Following up upon our elucidation of Bohemian Grove and the “cremation of care” we now introduce you to the Zozobra ritual celebration which takes place yearly in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The cremation of care is officially said to be just that, an “escape from business cares.” Dull Care, as the anthropomorphized figure is known, is actually burned yearly as it again raises its worrisome head only to be burnt again and again.
Note a report by The New Mexican (Robert Nott, “87th annual Zozobra: The lives and deaths of a beloved bogeyman,” September 08, 2010 AD):
Born in 1924, he has suffered a fiery demise every year since and remains Santa Fe’s equivalent of the bogeyman…Zozobra, aka Old Man Gloom…the effigy was known as Old Man Groucher.
A huge fifty foot tall figure is built, fire dancers perform a ritual before it and then, to the blazing of fireworks, the figure is burnt. This ritual marks the brining of gloom and also the beginning of the Santa Fe fiesta.
Someone who “recalled watching Zozobra burn… in the late 1930s” noted that a fire dancer “was dancing on a drum, and he was painted gold.”
In December 1940 AD:
…film star Errol Flynn torched the marionette. Flynn…asked Shuster and company to build a Zozobra that would look like a Warner Bros. cartoon character, so that year, Tito Coco (Uncle Bogeyman) was created. Valdez said he’d like to revive Tito Coco in the future.
L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. is the son of the founder of Dianetics / Scientology. He “was director of training for the organization” and “created a lot of the Scientology processes and procedures” he “helped create and run the organization…was very deeply involved, very directly, for seven years, during its formulation and building.”
He notes the following in the article Inside The Church of Scientology: An Exclusive Interview with L. Ron Hubbard, Jr. (note that the article is from a 1983 AD Penthouse magazine and so no, primary source research was not conducted in this case):
My father and Errol Flynn were very similar…[Flynn] wanted my father to use his black-magic, soul-cracking, brainwashing techniques on young boys. He wanted these boys as his own sexual slaves. He wanted to use my father’s techniques to crack people’s heads open.
As it has been reported of William Howard Shuster (1893-1969):
Perhaps the activity that many people know Will Shuster for is the creation of the burning of Zozobra in 1925. He and the then editor of the Santa Fe newspaper built a giant puppet with the help of Gustave Baumann that was filled with paper soaked in copper sulfate so it would burn quickly. It represented all the gloom in the community with the idea being to usher out all the gloom before the beginning of the fiesta celebration. It was loosely based on the Yaqui Village tradition of burning a scarecrow-type figure which represented Judas.
His inspiration for Zozobra came from the Holy Week celebrations of the Yaqui Indians of Mexico; an effigy of Judas, filled with firecrackers, was led around the village on a donkey and later burned.
Shuster and E. Dana Johnson, a newspaper editor and friend of Shuster’s came up with the name Zozobra, which was defined as “anguish, anxiety, gloom” or in Spanish for “the gloomy one.”
Anyone with gloom that they need to get rid of can come by the offices of the Santa Fe Reporter in the weeks leading up to the burn to drop off slips of paper with personal gloom written on them. Many people put legal papers in the gloom box as well. At the festival the papers from the gloom box are placed at Zozobra’s feet to be burned alongside him…
In what sort, kind or form of Spanish does zozobra mean “the gloomy one” or “anxiety”? Gloom is a word to the likes of triste (sad, etc.) and anxiety is ansiedad.
Well, perhaps Zozobra is not frequented by the world’s (pseudo) elite but one burns away care and the other gloom. This seems like Buddhist philosophy (or rather, misosophy): rid yourself of care and you will rid yourself of gloom…or something.