Occult Theatre

A Talk Delivered at “The Moot with No Name” on 20th April 2011 concerning
1. Greet the audience.
2. Thank the organizers.
3. Introduction.
From deepest antiquity, Theatre has been associated with both sacred mysteries and magical ritual. This is not to say that all of these carefully rehearsed activities are synonymous (even though the aesthetic sense is genuinely elative and not simply an amusing faculty), but to assert their, often reflexive, relationship. One of the evidences of this dramaturgical claim is to be found in the nature of the intended audience. Religious enactments, after all, form part of Worship. They aim to achieve Communion with higher levels of Being. In which case, performers seek audience-participation with Being in and of itself. Occult experiments, on the other hand are designed to empower their practitioners. They are undertaken to realize psycho-physical objectives internally, as well as externally surrounding, the person of the esoteric engineer. This evening, therefore, I will not be discussing the wiltingly beautiful Eleusian celebrations of Ancient Greece, nor will I be exploring the almost technocratic obsessions of the Cabalists, or even the surprising endurance of village Folk Theatre. Instead, I will be examining the role of Silence and Revelation as dramaturgical devices in North European Theatre, in order to uncover the genuinely hidden power gifted by any journey into the human self.

4. Semantic Frameworks
Context is everything. To commence our deliberations, we need to find the semantic frame built around these seemingly well understood lexical items. Most scholars would agree that the common coinage of “Revelation” is to be found in the New Testament. Once this is conceded, it becomes clear that words such as “Reveal” and “Revelation” cannot have been used in the everyday sense of the verb “ to disclose”. (1) Indeed, anyone reading Biblical texts is suddenly confronted by the presence of inherited and complex theological vocabulary. Certainly, the semantic-fields of New Testament lexicography tell us that this word item must be interpreted as entirely eschatological. (2) When speaking of “revelation” (apocalypsis), Christian writers are talking about a final unveiling of Divine Intention at the end of this age (parousia). The implication, however, is not that revelation only takes place as a concluding scene in the surprisingly brief drama of Salvation, but that it will be an actual series of supernatural events rooted in a future mystery. After all, overtly religious words such as “revelation” need to be understood in an atmosphere of spiritual “encounter”; a creative process easily lending itself to exploration within a theatrical environment. Obviously, it has long been held by Personalist thinkers that if theological discourse started from the position of unfolding Being (instead of the bland and largely mundane re-articulation of historical happenings), it quickly becomes possible to narrate the process of “revelation” in a variety of cultural settings; as well as through a variety of social media. (3)

Similarly, the concept of “Silence” within inherited mystical metatext equally exposes us to sophisticated, theological, paradigms. Neither understood as refusal to speak, or the absence of sound, nor a failure to communicate, moments of silence were held to be expressions of qualitative endeavor. Indeed, during the seventh century in the Eastern Church, it was well known that St. Maximus the Confessor (580-662) talked about a “mystical silence of inspired experience”(4). By this, he appears to be drawing on the Dessert Traditions, whereby the Fathers described three types of Silence: of words, of desires and of thoughts. Stunningly, they are making Persoanalist claims, which include the idea that “enlightened recollection” is intimately bonded to pure perception. Like their far more ancient Buddhist counterparts, these holy men look towards levels of perfection beyond quantitative adjectives and strangely suggestive metaphors. They stood firm in their experience that quietude, stillness, not to mention our uniquely reverberating individuality, is to be discovered in the circuitous articulations of Silence. In other words, the lack of audible, or indeed subjective sound, never ever quashes higher order communication.

5. Miracles in Action
It goes without saying that Revelation, as well as Silence, have always proved fruitful theatrical devices in staged attempts to recreate human interaction with the metaphysical. Moreover, these superficially basic techniques often formed part of the burial rites of our Vikings ancestors. According to Professor Neil Price of the University of Aberdeen, in saying that the Vikings had “no defined religion”, we moderns tend to miss the ways their spirituality found expression. (5) Silent, yet intensely elative reflection, along with an epiphanous relationship with the living forces of Fire and Ice, all formed part of the Viking lifestyle. As a matter of fact, these warriors acted out their basic beliefs and abstract intuitions at the graveside of fallen comrades. In the case of a vanquished Hero, especially elaborate rites of passage seem to have been performed by the entire community. Eventually, Price continues, these Scenarios became a form of village Theatre, easily predating the Sagas and may have contained within them the very origins of Norse Mythology as a genre. With the passage of time, Rune Bards sang of powerful Giants, valiant Princes and Heavenly Intelligence’s within the complex web of the Wyrd, while mothers and farmers talked of Fairies, Trolls and Wizards. From those Pagan days to these, it seems as if ritual found expression before either Myth, or Folktale, fully formulated.

Traditional English Miracle plays, as another example, arose from chanted responses and simple religious pageantry. (6) Scripted “revelations” being re-enacted through the stressed delivery of spoken words; silence and stagecraft remaining uneasy, although on occasion essential, bedfellows. Symbolic characters, such as Judgement, or Mercy, talked on stage with a self-realizing efficacy; as the Hebrew Prophets themselves are said to have done outside of the auditorium. The dramaturgical assertion, therefore, seems to have been that the “revelatory” Word was made much more potent to untutored folk through the medium of dramatized engagement. Perhaps this is why the time and place of each performance became a matter of careful calculation. For the Craft Guilds of the fourteenth century (as in the Bible itself), “revelation” formed part of a spiritually instructive sequence, whereby the world found both order and redemption; again and again. In this way, entertainment was put in the service of Christian ideas and a new theatre developed directly from religious ritual; rather the prayerful reflection. It was not, of course, denied that similar types of theatre had existed in ancient Heathen days, merely that laymen would find this form of instruction particularly felicitous when participating in the Mass. With this liturgical claim in mind, it is merely a matter of research to locate records affirming the recitation of Miracle dramas across medieval Europe.

Yet, contemporary Europeans need to recall that these aids to a Christian experience of “revelation” became progressively opulent, despite the reservations of some ecclesiastical critics. Arising from manifestly humble origins in Anglo-Norman French, for example, The Harrowing of Hell had its place as the earliest documented performance piece in England, towards the end of the thirteenth century. (7) However, when Historians of Drama trace the steps of it’s dramatization they find that this show swiftly evolved through tableau and responsorial psalm into a much more complex performance, perhaps particularly in Northern Europe. Moreover, the emergence of movable stages and identifiable scenarios delighted audiences from the fourteenth century onwards. Eventually, the comic byplay, the narration of an off stage moral observer and the recognition that life, even in matters of worship, can occasionally be light-hearted, all assisted theatrical managers (as well as aspiring playwrights), to take their rightful social positions during the extraordinary social developments of the sixteenth century. Of course, the actual authorship of these carefully constructed Mystery plays is still as much a matter of debate in academic circles as is the precise design and theological purpose of these dramas.

6. Occult Drama
When focussing on overtly Occult Theatre, however, it is useful to dust off the records of nineteenth century Europe. Unsurprisingly, the subculture of specifically Occult ideologies and the sphere of experimental Performance interacted as an almost essential artistic response to the cultural zeitgeist of that time. In the provinces, Puppet Theatre, village tent entertainment’s and Pantomime remained equally influenced by the villainy of Punch and the traditional sparkle of a Fairy Godmothers wings. But the research of Orientalists, allied to the brazen literary outrages of explorers such as Sir Richard Burton (1821-1890), allowed for the introduction of innovative and exotic themes in the Capitol. Indeed, during the period of the so-called Occult Revival in Symbolist Theatre, openly Hermetic, Arabic Sufi and Chinese Buddhist imagery emerged on stage. This led certain conservative Critics to denounce such styles of theatrical Production as little more than a series of flirtations with Evil. With hindsight, it is difficult to see the wickedness behind Flying Carpets and golden Geneii, or the lavish re-constructions of Egyptian civic ceremony, but, unarguably, audiences did sense a threat to the political conditioning of their period. Of course, once viewed from this seditious perspective, Symbolist playwrights like August Strindberg (1849-1912) and Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) may be seen as dangerous, subversive rebels, in their attempts to dramatize the effects of invisible forces on everyday life. In a slightly later age, at least according to Dr. Edmund B. Lingam’s essay “Contemporary Forms of Occult Theatre”, it clearly explains the professional resistance encountered by a young Peter Brook, when he consulted Aleister Crowley (1874-1947) on the conjuring scenes in Brook’s revolutionary Production of Christopher Marlowe’s (1564-1693) masterpiece, Dr. Faustus. (8)

7. Personalist Perspectives
Yet, from a Personalist perspective there is an existential interiority as well as a humanizing objectivity to all things in Being and, by refraction, on the stage. Simple retellings of legend stir ethnic recollections within our Folk-Soul, while serious drama awakens our sense of elation into an experience of the Beautiful. Amongst the giants of philosophy, it is Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) who finds this fact overwhelmingly pertinent. In a stream of breathtakingly intelligent books, he argues that elation stems from the “play impulse”, which establishes the ground of aesthetic sensibilities in humans. It is an impulse allowing morality and feeling to coexist. As a dramatist and poet, Schiller also maps the “formal impulse” along with the “material impulse” as the struts of a bridge built between effective living and the necessities of nature. He reasons that play is free and spontaneous; combining as it does with conscience to project the ideal of perfection. In none of these cases, Schiller argues, is our human construction of events the sole factor. Put otherwise, he is contending that Being constantly shines through appearance. As a far from obvious Personalist, Schiller posits play as a proof of the macrocosmic design radiating within microcosmic form. (9) In order to illustrate this point, he discusses the notion of tragedy. Initially, Schiller interprets tragedy as a display of suffering, intended to arouse pity in observers. He ends up by concluding, however, that tragedy is “moral resistance against suffering”; a position leading him to place poets as the providers to philosophy of First Principles and never vice versa.

Using these delightful and poignant rubrics, it is easy to see how play may be experienced as both idle fun, on the one hand, or as a seriously challenging endeavor on the other. Once agreed upon, these rubrics equally reveal that there is no greater tragic poet than Henrik Ibsen. (1828-1906) He stands shoulder to shoulder with Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Jean Paul Satre (1905-1980) as a Master of his craft, as well as a man with uncompromisingly clear eyes for social trauma. Nevertheless, it is telling that Ibsen’s allegedly Modernist plays abound with talk of Trolls, the icy ferocity of nature and the lingering legacy of Viking heroism. At every turn of the plot in his disturbingly provocative play The Master Builder, unsettling powers are seen to be at work in the lives of his characters; principalities referred to by the language of Norwegian folklore. Additionally, in his verse drama Brand, audiences are presented with an unsparing vision of a Christian priest driven by his soul-numbing faith to risk the deaths of his wife and child, in order to prove his Bible based convictions. Actions, of course, witnessed by a chorus of spirits. In the case of Satre, it goes without saying that his best known play in the English speaking sphere, In Camera, is actually set in the afterlife, where his lost and broken characters rake over each others inadequacies forever. Inherited genre restrictions are not the real literary issue in these plays, but the perennial appeal of revealed Being. As humans, we need to articulate this Absolute through the figures of Fairies when young and as stifling moments of elative significance when we become adults. Undoubtedly, in this process of articulation, Theatre remains the premier medium of such a playful and yet deadly serious confrontation, since nowhere else may Silence as well as Revelation be applied with this aesthetic effect.

8. Conclusion
Overtly, Occult Theatre is a cultural mirror reflecting the truly magical. It is an artifice by which audiences observe a little of their own spiritual worth as individuals, or their lack of honest, humane, values as a social grouping. In recent decades, Productions such as the genuinely subversive Shockheaded Peter have sought to revive something of this staged encounter with Being to theatre goers of all ages, through Fairy tale mixed with existential realities; an surprisingly traditional admixture. However, the importance of this specific type of Production is found neither in acts of quasi-religious mimickery, albeit instructive, nor in the ultimately trivial accomplishments of mere social empowerment. The enduring necessity of Occult Theatre is discovered in its detailed uncovering of human selfhood, on a psychological, political and fundamentally spiritual level. Whether or not this narration takes the form of insights into criminal irresponsibility, the observation that our world is peopled with powerful and inhuman forces, or the iconic life and wisdom of a moral giant, they gift us with a usually obscure and largely hidden knowledge of ourselves.



Selected Endnotes
1. Alan Richardson, (ed), A Dictionary of Christian Theology (London, 1969).
2. ibid.
3. Personalism is a philosophical position taking the concept of “person” as ultimate.
4. Aaron Taylor, Logismoi (Blog Archive, Feb 2009).
5. Neil Price, Passing into Poetry: Viking Funerals and the Origin of Norse Mythology (The Inaugural Lectures 2008).
6. Nicolas Barker, The Cambridge Guide to English Literature (London 1982).
7. ibid.
8. Edmund B. Lingan, Beyond the Occult Revival: Contemporary Forms of Occult Theatre, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (Volume 28, Number 3, September 2006).
9. Schiller is not usually seen as a Personalist, but a close reading of his work reveals a number of compelling reasons for this reinterpretation.