Gone To Croatan

Gone to Croatan: Origins of North American Drop Out Culture ISBN:0936756926 by Peter Lamborn Wilson, Ron Sakolsky and others.

preface - If we question the division of our world into the categories of "CivilizatIon" and "BarbarIsm," then we have begun to question all forms of hierarchy.

section from TAZ - So--the very first colony (Roanoke Island) in the New World chose to renounce its contract with Prospero (John Dee/Walter Raleigh/Empire) and go over to the Wild Men with Caliban. They dropped out. They became "Indians," "went native," opted for chaos over the appalling miseries of serfing for the plutocrats and intellectuals of London. As America came into being where once there had been "Turtle Island," Croatan remained embedded in its collective psyche. Out beyond the frontier, the state of Nature (i.e. no State) still prevailed--and within the consciousness of the settlers the option of wildness always lurked, the temptation to give up on Church, farmwork, literacy, taxes-- all the burdens of civilization--and "go to Croatan" in some way or another. Moreover, as the Revolution in England was betrayed, first by Cromwell and then by Restoration, waves of Protestant radicals fled or were transported to the New World (which had now become a prison, a place of exile). Antinomians, Familists, rogue Quakers, Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters were now introduced to the occult shadow of wildness, and rushed to embrace it.