In the spring of 1930, lawyer and historian Carl Wheat made a visit to some old mining camps in California for the purposes of researching life during the Gold Rush. His focus came to rest on the practice of a secret society among the miners, one with an apparently long and storied past. Mr. Wheat was no stranger to fraternal societies himself, being a member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, whose annual retreat for the rich and powerful at Bohemian Grove serves as popular fodder for many conspiracy theorists. But in the secret order that flourished among miners in the 19th century, called E Clampus Vitus, Carl Wheat saw something more than an organization for the elite. He saw a society for the everyman, for the lover of history both obscure and preposterous, and he came to believe it was a tradition worth reviving. He and some fellows of equally high CQ--an attribute like unto IQ, but measuring instead their degree of “Californiosity”--got together not long after, in a Yerba Buena lunchroom, to form once again a lodge dedicated to the traditions of this bygone order, about which they actually knew very little. Not long after forming their Chapter Redivivus, however, a mysterious stranger telephoned Wheat, claiming to have been, in his youth, the last Noble Grand Humbug of the last practicing lodge. Building from the knowledge of this Clampatriarch, as they called him, the New Dispensation of E Clampus Vitus began, and its fantastical history could finally be written.

I will commence with a discussion of the rather successful revival of a secret society that died out with the end of the California Gold Rush of the 19th century. This fraternal organization, reborn in the 1930s, today boasts that their members number in the tens of thousands in more than 40 chapters scattered across the Western United States, but by far their numbers are highest in my home state of California, where much of the order’s history takes place. While the math on the aforementioned membership does not quite seem to work, unless every chapter has initiated thousands of members, nevertheless the chief occupation of the Clampers, aside from merrymaking, does seem to indicate that they are widespread. This historical drinking society--though some argue it is more a drinking historical society--proves its historical bonafides by placing historical plaques across the American West. About a decade ago, they had put up more than a thousand historical markers, and by now that number is far higher. What I appreciate is that the members of E Clampus Vitus don’t concentrate on memorializing well-known history, or “rich old man’s history” as they call it, but rather the little known facts of the state. As an example, in the quaint town of Murphys, they have a plaque that preserves the memory of the saber-toothed tiger that prowled the neighborhood in the distant past, and in the town of Volcano, they celebrate the invention of Moose Milk, a cocktail composed of bourbon, rum and heavy cream that was popular among Gold Rush miners. To illustrate better the playfulness of their plaques, consider the strange upside-down house built by silent film star Nellie Bly in the town of Lee Vining, which they commemorate with an upside-down plaque. While these plaques are good fun and demonstrate the society’s preoccupation with history, none of these monuments record the secret mysteries behind the founding and evolution of the order. For this, we must delve into the hard-to-find documents published by the first members of the Chapter Redivivus, who revived the order and learned its lore from an old man who was around when it was still being practiced in the 19th century.

In determining when the society of E Clampus Vitus began and who started it, it is necessary to consider its name. Some theologians trace the society back to Moses, who is claimed to be an early Noble Grand Humbug or Clampatriarch, for one of the hypothesized source documents of the Torah, called the Elohist, is more commonly referred to as E, corresponding to the beginning of the order’s name. Others, however, trace the beginning of the order all the way back to the beginning of time and creation, naming Adam as the Clamprogrenitor, as it were. This is suggested by the fact that the word Vitus is said by some to derive from the Greek phitos or begetter, referring to Adam as the father of humanity. By this reckoning, the word Clampus derives from the Greek kleptos, to steal, because after receiving the knowledge by eating of the tree in the Garden of Eden, Adam smuggled out the secrets of the order so that he could pass them down to all mankind. If one finds it hard to credit such ancient origins of the order, alternative etymology suggests E Clampus Vitus to be a Latinate phrase, with E meaning “out of,” Clampus being a combination of clam, or “ignorance or darkness,” and pos, meaning “after.” Finally, Vitus would be vita, or “life,” making the entire translation “out of darkness, after life,” as in seeking after life. No matter what one makes of the meaning of the order’s name, it cannot be denied that its central figure was Saint Vitus, after whom Sydenham’s chorea, or St. Vitus’s Dance was named, that malady being one suspect for explaining the notorious Dancing Plague I have discussed in the past. St. VItus is known to have exorcised a demon from Emperor Diocletian’s son, or as the more scientific might suggest today, somehow cured the boy of some neurological or psychological condition. In return, since St. VItus refused to attribute the miracle to pagan gods, Diocletian tortured him to death. It is said that before his unfortunate end, St. Vitus was in the process of writing the great history of E Clampus Vitus, but had only managed to write out one line.

Saint Vitus, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite St. Vitus’s death, the order survived as a monastic tradition carried on by the Vituscan brothers. Their form of the phrase was the Latin Ecce Lampas Vitae, meaning “Behold, the Light of Life,” and how this phrase became corrupted is truly a remarkable tale. A 20th century discovery in the Vatican Library tells the tale in the form of a letter by one Heliodoricus, himself a Vituscan. In his letter, Heliodoricus describes a long and arduous journey of four years that he took with nine fellow Vituscan missionaries all the way to the Far East. Only two others survived the journey, Stomachus, and Bellicosus, whereupon they gained an audience with Chinese emperor Hee Sing Li. Heliodoricus describes the great success they had at converting the Chinese, introducing the customs of their order halfway around the world. It is the Chinese, he says, who in mispronouncing their motto Ecce Lampas Vitae coined the modern name E Clampus Vitus, a revelation that caused much stir among the aforementioned theologians who had developed so many theories about the phrase and its implications for the origins of the order. After this historic Vituscan mission to China, it appears the traditions of E Clampus Vitus, as they called it, flourished for generations. The truth of this is attested in another historic discovery, made by one Rev. Dr. Shaw of New York City, in 1890 during his own mission to China. Of course, by this time, the practice of E Clampus Vitus could be observed in California, and Dr. Shaw’s discovery explains at least part of the story of the order’s roots in my state. Shaw came across a Chinese manuscript that, astoundingly, indicates a Chinese navigator by the name of Hee Li discovered America, and more specifically California, as early as 435 CE, making the Chinese claim of discovery even earlier than the claims of Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact by Vikings. According to the story, Hee Li’s vessel was blown out to sea by a storm, and by some cosmic mischance, a cockroach-like beetle had gotten into his only compass, misaligning the needle and dying inside, out of sight. Hee Li relied entirely on this broken compass, following it ever eastward, despite never finding the shores of his homeland. When a member of his crew pointed out the sight of the rising sun to prove they were headed the wrong direction, Hee Li threw the mutineer overboard. Eventually, upon making landfall at what is modern day Monterey and finding the dead bug in his compass, Hee Li, himself a dedicated Clamper, declared the new land Gumshaniana, or Gum Shan, and set about instructing its native inhabitants in the traditions of E Clampus Vitus.

Hee Li eventually managed to make a return journey from Gum Shan after having established Clamperism there, and his discovery of this far off land we today call California was well known among his countrymen. Indeed, his adventure would inspire another expedition many years later, this one more purposeful and also less successful. This voyage was undertaken by one of low birth, the son of a servant woman who cleaned the privy chambers of the Empress. Due to a peculiarity of his anatomy, he was known among the women at court as Lo-Hung-Whang. One night, the Empress relieved herself into a chamberpot and fell in. Enraged at the man responsible for leaving too large a chamberpot in her room, she had the foul toilet forced onto the man’s head. Lo-Hung-Whang gave this poor soul sanctuary and helped him remove the pot, and in return, the man helped smuggle Lo-Hung-Whang out of the palace in another, even larger chamberpot. Thereafter free to pursue his dream life as a sailor, Lo-Hung-Whang always kept that massive toilet with him to remember his deliverance. After establishing himself as a capable navigator and having made some explorations of his own, he set out to organize a colonial expedition to Gum Shan after hearing of Hee Li’s discovery. In addition to his crew, he brought three hundred fertile slave girls, with the intention of peopling Gumshaniana with their descendants. These poor women were subjected to terrible abuses, and if they dared raise their voice in protest, they were silenced by having a handful of red pepper powder thrown in their faces. One among these women, Lo-Hung-Whang’s own concubine, Hop Mee, proved to be stronger and more clever than the men anticipated, though. She arranged for the eunuchs guarding the other girls to be drugged, and once free, the former slave women took control of the vessel, throwing any who resisted them to the sharks. Upon finally landing at Gum Shan, somewhere near modern day Mendocino, Hop Mee decided that she would be the empress of this new land, and it is said that she is the true Amazonian warrior woman whose legend inspired the fictional character Calafia, after whom California is named.

Mural depicting Califia, fictional Amazonian queen for whome California was named, via Wikimedia Commons

The branch of E Clampus Vitus descending from the Chinese chapter established by the Vituscan missionaries, however, has not the only claim to being the origin of Clampers in the New World. Indeed, there was another monastic order originating from the teachings of St. Vitus, this one established by his disciple Dumbellicus, himself also a martyr killed by Emperor Diocletian. Dumbellicus was an ascetic soul, known to deny himself pleasure and excess, and so, as an especially cruel torture, Diocletian gave Dumbellicus to the priestesses of Venus, who chained him naked upon a flower-strewn altar and took from him his chastity. However, Dumbellicus resisted, biting off his own tongue and making himself pass out, so that he retained, in theory, his purity. His was a “moral martyrdom,” for he did not lose his life. Afterward, he spoke only in signs, and his followers sought his canonization as a saint. However, sainthood was denied him, for it was suspected that he never actually bit his tongue off, and that perhaps he did not resist his altar-bound intercourse as much as his legend claims. The church likely came to this conclusion based on the behavior of his followers, the Dumbellican Brotherhood, who received the nickname the Frollicking Friars due to their licentious behavior. It was this so-called “breechless brotherhood” that added to the original Vituscan directive to care for widows and orphans the clarification that it was “especially the widows” that they sought to comfort. It was they who introduced the central Clamper symbol, the Staff of Relief, a decidedly phallic image. The Frollicking Friars did much to spread their order, for it’s said they expanded on the notion of widowhood, applying the Staff of Relief even to women who they said had been “widowed” by their husbands’ neglect, and therefore they frequently were obliged to flee from one place to the next. Thus with the discovery of the New World, many of the Dumbellican Brotherhood were only too eager to leave the old world behind and joined the ranks of armies led by such famous conquistadors as Pizarro and Cortes, who made plenty of widows for the breechless brothers to comfort.

The question then becomes whether it was the particular Chinese brand of E Clampus Vitus passed down through the native progeny of Hop Mee, Empress of Gumshaniana, that was practiced by the miners of Gold Rush California, or whether it was the form spread by the Frollicking Friars during their rapacious journeys through the New World. Of course, it may have been a combination of both. There is one tale that tells of these two branches of Clamperism meeting. The last of the Dumbellican friars are said to have encountered a band of Native Americans calling themselves Clampas in Arizona. These Clampas gave some of the ancient signs of their order, which the friars recognized. However, rather than finding themselves hailed and well met, they instead found themselves under attack by the Clampas. These Native Americans brandished their own staffs, but these would bring the friars no relief. The unusual anatomy of these Clampas indicates that Lo-Hung-Whang survived Hop Mee’s mutiny and managed to father children, or perhaps was kept as a sex slave himself as he had previously kept Hop Mee, for the peculiar trait that gave him his crude sobriquet was observed by the Frollicking Friars in the naked Clampas who charged at them. Indeed, these natives appeared ready to use their formidable weapons against the Dumbellican Brothers. Though they wrapped their robes about their loins like diapers to better facilitate their flight, the Frollicking Friars could not escape their awful fate. Clampers have since marked the site of their massacre with a plaque that reads: “Here fell the last of the Frollicking Friars. They could pass it out, but they couldn’t take it.”

Persecution by Emperor Diocletian, via WikiArt.org

And that is where the unbelievable history of E Clampus Vitus might end, if it were not for the fact that this episode releases just before April 1st and is an April Fools Day joke! I am sorry to say that none of this is real history! Well, to be fair, it does appear that Gold Rush miners had a fraternal organization called E Clampus Vitus, and it is true that Carl Wheat revived it in the 1930s, but all of the lore I just shared with you was fiction playfully concocted by the New Dispensation under the Chapter Redivivus. Perhaps this was obvious from the ridiculous and frankly racist names of its central characters as well as its bawdy subject matter. The fact that it is not meant to be taken seriously would have been even more apparent had I shared with you the one line that St. Vitus was said to have put into writing about E Clampus Vitus before he was martyred: credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd. This has become the motto of this historical drinking society. Imagine a gathering of overeducated history buffs drunkenly regaling each other with the most ridiculous false histories they could think of. This was the beginning and the foundation of the modern day Clampers, although today, as I understand it, it is more of a plain old drinking society that enjoys to play pranks. And this may be even closer to the E Clampus Vitus of the Gold Rush Miners. Many of the surviving stories suggest that in the 19th century, E Clampus Vitus was just a way to put one over on outsiders. Travelling salesmen entering the mining camps could find no patrons, and entertainment troupes could not fill their audiences, until they agreed to join the ranks of the society, to be “taken in,” as it were, which meant the miners would be able to drink on their dime for the night. Thereafter, the miners gladly patronized these newcomers to their town, so it was essentially an initiation into the community. But there is no evidence that the rough and tough miners of 19th-century California touted any such colorful beliefs about the origins of their little club.

In fact, there is something of an origin story for E Clampus Vitus to which we might give more credence. It appears to have begun in West Virginia, dreamed up by a blacksmith and tavern keeper named Ephraim Bee sometime during the early 1850s. Bee had political aspirations and fancied himself something of a folksy storyteller. At the time, secret societies were all the rage. There were the Sons of ‘76, the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, and the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, that nativist fraternity that I devoted a patron-exclusive episode to discussing, and even the Freemasons had made a comeback after the Anti-Masonic movement of decades earlier had reduced their numbers. What Bee established, however, was a burlesque of the well known secret fraternal organizations. The other secret societies all seemed to take themselves and their rituals far too seriously, and they were full of “stuffed shirts,” so Ephraim Bee founded a kind of parody of them, with nonsensical rituals, and a name that sounded Latin but was not… that’s right, E Clampus Vitus means nothing. It is Dog Latin, simply an imitation of the dead language. In fact the seeds for the elaborate lore that would later spring up around the order were planted by Ephraim himself, for he said he had learned the secrets of the order from Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts statesman who had visited China and brought back the mysteries of this Confucian brotherhood that was widespread in the East. Ephraim Bee’s E Clampus Vitus grew a bit in West Virginia and elsewhere, but it faded away during his lifetime. One enthusiast named Joseph Zumwalt, however, brought the order with him from Missouri to California during the Gold Rush… or so they say. The timeline doesn’t seem to jibe, though, for how could Zumwalt have brought E Clampus Vitus to California in 1849 and established the first chapter here in Calaveras County in 1851 if Ephraim Bee was only just forming the first chapter in West Virginia in 1853? Considering all the false and absurd history told by the Clampers, in the end, it’s hard to believe anything you read about them. And perhaps that’s just the way they like it.

Supposed image of Ephraim Bee circulated on the Internet by Clampers… who knows if it’s really him…

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a wonderful quotation shared by Thomas Duncan as an epigraph on his book E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore, which ended up serving as my principal source on this episode mainly because all the other works on Clamper history seem to be held hostage in the Special Collections rooms of California libraries, and the few available at my local library, I discovered, have been stolen. The epigraph is from Alexander Stille’s The Future of the Past: “The past is only the memory or residue of things that now exist in the present moment, a mental construction that—cleaned up or embellished—often serves the needs of the current moment instead of corresponding to any ‘historic’ truth.”

The Unbelievable History of the Ancient and Honorable E Clampus Vitus

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