Words Rah Loves: Cabal

Cranky Rah has been using the word cabal a lot lately. Also, bifurcated.

(Don't ask why; when someone uses the words cabal and bifurcated a lot, it's safe to assume you should keep your distance from the mess that is that person's life at the moment.)

Anyway, cabal is a pretty cool word. A cabal is a group of individuals meeting secretly, usually for political purposes. One might use it like this:

The cabal summoned to Cranky Rah's cave during the new moon is scheming to take over the world.

(Please note: This is not a technically accurate usage of the word. If Cranky Rah was scheming to take over the world, she would not employ a cabal. She would just do it herself.)

Not this kind of madonna.

Anyway, cabal comes from the Medieval Latin cabbala from the even older Hebrew qabbalah. If one is of a certain age, one might equate the word with the Jewish mysticism tradition weirdly embraced in the 90s (that would be the 1990s) by the weird, multi-talented, once-upon-a-time-Catholic singer-actress Madonna.

The word qabbalah means, loosely, "something received," and the related mystic tradition is, like most mystic traditions...well, mystic and esoteric and kind of hard to pin down. In any event, some of the ideas of Jewish kabbalah-ism were embraced by a sect of occultist Christians during the Renaissance, and it seems to be at that point that the word took on its flavor of secrecy (occultism not really being mainstream in the world of Christianity).

The word retained a purely religious meaning until the 1660s and the reign of Charles II, he of, officially at least, England, Scotland and Ireland. Poor Charles Stuart had a rough time getting to the throne. When he was 19, his dad Charles I was beheaded, and II had to flee to France in order to retain his own gorgeous black tresses. (Those Stuarts had some good hair.) In 1660, after suffering the mind-numbingly boring rule of Oliver Cromwell (turned out that not only did Cromwell not have good hair, he was down on theater, sports and colorful clothing), the people of England asked Charles to pretty please come back and be king. Which he did, and on his 30th birthday no less.

Seriously. Check out
that hair.

Charles II was a man who knew how to party. When he entered London, bells rang, fountains flowed with wine, and the nobles got decked out in all the cloth of silver and gold they hadn't been able to wear during Cromwell's days.

But had II's luck changed? Not really. In the first years of his reign, England was hit by a plague that killed somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 people in London alone—the year before the Great Fire burned through 373 acres of the city. And II managed to get himself into a war with the Dutch.

It was in part because of that war with the Dutch (the second of four Anglo-Dutch wars) that one of II's closest counselors lost the king's faith and was replaced by a group of five ministers: Thomas Clifford, Lord Arlington, George Buckingham, Anthony Ashley and Lord Lauderdale. These men got together (more or less; they weren't so much of the "all for one" ilk as of the "more for me" persuasion) and arranged a secret treaty pulling France into the fray against the Dutch.

So check out the first letters of their last names: CABAL.

Isn't that cool? It's just a coincidence, but it did help popularize the word at the time, and it's carried carried sinister connotations ever since.

II, by the way, kept his head and his crown on top of it. But he didn't leave behind a legitimate heir, so his unlikeable younger brother James took the throne, a misfortune that led directly, 60 years later, to the massacre of Cranky Rah's peeps on a desolate Scottish moorland and to the vote for Scottish independence happening today.

So it just goes to show that good hair does not a good leader make.