The South is a haunted place. It’s where the neuroses of a younger America went to germinate and thrive for a time before dying away to modernity, and any family with true roots has some kind of footnote or detail to add to its history; something violent, something strange, something preternatural. Mine is no exception.
For whatever reason, during an odd rainy day in the middle of spring, I was in the mood for a ghost story. I knew vaguely of one from my maternal side about a pair of siblings who supposedly shared a weird psychic connection. Some relatives had compiled a book of family history and anecdote. The story is a main feature:
Two siblings; George and Janette. George went to college a couple hundred miles away from home, somewhere in Florida or Georgia, only to die tragically within the first week of his first semester. He was struck by lightning. Back home, his sister began to have strange notions of his death, feeling something violent and grisly had happened on the other end of the string holding them together. She would contract a terminal fever after news of his passing confirmed her intuition, and for weeks, as she wasted away in bed, she would swear to her parents that George was visiting her at night, sitting at the edge of her bed and pleading for her to join him in the afterlife. And Janette would.
After reminding myself of those details, I felt compelled to flip over to the very beginning of the record. The oldest name came from colonial Virginia, Henry Kidd. He was a tobacco planter, very well established. His grandson, Seaborn Jones, would leave Virginia for the prospect of plantation life down in Alabama. He found himself on the wrong side of history, giving up his only son to the Confederacy, a blockade runner my grandmother would often tell me stories about, and upon the close of the war, as ravaged and beaten as the rest of the region, having lost all of his wealth, he would sell his land in order to eat.
He had three daughters. I found something that shocked me as I read through their entries and little compressed histories:
Martha Ann Hightower was among the first officers of the Pleasant Grove Grange, a farmer’s organization. In 1874, she held the office of ‘Ceres’. Ceres was the Roman goddess of agriculture.
To anyone with an interest in the occult, or just a passing acceptance and understanding of the power of ritual, the human capacity for spirituality and religiosity, the inevitability of both implicitly pervading all the things that we do, the phrasing ‘held the office of Ceres’ should stick out to you, as it did me. Priests hold offices. It was a common feature of ancient religious practice for people to assume the roles of gods and spirits within ritualistic contexts. Was that what my great-aunts had been doing?
My imagination ran wild with scenes of these old farmers, whose blood I happened to share, holding communion with something far older and stranger than both themselves and the New World earth they plowed. I imagined weird rituals in forest clearings under lantern-light, chanting and stomping feet. I watched them walk to their barn under the cover of darkness for pagan worship, fearing the eyes of their Christian neighbors. Their faces, somber composites of their own Puritan ancestors, lit by torchlight, the judgment of those simpler and longer dead expressed through the hard shadows dancing and flashing across their borrowed features.
What exactly had I found out?
Seaborn Jones Kidd had nothing as soon as the war was over. He sang a common tune. As the South tried to rebuild, the railroad monopolies pounced and took advantage of the situation, setting exploitative shipping rates that crippled any chance of a decent agricultural income. It was the beginning of the Gilded Age. They went and landed wherever they thought there was carrion to be made and consumed.
Enter Oliver Hudson Kelly, a young member of the Department of Agriculture. In 1865, Andrew Johnson commissioned him to travel across the American South and assess its economic issues up close. Inspired by the welcome and strange refuge he found among his Masonic contacts, Kelly decided the only way forward for the entire region would be through the induction of a new secret society, and one that championed the rural and agricultural folk he found to be suffering: the National Grange, or the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry.
However, the man responsible for much of its ritual and religious edge was one named Francis McDowell, an entrepreneur with ties to the railroad industry himself. Supposedly, he had traveled to Europe to accrue the investment capital for his brother-in-law’s start-up and stumbled upon an enclave of Italian nobles still practicing the long-forgotten Eleusinian rites, the most secretive and mysterious of all ancient Mediterranean religious practices.
The rites were something most everyone was familiar with back in the day. They are often cited in ancient literature, by authors ranging from Plato to Cicero, as evidence for the gods and the sublime and the continuation of the soul after the death of the body. The Eleusinian Mysteries were modeled after the myth of Demeter and Persephone. To the old and initiated, the myth of Demeter and Persephone was meant to strike a similar chord in the heart as the story of the Resurrection might for the living today. The rites were mythopoetic witness to the human desire and hope for renewal and change.
One of the first sources I was able to find was an article written by a man named Donald Rowland, aptly titled ‘The Eleusinian Mysteries and the Patrons of Husbandry’. It details McDowell’s involvement with the Order as well as some early correspondence between its founding members. One particular letter addressed to Kelly captured the kind of energy McDowell brought to the movement:
…Yesterday, Bro. McDowell dropped in upon us and the National Grange was at once convened in special and extraordinary session. Upon which occasion we joined hands over the altar of Husbandry and vowed a vow onto Ceres, Flora, Pomona and all the rest of the Goddesses that we would rekindle the fires of our zeal and devotion, and that henceforth whatsoever our hands find to do, that we will do it with our might.
And while Seaborn and Martha as well as Kelly and McDowell and all the others involved in all of this might have been bitten by the classicism of the Victorian times in which they lived, the rituals and ceremonies and alignments they acted out and brought into their lives originated from a place of genuine feeling, or so I choose to believe.
So, what does any of this have to do with me or you? Does the fact that a couple of old Southern aristocrats were involved in some weird shit have any bearing upon the present day? Why is any of this important? It just sticks with me, and it has for a couple of years now. The Eleusinian rites that my ancestors tried to reinvigorate were simply the story of Demeter and Persephone turned to practice, the cycle of life and death archetypically captured and refined for performance. In ancient times, as far as we know at least, the participants were made to enter into the Underworld, perhaps through some kind of psychedelic means or perhaps not, but they were made to experience their own little deaths, so that they might emerge with a sense of their own souls. It makes sense when you realize that Hades or Pluto was the god of wealth and jewels and whatever else could be dug out of earth and turned into money, not just the old pale fool who resided over the dead and all their sorrows.
It was the beginning of the Gilded Age. Plutocracy ruled the world. It was a time of harsh economic disparity and struggle. The Kidds lived out the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The Kidds were trapped in the Underworld, the American South, as prisoners to a capitalistic system working out the kinks of its new godhood. There’s symmetry there, or so I think.
Perhaps, it’s all just in my head and I’m making paranoid connections where there shouldn’t be any, or that the parallels I’m seeing are real but did not come about as organically as I’m choosing to believe they did, that Kelly and McDowell handpicked a myth that seemed relevant to their situation, but then what exactly is belief and religion and spirituality if not narrative tailored to move life?
So, I have to ask, where is the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry today? The economic climate is pretty rough. It feels like we’re all living through a perpetual winter sometimes, having to make do with scraps. It seems Persephone is gone forever. The National Grange, or the Order, is still around today though all of its previous import and subversion seems to have vanished. You can register as a member online now. You no longer need to achieve the Fourth Degree. The Priest of Demeter is a high school math teacher. Kelly is rolling in his grave. The Grange Halls host bingo games. The seven degrees of ritual and their mysticism that McDowell discovered on his way to Rome no longer hold the same magic. I imagine his ghost is haunting a potluck somewhere out in the Midwest, or wherever the spirit finally died.
But I still have trouble trying to shirk it all away as superstition, the strange actions of an older and backwards generation, or as some weird anecdote to throw around haphazardly at parties whenever I’m fishing for a reaction. I found a short eulogy for Seaborn in the very back of the family record. It was written by one of his nieces. He was said to be a very generous man and a vocal member of the local Temperance movement chapter. It was said he made sure all of his daughters received a proper classical education with a heavy emphasis on Greek and Latin and all the stories and myths between. I think an effect of living in the Underworld, or this latter leg of modernity, is the complete alienation and near-voiding of myth.
The Kidds felt the mysteries deeply, felt their prayers to Ceres and Pomona and Flora earnestly, hoping to see their presence writhing around in the soil they couldn’t bring to proper yield. I look at their names written in black type in a book I’m lucky to own and feel nothing really true or strong besides an envy for the intensity of their beliefs. I struggle to identify what grand narrative I might be playing out within my own life, unconsciously or not. I struggle to identify what myth might finally pull us all out of winter.
— Michael Parker is a writer from the South. You can follow him on Twitter at @scraped_elbows.