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MasSUSchusetts (Pt. 2D): Pynchon, The Purple Witch's Teat, & Rosicrucian Symbolism in "Under the Rose"
🕑 Added 2023-07-04 19:44:51 +0000 UTCWelcome back to ParaPower Mapping and the fifth installment of "The Secret History of MasSUSchusetts". It's a surprise double header! This was initially going to be one episode, but I got so obsessed w/ mapping William Pynchon's fur-trading monopoly and decoding the Rosicrucian wordplay in Thomas Pynchon's short story "Under the Rose" that I had to split it into 2.
This episode covers:
our cont'd serialization of Winthrop the Younger’s alchemical Rosicrucian plantation; the enabling of his settlement of the Pequot lands of Nameaug/ New London by his daddy's war against the Pequot; the complex territorial power dynamics b/w Winthrop Jr., the Mohegan chief Uncas, the Pequot Robin Cassacinamon, & the Connecticut & Massachusetts colonies; Winthrop's attempt to use his alchemedicine practice to consolidate power & respect among Pequot by posing as a "powwaw" (medicine doctor); Uncas's strategic wifing up & the rad counter-revolutionary moment when Robin helped a Pequot woman escape from her enslavement in Winthrop Sr.'s compound in Boston; Uncas & his war band's raid on New London—attempt to assert his power over Pequot villagers & make his tributaries return to his camp; the rare instance where the colonial authorities sided w/ Uncas (an indigenous sachem) instead of English grievances; Winthrop's enslavement of Robin; Uncas's obstruction of Winthrop the Younger's shipments of ore from his Tantiusque mine site...
...a brief Puritanical backlash against alchemy in the 1640s, & Winthrop Jr.'s ally Robert Child's house arrest; Child's dissident faction, which petitioned the colonies to change their enfranchisement laws & push MA + CT to become more religiously tolerant...
...William Pynchon's defense of Robert Child's crew; his "heretical" text The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption; William Pynchon family's gentry status & property-holdings in Chelmsford; his status as churchwarden & "Matthew Yglesias-like hall monitoring" of his fellow villagers (basically he was a pain in everyone's ass); Pynchon fam's decision to join the Puritan emigres to NE for economic reasons; his founding of Roxbury & Springfield; preexisting relationship w/ the Winthrop's; the tragic smallpox epidemic that killed 12,000 indigenous in the Connecticut River Valley in 1633, "clearing the way" for Pynchon's Springfield; Pynchon's land & fur speculation; his role as colonial treasurer; the Springfielders' belief that Connecticut indigenous cursed their settlement by invoking Hobbamock; Pynchon as magistrate & overlord of his village; his prosecution of Hugh & Mary Parsons for witchcraft, which may have acted as a convenient distraction from his heresy case; Pynchon's proto-capitalist system of keeping villagers indebted to him indefinitely so he could work them to death, particularly Hugh Parsons; witch's teats, purple milk, a calf w/ 3 heads, witch-y night terrors, UAP lights over Boston, bloody rain, & other "Memorable Providences"; Mary Parson's shock confession of witchcraft & death in prison; Pynchon's Biblical exegesis of the Atonement; & his return to Old England...
...a mapping of W. Pynchon's powerful descendants; Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables & the Pynchon fam's piss-iness that he "slandered" them; a glossing of Thomas Pynchon's early life, matriculation at Cornell, Navy deployment, Greenwich Village connections, & early writing career; a semi-close-reading (possibly schizo) of one of Pynchon's earliest stories, the spy-caper "Under the Rose" (which was repurposed in V. & Slow Learner), especially the rampant Rosicrucian symbolism & wordplay; his use of his colonial heritage; & other speculations...
Songs:
| Maas — “San Narciso” |
| The Insect Trust — “The Eyes of a New York Woman” |
| 15 seconds of... Dropkick Murphys — “Shipping Up to Boston” ...for comedic effect |
| Sheb Wooley — “The Purple People Eater” |
| Radiohead — “We Drink Young Blood” |
| Greenfield Leisure — “Too Fat to Frug” |
Comments
ParaPower Mapping
There's definitely a continuation of performative violence from those early witch trials & on to the festering evil of the American slavery system. I don't know if this is a point I've made explicitly enough in the "Secret History of MasSUSchusetts" EPs, but the emergence of the colonial slave(ry) trade & various New England witch trials are bound together—in time, locale, & the ruling elite who profited from both. Further mapping of the landed, New England colonial families who are hugely culpable for the formation of the triangular trade is something I want to return to eventually.
D.K. Wilson
Do remember this hanging of “witches” as a public event would be repeated in the Jim Crow era. Hanging, cutting off oenises to be stored as memorabilia and burning of “black’ men was often the highlight of a so-called God-fearing community’s weekend. Additionally these events were photographed, not only “for posterity” but tuned into postcards and sent to friends and relatives throughout the U.S. Wanton violence of people seen as “evil” and/or “The Other” seems to have persisted for millennia in “Western Culture.”
