competition 

with each other, lacked the kinds of active promotion of popular education and morality, 

as well as a concern to promote the material welfare of its subjects, especially the poor 

and peasants, that were ancient features of the Chinese state. These differences are crucial 

for the economic developments of both regions. The Chinese state was concerned with 

static, not to say stagnant, efficiency and wanted to spread the best techniques available 

across a vast area. Its goal was to increase state revenue by encouraging the material 

improvement of its subjects. European states, on the other hand, sought competition and 

growth, not anticipating that this would result in the industrial revolution. Thus, the 

differences in Chinese and European development were the outcome of their specific 

historically developed state structures and their policies. 

When Wong discusses the Chinese economy, he makes it sound as if it were 

solely a market economy for both peasants and artisans. This ignores the tributary nature 

of the Chinese state in this period. The Chinese state appropriated and redistributed 

peasant surpluses in a manner quite different from what European states were doing 

during this period, although one must distinguish between this and the tributes the 

Chinese state received from its client states. This did not preclude peasants selling what 

remained in markets, but Wong glosses over the tributary aspect of the Chinese states and 

this is a serious omission. Further, Wong replicates, in a more palatable form, the 

Eurocentric argument that Chinese state institutions represented a block on economic 

development. The Chinese economy may have been dynamic and not stagnant, but Wong 

does not decisively refute the ‘Euro-myth’ of European institutional superiority. 

Kenneth Pomeranz is also a specialist in China and a colleague of Wong. He, too, 

wants to challenge Eurocentric views. He argues “no matter how far we may push back 

the origins of capitalism, industrial capitalism, in which large-scale use of inanimate 

energy sources allowed an escape from the common constraints of the pre-industrial 

world, emerged only in the 1800s. There is little to suggest that Western Europe’s 

economy had decisive advantages before then, either in its capital stock or economic 

institutions, that made industrialization highly probable there and unlikely elsewhere.” 40 

Pomeranz argues that before the nineteenth century, high levels of capital accumulation, 

demographic patterns, and markets in general existed in Western Europe, China, Japan, 

and perhaps elsewhere. Consequently, these factors cannot explain why Europe 

industrialized in the nineteenth century, nor would they even suffice to explain a counterfactual 

Chinese industrialization. According to Pomeranz, technology cannot explain this 

either, because the real differentiation between Europe and Asia in technology occurred 

in the nineteenth century. Perhaps Europe had some advantage in international trade, but 

this was a difference in degree rather than in kind, and does not justify any claim that 

40 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 32. 



Western Europe had developed a “capitalist mode of production” or a “consumer society” 

which differentiated it from Asia by creating the industrialized society of Europe in the 

nineteenth century. Pomeranz further argues that by the end of the eighteenth century, a 

series of fundamental ecological constraints increasingly beset Asia. Increased trade 

within Eurasia and Africa would not ease these constraints. Fortunately for Europe, the 

conquest and colonization of the New World provided a way out. Since Europeans were 

able to structure their trade relations with their colonies—as opposed to free, consensual 

trade among Eurasians—Europe was able to transcend its ecological constraints. In the 

process, Europe created the world’s first modern “core” and “periphery,” which allowed 

Europe to build a unique industrial system upon an advanced market economy which 

itself was not unique in Eurasia. 

There are some things to note here. First, Pomeranz presupposes Smithian 

economics. It is the only economic model and it is found everywhere. Even so, Smithian 

dynamics do not lead to capitalism. In fact, just as in Frank, Pomeranz denies the very 

notion of something qualitatively different called “capitalism.” Industrialization is what 

distinguishes Western Europe after 1800, a result of escaping ecological constraints. This, 

in turn, is a consequence of the conquest of the Americas, their colonization, and the 

transfer of wealth to Europe. In Pomeranz, this wealth took the form not only of precious 

metals, but also of colonial products, especially various types of food products. Thus 

Pomeranz returns to a Wallersteinian theme, though he is critical of Wallerstein here and 

there. What are missing here are any fundamental qualitative changes in social relations 

in Western Europe leading to industrialization. 

Some general criticisms of these works are in order. The first point to make is 

about how Frank, Wong, and Pomeranz actually characterize Asian economies during 

this period. As noted earlier, Frank has very little to say about peasants and instead is 

obsessed with trade. This is a serious flaw in his book. The vast majority of the world’s 

populations until the twentieth century were peasants, and peasant production was the 

main global economic activity until that time. Frank has practically nothing to say about 

this, and what he does say about peasant production has to do with merchants trading 

their products. Wong and Pomeranz do discuss peasants, but there is a curious absence in 

their discussions. One gets the impression in both books that Chinese peasants were akin 

to the small independent farmers found in the United States in the nineteenth century. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Chinese system integrated peasants into a 

tributary state that appropriated and redistributed a share of their production by 

essentially non-market means. Here, Wallerstein is correct in his analysis of China as a 

world-empire, though he vastly underestimates the amount of market exchange that 

existed alongside this tributary system. In order to make their arguments, Wong and 

Pomeranz have simply ignored this important aspect of the Chinese socio-economic 

system. This is a severe distortion of reality. 

This absence is a product of the adoption of Smithian economic theory, refracted 

through Neo-Classical economics. To bring up the Chinese tributary system (which 

should not be confused with these authors’ discussions of “tribute” received by the 

Chinese state from countries in its sphere of influence) is to undermine the Smithian 

PETER S. GRAY


201 

argument that Wong and Pomeranz want to make. None of the three authors seriously 

consider alternative economic theories. When Marx is discussed, his ideas are dismissed. 

Frank is most vociferous about this, spuriously arguing that Marx’s analysis of the origins 

of European capitalism is intimately tied to his belief that Asian economies were stagnant 

and their political systems despotic, preventing economic dynamism. Certainly, Marx 

considered England the place where capitalism arose, and never considered any other 

area as a candidate for this development. However, Marx’s limited analyses of India and 

China are not justification for the dismissal of his arguments about England. By the end 

of the 1850s, Marx was the expert on the English economy and its development, and his 

analysis did not rely on other parts of the world being stagnant. His arguments are about 

England, what had happened there, and how its economy worked at that time. The same 

holds true for Brenner, who is the major modern proponent of the Marxian view of the 

origins of capitalism. None of the anti-Eurocentric authors seriously consider Brenner’s 

arguments, because they have already made their choice for Smith and against Marx. 

This means that class is not a category of analysis for any of these authors. Thus, they 

derive no meaning from Brenner’s claim that class conflict leads to changes both in class 

structure and in the economic logic governing the economies of the different European 

states. This is already evident when Pomeranz tries to pair Brenner with Douglas North, a 

Neo-Classical economic historian, stating that they essentially reach the same 

conclusions. However, the gulf between Marxism and Neo-Classical economics is 

immense. That Brenner and North can be seen as kindred spirits shows either that 

Pomeranz does not know Marxism (the rest of the book shows he knows Neo- 

Classicism), or that he simply does not care. 

Historians should prefer Marx to Smith, because Marx offers a thorough historical 

explanation for the development of capitalism, right down to the level of the very “laws” 

that govern the operation of an economic system. Smith and the Neo-Classicists do not 

go this far, and instead posit their basic economic models as operating at all places and 

times, something akin to the laws of Newtonian physics. Marx argued that the economic 

sphere is just as historical as the social, cultural, and political spheres— that, in fact, the 

economic sphere is itself social, and should not be separated from society. Neo-Classical 

economists tend to do just that, when they are not trying to reduce society to the market 

model. Humans have devised different economic systems throughout their existence— 

different at the most fundamental level—and these systems have changed over time. For 

Marx, the motor of change is class conflict, arising from the development of a socioeconomic 

system that in itself is the result of earlier class conflicts. This class conflict is 

not mechanical or deterministic. Circumstances, unintended consequences, and other 

factors influence the outcome of a class conflict. Many historians are uncomfortable with 

the notion of class as a prime mover of historical development. One does not need to 

adopt this aspect of Marxism to agree with another aspect of Marxism, outlined above, 

that the laws governing economic activity change qualitatively over time. One does not 

have to be a Marxist to use class as a category of analysis. Max Weber, generally taken to 

be the most sophisticated alternative to Marx as a social theorist, had no problem using a 

concept of class. 



It is not surprising that orthodox economics has influenced Frank, Wong, and 

Pomeranz, given the generally anti-Marxist climate found in the United States and 

elsewhere. In rejecting the thoroughgoing historicism of Marx in favor of Smith, all three 

thus reject the very idea of capitalism, in one way or another. As we have seen, 

Smithian/Neo-Classical thinking essentially maintains itself to be the basic model for all 

economic activity. Any deviation from it is the result of human interference, which 

usually turns out badly. Since the basic logic of economics is the same everywhere and at 

all times, it makes no sense to talk of capitalism if one means by that term some sort of 

different form of economy. If by capitalism one means the Smithian model of the 

economy, then, by this theory, capitalism has always been present in one form or another. 

For this reason, Neo-Classical economists usually avoid the term capitalism altogether. 

The anti-Eurocentrists have another reason to avoid the term. To talk of 

capitalism is to grant some validity to nineteenth-century European social science and 

historical writing—especially Marx, who created “capitalism” as a category of historical 

and socio-economic analysis. Consequently, anti-Eurocentrists are keen to deny any 

validity to the term as it relates to notions of European difference and superiority. When 

confronted with undeniable European economic difference, these authors talk of 

industrialization rather than capitalism. This is because they believe that industrialization 

neatly fits into the parameters of the Smithian model. However, industrialization postdated 

Smith, who really only knew an economy based on agriculture and incipient 

factories. 

There is another problem with this anti-Eurocentric line of thinking. European 

thinkers did not develop the concept of capitalism to denigrate non-European people. 

Rather, they wished to explain the rapid changes taking place in Europe and especially in 

England, changes to which Marx gave the term capitalism. Marx was the first thinker to 

offer a truly historical view of the problem. He realized that previous economists, Smith 

and Ricardo in particular, did not think in historical terms, but instead took ahistorical 

Newtonian physics as the model for their theories. The anti-Eurocentric historians, in 

trying to de-privilege Europe by eliminating the concept of capitalism, are essentially 

going back to this ahistorical model. Thus, no matter how detailed their historical 

research, the model within which they articulate their evidence is fundamentally flawed. 

There is a further irony in this choice as well. Smith was European, and the 

Smithian model is a product of European thought. Smith may have said a positive thing 

about China here and there (and Frank is quick to point these statements out, though not 

as interested in some of the more negative things Smith said about China), but this does 

not change the fact that Smith’s model is based on European thought and experience. 41 

What Smith knew of the rest of the world came from accounts written by Europeans, 

some of whom had been to the places they wrote about, some not. In this, Smith was no 

different from Marx and Weber. Yet somehow Smith escapes the charge of Eurocentrism, 

despite the fact that he clearly thought that Europe had reached the highest stage 

development. Smith’s implication that the commercial stage was open to all nations does 

not change anything. In fact, Smith is Eurocentric in arguing that Europe had best 

41 For some negative comments on China in Smith see Wealth of Nations, 95, 462, 644-5. 

PETER S. GRAY


203 

removed constraints on the development of commercial society. Surely, this makes 

Europe special—even superior in some sense. Anti-Eurocentric historians thus essentially 

continue to rely on European derived theories and categories, calling into question their 

claims of being truly anti-Eurocentric. R. Bin Wong is aware of the problem, claiming he 

tries to avoid it, but his work is firmly rooted in European social science. There is a 

strange contradiction here which is unacknowledged by these authors. 

The European roots of a Marxian approach to this issue do not share this problem, 

just because it is not trying to deny capitalism or the European origins of capitalism. 

Marxism does argue (without privileging Europeans for any of the reasons that Blaut 

offers) that changes in European society lead to Europe being more advanced than the 

rest of the world, in terms of both economic structure and thought about the nature of that 

structure, for examples. However, nothing in Marxism denies other societies the ability to 

develop capitalism, or even something entirely different. Instead, Marx argues that 

societies change qualitatively over time and that the main factor in such change is class 

conflict, which changes both class structure and the overall economic logic of the society 

in question. That England developed capitalism first is an accident of history—the result 

of a particular set of circumstances in a specific place and time. It could have happened 

somewhere else, or it could have not happened at all. Capitalism did not arise first in 

Asia, and when it did arise there, e.g. in Japan in the late-nineteenth century or in China 

in the last two decades of the twentieth century, it developed in a different manner. 

It is possible to use the Marx-Brenner model on a world scale. While the model 

denies that the expansion of commerce caused the rise of capitalism, it does not deny that 

there was commerce among societies, nor does it deny the importance of that commerce. 

Societies trade with each other and have always traded with each other. This is, in fact, a 

main way that technological and other innovations spread throughout the world. A Marx- 

Brenner model of economic world history since 1400, for example, would focus on 

tracing the internal development of class conflict and class structure (and how those 

created different economic logics in different societies of the world), while also paying 

attention to how world developments such as trade affected the development of those 

class conflicts, structures, and logics. An ideal Marxist account of the world economy 

since 1400 would integrate a variant of the world systems approach (i.e., one without the 

commercialization model) with a detailed analysis of the various class conflicts, class 

structures, economic logics, and the social and political formations arising from them 

around the world, and would also consider how these two levels interacted both vertically 

and horizontally. Such a task is most likely beyond the ability of any single historian, but 

a collective endeavor could achieve it.

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