Vol. 5, No. 2, Fall 2006

[p. 154]

Edmund Lingan

Book Review

Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Theater and Drama. By Robert Lima. University Press of Kentucky, 2005; pp. 344. $55 cloth.

Reviewed by Edmund Lingan, Adjunct Lecturer at Baruch College, Tisch School of the Arts, and Rutgers University

In the introduction to Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Theater and Drama, Robert Lima describes his book as “a representative, in-depth comparative study of Western mythological, folkloric, and religious beliefs regarding evil as expressed in theatre and drama from the classical times to the present” (6) and asserts that  “no other critical study has ranged as widely in time or assessed so many works on the subject of occult thematics in Western theatre and drama” (9).  Lima has written some unique interpretations of plays and constructed a bibliography of plays that will be useful to other scholars of theatre with supernatural themes, but Stages of Evil fails to provide a comprehensive overview of the relationship between the occult and theatre.

Stages of Evil is divided into a series of sections containing chapters that give examples of what Lima claims to be the “phases” of the “evolution” of the representation of evil on the stage and in written texts (6).  Part One, “The Matter of the Underworld,” contains Chapter One, which focuses on the ancient origins of the Hell Mouth motif that appears in medieval dramas and iconography.  Part 2, “Metamorphosis of Gods,” contains Chapter Two and Chapter Three.  Chapter Two argues that Harlequin is derived from mythical figures associated with “the Central and Northern European barbaric culture” and “the classical tradition of the Mediterranean” (49).  Chapter Three distinguishes between ceremonial magic and witchcraft in Fernando de Rojas’s Tragicomedia de Calixto y Meliba. In this chapter, Lima argues that “magic and witchcraft are two distinct and mutually exclusive esoteric pursuits—the one being ritualistic and the other religious” (7).  Lima supports this point with Margaret Murray’s The Witch Cult in Western Europe (1921), an anthropological text that is viewed as undependable and questionable by many scholars today.  Part 3, “Possession and Exorcism,” contains six chapters.  Chapter Four contemplates whether Euripides’ Dionysus was a “nature deity” or a “deranged mortal” in The Bacchae (7). Chapter Five explores how the cabbalistic doctrines of metempsychosis, possession, and exorcism operate in Sholem An-Sky’s The Dybbuk by comparing the text of the play to concepts contained in the Zohar (120). [p. 155] Chapter Six interprets Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones as the regression of a possessed mind into “an ironic triumph of superstition” (7). In Chapter Seven Lima argues that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible shows that the Salem witch-hunts were, in part, a combination of sexual repression the fear of Satan, and in Chapter Eight Lima interprets Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun as a work indicting political powers and public credulity for the execution of Urbain Grandier. In Chapter Nine, Lima discusses how Francisco Neiva plays on the theme of the vampire to reveal the decadence of human society in his play Nosferatu.  In Part 4, “Cauldron and Cave,” Lima explores the significance of witches and caves in supernatural and occult dramas.  Lima considers Elizabethan and Jacobean conceptions of witches and witchcraft in Chapter Ten, and in Chapter Eleven he reveals how caves are depicted as ideal settings for the practice of magic in medieval and renaissance drama.

At the end of Stages of Evil there is a bibliography of European and American plays on topics such as the occult, recurring supernatural characters of folklore (such as werewolves and vampires), and famous characters associated with the occult or the supernatural (such as Faust and Joan of Arc).  The list of topics in the bibliography includes: alchemy, astrology, Cassandra/sybils, cave, Circe, demonic pact, devil, Don Juan, fairies, Faust, ghosts/specters/séances/spiritism, Harlequin, Joan of Arc, last judgement, Lilith, lycanthropy, magic, Medea, Merlin, mouth of hell, possession/exorcism, Tiresias, wild man, and witchcraft.

Although Lima’s biography is potentially useful and his book covers a wide range of plays and historical eras, Stages of Evil is far from a complete examination of the relationship between the occult and theatre.  Lima excludes from his book esoteric plays written during the fin-de-siècle Occult Revival by playwrights such as August Strindberg, Maurice Maeterlinck, W. B. Yeats, and Andrei Bely. This exclusion mirrors the lack of reference in Stages of Evil to scholarly texts published in the 1980’s and 1990’s that deepen the knowledge of the relationship between occultism and symbolist theatre in the field of theatre studies. Such works include Frantisek Deak’s Symbolist Theatre: The Formation of an Avant-Garde, Daniel Gerould’s Doubles, Demons, and Dreamers, and Maria Carlson’s “No Religion Higher Than Truth”: A History of the Theosophical Movement in Russia, 1875-1922.  

In addition to leaving out these relevant works, Lima supports many of his statements about the history of witchcraft with Margaret Murray’s previously mentioned Witch Cult in Western Europe.  Lima accepts her thesis that the witches who were tormented during the European and American witch-hunts of [p. 156] the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries were the practitioners of an ancient, pre-Christian Dianic cult that has continued into the present in the modern witchcraft religion known as “Wicca” (84).  In the following quotation, Lima summarizes Murray’s thesis:

Witchcraft is, as we have seen, a pre-Christian [Lima’s emphasis] religion whose deities embody  primal natural and cosmic principles.  There is no Satan or Devil in witchcraft.  When Christianity became the “establishment” religion of Europe, it superimposed its conception of evil on pagan beliefs, effectively personifying Satan in some deities of the ancient religions that it could not assimilate into its benefic pantheon of saints.  Thus, the Old Religion, Wicca, the Craft of the Wise, witchcraft, came to be perceived as worship of the Devil. (n. 156)

Lima’s use of Murray’s thesis is problematic. As Ronald Hutton explains in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford, 1999), several British historians in the 1970’s—most notably Keith Thomas and Norman Cohn—produced academic research that threw Murray’s witchcraft thesis into serious question.  Contemporary anthropologists and historians do not accept Murray’s thesis.

Stages of Evil: Occultism in Western Theater and Drama does not represent an authoritative work on the relationship between the occult and theatre.  Rather, it is a collection of essays about plays that treat themes such as the occult, magic, witchcraft, and the supernatural. Some of these essays are quite insightful, and they demonstrate that Lima has been working on the subject of the book for many years. As mentioned earlier, Lima offers an enlightening discussion in Chapter Five about the place of metempsychosis—the transfer of a human or animal soul at death into the body of the same or different species—in Jewish mysticism.  His exploration of the vampire as a symbol of empty, decadent power in relation to Francisca Nieva’s Nosferatu is convincing and intelligent. However, Lima does not consider the flurry of occult dramas that appeared in Europe and America during the Occult Revival that lasted from roughly 1840 until the end of World War II.  He does not acknowledge a great deal of relevant research and rests many of his claims upon the authority of outdated and, in some cases, dubious scholarship.Thus, theatre scholars are still waiting for a comprehensive study of occultism and the theatre.