Short entries this week and next, as we’re coming up to the opening of Rash Acts, living it day and night. Life at this point becomes akin to ventricular fibrillation — look it up in Wikipedia, it’s as bad as it sounds.

But I’m still studying Spanish on morning walks, and reading two books relating to magic. The first is Eros and Magic in the Renaissance by I.P. Couliano, a studiously turgid but fascinating book about the philosophic tradition underlying the Renaissance understanding of magical practice. I’m interested not only in what the actual practices were in “literate” magic as opposed to folk magic, but also how magicians themselves viewed their goals and what resonances Prospero’s magical acts would have with a Jacobean audience. Some of that is fairly obvious, but Couliano’s book relates magic to a much broader philosophic spectrum, based heavily in spirit/body duality, which I think links to the strangely ambivalent role of eros in The Tempest.

The second is the very well written and researched Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley by Lawrence Sutin, about a man who was as dead-serious about his magic as Prospero and even more paradoxical. I’d hardly portray Prospero as an Italianate Crowley, but there are extraordinary psychological parallels in his will and obsessions. I’m interested in the experience of an individual utterly immersed, as Prospero is, in the exercise of occult powers, and while I’ve read a bit about John Dee and Robert Fludd — magicians contemporary with Shakespeare — Crowley’s relatively modern-day experience is much more accessible. I’ll write more on this as I forge through these books.

For The Tempest to work, we have to feel that Prospero is tapped deeply into a center of power. Shakespeare tells us little about this, but I think the figure of the mage was much more powerful — and fearful — on the Jacobean stage than at present, now watered down by four centuries of fiction, plays, rabbits from hats, sci fi and Disney. It’s the difference between seeing cowboys toting six-shooters in the movies and having a friend walk into your house with a pistol in hand.

If The Tempest is about Prospero’s coping with his own unbridled power and his struggle to steer this mighty force in the direction he wants it to go, then we have to sense the reality of that power, the demands it makes upon him. He calls to mind the revolutionary leader hard-pressed to control what he’s unleashed and to adhere to his ideals when the call is for blood. Or the scientists at the heart of the Manhattan Project, forcing their concentration of will to focus the unimaginable magical act that erupted over Hiroshima. That’s what he’s harnessing and trying to hold in harness.

What are Prospero’s actual rituals? Book knowledge is central to it, we know, involving alchemy, astrology and the vast literature of the Hermetic tradition. But no magician just reads a book and waves a wand. The heart of it in indeed analogous to the concentrated bombardment of electrons — the mage’s focus of will — that spurs nuclear fission. The techniques are diverse: trance, chant, exhaustion, pain, ordeal, bloodshed, sex acts, drugs, emotion-charged substances & symbols, song, dance, drums, fire, mandalas, mudras. What has he done to enslave spirits, make the dead walk, and raise a tempest?

We do need to work out the particulars and at least suggest them on stage. But the core of it, I think, is that the evolution of the mage is always through a life passage, an initiation. Like Paul’s seizure on the road to Damascus, it’s a rebirth, and you’re never the same again. There’s a gain, but also a terrible loss of ego in order to forge a will.

I think the first shock came with the loss of Prospero’s wife in childbirth, which plunged him into magical studies just as Victor Frankenstein was shocked by human mortality with the death of his mother. In the ensuing three years he gave up all interest in governing, and his brother lost no time in asserting power. Miranda was three at the time of the coup, and I feel the leaky-boat journey was the ordeal wherein the raw initiate became a master. Like Jesus’ three days in hell before resurrection, Prospero came ashore in the island with the powers of a god.

That’s all fantasy, with a few scant bits of text to support it, but it seems to me consistent within itself and with the text. And so, for now, we’ll go with that. The greater question is in the play itself, in his capacity, by the end, to give it all up, to achieve rebirth back into his old form. But that’s powerful to us only if it’s as profound a journey as his journey into magic was to start with.

That’s it for this week.
Peace & joy–
Conrad