MasSUSchusetts (Pt. 2D): Pynchon, The Purple Witch's Teat, & Rosicrucian Symbolism in "Under the Rose"

Welcome 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” |