Mythical or mysterious -- search for Bigfoot alive among Montana believers


by Maritsa Georgiou

Friday, November 1st 2019

A Sasquatch warning sign hangs in the forest at the Montana Vortex, where several people have reported seeing Bigfoot. Photo: NBC Montana

COLUMBIA FALLS, Mont. — On any given day in a forest in the Pacific Northwest, you can find people searching for proof of a mysterious creature.

“Yes, I do believe in Bigfoot.” That’s what Joe Hauser told us on a late summer day at the Montana Vortex and House of Mystery outside Glacier National Park.  GLACIER IS SHARED WITH CANADA, WE CALL IT WATERTON NATIONAL PARK, BIGFOOT IS A CANADIAN TOURIST FROM HARRISON, BC

Hauser walks the grounds every day. He bought the property to study the electromagnetic anomaly. He’s the first to tell you weird things happen there.

“A lot of people come in totally skeptical, and then they leave and go, ‘I don’t know what’s going on here, but there’s definitely something going on here,’” Hauser said.

And people like Hauser say they’ve seen Bigfoot appear out of nowhere in the very woods surrounding the Montana Vortex.

You can find Bigfoot reminders everywhere at the tourist attraction, including what believers say is real evidence of footprints.

“You can see they’re all different just like our feet are all different,” Hauser explained, showing off casts of the footprints. “That was from Bluff Creek by Roger Patterson -- and that’s where the Patty video was actually done in California.”

That Patty video is possibly the most controversial and known footage of what some say is Bigfoot. It was shot in 1967, and it’s what first piqued Hauser’s interest.

“I remember watching that on the news with my parents and grandparents -- and my grandfather and dad and uncle, they had an experience in Colorado where they found large tracks in the 1930s.”

Hauser’s first encounter took place goldmining in California in 1983.

“We heard some really big loud screams and whoops. It was like a howler monkey on steroids. And I turned to my partner and said, ‘What the heck is that?’ He said, ‘Oh, that’s Bigfoot. Haven’t you heard him yet?’”

It took 22 more years before Hauser says he actually saw a Sasquatch -- at the ever popular Avalanche Lake in Glacier Park with his son.

“He looks across the lake and goes, ‘Hey Dad, there’s two Bigfoot walking across that snow field there.’ And sure enough -- big strides, great big arm swings, arms down to their knees. And we had about a 5-minute sighting walking across the snow field.”

Hauser’s most recent sighting took place last fall on a trail at the Vortex, where tourists also reported seeing them. Hauser says Bigfoot will knock on his house at night and leave signs on his walkways after he's raked them.


Joe Hauser, Bigfoot enthusiast and Montana Vortex owner, talks everything Sasquatch with Maritsa Georgiou.{https://nbcmontana.com/news/local/mythical-or-mysterious-search-for-bigfoot-alive-among-montana-believers }

And he's not alone.

“Most people don’t talk about it, because there’s kind of a stigma to it, and people think you’re crazy because you saw a Bigfoot or you heard something,” Hauser said.

But some people do talk about it. You can find thousands of reports on the Bigfoot Field Research Organization website, which is run by reality show personality Matt Moneymaker of “Finding Bigfoot” fame. It includes photos and audio recordings and descriptions of sightings, including hundreds of Montana sightings from Missoula to Malta.

The BFRO has collected reports since 1995. Once you report a sighting, a BFRO investigator will likely do a follow-up report. The database shows 22 of Montana's 56 counties don't have any sightings. Missoula County has the most official reports to the BFRO at 17. Flathead comes in second with 13, and Gallatin County ranks third with 10 reports. But there are many more sightings you won’t find on the site.

“We have lots of sightings here; they’re just not reported,” Hauser said. “We take reports in here almost every week. And this is all over Montana. Georgetown Lake, Anaconda, and people have been having experiences down there for years. Glacier Park has a lot of sightings up there.”

There's no doubt Bigfoot has made a comeback in pop culture. Montana filmmaker Adam Pitman wrote his first screenplay in 1999, a psychological thriller about Bigfoot. It came after his dad recounted a strange sighting.

“He was on a jog, and up ahead of him this guy walked out across the road, but it wasn’t a guy,” Pitman said. “He was much taller, pure black and long arms. Very long arms that reached down to his knees.”

Pitman researched the legend at length, but added, “I’m not a believer. No. I’ve heard countless stories, but I want to see. And during my research I’ve gone through so many pictures and so many stories and nothing is definitive or caught me, like, how could that be explained?”

“There’s thousands of sightings and people are hearing whoops and screams and stuff like that,” Hauser said. “So we either have thousands of delusional liars out there, or something is really going on.”

So where's the evidence?

“There’s been bones that have been found; there’s been DNA studies that have been done,” Hauser explained. “There’s another DNA study being done right now.”

He couldn’t comment on the studies, but said they’re being done at reputable universities. He says some of that DNA was collected at his Vortex.

“They like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and if you put double-faced tape on the outside and they pick up the bowl it leaves hair and skin follicles,” Hauser said. “And then if you put a different variety of food in there, they’ll sample it. They don’t like Skittles or M&Ms, so they’ll put it in their mouth and then spit it back out in the bowl, and there’s saliva. There are DNA tests being done right now.”

Until those test results come back, the questions remain.

“All of those out there searching for Bigfoot, good luck,” Pitman said, addressing the camera. “Find him. I want to believe!”

“If you ever have a Bigfoot experience, once you have that experience it changes your life,” Hauser said.

And with every experience, the legend lives on, and so do the searches through our Montana forests.

Even in the camp of believers, there are a lot of debates on topics like why the creatures are so elusive and so on.

Hauser says there’s been an increase in scientific interest in recent years, and he hopes more evidence comes out of that.

St. Johns County man releases Bigfoot movie on Amazon Prime

BY SHELDON GARDNER, ST. AUGUSTINE RECORD THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
FEBRUARY 06, 2021

ST. AUGUSTINE, FLA.

As part of his new line of work, St. Johns County resident Chris Simoes has become well-acquainted with Bigfoot culture.

The filmmaker has traveled with Bigfoot enthusiasts and gone on sasquatch hunts. He camped in North Georgia with a friend he describes as a “Bigfoot believer,” who used various calls to try and attract a sasquatch.

“There’s several ways that people believe Bigfoot communicates,” Simoes said. “He knocks on trees, like with a stick. So they’ll knock on trees. They’ll clack rocks together. And they’ll hoot and, you know, howl and that kind of thing, so a lot of Bigfoot hunters will go out into the woods and try to mimic their sounds and wait for answers.”

So far the trips haven’t surfaced any Bigfoot sightings.

Simoes has made two feature-length films about Bigfoot

His latest, “Bigfoot: The Conspiracy,” was picked up in December by Amazon Prime Video after he submitted it for publication. The film has been streamed for millions of minutes so far, he said. It’s also available on the site in Japan.

“It’s surreal, really,” he said.

He created the film under his business, Legends Beware.

“As a kid I was always so enthralled, I guess, with myths and legends and Bigfoot, and that kind of thing,” he said.

Simoes sat down for an interview with The Record at his home near U.S. 1 South along with his daughter, Alexa, who is 24.

He said he chose Bigfoot as the topic for his first feature-length film, “Bigfoot: The Curse of Blood Mountain,” which was released in 2014 on Amazon Prime Video, in part because of the “subculture” that follows Bigfoot sightings, he said. He knew people would watch it.

THE LEGEND

According to the Washington Military Department (a sector of the Washington Air National Guard took Bigfoot as its mascot), “The legends of Bigfoot go back beyond recorded history and cover the world. In North America — and particularly the Northwest — you can hear tales of 7-foot-tall hairy men stalking the woods, occasionally scaring campers, lumberjacks, hikers and the like.”

Some Bigfoot movies are about “mindless killing machines” who tear people apart, Simoes said. But that wasn’t the kind of Bigfoot story he wanted to tell.

Simoes wanted to emphasize the importance of respecting nature and to portray Bigfoot as more of a protector of the land.


“It’s just like any other bear or anything else,” Simoes said. “They just want to be left alone.”

Through research for the films and from experiences with Bigfoot researchers, he has learned more about the roots of the Bigfoot story.

“Like the first movie, it’s based on Cherokee Indian folklore. There are a lot of Cherokee Indians who are firm believers in Bigfoot,” he said.

Alexa said the movie sheds a different light on Bigfoot.

“It’s not just like, ‘This is a monster,‘” she said.

Some people take Bigfoot research seriously. The Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization ― which describes itself as “the only scientific research organization exploring the Bigfoot/Sasquatch mystery” ― lists close encounters by region.

There are five reported encounters in St. Johns County, the latest from February 2013 at Twelve Mile Swamp, according to the website.

Though the man didn’t see a creature, he heard noises. The site described it as largely constituting “typical Sasquatch behavior.”

“At one time (the man) hooted twice. In return, the branches thrashed violently, and he heard a guttural growl,” the report says. “Before he left, he hit a tree, twice. When he did this something ran through the scrub away from him, it sounded to be 40 feet away.”

Simoes said he went out to the area a couple of weeks ago and didn’t not encounter Bigfoot, or the “skunk ape,” as it’s referred to in Florida.

According to the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, “Indian tribes across North America have a total of more than 60 different terms for the sasquatch. ... Many different terms have been used by pioneers and later non-native inhabitants of North America, including ‘skookums’ and ‘mountain devils.‘”

The group also offers safety advice to people who encounter Bigfoot:

“A bright flashlight or spotlight seems to be the most effective way to make one or more sasquatches back off and leave an area. Even warning shots are apparently not as effective as bright spotlights, especially when carried by groups of people searching a wooded area after dark.”

A VOLUNTEER EFFORT

An unexpected life event led Simoes to making movies about Bigfoot.

Years ago, Simoes was forced to retire early from a career in federal law enforcement because of a back injury. He worked jobs that proved to be unfulfilling, and so he began to pursue his longtime interest in filmmaking.

With no background in the field, Simoes sold personal items to buy equipment and learned the craft on his own. He practiced by making short films with family.

“Bigfoot: The Conspiracy” focuses on a retired Border Patrol agent (played by Simoes) “as he discovers the possible existence of Bigfoot and the shroud of darkness that surrounds it,” the film’s summary reads.

Simoes has lived in the area with his family since 2020, but he filmed much of the movie on their former property in Georgia. His children appear in the film, and Alexa helped with production.

Filming started in July 2019, just soon enough to finish before COVID-19 struck.

Simoes began working in the film industry as an actor before going into filmmaking, and he built relationships with other actors.

Eventually he got tired of being an extra and decided to do his own work, desiring to influence the creative process, he said. He reached out to actors he had met, and he found enough volunteer actors to put films together.

Simoes’ friend Dave Watkins starred in the latest film and co-produced it. But there was a multitude of help from other people.

And, of course, Simoes’ needed a Bigfoot suit.

But the one he ordered online wasn’t ready to go when it arrived.

“When I got it, I was disappointed there wasn’t more hair, so I added so much more hair to it,” he said.

He taught himself how to plug hair into the suit, and even collected hair from Alexa after she got haircuts. It’s lightweight, weighing only about 15 pounds or so.

A few people wore the suit in the movie, including someone with experience as a professional sports mascot. Watkins made a small appearance in the suit.

“It’s actually very difficult to do. … I’m definitely not the best Bigfoot walker,” Watkins said.

Simoes said without the help of Alexa, Watkins and volunteers, the film would not have been possible.

“We know we’re learning. We know we don’t have a budget. We just try to work extra hard to create a cinematic feel,” he said.

Eventually Simoes wants to make money creating films. He’s focused now on a short film about COVID-19 and the vaccine, he said.

It’s not clear yet what fresh work Simoes might pursue involving Bigfoot, though he is planning a trip with another Bigfoot enthusiast.

As for his thoughts about the legend of Bigfoot?

“I’m an enthusiast, but I’m a skeptic,” Simoes said.

Stomp out governmental regulation of Bigfoot
Feb 5, 2021

If there is one thing I can’t stand, it is government overregulation of cryptozoological creatures.

There are actually several things I can’t stand — someone putting an empty steak sauce bottle back in the refrigerator, irresponsible dog owners and people with Facebook medical degrees, just to name a few.

This week, though, it is government overregulation of cryptozoological creatures, specifically Bigfoot.

Regular readers of this column know I am a citizen of the city that proudly hosts the annual Western North Carolina (WNC) Bigfoot Festival during non-plague years.

Those same readers may even recall I performed as Bigfoot’s stand in a few times, climbing into the suit for both promotional and educational efforts, such as the non-award-winning documentary “Bigfoot Tells Fifth-Graders about Trees.”

That’s probably not the name of it, but I was only on set for about 20 minutes before I overheated in the suit and left.

Netflix might have it.

Those same readers, it appears, have mixed feelings about ongoing Bigfoot coverage.

“Love your stuff,” Loretta wrote in an email last week. “The Monkey Reports were super. Bigfoot, not so much…”

My friend Susan, though, alerted me to the most recent Bigfoot-related news to tackle.

“I feel certain you will cover this more thoroughly,” she wrote in a message that included a link to NPR.

I initially figured it was either a way to make a donation for a tote bag or instructions on how to donate my car, but it turned out to be a Morning Edition blurb about an Oklahoma lawmaker who introduced a bill to establish a Bigfoot hunting season.

“The measure would require hunting licenses, and comes with a $25,000 reward for Bigfoot’s capture,” NPR’s intro said. “The legislation is aimed at increasing tourism near the Ouachita Mountains.”

Immediately, I stopped doing real work and began extensive research into this misguided attempt by the government to regulate Bigfoot.

Let me be clear: I am not anti-government. I haven’t stormed anything in weeks. I pay my taxes, eventually. I get out and vote if it isn’t raining too hard.

But there are some things government has no business sticking its nose in and Bigfoot is one of them. Yes, admittedly, our mayor declared Bigfoot the official animal of Marion, N.C. but that was purely ceremonial. No one, as far as I know, wanted to issue a state license to hunt down Bigfoot.

After some blowback from the Bigfoot community, the legislator who introduced the bill, State Rep. Justin Humphrey, clarified his intent to The Oklahoman newspaper.

“I want to be really clear that we are not going to kill Bigfoot,” he said. “We are going to trap a live Bigfoot. We are not promoting killing Bigfoot. We are promoting hunting Bigfoot, trying to find evidence of Bigfoot.”

Humphrey insists it’s all in good fun and a way to get people to buy a Bigfoot hunting license to carry in their wallets or hang on their walls, but I envision a scenario like this:

“Hello, boys. I’m Warden Simmons with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation. How y’all doing today?”

“Uh…fine, sir. You?”

“Not too bad. What you boys got on the back of the truck there?”

“We got us a Bigfoot.”

“Yeah, that’s a nice one, too. He must go 7-and-a-half, maybe 8 feet. I’m going to need to see your Oklahoma-issued Bigfoot hunting license.”

“Do what now?”

“Bigfoot hunting license. You can’t go around hunting Bigfoot without a state-issued Bigfoot hunting license. Where do you think you are, North Carolina?”

“You mean we have to throw him back?”

“Oh, yeah. And I’m writing you a ticket, too. It’s going to be $250 plus court costs. You can pay it to the magistrate on duty at the Ouachita Mountains Tourism Development Authority. Y’all have a good day and remember: Oklahoma is OK – except when it comes to hunting Bigfoot without a license.”

Scott Hollifield is editor/GM of The McDowell News in Marion, N.C. and a humor columnist.

'THE WITCH' AND 'INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS' MAKE HORROR OUT OF BOTH CONFORMITY AND INDIVIDUALITY


Credit: Allied Artists Pictures/A24

Opinion Contributed by Noah Berlatsky
Feb 5, 2021, 

Horror is about that cackling outsider, scratching at your door. The question in the genre is always which side of the portal you’re on. Are you with the community, fighting the threat? Or are you rooting for the monster to break through and savage the dull weight of ordinariness?

From that perspective, Don Siegel’s 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which turns 65 this month, and Robert Eggers’ 2016 film The Witch, which turns 5, are ugly, oozing mirror images. Body Snatchers is about how evil alien pod people infiltrate the small, wholesome 1950s California town of Santa Mira. The Witch is about a good, wholesome, God-fearing family in the 1630s and how much fun it is when their daughter gets to abandon their boring hypocrisy to join a bacchanal of witches. You could argue that between 1956 and 2016, good, wholesome Americanism started to look less heroic and more like death. Eggers’ witches are Siegel’s aliens, but with better PR.

MORE THE WITCH

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If you look closer into the maw of evil and/or good, though, you start to wonder whether even the PR has changed. Body Snatchers has as much dislike for deindividuation as The Witch; The Witch mistrusts freedom as much as Body Snatchers. Both celebrate an American individualism that they both also fear, and for good reason.

The much-remade Body Snatchers is a classic of Cold War paranoia. Handsome, hearty doctor Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) returns from a conference to discover the town of Santa Mira in the grips of a quiet epidemic of neuroses. Patients believe their close relatives — mothers, uncles, fathers — have been replaced with exact, unfeeling duplicates.

Miles is skeptical at first, but it’s all true. Space spores have landed and grown giant pods. These open to reveal wet plant people, who absorb sleeping human minds and personalities. The film is shot in crisp black and white, and its horror comes from seeing rational, suburban normality fray and disintegrate even as it continues to look precisely like rational, suburban normality. Everyone goes about their business as always. It’s just that the business becomes perversion and apocalypse.

In the '50s, perversion, apocalypse, and Marxism were seen as all of a piece. The people who are replaced by the pods lose all appetite for business and consumption, abandoning produce stands and closing shops. They want only to spread the pods further, across the nation and the world. “Love, desire, ambition, faith. Without them life’s so simple,” one of the pod people declares with the menacing altruistic calm of a devoted cultist. The alien communists drain away personality and autonomy, leaving a hive mind that has feelings and energy only for the collective. It’s a nightmare vision of American individualism subsumed by socialist group-think.

In The Witch, the threat of conformity comes not from the communists, but from the church. William (Ralph Ineson) is a stubborn religious dissenter who is kicked out of a New England settlement. He, his wife, and their five children settle in a clearing in the woods, where they pursue a dreary, colorless existence, filmed in sweeping vistas of ravishing bleakness. They subsist on a diet of starvation rations and fears of hellfire. William’s idea of a fun father-son chat is to quiz his boy, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), in an elaborate catechism about the corruption of his soul.

The family’s obsessive fear and paranoia leave them with few resources when the witches steal away infant Sam. Williams, his wife, and their children quickly turn on each other in a brief, sexless orgy of paranoia, recrimination, and hypocrisy. When older daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) gets a chance to sell her soul to the devil for the taste of butter, pretty dresses, and other lascivious pleasures, who can blame her? Flickering candlelight gives her a beauty and color the movie has almost entirely denied her as Satan whispers, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” She and the viewer answer with an enthusiastic affirmative.

Thomasin is ironically achieving the American dream her dreary father grasped for. He wanted absolute freedom of conscience and fled England to escape from the stifling, dead norms of the old world. Family, church, community — they demand you stifle desires for the good of the group, just like pod people always do. Thomasin, nude, blood-spattered, ecstatically laughing as she floats into the trees in the film’s final dramatic shot, has escaped that hivebound gravity. She becomes her truest self through an exercise of individualist, American will — like Ben Franklin, if he were a self-made demon rather than a self-made businessman.

Does Thomasin really make herself over, though? When the Devil asks her to sign the book, she has to admit she doesn’t know how to write her name. “I will guide your hand,” he says in that rich, velvety voice. But if he’s the one manipulating Thomasin here, might he not have been manipulating her throughout? It’s only because witches steal away infant Sam, curse Caleb, and, it is implied, spoil the harvest, that Thomasin’s family falls apart. The film is a plot against Thomasin; the director is Satan himself, leading her to damnation. Thomasin has little more choice than her siblings, who, it is intimated, are stolen away by the witches to be boiled down for their fat. American freedom is a trick the Devil plays to convince you to crawl into his mouth.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers is also not quite so emblematic of virtuous American independence as it seems at first. After all, the whole point of the movie is that the pod people are us; we’re one and the same. When the good folks of Santa Mira — the cop, the psychiatrist, the housewives — all chase after Miles and his girlfriend Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter), it looks eerily like a witch-hunt. And the targets of witch-hunts in America and Hollywood in the 1950s were not capitalists, but Communists.

In the name of freedom, those Communists were persecuted and hounded for refusing to bow to community norms. In the film’s conclusion, Miles contacts the authorities, and the weight of U.S. military and logistical power is poised to sweep down on the pods. A story supposedly about communists assimilating Americans ends up as a story about Americans exterminating communists. All the aliens will be destroyed for the cardinal sin: refusing to embrace the communal value of individualism.

Americans love liberty. It’s such a core value that those who do not hold it are viewed with suspicion. You must be an individual or face the consequences of communal loathing. As a result, the ecstatic Dionysiac abandonment of the witches and the satisfied emotionless calm of the pod people start to look much the same. When you watch Body Snatchers and The Witch together, the horror isn’t individuality. Nor is it the obliteration of individuality. It’s that you can’t tell the two apart.


<The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's, and do not necessarily reflect those of SYFY WIRE, SYFY, or NBCUniversal.>

Friday essay: why Rosaleen Norton, ‘the witch of Kings Cross’, was a groundbreaking bohemian

Rosaleen Norton works in crayon in a converted stable in Kings Cross in Sydney, 1946. News Ltd/Black Jelly Films

February 4, 2021 2.08pm EST

Marguerite Johnson

Rosaleen Norton, or “the witch of Kings Cross,” is finally receiving the attention she deserves. Born in Dunedin in 1917, emigrating with her family to Sydney in 1925, and dying in 1979, Norton was a trailblazing woman and under-appreciated cultural touchstone of 20th century Australia.

A self proclaimed witch, Norton experienced childhood visions. From around the age of 23, she practised trance magic and, later, sex magic in various flats and squats in inner-city Sydney.

Trance magic involved Norton meditating (sometimes with the assistance of various substances, ingested and/or inhaled) and raising her consciousness. The aim was to transcend her physical body and conscious mind to experience higher forms of existence.

Sex magic was developed by the infamous occultist, Aleister Crowley around 1904, and involves a complicated series of sexual rituals designed for a variety of perceived needs (depending on the practitioner), including spiritual awakening

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FireBird by Rosaleen Norton. Black Jelly Films, courtesy Burgess Family

As an artist, Norton drew and painted her beliefs and the gods, goddesses, and spiritual beings who were central to it. She also lived free from societal expectations. Not only a witch, but openly bisexual, Norton robustly challenged a predominantly Christian Australia. But she was reviled for doing so, attacked by the media for her art, her beliefs, her lifestyle, and sometimes, her appearance. She experienced police surveillance and faced obscenity charges over her art.

Norton defied cultural norms and, though she did not identify as a feminist, was a powerfully unconventional woman. Poor but not without imaginative style, she had distinctive arched eyebrows, sometimes dressed in male attire, and was often photographed wearing all black. With a new film about her life being released next week, it is timely to look at her legacy.

Freedom and creativity

Norton’s story has fascinated me from the age of five, when I began to devour the 1970s tabloid newspapers and magazines that featured her. During those years, Norton had become something of a recluse, rarely appearing in public but graciously agreeing to be interviewed about her life. By this time, the legend of “the witch of Kings Cross” was entrenched. Norton was not averse to it, even donning a pointed hat for photos.

This passionate interest went on to inform my adult life. As a classicist, I have explored Norton’s occult belief system, which embraced the old gods. Beings such as Hecate, an ancient Greek goddess who presided over witches, Lilith, the ancient female demon originating in Mesopotamia, and the Egyptian goddess Isis, were at the heart of Norton’s magical practice.

Pan and Daphnis. Roman copy of Greek original c. 100 BC, found in Pompeii. Wikimedia Commons

But the Greek god Pan was at the centre of her pantheon. To the ancient Greeks, Pan was the god of nature, regularly associated with pastureland and its human and animal inhabitants.

Half-man, half-goat, Pan also embodied the sexual drive, the uninhibited urge to copulate. As the “High Priestess at the Altar of Pan”, Norton performed rituals both alone and with members of her inner magical circle in his honour.

In my own research, I have studied witchcraft through the ages and how, especially from Victorian times, it provided an outlet for unconventional women to leverage freedom (and sometimes power) and express their creativity. (Even as a child, I baulked at the media’s determination to cast Norton as a woman to be judged, feared or, worse still, mocked.)

Read more: Toil and trouble: the myth of the witch is no myth at all

As an academic, I extended my research into the worlds of Greece and Rome with a focus on sexual histories and belief systems — and explored Norton’s life through the same lens. Along the way, I acquired enough material to donate a personal archive on Norton to the library at The University of Newcastle.

Norton’s identity as a witch was formed early. As a child, she was drawn to the night, to nature, and to drawing and recording the preternatural world. In an article published in Australasian Post in January 1957, she describes visions from the age of five (a lady in a grey dress, a dragon) and trance states (which she called “Big Things and Little Things”) to capture the experience of her body growing in size as she “floated,” as if in a dream. She also records the appearance of “witch marks” on her left knee when she was seven (in the form of two small, blue dots).

Bored and frustrated by her middle-class life in Lindfield on the North Shore, Norton left home for inner-city Sydney at the age of 17 and never returned. She found employment as an artist model (including a stint modelling for Norman Lindsay), a pavement artist, and as a contributor to the avant-garde publication, Pertinent.

Eventually, she based herself in Kings Cross. There, she was free to explore and develop her beliefs and practices. In the late 1940s, it was where she met one of her companions in life and magic, the poet Gavin Greenlees (1930-1983)

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Rosaleen Norton and poet Gavin Greenlees, one of her lovers, photographed on Darlinghurst Road in 1950. Sydney Morning Herald

Strands of magic

Norton and Greenlees practised several strands of magic, including trance magic, sex magic, and ceremonies combining and improvising elements from several traditions. These included Kundalini (the feminine, creative force of infinite wisdom that “lives” inside us, usually represented by a snake) and Tantra (encompassing esoteric rituals and practices from Hindu and Buddhist traditions).

Norton explained that she employed these practices to augment her unconscious, inspire and empower her art, and commune with entities on other planes.

Norton’s trance magic, in states of self-hypnosis, was a continuation of her childhood visions and visitations. In correspondence with a psychologist in 1949, she described experiencing deities and projecting her astral body to contact other practitioners in alternative spiritual spheres. The idea, she wrote, was “to induce an abnormal state of consciousness and manifest the results, if any, in drawing”.

Read more: A murky cauldron – modern witchcraft and the spell on Trump

These experiences informed and inspired her art. Norton’s paintings were produced for her own ritual spaces, as well as for exhibitions and publications. In a well-known photograph from the 1950s, Norton is shown crouching at the base of her altar to Pan, replete with a large portrait of the god.

Norton in front of her altar to the god Pan, photographed in 1950. 

The Sydney Morning Herald/Black Jelly Films

Pan features in many other works. As Norton said in 1957, his “pipes are a symbol of magic and mystery”, while his “horns and hooves stand for natural energies and fleet-footed freedom”.

Norton’s worship of Pan reflected her passion for animals, insects and nature in general. While she did not publicly campaign for animal rights, she was, in some respects, a forerunner of the movement. Regularly the target of outrageous media allegations, she was particularly incensed when asked whether, as a witch, she performed animal sacrifice.

In 1954, 89.4% of the Australian population identified as Christian. Unfortunately for Norton, the ancient Greek god Pan also resembles Christian representations of Satan or the Devil. Indeed with his goat legs, pointed ears, and lascivious face, Pan most likely inspired early Christian images of Satan. Norton was regularly asked whether she was a Satanist. She wasn’t. But, accusations of Satanism haunted her.

Journalists accused her of Devil worship, police occasionally placed her and Greenlees under surveillance, and her private life became fair game. By the 1950s, the tabloid press’ preferred name for Norton — “the witch of Kings Cross” — had stuck. It featured in news stories on her even after her death.

Sensationalist claims about Norton were frequently published in Sydney’s newspapers, like here in the Sunday Telegraph. The Sunday Telegraph/Black Jelly Films

Censorship and court proceedings

Norton’s run-ins with authorities are partly what make her such an important historical figure. Her early exhibitions were subject to media attention and sensationalism, censorship and court proceedings. During an exhibition of her art at Rowden-White Library, University of Melbourne, in 1949, the Vice Squad seized several works deemed to be profane. Norton appeared in court on obscenity charges — the first such case against a woman in Victoria.

While Norton was acquitted, more scandals erupted. Her collaboration with Greenlees on a book titled, The Art of Rosaleen Norton, with poems by Gavin Greenlees, published privately by Walter Glover in 1952, landed Glover and printer, Tonecraft Pty Ltd, in court on charges of producing an obscene publication.

Fohat, one of Norton’s most famous and controversial works. Black Jelly Films, courtesy Burgess Family

Glover was fined £5 and Tonecraft £1. The book was subject to a customs ban (copies sent to New York were confiscated and burnt by United States Customs) and it became a prohibited import to Australia.

Norton’s Fohat (one of the book’s notorious images) was a representation of her beliefs. The goat, she said, “is a symbol of energy and creativity: the serpent of elemental force and eternity”. As with the images of Pan (and many other artworks), the meaning behind Fohat was misconstrued, deemed obscene and Satanic.

The case of Sir Eugene Goossens

Norton’s practice of sex magic was at the centre of one sensational court case. Her private rituals concerning the practice (including, among other acts, anal and oral sex, and sado-masochism) involved a discrete group of devotees. One of them was the revered composer and conductor Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962).

As director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium and chief conductor of the ABC’s Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the English-born Goossens was a cultural and social giant in a still very parochial Australia. Having seen a copy of the infamous book by Norton and Greenlees, Goossens sought out the couple and soon became part of their occult practices and personal lives.

Caught up in their world, Goossens became an unsuspecting target of police surveillance. In March 1956, returning from an overseas trip, he was confronted with officers waiting to search his luggage and subsequently charged with importing prohibited items, allegedly including “indecent works and articles, namely a number of books, prints and photographs, and a quantity of film”.

Goossens was besieged day and night at his home, and newspapers screamed headlines, such as “BIG NAMES IN DEVIL RITE PROBE”

.
Norton photographed with her cat in 1949. News Ltd

Goossens’ life and career were ruined. He pleaded guilty to pornography charges in absentia at a hearing in Martin Place Court of Petty Sessions, was fined £100, and returned to the United Kingdom a broken man.

While the media and some biographers of Goossens still tend to blame Norton for contaminating him by inducting him into her unholy cult of sex magic, this could not be further from the truth.

In fact, Goossens came to Australia with significant experience in occult practices, actively seeking out Norton and Greenlees. Personal correspondence from Goossens to Norton reveals his role in mentoring his new friends in more advanced magic, and hints at a network of practitioners in the UK and Europe. Three of the extant letters are signed with Goossens’ magical name, “Djinn”.

Later life

Norton retired from public view during the 1970s, living in a basement flat in Roslyn Garden, with her sister, Cecily Boothman (1905-1991), close by in the same apartment block. Frail, in poor health, but an artist and witch to the end, Norton practised her rituals, painted and communed with animals and nature.

Rosaleen Norton’s Bacchanal. Black Jelly Films, courtesy Burgess Family

She and Boothman were visited by Greenlees on his days of temporary release from the Alma Mater Nursing Home, Kensington, where he had been sectioned after a lengthy stay at Callan Park Mental Hospital at the age of 25.

At the age of 61, Norton was diagnosed with colon cancer. She died at the Sacred Heart Hospice for the Dying, in Darlinghurst, on 5 December 1979.

Norton has been the subject of biographies by Nevill Drury, a fictionalised account, Pagan, by Inez Baranay, and several plays (including a student production, on which I was dramaturg).

Rare footage also captures her at her rebellious best: ensconced in a Kings Cross cafe, talking about rejecting the ordinary life of wife and mother, the thought of which prompts her to say: “I’d go mad”.


Norton was more than a witch. When we look closer at a woman reviled by the media, we see a groundbreaking bohemian, committed to living freely and authentically, who challenged censorship.

In many ways, she helped to push Australia out of the safety of the Menzies era, into the civilising forces of the sexual revolution and the freedoms it brought.

The Witch of Kings Cross, written and directed by Sonia Bible, will be released on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo and GooglePlay on 9th February and opens in selected cinemas from February 11.

Marguerite Johnson

Professor of Classics, University of Newcastle

Sex magic, occult art and acid: the story of the infamous witch of Kings Cross

In the 1960s she would have been celebrated by the counterculture – but a decade earlier, Rosaleen Norton was shunned and mocked

Norton with her painting The Adversary in 1949. Photograph: Fairfax Media

‘She was at the vanguard’: a new documentary about Rosaleen Norton is out now. 

Brigid Delaney THE GUARDIAN
Mon 8 Feb 2021 16.30 GMT

They didn’t quite burn witches in Australia in the 1940s and 50s, but they didn’t make it easy for them either.

Take Rosaleen Norton, an artist and self-identified witch who the tabloids called “the witch of Kings Cross”. She was repeatedly arrested, had her artwork burned and was shunned and mocked by society.

Norton eked out a modest living selling her art, and putting spells and hexes on people. Her story has been captured in a new documentary, released online on Tuesday.

Norton, who lived in Kings Cross in the postwar years until her death in 1979, had been fascinated with the occult since she was a child.

Ban on Aleister Crowley lecture at Oxford University – archive, 1930

Aged 23 and living away from her conservative family in a variety of lodgings and squats in the seedy Sydney suburb, she began to practise trance magic and, later, sex magic. The former involved invoking spells, rituals and taking substances with the aim of achieving a higher form of consciousness; the latter was popularised by the British occultist Aleister Crowley and involved having sex with multiple partners that invoked rituals similar to Tantra.

The fascinating story of Norton’s life may have been lost had it not been for the commitment of Sonia Bible to bring it to the screen. 

NOT TRUE NEVILLE DRURY WROTE A BIO OF HER

Made on a shoestring budget, and largely crowd- and self-funded, the documentary is a labour of love. The film-maker managed to track down several of Norton’s contemporaries before they died, and sourced diaries and artworks that were in private hands; she melds the historical documents with dramatic recreations (Norton is played by Kate Elizabeth Laxton).

Film-maker Sonia Bible says the woman dubbed the ‘witch of Kings Cross’ lived life on her terms and in her 60s was still dropping acid and making art

“When I started making the film, I knew this story was on the edge of living memory,” Bible says. “This would be the last film on the late 50s, because the people have died. The oral history of people who were there – that has gone now.”

She came across Norton’s story in the tabloid papers, while researching 2011’s Recipe for Murder – another documentary set in postwar Sydney.

“It was a time of great social change,” Bible says. “A dark noir time before pointy cars and rock’n’roll, but in the lead-up to the counterculture.

‘If she had been launching herself in the 1960s, 

with the counterculture and feminism in full swing, 

she would have been like Brett Whiteley’: 

Bacchanal by Rosaleen Norton. Photograph: Burgess family

All her life, Norton combined her interest in the occult with art. Her paintings, some of which were seized by police and burned, could loosely be defined as esoteric: canvases often filled with hectic images of women embracing the Greek god Pan, snakes and horned demons.

Australia in the postwar years was almost 90% Christian, and Norton was made a target for her beliefs. Surveillance and raids from the vice squad, and seizure of her work, criminalised her, and turned her into a notorious and shocking tabloid figure. One of her sex magic partners, the celebrated Sydney Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir Eugene Goossens, was forced to flee Australia when his luggage at Sydney airport was found to contain pornography. The pair each suffered in their own way for transgressing the strict moral boundaries of the time.

“There was a rapid change in relationships between men and women, social conventions and politics,” Bible says. Right now we are also living in a time of great change, but when you are in it, you can’t analyse it.”

Photograph: News Ltd

Part of the tragedy of Norton’s story is that she was born too soon – in 1917. If she were alive now, there would be a whole community of witches to connect with on TikTok – but even being born 10 years later would have made a difference, according to Bible.

“If she had been launching herself in the 1960s, with the counterculture and feminism in full swing, she would have been like Brett Whiteley … She was at the vanguard and she did have an impact and inspired people. Young people went up to the Cross looking for her.”

But even though Norton’s life was hard, Bible cautions about viewing her with pity.

“She lived the life she wanted. She didn’t value money. She was very happy. She had her art and her religion. She lived life on her own terms and towards the end she had a flat in Kings Cross, given to her by the church.

“People felt sorry for her, this old woman living in the Cross with her cats. But in her 60s she was dropping acid and still making art. She was very happy.”

• The Witch of Kings Cross releases worldwide on 9 February on Amazon, iTunes, Vimeo and GooglePlay; it will be in selected cinemas from 11 February

Church of Satan denounces Big Tech in hilarious tweet


By Sara Dorn
February 6, 2021 

"Big Tech does a lot of things. We can assure you, 'serving Satan' isn't one of them," The Church of Satan tweeted on Feb. 6, 2021.Shutterstock

Even Christians and Satanists agree — Big Tech is bad.

The Church of Satan is publicly distancing itself from Big Tech — on Twitter, naturally — after the CEO of the controversial social media company Gab claimed the industry is “serving Satan.”

“Big Tech does a lot of things. We can assure you, ‘serving Satan’ isn’t one of them,” The Church of Satan tweeted Saturday.

The hilarious declaration was made in response to a blog post by Gab CEO Andrew Torba earlier this week, in which he urged his followers to take part in a “silent Christian secession.”

“I am in the process of transitioning every part of my financial expenses to support Christian businesses, Christian media companies, Christian content creators, and Christian people,” Torba wrote, noting the site has been de-platformed by more than 25 service providers, including GoDaddy and Apple.

“Deeply examine the businesses, brands, and media companies you currently support both financially and with your time. If they are virtue signaling critical theory nonsense or owned by demons you should immediately stop paying them and using their services,” he wrote.

Gab was founded in 2016 and has become a haven for far-right provocateurs and extremists.

The site, which bills itself a “free-speech social network,” has reported a surge in users in recent weeks, after other social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter booted former President Donald Trump and other prominent conservatives following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Books

'I’ve been called Satan': Dr Rachel Clarke on facing abuse in the Covid crisis

Critical care staff turn a Covid-19 patient on the Christine Brown ward at King’s College Hospital in London on 27 January. Photograph: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty Images

As well as fighting to keep Covid patients alive, NHS staff are now battling a surge in abuse and denial in the second wave. Dr Rachel Clarke on how she is coping – and what gives her hope



Rachel Clarke
@doctor_oxford
Sat 6 Feb 2021 

Please imagine it, for a moment, if you can bear to. Being wheeled from your home by paramedics in masks who rush you, blue-lit, to a hospital. Then the clamour and lights, the confusion and fear, the faceless professionals, gloved and gowned, who eddy and swirl past your trolley. Your destination is intensive care where too soon, or perhaps not soon enough, you will arrive at a point of reckoning. You will blanch when they tell you, because you’ve watched the news and know what it signifies: you are going to be put on a ventilator. You will understand, as clearly as they do, that your doctors cannot promise to save you.

Here, though, is the detail that haunts me. For every patient who dies from Covid-19 in hospital, from the moment they encounter that first masked paramedic, they will never see a human face again. Not one smile, nor pair of cheeks, nor lips, nor chin. Not a single human being without barricades of plastic. Sometimes, my stomach twists at the thought that to the patients whose faces I can never unsee – contorting and buckling with the effort of breathing – I am no more than a pair of eyes, a thin strip of flesh between mask and visor, a muffled voice that strains and cracks behind plastic.

Of all Covid’s cruelties, surely the greatest is this? That it cleaves us from each other at precisely those times when we need human contact the most. That it spreads through speech and touch – the very means through which we share our love, tenderness and basic humanity. That it transforms us unwittingly into vectors of fatality. And that those we love most – and with whom we are most intimate – are the ones we endanger above all others.

It’s late January. The wards and ICUs are overwhelmed, awash with the virus. The patients seem younger, the new variant more virulent. We are drowning, drowning in Covid. The sight of a doctor or nurse breaking down has become unremarkable. Too close, for too long, to too many patients’ pain, we have become – just like them – saturated. Behind hospital doors, tucked away out of sight, we seem to suffer as one.

Outside, on the other hand, the virus has once again carved up the country into simmering, resentful, aggrieved little units. It’s too old, too cold to be doing this again. One way or another, lockdown hurts us all. But instead of unity, community and a shared sense of purpose – that extraordinary eruption of philanthropy last springtime – we seethe like rats in a sack, fractious, divided.
One morning, on the way to work, the politicians and the trolls and the suffering and the death become too much. All of a sudden, I’m unable to drive

During the first wave, I knew the public had our backs. This time round, being an NHS doctor makes you a target. For the crime of asserting on social media that Covid is real and deadly, I earn daily abuse from a vitriolic minority. I’ve been called Hitler, Shipman, Satan and Mengele for insisting on Twitter that our hospitals aren’t empty. Last night a charming “Covid sceptic” sent me this: “You are paid to lie and a disgrace to your profession. You have clearly sold your soul and are nothing more than a child abuser destroying futures. I do not consent to your satanic ways.” A friend, herself an intensive care doctor, has just been told by another male “sceptic” that he intends to sexually abuse her until she requires one of her own ventilators. And this morning, another colleague, also female, was told: “You evil criminal lying piece of government shit. You need to be executed immediately for treason and genocide.”

In short, we have reached the point in the pandemic where what feels like armies of trolls do their snarling, misogynistic utmost to silence NHS staff who try to convey what it’s like on the inside. Worse even than the hatred they whip up against NHS staff, the deniers have started turning up in crowds to chant “Covid is a hoax” outside hospitals full of patients who are sick and dying. Imagine being forced to push your way through that, 13 hours after you began your ICU shift. Some individuals have broken into Covid wards and attempted physically to remove critically ill patients, despite doctors warning that doing so will kill them.

‘Human kindness will not be locked down’ … people clap as a funeral cortege passes through Glencoe, Scotland. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

I well understand why they want to gag us. Our testimony makes Covid denial a tall order. We bear witness not to statistics but to human beings. Our language is flesh and blood. This patient, and then this patient, and then another. The pregnant woman in her 20s on ICU, intubated and lifeless. The three generations of one family on ventilators, each of them dying one after the other. We humanise, empathise, turn the unfathomable dimensions of the 100,000 dead into mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers. Increasingly, speaking out feels like a moral imperative. Because perhaps – if we can only disprove enough untruths, if we can just slow the onslaught of disinformation – we may have fewer dying hands to hold in the future.

Please don’t flinch. Please don’t look away. The truth of conditions inside our hospitals needs telling. To dispel a few prime ministerial press conference myths, the NHS is not “close to” or “on the brink of” being overwhelmed. We are here and now in the midst of calamity. The Covid patients keep on coming, so unnervingly unwell, and we race to find space for them. But all the spare staff have already been snatched from their day jobs. Elective surgery has shut down, everything inessential postponed. ICUs are filled with obstetricians, paediatricians, psychiatrists and surgeons doing their amateur best to support the small pool of staff with proper expertise. On wards across the country, where Covid patients live and die in their thousands, the medics are stretched perilously thinly. And still the new admissions come.

This week, a doctor friend in another trust sent me this, having been newly redeployed to her hospital’s ICU: “The situation at work is just dreadful. Once I’ve donned PPE and gone into ICU, hours and hours go by. And it’s just awful in there. It’s not calm like the news videos, it’s chaotic with alarms going constantly, patients being intubated and proned. Most of us are NOT trained to do this or deal with this. We are surgeons, anaesthetists, physicians, nurses, HCAs, porters etc. We are NOT ICU staff.”
It did not have to be like this. None of these horrors were inevitable

Newly qualified doctors with scarcely six months’ experience sometimes struggle singlehanded on the Covid wards at night, their seniors unable to leave crashing patients elsewhere. Whoever deteriorates overnight may live or die according to whether a bed can be found on ICU. This is rationing, without being named out loud as such. An unacknowledged peacetime form of battlefield triage: lives being lost because there aren’t enough staff to go around. No one here is being “protected”, not the patients, not the nurses, not the doctors, not the families, and certainly not the NHS writ large.

Sometimes, colleagues confess that they feel suicidal. Sometimes, in the darkness, a patient pleads to die. They cannot take the claustrophobic roar of their CPAP mask any longer. The struggle to breathe is costing them more than they can bear. A student I used to teach looks close to collapse. “I feel as if it might be my fault when they die,” he tells me in a monotone. “If I’d been a doctor for longer, I might know how to do something different. Maybe it’s me – maybe I’m not cut out to be a doctor.” I watch him wrestle to keep his tears at bay, unable even to reach out to give him a hug. The wrongness of it all constricts my chest until it hurts. He’s too young, too green to be standing here like this, accusing himself of failing the pandemic dead, who themselves have been failed by so many in power above. At what cost do these night shifts worm into his soul?

The truth is, patients of necessity are falling through our cracks. We cannot hold them all, we’re too few and too ground down. Rationing does not declare itself in a fanfare of noise. It sidles in, bit by bit, as the Covid cases rise. Intensive care nurses, used to working with a concentration of one nurse per patient, are asked to stretch themselves across four patients or more. Standards start to slip as battered, shell-shocked staff do their brave and hopeless best against the ever-surging human tide. The truth – and don’t we know it, if we’re honest? – is that doctors and nurses are neither angels nor heroes. We’re human. Merely human. We can only do so much.

An anti-lockdown demonstration in Edinburgh in January. 

Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

I can’t sleep. I can’t sit still. I feel sick. I want to scream. Something monstrous, like cancer, is twisting in my chest. One morning, on the way to work, the politicians and the trolls and the suffering and the death become too much. All of a sudden, I’m unable to drive. In a layby I cringe, doubled up, fighting for breath. My body is in mutiny, it’s overruled my head. You clench your teeth, wipe your cheeks, turn the ignition, set off again. You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

A unity of sorts emerges with the stupefying news that in Britain, an island, the cumulative Covid death toll has surpassed 100,000. On the same day, we learn that our death rate per head of population is the highest in the world. As the country reels from these calamitous statistics, the prime minister insists that his government “truly did everything we could to minimise loss of life”. Yet a quarter of those deaths have occurred in 2021 – during the last four weeks alone – making Boris Johnson’s words a patent lie. He didn’t lock down promptly, he didn’t close our borders, he didn’t protect care homes, he allowed tens of thousands of elderly and vulnerable residents to die. And then, instead of future-proofing Britain from a second surge last summer, he offered bribes for social mixing. But our eating out, far from helping out, sent Covid cases ticking hungrily upwards.

Dr Rachel Clarke. Photograph: Antonio Olmos/The Observer

This second wave has been turbocharged by Downing Street’s procrastination. Putting off lockdown until the eleventh hour has – yet again – wreaked havoc. Urgent cancer surgeries should not be postponed. Covid patients should not be calling Ubers to rush them to hospital because the ambulances they need are nowhere to be found. Doctors and nurses should not be suicidal with stress, nor tended by their own as they suffocate and die on ventilators. It did not have to be like this. None of these horrors were inevitable.

Every single day at work, I see more kindness, more sweetness, more compassion than you could ever, ever imagine

How – from where – can we find cause for hope when our political leaders, despite a track record like this, insist they’ve behaved infallibly? Well, by early spring, the country’s most vulnerable citizens should be vaccinated, a prospect that makes me ecstatic. And lockdown has already sent new cases plummeting downwards. The deaths, we know, will follow. Momentum too is building towards a zero Covid strategy – the complete elimination of the virus – as demonstrated so successfully by countries such as New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam.

But my main reasons for optimism lie closer to home, flickering and sparking amid the darkness. I turn my gaze from the dizzying statistics and look instead to the human beings around me. Their ingenuity and kindness give me the steel to go on. One day, for example, a peculiar procession outside the hospital turns heads on the high street. It is led by a strangely immaculate tractor, freshly waxed and wreathed with flowers, gleaming beneath the winter sun. The tractor is destined for a nearby village, hauling an agricultural trailer on which a coffin has been laid. Several cars follow, their stern-faced drivers dressed in black. It’s the funeral cortege of a larger-than-life farmer, known to all in his village and far beyond. Pre-Covid, hundreds of locals would have packed into the village church, eager to pay tribute to a man much loved. Now though, a virus dictates our forms of mourning. No large gatherings are allowed.

When the tractor arrives in the village, lumbering slowly towards the empty church, something magical and startling begins to unfold. Word of mouth and social media have told the neighbours when the cortege will pass and now, on their doorsteps and in porches, behind their gates, on garden paths, they assemble at a respectful social distance. As the tractor passes, so begins the applause. First a ripple, then a clatter, then a thunder, then a roar. In physical estrangement, a population finds its voice. This community, unbowed, celebrates a man they loved – and how. My heart lifts. I feel hope flicker. For however bleak the times, however grim our prospects seem, human kindness finds a shape and form: it will not be locked down.

All across the hospital, you see it. In the tiny crocheted crimson hearts, made by locals for patients and delivered in their scores so that no one feels alone. In the piles of donated pizzas, devoured at night by ravenous staff. In the homemade scrubs, whipped up by an unstoppable army of self-isolating grandmothers whose choice in fabrics is fearlessly floral. In the nurses and carers and porters and cleaners who keep on, despite everything, smiling. I may be tired and angry and sometimes mad with grief, but every single day at work, I see more kindness, more sweetness, more compassion, more courage, more resilience, more steel, more diamond-plated love than you could ever, ever imagine. And this means more and lasts more than anything else, and it cannot be stolen by Covid.

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a Time of Pandemic by Dr Rachel Clarke is published by Little, Brown

Why Donald Trump was the ultimate anarchist

The former president is being tried for his role in inciting anarchy but anarchia, in the Greek sense of “vacant office”, characterised his entire term.

BY MELISSA LANE
8 FEBRUARY 2021

Trump support inside the Capitol in Washington, DC on 6 January
PHOTO BY BRENT STIRTON/GETTY IMAGES

On 13 January, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach Donald Trump for a second time in just over a year, making Trump the first American president to be impeached twice. The House resolution focused upon Trump’s “incitement of insurrection” during a speech delivered to a crowd of his supporters on 6 January, some of whom later stormed the Capitol where Congress was meeting to certify the election results. The resolution argued that by such conduct Trump “betrayed his trust as president”.

“Democracy suddenly gave way to political anarchy”, the Washington Post wrote on the evening of 6 January. The theme was echoed in the British press, which converged on the headlines “Anarchy in the US” (Metro) and “Anarchy in the USA” (the i and the Daily Express).

Most of this coverage associated “anarchy” with the violence and lawlessness that characterised the Capitol riots, as a direct result of which five people died, including one Capitol Police officer. Yet there is a sense in which Trump not only incited anarchy during this violent finale to his presidency, but acted as an anarchist par excellence during his entire tenure in office, embodying what an ancient Greek observer would have called “anarchia”.

The Greek word anarchia literally means a vacant office: the absence of an officeholder. It was also used to describe an officeholder who undermines the constitutional order on which their own office, and the rule of law, depends. In fact, anarchia was often used to describe an officeholder – usually retrospectively – as having been no proper officeholder at all.

While violence might be unleashed by a vacant office or a vacuum of accountable power, it’s striking that a number of Greek authors, from Aeschylus to Isocrates, contrasted anarchia with tyrannis, or “tyranny”. This means anarchy is not just another word for the tyrannical or authoritarian abuse of power, or “lawless” conduct. It is a condition in which the very basis of political office has been undermined.

Explaining how a democracy might degenerate in the Republic, Plato tied the idea of anarchia (using the related adjective anarchos) to the actions and attitudes of both citizens and officeholders. Like those who stormed the Capitol, the citizens of a degenerating democratic constitution in Plato’s narrative come to believe that “there is no necessity…to be governed, unless you like [to be]”. Plato’s Socrates claims that these members of a failing democracy are influenced by distorted civic values which redescribe “anarchy” as “freedom”; he sums up the democratic constitution as being anarchos.

Plato cannot literally mean here that no one has been installed in office: democracies in ancient Greece chose many officials, both by lot and by election, and the same is true of the democracy described in the Republic. Rather, the point of linking democracy to anarchia is to suggest that democracy involves no meaningful and enforceable requirement either for citizens to obey officeholders, or for officeholders to use their powers as intended.

On this view, it is possible for the duties and legal entitlements of a democratic office to be hollowed out in spirit, even if formally followed in practice. Here democracy risks becoming a kind of shadow play in which people are chosen for office and nominally claim to hold it, but in so doing violate the most basic expectations of that office and thereby undermine its effectiveness and power.

The latest article of impeachment charges Trump with having acted “in a manner grossly incompatible with self-governance and the rule of law”. Following the ancient Greeks, the underlying idea can be taken further. By “betray[ing] his trust as president” as flagrantly as he did, Trump should be counted as an anarchist: ie, as having been no real officeholder at all.

Trump’s effective abdication of office can be seen in many of his acts before the November election and his efforts to reject and undo its results. It is most egregious in cases in which his conduct undermined the very conditions of political office, just as Greeks fearing anarchia would have expected.

Consider Trump’s pardoning of former sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in Arizona. Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt of court for continuing to detain people based solely on suspicion of their being unauthorised immigrants, in defiance of an order of a federal district judge. By pardoning not just someone guilty of criminal conduct, but specifically an official who had been held in contempt of court, Trump undermined the fundamental democratic and constitutional principle that, as John McCain put it in the wake of Arpaio’s pardon, “No one is above the law.”

Worse still was Trump’s refusal to abide by a court order that the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, William Perry Pendley, “should be removed from his position because he was performing his duties illegally”, having been appointed in violation of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act. The judge in the case ruled that because Pendley “had served unlawfully for 424 days as acting director of the bureau”, it followed that his acts in that role “would have no force and effect and must be set aside as arbitrary and capricious”. By refusing to remove Pendley, Trump again shirked the duties of his office. But this refusal went further insofar as it undermined the legitimacy of the acts of the bureau as well.

In the end, Trump’s “incitement of insurrection”, combined with his consistent failure to live up to the obligations of the presidency, show that he was no proper office holder at all. Despite his claim to be “the only thing standing between the American Dream and total anarchy”, it is clear that Trump was the real anarchist all along.

Melissa Lane is the Class of 1943 professor of politics and the Director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. She is the author of Greek and Roman Political Ideas.

This article is part of the Agora series, a collaboration between the New Statesman and Aaron James Wendland, senior research fellow in Philosophy at Massey College, Toronto. He tweets at @aj_wendland