Edmund Lingan

University of Toledo · Theatre and Film

This book explores the religious foundations, political and social significance, and aesthetic aspects of the theatre created by the leaders of the Occult Revival. Lingan shows how theatre contributed to the fragmentation of Western religious culture and how contemporary theatre plays a part in the development of alternative, occult religions.

This article illuminates a modern shift in the relationship between theatre and religion that became apparent during the Occult Revival that thrived in Europe and the United States between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It does this by exploring how Edouard Schuré, Katherine Tingley, and Rudolf Steiner combined theatre with an e...

Ansuman Biswas, Theatre, from Body States: The Pilot Project, 2005.Photo: Courtesy Franc Chamberlain. This special section of PAJ, entitled “Art and the Spiritual,” concerns a surge of interest in spirituality that currently informs the creation of art across a wide range of disciplines. In the fields of performance art, film, sculpture, video inst...

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28.3 (2006) 23-38 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City held an exhibition between September 27 and December 31, 2005, entitled The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, in which more than 120 photographs taken between the 1860s and World War II were displayed. Most of the photos in the exhibiti...

In the art of theatre, many effects are created by way of a thorough understanding of the performance space , and also through the manipulation of the borders that divide the architecture of the theatre building from the temporary scenery of a production, the actors from the audience. These realms—the building, the scenery/stage, the auditorium—hav...

This essay explores the specific way in which two of the leading figures of the Occult Revival “ Katherine Tingley and Gerald Gardner (who established Wicca, the modern witchcraft religion) ” related nature to theatre and dramatic rituals as they sought to embody their spiritual teachings through theatre, drama, and performance. Tingley was leader...

Aleister Crowley’s (1875–1947; see figure 4.1) Rite of Saturn premiered at London’s Caxton Hall in 1910. This was the first of seven magical rituals that were performed between October 19 and November 30, as part of a larger work titled Rites of Eleusis.1 Crowley’s Rites of Eleusis were a mixture of poetry, ecstatic dance, music, and ceremonial mag...

Point Loma, California, which is a few miles west of San Diego, was once the site of what could justifiably be considered the most elaborate US experiment in occult theatre. Between 1897 and 1929, this multi-acre plot of land was developed and overseen by Katherine Tingley (figure 2.1), the leader of the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Socie...

Although Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) never used the term “religion” to define his occult worldview, Anthroposophy, his four Anthroposophical mystery dramas were written to achieve a religious purpose: they represented Steiner’s descriptions of a supersensory world peopled with spiritual beings. Steiner taught that human beings can develop the power...

This chapter concerns the theatrical aspects of two related occult movements that were established in England near the middle of the twentieth century: Alex Mathews’s (1890–1942) Rosicrucian Order Crotona Fellowship (ROCF) and Gardnerian Wicca, which is a modern witchcraft religion that Gerald Brousseau Gardner (1884–1964) revealed to the public in...

There is no clear line of demarcation that shows the point when the Occult Revival ended and neo-pagan performance began. Although occultists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized things differently than many of the ceremonial magicians, witches, and pagans who appeared between the mid-twentieth century and the present, it...

Some historians credit Gardner with the inauguration of a new and performance-rich current of esoteric spirituality that began to bloom and diversify in the 1960s. This twentieth-century current of esotericism bore many connections to ideas and practices that thrived during the Occult Revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, bu...

From the spiritualist mediums who apparently secreted ghostly ectoplasms from their bodies to members of secret societies who practiced ceremonial magic with pentagrams, candles, and swords, theatricality was central to the Occult Revival that flourished in Europe and the United States between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The...

In Point Loma, California, which is a small town a few miles west of San Diego, stand two eye-catching buildings on what is now the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University. One is a round building topped with what resembles a three-dimensional, purple, stained-glass teardrop. The other is an outdoor theatre with orchestra and hillside seating that...

Lance Gharavi’s Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama: Aleksandr Blok’s The Rose and the Cross is described by its publishers as “two books in one,” because it contains two distinct sections. The first section contains Gharavi’s introduction to and extensive commentary on Blok’s 1913 play, The Rose and the Cross, and the second section co...

Michael Mangan's Performing Dark Arts is a lively study of "the way in which the meanings of magic change in relation to the society in which the magic is produced" (p. 172). With the word "conjuring," Mangan refers to theatrical magic, of the sort that most Americans associate with David Copperfield and Harry Houdini. A skillful blend of magic his...