The Bohemian Club's owl mascot, symbolizing wisdom, dates to its 1870s founding; the concrete Owl Shrine was sculpted by member Haig Patigian in the late 1920s. The Cremation of Care, first performed in 1881, is a scripted allegory in which an effigy called Dull Care is burned to banish worldly worry; biblical Moloch is never described as an owl. Mother Jones and Spy both infiltrated and reported it before Alex Jones's 2000 hidden-camera film recast it as ritual sacrifice.
Jon Ronson, who accompanied Jones inside, called it an overgrown frat party. Yet the guest lists are real, presidents and cabinet secretaries, and a documented 1942 meeting at the Grove helped lay groundwork for the Manhattan Project. The myth feeds a true observation: the powerful really do gather in secret, they just gather to drink and stage drag revues.
Read closely, the ritual is an admission, not a concealment: members symbolically burn care, conscience's Old English twin, to enjoy two weeks of unaccountable ease. The conspiracy imagines they sacrifice others; the script says they sacrifice their own worry. Depending on your politics, that may be worse.
If the ritual is theater, and everyone involved calls it theater, what is the correct level of alarm?