Our Stonehenge
It’s shortly after sunrise and I’m sitting in an oak grove on an ancient limestone block waiting, hoping, for the Druids to come.
Today is summer solstice, the longest day of the year. In San Francisco that means 14 hours, 46 minutes and 55 seconds between sunrise and sunset. It’s my favorite day of the year. Even when it arrives decked in fog, I love the solstice for those extra moments of daylight and despite the melancholy knowledge that the days will start getting shorter from here on out. This bittersweet cusp is the paradox of mortality itself: our lives are illuminated by the certain eventual darkness of death.
The solstice is a day of celebration for Druids, Wiccans, pagans and others who practice ancient earth-centered spiritual traditions. Thousands descend on Stonehenge every year to honor the longest day and the transition to a new season. Here, they reportedly gather in this grove of oaks where there are two circles of rocks that are known as the druid stones.
Druids, which trace back to ancient Celtic culture, historically practice their rites in oak groves. (Online I learn the word Druid itself may be derived from a Celtic word meaning “knower of the oak tree.”)
I sit quietly amidst the coast live oaks trying to channel some wisdom, some mystery from the old trees with their branches that spread like beckoning arms. A small bird pecks at the dusty ground, a bee wafts along lazily, I can smell the dusty brown scent of dead oak leaves, I hear a dog bark in the distance. But mostly what fills my senses, even at this early hour, is the ceaseless drone of traffic from Lincoln Avenue. I’m a little disappointed as I walk away. And then a coyote picks its way out of woods just ahead of me and trots down toward the street. A lovely greeting from the wild.
The druid stones are the remnants of Santa Maria de Ovila monastery, a twelfth century Spanish Cistercian monastery bought by that imperial magpie William Randolph Hearst in the early 1930s. At the time he already owned one Spanish monastery and a castle in Wales, but he hoped to build another castle on his mother’s estate, Wyntoon, in Siskyou county. He spent $1 million to buy the crumbling building, disassemble it and ship the 10,000 carefully labelled stones here to be reconstructed. It took eleven ships to transport them. The 1,500 crates of stones sat idle in warehouses for years as architects worked on the design. Eventually he had to give up the grandiose plan, his fortune dwindled by the Depression and years of extravagance. In 1941, Hearst struck a deal with the DeYoung Museum, selling the stones for $30,000 to cover his storage and drayage bills.
The crates were moved to areas behind the Japanese Tea Garden and near the handball courts and there they sat, neglected for decades. There were plans to rebuild the monastery in the park on what is now JFK Drive; there were plans to construct a medieval museum. But none materialized. A series of five fires damaged the stones, while the cold water used to put out the flames washed away the coding marks for reconstruction, transforming the blocks into what the Examiner in 1995 called “the world’s most expensive and complex jigsaw puzzle.”
Over time, some of the stones were stolen or dispersed around the park for landscaping projects in the Botanical Garden, Stow Lake, the Rhododendron Dell and elsewhere. Somewhere along the way, some of them ended up arranged in rough circles in a secluded grove of coast live oaks east of the handball courts. And at some point, they became a special place for what the Examiner in 2010 snidely called “nice people who like to wear robes and put twelve rocks in a circle and call it a church.”
In1994, the city agreed to transfer the bulk of the remaining stones to a Cistercian-Trappist abbey near Chico where they would be reassembled. The abbot of Our Lady of New Clairvaux told the New York Times he’d been dreaming of regaining the deconstructed monastery for nearly 40 years, since he first saw the stones in Golden Gate Park in 1955. "It's like getting back a precious family heirloom…We feel a powerful connection with our ancient brothers who lived within its walls."
Before the stones were moved, the Times reported, Druids who had been using them for ceremonies asked the abbot to attend a farewell ritual in which they poured Scotch over the 800-year-old limestone blocks.
Earth-centered faiths recognize an animating sprit in all of nature -- in trees, plants, animals, even rocks. This grove with its oaks and stones holds one more whammy of spirit power — thanks again, weirdly, to William Randolph Hearst. In 1889 Hearst sent out one of his reporters to hunt down one of California’s last grizzly bears. Six months later, the reporter returned with a 1,100-pound male that he’d captured in the San Gabriel mountains. Hearst dubbed the bear Monarch after the tagline of his newspapers, “Monarch of the Dailies.” Poor Monarch was caged and put on display first at Woodward Gardens, and then a few years later moved to an enclosure in this oak grove.
Monarch became the emblem for the city following the 1906 earthquake and totem animal of the state as model for the grizzly on the California flag. When he died in 1911, his pelt, feet and skull were stuffed and displayed in the old Academy of Sciences building, just across the road from the oak grove. The rest of his body was first buried in Golden Gate Park and then the skeleton was exhumed and given to the Museum of Invertebrate Zoology at UC Berkeley.
His story is told in a website for the Monarch Bear Institute, which is run by Rodney Karr, a clinical psychologist and member of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. Monarch’s treatment in life was sad enough, but Karr writes on the site, his treatment in death was even worse. “It is extremely disturbing from a shamanistic point of view that the Monarch Bear… has been denied his rightful journey of transformation and rebirth.” On the winter solstice in 2003, just before the old Academy building was closed, Karr and several native American shamans performed a ritual to “reclaim and honor the spirit and body of Monarch Bear.” The ritual called “upon the spirit of the Monarch Bear to leave its body and skull and enter into two bear claws” which were later ritualistically buried in the Sierras.
Because of this history, Karr refers to the oak grove as the Monarch Bear Grove. According to him, it’s been a site of sacred ceremonies since at least the 1920s. It’s not clear when the stone circles were added, but in 2010 when a gardener started dismantling the circles, Druid leaders complained and Rec and Park agreed to put them back in place. Since then, the gardeners have been careful not to move the stones.
I go back to the grove near sunset. Still no Druids. Now the quiet is pierced by the synthy sounds of club music. I follow the bass beat to the Music Concourse to find a very different solstice celebration: a DJ flanked by purple and pink lights is playing and a small crowd of people are dancing in the gathering dusk.
****
Postscript: Later in the day, I reach Karr on the phone. He tells me the Druid solstice celebration honors the whole summer season of light and growth, extending from June 21 to August 1. It’s one of eight seasonal festivals in the Druid calendar. His order will hold a public celebration in the Monarch Bear Grove on July 15. Karr says all are welcome.
Thank you!
Thank you Fern -- looks like your substack is going really well.