Dark Prisms Occultism in Hispanic Drama - 1st Edition

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To Sally
 Contents

Preface

PART ONE: Evolution

I Supernaturalism in Medieval Spanish Drama
II Esoterica in the Golden Age Drama of Spain
III The Demonic Pact and the Quest for Esoteric Knowledge

PART TWO: Devolution

IV Ancient Ways: Occult Lore in the Plays of Ramón del Valle-Inclán
V Toward the Dionysiac: Pagan Elements and Rites in Federico García
Lorca’s “Yerma”
VI The Devil in the Blood: Genesis and Subversion of the Demonic Pact in
Alejandro Casona
VII Illuminati, Devils, and Witches: The Unholy Plays of Domingo Miras
VIII The Orishas of Ifé: African Deities in Cuban and Brazilian Drama

PART THREE: Bibliography

IX Drama of the Occult: A Bibliography of Spanish and Latin American
Plays
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Human kind
cannot bear too much reality.
T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets. Burnt Norton (I)”

It is one thing merely to believe in a reality beyond the senses and another
to have experience of it also.
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy

That which is magical unequivocally takes on that nature when it surges

from an unexpected alteration of reality (the miracle), from a privileged
revelation of reality, from an unusual or singularly favorable illumination of
the unsuspected richness of reality, from an amplification of the range and
categories of reality, perceived with a particular intensity by virtue of an
exaltation of the spirit.
Alejo Carpentier, “Prólogo,” El reino de este mundo
 Preface

Prisms are transparent bodies, usually with a triangular base, used for
dispersing light into its components (the spectrum of insensible tangencies
in the procession from the color of the longest wavelength, red, to that of
the shortest, violet), or for reflecting light beams. The title Dark Prisms is
metaphorical, not oxymoronic; it is meant to convey the passage of occult
cultural icons from Hispanic life through the prism of drama, the images
inexorably flowing from the bright side to the dark side of the spectrum.
The resultant is a metaphysical state.
Metaphysics is not used here in the manner of the Aristotelian construct
of exegesis on such as existence, causality, truth, among other first
principles, nor does it refer to the seventeenth-century school of English
poets whose principal exponent was John Donne and whose chief concern
was expressing intellectual and philosophical matters through exotic
conceits and ingenious wit. Rather, metaphysics is employed here in the
sense conveyed by the protagonist in Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical
History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1588) when, filled with
excitement at the prospect of acquiring esoteric knowledge from the tomes
placed into his hands by the thaumaturges Valdes and Cornelius, he
exclaims:

These metaphysics of magicians

And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, signs, letters and characters—
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires. [Scene 1, 52–55]

It is the variety implicit in Faust’s statement that concerns us in this study,

for the sigils, symbols, seals, signets, and other semiotic elements in the
grimoires consulted by Faust in his search for the meaning of the cosmos
are but the external manifestations of a complex, universal, and interrelated
system of arcane traditions whose origins may be lost in antiquity but
whose impact is still felt. The quest of Faust is a universal one.
And perhaps because these modes of thought and being were first
expressed through formal gesture, elevated speech, rhythmic movement,
and ritual action—all basic elements of the ancient worship that gave rise to
drama—they have continuing vitality in the written dialogue-work and its
counterpart, theater, the play on stage.
The chapters in this book present a comparatist’s view of mythological,
folkloric, and religious beliefs of the Western cultural heritage that have
prompted a long and ongoing history of esoteric themes in theater and
drama, from the Middle Ages to the present, in Spain and the Americas,
either intact or syncretically. The terms occultism and occult are used here
principally to describe the many ways that human beings have sought to
fathom a secret knowledge intuited to exist but held to be inaccessible
through normal means; turning to other possibilities, humans have sought
the aid of supernatural agencies through alchemy, angelology, asceticism,
astrology, demonolatry, divination, ecstasy, magic, necromancy, possession,
santería, seances, voudoun, witchcraft, and so on. Because the list is
extensive, the terms are meant to be more inclusive than exclusive.
The peoples of Europe were loath to give up the deities of millenia when
Christianity confronted the pagan religions and overwhelmed them with its
dogma and status after the fall of Rome. But despite the Church’s drive and
commitment to eradicating ancient beliefs it considered inimical to its
message and mission, the peoples of Europe retained the old gods, nurturing
them in the very cradle of the new faith, often vesting them with new
identities and elevating them to sainthood without the formalities of
canonization. Their festivals were integrated into the Church calendar in
each vicinity, and their rites were practiced openly as if condoned by the
religious authorities, as indeed was the case in the face of popular
insistence. The result was that a pagan substratum thrived beneath what was
in effect the veneer of Christianity.
That pagan tradition is still extant, not only in Europe but also in other
geographical areas as well, including the Americas and Africa (indeed,
wherever European colonizers took Christianity as part of their cultural
baggage and imposed its tenets on the indigenous peoples they encountered,
ever interpreting their religions as myths and damning their practice as
sinful). Despite ongoing attempts at eradication, pre-Christian beliefs have
persisted, continuing to inform and shape much modern thought. Hispanic
drama is no exception.
Divided into three parts, Dark Prisms distinguishes the general from the
specific in its assessment of theater and drama in Spain and Latin America.
The chapters in Part One present overviews of the topics they cover, while
those in Part Two deal at length with the pertinent works of playwrights in
which the occult canon is at the core. I have selected specific plays to
discuss because of their focus on the occult. Some playwrights address this
theme with greater frequency and import than others, thus their inclusion in
Part Two. Part Three, the bibliography, is a compilation of plays in which
occultism is central to the theme or is an important element therein.
In the chapters that follow, I first of all address, in addition to the
metaphysical aspects of particular works, the human desire to know and
connect with a supernatural order, whether through the formal worship of
an established religion or through the attempt to effect personal control of
the cosmos by the varied machinations of what is termed “magic.” Be it the
materialization of Hell on the medieval stage or the efficacious presentation
of demonic pacts, astrology, alchemical operations, Cabbalism, witchcraft,
Satanism, and so-called voodoo, the mechanism in human nature that
prompts belief in these matters is the same: an intuitive sense of the
existence of something beyond human cognition and attainment. The
unknown prompts both fear and curiosity, the latter resulting in attempts to
grasp its meaning, possess its hidden powers, engage in communion with
hermetic forces and beings, or dabble in arcane doctrines toward
illumination. It is all the result of ignorance about what lies beyond the
human ken, along with the desire to have unlimited knowledge thereof and
power over its operations, in short, to be godlike.
Second, the following chapters have many subtle interrelationships
founded on shared topoi. For example, the belief in telluric forces and
demons, which grew out of polytheistic animism, giving vent to the devils
and pacts of medieval Christianity, the witches and magicians from the
Renaissance through Salem, as well as the deities and their shamans taken
out of Africa and brought to the. Americas, where they mixed with
Christian beliefs in Saints and miracles. It is all part of the pagan
substratum, which is still extant in many parts of the world.
The topics herein also share the same roots in mythology and folklore—
largely, but not exclusively, Greek and Roman. For one, the doctrines of the
Cabbala are replete with Platonic ideas and Pythagorean principles that
have attached themselves to that esoteric, mystical oral tradition of the
Jews. Indeed, there are many European superstitions within the Jewish
mystical system and, in turn, medieval occultism was greatly influenced by
that oral tradition upon its transcription in numerous heterodox texts. The
impact of the Cabbala is evident in the Faust legend and the theme of magic
in early European drama, as well as in later plays.
Even where the gods are seemingly foreign to the European tradition, as
in Africa, they parallel the deities in the pantheons encountered in the
Western cultural heritage, often with surprising affinities, such as similar
genealogies, myths, symbols, and ritual practices—among the latter, the use
of snakes, states of possession, and the role of divination. Furthermore, the
syncretism that took place in the Americas relates African and European
beliefs meaningfully. Yet the superimposition of Western ideas does not
obliterate the deeply embedded culture of Africa; at work there, as well as
in Europe, is the pagan substratum.
Lastly, there are the shared factors of the human psyche, the interfacings
and similarities of beliefs, rituals, and archetypal images that Jung saw as
the result of “the collective unconscious” at work since prehistoric times.
These universal elements have given rise to similar Creation and Flood
myths, to name but two, in the Middle East and in the Americas, as
elsewhere in the world. The Stith Thompson Motif Index attests to the
human penchant for originating similar concepts in vastly different settings
of time, place, and culture.
Dark Prisms explores a great many of these aspects of esoteric
knowledge and practices as manifested in the drama of the Hispanic world
—with an expansion into the Lusophone world of selected Afro-Brazilian
plays because of their thematic proximity to the Cuban works studied—in
order to show how the universality of human beliefs in the supernatural has
given rise to a long tradition of staging and writing plays on that broad
theme on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

Two of the chapters in this book first appeared in earlier versions in the
following journals: Chapter 5 in Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
4, no. 2; and Chapter 6 (in Spanish) in Romance Notes 24, no. 1. Chapter 8
contains passages from two articles that appeared respectively in Latin
American Theatre Review 23, no. 2, and Afro-Hispanic Review 11, no. 1-3.
Some entries in the bibliography were published in “The Occult Arts in the
Golden Age,” a special issue of Critica Hispánica 15, no. 1.
PART ONE
Evolution
 I
Supernaturalism in Medieval
Spanish Drama

The term “supernatural” . . . denotes a fundamental category of religion,

namely the assertion or belief that there is an other reality, and one of
ultimate significance for man, which transcends the reality within
which our everyday experience unfolds.
Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels

After the fall of Rome and during the rise of Christianity, the
sophistication of the classical past was eroded. At best, only externals of the
greatness that had been Rome remained: roads, aqueducts, buildings, and
the like. Indeed, much of the Empire’s great architecture fell into decay
through disuse or abuse. Classical Latin had long before given way to the
vulgar tongue, and now it was often unrecognizable in the emerging
languages of a disjointed Europe. A largely uneducated and backward
populace, concerned with problems of daily life, had no use for the
literature of the classical civilizations, and thus much of it was lost as a
consequence of ignorance, indifference, or hostility. Rightly or wrongly, the
period has come to be known as the Dark Ages.
Ironically, it was through the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the
followers of Mohammed that the knowledge of the West was returned to it.
The great literary, scientific, and philosophical texts of the past might have
perished had not the majority of them been preserved in Arabic by Islamic
scholars in such centers of learning as Baghdad and Cairo. These texts, in
turn, were brought to Al-Andalus where, in the caliphates of Córdoba and
Seville, they attracted scholars from all of Europe. These Moorish courts
were, in fact, the first European universities.
Much of ancient knowledge passed into Christian Europe through such
enlightened Christian courts as that of the thirteenth-century monarch
Alfonso X of Castile, who had many of the texts translated from the Arabic
and who compiled considerable knowledge and lore of the era in
encyclopedic works, earning the sobriquet “the Wise.”
The conscientious toil of monks in monasteries illuminating manuscripts
helped disperse such writings throughout Christendom. These treasures of
art as well as wisdom were securely placed in reading rooms within
monasteries and in other libraries of the Church, later to be rediscovered in
the great period known as the Renaissance.
In Spain the rebirth of interest in Humanism was to occur in the Siglo de
Oro, or Golden Age, ranging from the consolidation of the Iberian
Peninsula in 1492 under their Most Catholic Monarchs Fernando and
Isabel, to the latter part of the seventeenth century when the death of Pedro
Calderón de la Barca marked the end of literary greatness. It was a
renaissance come full circle out of its origins in Muslim Al-Andalus.
In the centuries before the Renaissance, however, Europe led a curious
life founded in large part on the struggle for survival of religious ideologies.
A mixture of classical and barbaric mythologies gave medieval life a strong
pagan substratum that Christian dogma could not eradicate; even the
establishment of the Holy Office of the Inquisition relatively late in this
period did no more than point out how deeply rooted were many of the pre-
Christian traditions. Regardless of the outward acceptance of the Church by
medieval Europeans through Baptism and other sacraments, there continued
to exist an extrasocial underground of practices rooted in ancient beliefs
(Eleusinian Mysteries, Druidism, Gnosticism, Mithraism, Christian
heresies), many of whose origins have been lost in prehistory. The struggle
of the Church with these incompatible forces, which were first termed
superstitious and later condemned, is amply noted in the writings from the
earliest apologists to Augustine and Aquinas.
While the Church sought to regulate and then eliminate these pagan
traditions through excommunication (the assurance of eternal damnation),
the state (frequently allied to the Church during this period) bolstered the
spiritual attack through temporal tactics founded on laws that promised
strong punishment for unorthodox practices. A case in point was the Spain
of King Alfonso X.
The frequency of divination, necromancy, and other “black arts” in his
thirteenth-century kingdom prompted Alfonso X to define occult activities
and to attach suitable warnings against and punishments for their
practitioners. These regulations were contained in his voluminous
compendium of Gothic laws known as Las Siete Partidas. In Title 23, Law
1 of the last Partida, we read:

Divination means the same thing as assuming the power of God in order
to find out things which are to come. There are two kinds of divination;
the first is that which is accomplished by the aid of astronomy, which is
one of the seven liberal arts; and this, according to the law, is not
forbidden to be practiced by those who are masters and understand it
thoroughly; for the reason that the conclusions and estimates derived
from this art are ascertained by the natural course of the planets and other
stars, and are taken from the books of Ptolemy and other learned men,
who diligently cultivated the science. Others, however, who do not
understand it, should not work by means of it, but they should endeavor
to study and master the works of learned men. The second kind of
divination is that practiced by fortune-tellers, soothsayers and magicians
who investigate omens caused by the flights of birds, by sneezing and by
words called proverbs; or by those who cast lots, or gaze in water, or in
crystal, or in a mirror, or in the blade of a sword, or in any other bright
object; or who make images of metal, or any other substance whatsoever;
or practice divination on the head of a dead man, or that of an animal, or
in the palm of a child, or that of a virgin. We forbid impostors of this kind
and all others like them to live in our dominions, or to practice any of
these things here, because they are wicked and deceitful persons, and
great evils result to the country from their acts; and we also forbid
anyone to dare to entertain them in their houses or conceal them.1

The second law of the same Title contains the definition of necromancy and
related subjects:
 What is called necromantia, in Latin, is the strange art of calling up evil
spirits, and for the reason that great injury happens to the country from
the acts of men who engage in it, and especially because those who
believe in them and ask for information on this subject suffer many
accidents through fear caused by their going about at night looking for
things of this kind in strange places, so that some of them die or become
insane, or lose their minds; we therefore forbid that anyone shall dare to
practice or make use of such wickedness as this, because it is something
by which God is grieved and great harm results from it to men.
Moreover, we forbid anyone to dare to make images of wax or metal, or
any other figures to cause men to fall in love with women, or to put an
end to the affection which persons entertain towards one another. We also
forbid anyone to be so bold as to administer herbs or beverages to any
man or woman to render them enamoured, because it sometimes happens
that such beverages cause the death of those who take them and they
contract very serious diseases with which they are afflicted for life.

The reach of the definitions indicates the widespread practice of these black
arts and speaks for the necessity of strong regulatory laws. Alfonso
completed the treatise by setting strict punishments for these crimes, which
offended God and man; if convicted by the testimony of witnesses or by
their own confessions, the accused were to die, and any who had aided them
were to be banished from the kingdom for life. Practices with beneficial
ends, however, were omitted from the third law’s prosecution: “Such,
however, as practice enchantments or anything else with good intentions,
as, for instance, to cast out devils from the bodies of men; or to dissolve the
spell cast over husband and wife so that they are unable to perform their
marital duties; or to turn aside a cloud from which hail or a fog is
descending that it may not injure the crops; or to kill locusts or insects
which destroy grain or vines; or for any other beneficial purpose similar to
these, cannot be punished, but we decree that they shall be rewarded for it.”
While the state sought to curb the malevolent practices of magician and
witch through the promulgation of Las Siete Partidas, the Church promoted
the damnation of the guilty as a deterrent. That neither was successful to
any large extent is evident in the continuation of these nefarious activities
over the centuries that followed and in the struggle of the civil and religious