Reformed Druids - Anthology 10 Oral Histories, Wisdom Ancient

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PART TEN
ORAL
HISTORIES
Introduction
It is my intention to provide the reader with more than one history
of Reformed Druidism by presenting the reader with transcripts of
oral interviews with prominent Reformed Druids. Their viewpoints
should provide more balance than my voice alone could provide.
D
RYNEMETUM
P
RESS
David Frangquist, ’66
Deborah Gavrin Frangquist, ’67
age. So I was ready when I came to Carleton just to do
more exploring, and the idea of the Druids intrigued
me.
October 31, 1993
I don’t believe that I have ever at any point abandoned
my sense of being a Christian. The strength with which
I have felt that has varied over time, but my interest in
other approaches has been one, for me, of personal
accretion: that the more that I could learn about other
belief systems, the more I felt that that was a benefit
and useful. I’ve always been intrigued by parallels that
would exist in different religious traditions. That be-
gan in the middle of high school, but I never felt the
need to jump from one religion to another. It was largely
a matter of curiosity.
Eric:
This is Eric Hilleman, the Archivist at Carleton Col-
lege, and I’m conducting an interview today with David
Frangquist, class of 1966, and his wife, Deborah Gavrin
Frangquist, class of 1967. The Frangquists have both
been very involved with the Carleton Druids, and we’re
expecting that to be the main topic of discussion today,
but I think I’d begin by asking you, David, to tell us
something about your own personal background, how
you got to Carleton College, and then we’ll get into the
founding of the Druids right after that.
Eric:
The Reformed Druids of North America began during
your freshman year, and I’d like to hear your perspec-
tive on the founding and early days of that illustrious
organization.
David:
I was born in Chicago in 1944 and grew up in the
North Shore Suburbs, Lake Forest specifically. As far
as coming to Carleton: about the middle of my junior
year in high school, we started, as juniors do, thinking
about colleges. I think actually Carleton first came to
my attention in an article in the Chicago Tribune about
quality liberal arts colleges in the Midwest. I suffered
from childhood asthma, and so one of my concerns
was to be as far north as possible to get away from the
ragweed areas, so we drew a line through, oh, about
Milwaukee and looked at places north of that. Carleton
really seemed to be the outstanding school in that area.
I did visit other schools that were at that time in the
same conference as Carleton; I looked at Ripon and
Lawrence and visited Macalester, but Carleton was the
place where I just felt most at home. Carleton seemed
to have it together better than the other places that I
visited, and Carleton was the only place I applied.
David:
Well, at that time of course there was a requirement
that we all attend chapel or something like it seven out
of ten weekends in the quarter. I didn’t particularly
question that; I was used to the notion that schools
made you do things you didn’t want to do, necessarily.
And I initially generally did attend chapel, because that
was convenient, and it left the rest of Sunday free to do
other things. I can’t say that I found the chapel services
all that meaningful at the time. They were of a general
Protestant nature: a little hymn sing, a little reading, a
sermon that might or might not mean something.
In the spring of that year, I just overheard that there
were some people, some of whom that I knew, some
friends of mine, who were starting up this group of
Druids, and they were doing it, clearly, to protest the
chapel requirement—which we in those days always re-
ferred to as “the religious requirement.” Nowadays we
tend to say “chapel requirement” because it’s a little
clearer, I think, for people hearing what we’re talking
about, but it was the “religious requirement” that they
were protesting.
Eric:
For this tape, actually, I think it would also be relevant
if you wanted to say something about your religious
background, if any—I don’t know what that might be.
David:
I was raised in the Presbyterian Church in Lake Forest.
I think the main reason that my parents chose that
church was that it was the largest, most active church
in town, having been founded originally by the
McCormicks, or at least largely supported by
McCormick money for a long time. So it was sort of
interesting: it was the society church in Lake Forest,
and there was a lot going on there, so that’s what they
chose. I was not real active; I mean I attended Sunday
school and all that. I was never active in the high school
youth group, although there was one.
I was not involved in the initial founding meeting, which
I believe occurred in Goodhue, and involved David
Fisher and Howard Cherniack. I think Norman Nelson
was present for that also, although I was not there, so
I’m not certain. I know that Howard was one of the
people who was particularly interested in getting some-
thing going here, and I believe that he saw it largely as
a political thing. The motivations of others who were
involved is murkier; best to ask them, I guess.
In the middle of high school I started becoming inter-
ested in other religions, and began buying books about
other religions. I had my own copy of the Koran. I
acquired through the services of some Mormon mis-
sionaries a copy of the Book of Mormon and actually
read the whole thing. Perhaps my interest in doing some
of the scriptural writing for the Druids came from that
period—and wanting perhaps to do a better job than
Joseph Smith did! Nevertheless, I became interested in
world religions at that time, and was doing a lot of
questioning and exploring, as students will do at that
442
I don’t know who actually came up with the notion of
having Druids be the form, because the discussion, as
I understand it, started out with the idea that we needed
to form some new religion on campus. The wording in
the Catalog, as I recall, was that you could get credit for
attending chapel, or the Sunday evening program, or
any regularly organized service of public worship. So
they said, “Let’s organize something.” And the idea was
that it should be sufficiently off-the-wall to obviously be
a protest to challenge the established order, but to be
believable enough that a credible argument could be
made that this was, in fact, a valid alternative religious
service.
Carleton. We can trace lines of ordination from one
person to another, and it all goes back to him. If it goes
back prior to him—well, you’ll have to ask David Fisher
about that. He was the source of our early liturgy, and
where he got it from—who knows?
I think the thing they liked about the Druids so much
was that so little was known about Druidism. Looking
at what few references were available in the Carleton
library at the time, we knew that Druids existed; we
knew that they had something or other to do with the
priesthood of the pre-Roman Celtic peoples in Britain;
and not much else was known, partly (probably) be-
cause their rituals were secret and nothing was written
down. Or at least if anything was written down, it hadn’t
been found. So we were free, really, to invent as much
as we wanted about what Druidism was going to be
here at Carleton. But nevertheless it was something
that had historical reality; it was not being just totally
made up out of whole cloth—we did not have to pre-
tend to have a latter-day revelation from some source
that had been started all off fresh. We could at least
pretend to have some continuity with an older tradi-
tion.
We did decide after a couple of meetings that the little
metal record stand was not really a very adequate altar.
The idea was that we would build something a little
more substantial. It seemed like Monument Hill was
the right place to do it: there were all of these inscrip-
tions on the monument about first services of various
sorts that had occurred on that site, and so, therefore,
this seemed like a good place in Northfield to start
another religious tradition. So we found a bunch of
rocks. At that time in a little grove of trees near Monu-
ment Hill there were quite a few rock piled up because,
I believe, Williams had been torn down only a couple
of years before, and some of the rubble from that had
simply been dumped in this little spot in the trees. So
it wasn’t hard to go and find rocks and cart them over
to Monument Hill and pile them up—which is basi-
cally what we did to create our altar.
The first meetings were held in April of that year [1963].
I was not present at the first service, which involved
setting up David Fisher’s record stand on Monument
Hill. They put a draping of cloth over it, and that was
the altar for the day. I do believe I was present at the
second service. I’m no longer sure who invited me to
that. I knew David Fisher at the time through work at
KARL, where he was an announcer and I was a con-
trol operator. For quite a while I was control operator
for David, and I can’t remember now what years I was
his control operator for a Saturday night program that
he did. I may have already been doing that at that time,
and it’s quite possible that he invited me. Jan Johnson
was another person that I knew from dorm life who
was involved in those days with the founding of the
Druids, or the early meetings. Either of them might
have been the person who got me out there.
It didn’t last very long! In fairly short order, people we
identified as the Anti-Druids came—we believe that these
were mostly jocks from Goodhue, who probably had a
keg amongst them prior to this escapade—they came
and ripped all the rocks apart and threw them about
Monument Hill. All of this is written up in the Early
Chronicles. I have to say that when I wrote the Early
Chronicles, I really was describing in there true events.
Now the language is in some cases deliberately vague,
or deliberately flowery, but the events behind it all re-
ally did occur. So the language in there about the build-
ing of the altar, and the Anti-Druids coming and tear-
ing it down, and all this—that all happened. We made
several attempts at building the altar, and after a while
we kind of gave up that spring, because, well, it was
getting to be a bit of a chore!
There were just, maybe, half a dozen of us at the time,
a circle of friends who started the meetings. At that
time, we hadn’t worked out much in the way of calen-
dar and ritual and so on that we later did. Now of course
we would say the meetings would normally be held
between May 1st and November 1st, during the sum-
mer half of the year, but at that time, holding our ser-
vices in April didn’t bother anybody because we hadn’t
figured out there was anything wrong with April!
At the same time we were also carrying the protest to
official levels. This was the thing that Howard was the
most interested in. We filled out the little slips—I be-
lieve they were little green slips that we had to fill out
for chapel. You’d put on there the date and the institu-
tion that you attended, and turn it in. In the case of the
men, we would turn it in to our proctors, and women
turned them in to...
David Fisher, as far as we know, made up the ritual.
He had an Episcopal background and is currently an
Episcopal priest, and there are certain echoes of Epis-
copalian Prayer Book language that show up in his
design of the service. He pretended—perhaps that’s a
pejorative word—he represented that he had been or-
dained as a Druid somewhere in Missouri by someone
else, and so therefore there was continuity with the past,
and he could come in here and be Arch-Druid and
carry the tradition into Carleton. But he was always
vague about this prior experience and who this was
and where it occurred, and I have to say that I don’t
really know anything about it, other than the fact that
he said that it occurred.
Deborah: We turned them in to the Dean of Women’s Office.
My recollection is that they were yellow, which may
have been women’s slips, I don’t know.
David:
OK. Maybe I’m confusing the convo slips with the
chapel slips. Anyway, we filled out little slips saying
that we had attended these Druid services, and we ex-
pected to have credit.
Deborah: We may have given them to our house mothers; they
got to the Dean of Women’s Office, anyway.
David:
Again, after this passage of time I don’t remember ex-
actly when all these things happened, but I believe we
did do it that first spring. It met with varying responses,
All of the rest of our Druid tradition, then, springs
from David Fisher as the first Arch-Druid here at
443
in that the men’s slips were rejected as being not legiti-
mate or not qualifying for credit, [while] only a couple
of slips were turned in by women, but they did, in fact,
get credit. We had great fun speculating over why the
women got credit. In the case of the men, the slips
were reviewed by someone in the Dean of Men’s Of-
fice (the Dean was then Casey Jarchow), and they spot-
ted these things and said they were not legitimate.
and get people to sign up. We got ourselves a table and
passed out pamphlets and tried to get people to sign
up. Not too many did. And again, we kept getting this
response: oh, well, this is all just a put-on; there aren’t
really any Druids; you’re just pretending. But a few
people would believe that we really were there, and
[would] come out and meet with us.
So a delegation was led by Howard Cherniack to the
Dean’s office to protest this action, and to raise the
question: why would the Druids not be acceptable? They
went armed with Yellow Pages from the Twin Cities
and lists of various strange and wonderful groups that
met there. I remember there was something about the
Seventh Hour Trumpeters, and several other groups
that sounded very strange. Nevertheless, these were
established churches—they were in the phone book. So
Howard said to the Dean: well, suppose that one of us
wanted to attend one of those churches and put that
on the chapel slip; would that be acceptable? And he
said no. So Howard said, well, then, what gives you the
right to decide what is a religion and what isn’t? These
others are established churches, and you’re saying
they’re not legitimate. What gives you that right? To
which Casey’s response basically was: the fact that I’m
the Dean of Men. I get to decide. There was no pre-
tense here to any intellectual defense of this position; it
was purely arbitrary.
At some point we decided that when we had thirty
people, that was a magic number of some sort, and we
declared that that was a multitude. So whenever we had
thirty, we could say, “Oh, we had a multitude present
for our meeting”—and that did happen a couple of times.
I believe we had a multitude present for Halloween
that year, the Samhain service. That was really quite an
elaborate affair, with a number of people in robes. We
had torches, and we had a grand procession through
the Arb from Monument Hill to a nice fire area in the
Upper Arb somewhere near the southern-most bridge
and up the hill a little bit. I probably could find it again
if I went out and tromped around out there. We had
this long procession along the various trails through
the Upper Arb to get there, shocking a number of people
along the way. I don’t know whether they were more
shocked by our regalia or just by the fact that we were
carrying all of these flaming brands through there.
Again, the events that are recounted in—by this time
the Latter—Chronicles that evening really did happen.
We had sort of a fortune-telling period, which started
with a process of melting bits of lead in a ladle in the
fire, and pouring them into water, and then people
would look at whatever shapes were formed in the wa-
ter, and attempt to interpret them, much as you would
tea leaves. I had read somewhere that this was a for-
tune-telling technique, so we did that. And as people
got into the swing of it, there were some things that
sounded a little bit like prophecy, and like some people
were in fact having some kind of profound experience—
one of which we later interpreted to be a foreshadow-
ing of Kennedy’s assassination. There were enough
echoes in that prophecy—and it is described in the
Chronicles—that it really later sounded like, gee, that
fits. Which was a little scary—there were some people
who weren’t at all sure that they liked this. It was be-
ginning to sound awfully real.
Being the good, obedient children of the fifties that we
were, when our slips were rejected, we simply went off
to chapel, or whatever we needed to do to get enough
points. We did not push the thing to the wall. We
were not going to jeopardize our Carleton education
for this thing, but we did try to make a lot of noise
about it.
One of the difficulties that we had was people tended
not to believe that we existed. We thought that we had
this wonderful protest vehicle, and yet when we tried
to get students excited about the fact that we were being
denied credit, and that this was not legitimate, it was
very hard to get other people on campus interested in
that. They simply believed that we didn’t exist. Occa-
sionally we would get people to come out to the Hill
and meet with us on Saturday afternoons, but many
people that we tried to invite simply believed that we
were pulling their legs, and that if they went out there,
they would be the fools for showing up for something
that didn’t in fact happen. So we never were able to
drum up a ground-swell of opinion. We couldn’t get
the Carletonian to write editorials on our behalf, or any
of that sort of thing—which we found very interesting,
given the climate of protest that was beginning to de-
velop in a number of areas having to do with things
like women’s hours and the like.
And there were, in fact, I think, a number of us who
were beginning to value the experience we were hav-
ing. Is it a real religion? Well, that’s always one of the
questions. Were we just playing games, or were we re-
ally doing something here that has validity in the spiri-
tual realm? I think that’s a question that each of us has
to answer for ourselves. It was certainly becoming some-
thing that was increasingly important to us in ways
outside of the initial protest idea.
So that was kind of where we were at the end of that
first spring. The following fall we made an attempt to
get a little more organized. By that time I was writing
things that later became The Druid Chronicles, trying to
put together some “scripture” and add a little more
legitimacy to what we were doing. We also printed some
pamphlets, and we got ourselves a table at the day where
various campus organizations could put out literature
444
After November 1st, we decided it was convenient—by
that time Fisher had worked out the notion that there
were these two halves of the year, and that there was
going to be a period of the Waters of Life in the sum-
mer, and a period of the Waters of Sleep in the winter,
and so we would not meet between November 1st and
May 1st. This was the period of the Waters of Sleep.
And besides, it was not very congenial to be meeting
outdoors in the bosom of the Earth Mother during
that part of the year.
year.
Eric:
Do you know anything about how a faculty advisor was
obtained?
Deborah: Well, not only the Waters of Sleep, but the suggestion
that the Earth Mother herself was asleep during that
season, which did make a great deal of sense here in
Minnesota.
David:
Well, Jon Messenger was on campus the year ’63–’64.
I think he was only here a year, as a visiting professor.
But his area of specialty was Celtic studies.
David:
Right. So there wasn’t much activity during winter, other
than I kept on writing on The Druid Chronicles. I do
remember having a discussion with David Fisher about
that time (I think it was more toward the spring) in
which he was beginning to feel that maybe this thing
was going too far, that maybe we should just stop it,
that it was in danger of becoming a “real religion.” I
remember him saying very specifically to me, “Well, I
don’t want to become another Joseph Smith.” And,
basically, I told him that it was too late, that this was
going to happen anyway, and that I had no problem at
all with being Brigham Young! But I think in many
ways he was hooked anyway. He was definitely enjoy-
ing playing the Arch-Druid.
Deborah: It was fairly obvious, and he was willing to do it.
David:
So I believe Howard approached him, and he said, oh
yeah, sure. He was quite willing to do that. He was not
actively involved, in that he did not come out to our
meetings and so on. We chatted with him a few times,
and he shared some lore with us. [He played] largely a
figurehead rôle. He understood that he needed to be
there as an advisor, and that that was mainly what we
required of him. Later, after he left, we approached
Bardwell Smith, whom we believed to be sympathetic
to our point of view, as indeed he was, and he was
quite happy to be our official advisor. But again,
Bardwell never really took an active rôle in working
with the Druids. He was simply willing to lend his
name to the project, and chat with us one on one if we
wanted to.
Deborah: He always had a flair for the dramatic.
David:
Yes.
Eric:
At what point did the structure of Arch-Druids and
Preceptors and all the various offices get established?
Was that something that happened very, very early?
Deborah: There may be a small gap, historically, there, because
Bardwell was on sabbatical ’64–’65, and if our recollec-
tion is correct, that Jon Messenger left at the end of
’63–’64 school year, I’m not sure who we had as fac-
ulty advisor ’64–’65. But if we remained a club in good
standing, we found someone.
David:
That happened very early. I would have to go back and
look at the dates that occur on the copies of the consti-
tution that we have. One of the aspects of the political
gambit here was to become a recognized, legitimate cam-
pus organization. We felt this would help our argu-
ment that we should get credit for this. To do that,
there were prescribed formalities. You had to adopt a
constitution. You had to submit the constitution to CSA
and have them recognize you as a campus organiza-
tion. You had to have a faculty adviser. There were a
number of things to be checked off.
David:
Well, I don’t believe there was an advisor that year,
and I don’t believe we were a club in good standing,
either!
Deborah: That’s possible.
David:
During the ’63–’64 year we did make all the proper
applications and so on, and my recollection is that CSA
had no problem with our being a campus organiza-
tion. Anybody who wanted to be an organization could,
as long as you got the appropriate things checked off. I
do have correspondence from Jon Kaufman, who was
one of the CSA people responsible for putting together
a booklet about campus activities, and we had submit-
ted a piece about the Druids for that booklet. The cor-
respondence that I have is essentially an apology for
the fact that that piece had been deleted just prior to
the final printing at the end of the ’63–’64 year. With-
out any prior warning or discussion or anything, it had
simply been summarily deleted by whoever finally put
the thing together. So there was certainly an atmosphere
of persecution there. There were people who really didn’t
want us to be legitimate, for whatever reason.
So it was necessary to write a constitution. I believe
that Howard Cherniack wrote the constitution, and in
the course of that developed the terminology: the Arch-
Druid, the Preceptor, the Server as the offices. I don’t
remember any specific conversations with them about
where those things came from. The Arch-Druid was
obvious. It’s a term that you see in the literature about
Druids. We believe that there was somebody that at
least we call the Arch-Druid, who was a leader of Dru-
ids in Britain.
The other terms—I don’t know where they came from.
It appears that Howard may have designed the rôle of
Preceptor for himself. The description in the constitu-
tion says that the Preceptor is charged with responsibil-
ity for secular matters, which involved things like writ-
ing the constitution, getting it submitted to CSA, lead-
ing the delegation the Dean’s Office, and so on. But I,
at least, had no direct involvement in the development
of the constitution, but that was all done the first spring
in ’63, I believe. So we were going through those me-
chanics of trying to get recognition the following school
445
The thing that changed, of course, was that in the sum-
mer of ’64 the chapel requirement was abolished. Sud-
denly the rules of the game were all different, and the
importance of our being an official campus organiza-
tion greatly diminished. We were never interested in
getting any money out of CSA, or anything like that, so
what point was there, really, in being an official organi-
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