10 Oral Histories - A Reformed Druid Anthology.pdf - A Reformed Druid Anthology - YasminLight

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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