Dark Prisms

Occultism in Hispanic Drama

Robert Lima

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780813192864
  9780813119090
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813184500
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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 establishments to eradicate what they considered the Devil’s plague, the work of anti-Christ.

Medieval Spanish literature also points to the prevalence of occultism, be it mystical or profane, in the daily life of court and populace. The earliest devil pact extant in Spanish literature dates from the middle of the thirteenth century; it is the Miraglo de Teófilo (Miracle of Theophilus), possibly derived from Rutebeuf’s chronicle, which recounts the tale of a bishop’s secular deputy who, being unjustly deprived of his post and then driven by resulting bitterness, sells his soul to Satan. Later, torn by his continuing resentment on the one hand and his deep Christian faith on the other, Theophilus finally selects the right-hand path and is saved by the Virgin Mary’s intercession. This theme of the devil pact, with or without salvation, would become the core of many plays of the Golden Age; it would have particular delineation in Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El esclavo del demonio (The Devil’s Slave) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El mágico prodigioso (The Prodigious Magician).²

The story of Theophilus appears in two medieval Spanish works that stress the religious conception of the topic. In Los milagros de Nuestra Señora (The Miracles of Our Lady) Gonzalo de Berceo recounts the tale in miracle number twenty-four, and in Las cantigas de Santa María (The Canticles of Holy Mary) Alfonso X, “the Wise,” gives his version in the third canticle. Both works contain many other references to the occult, such as miracles, wonders, superstitions, enchantments, possession and satanic pacts. Considered by some as pietistic collections, Berceo’s Milagros and Alfonso’s Cantigas continue to be studied as examples of dramatic staging, for there is some conjecture that the miracles in both texts may have been presented in the round. Indeed, certain miniatures in the Códice Rico of the Cantigas point to the use of current staging techniques in the artists’ creation of the miniatures.³

Such novels of chivalry as El caballero Cifar (The Knight Cifar) and Amadis de Gaula (Amadis of Gaul), together with those Arthurian and Carolingian legends translated into Iberian romance, gorged themselves on the fantastic and the occult. The novel of chivalry became a milieu of esoteric operations presided over by Merlin and his kith and kin; the supra- and supernatural were unleashed to fly and leap, appear and disappear at the flick of a wand or the dropping of a demonic name. It was this exorbitance that impelled Cervantes to deal the genre, already moribund, its fatal wound in Don Quijote.

A similar interest in occult matters can be noted in the drama. The oldest extant play from the early Middle Ages in the Iberian Peninsula is a twelfth-century fragment of 147 verses, which has come to be known as the Auto de los Reyes Magos (The Play of the Magi); it is the real beginning of occultism as a subject for drama in Spain. The remnant of five brief scenes from the one surviving act of a longer work has been given its title solely on the basis of the motif on which it centers, a gloss from the Gospel of Matthew. The emphasis is on three personages who enter one by one—not the Three Kings of later tradition but the Magi of the Zoroastrian religion (or simply astrologers of Oriental heritage)—on their journey after a mysterious star, which each has followed from his realm.

GASPAR (Alone): I do not know what star that is!

This is the first that I have seen it,

since its birth is very recent. . . .

BALTHASAR (Alone): This star confounds me; I know not

whence it comes, who brings or holds it.

Why does this sign exist? . . .

MELCHIOR (Alone): That star does not belong up there

or I am not a good astrologer.

GASPAR (To Balthasar):

Have you ever seen such a wonder?

A star has been born.⁴

Having joined in the quest to follow the star, they visit the court of King Herod, the puppet set up by Rome to rule over the Jews, hoping to learn the exact whereabouts of a newborn king whose sign in the sky has led them to the city. Upon their departure, Herod summons his astrologers, learned men, and seers to verify that what the foreign wise men told him was true.

The fragment is, of course, a segment of the familiar story of the Nativity and as such qualifies as a Mystery Play, dealing as a whole with an aspect of Christ’s life. Yet, it is curious that the only verses of the longer play that have been preserved are the ones dealing with the supernatural aspects of the birth of Christ, itself an event of outstanding proportions, for it is the manifestation of God as man in the Christian belief system. Separated from the rest of the work as it is (historical irony or deliberate act?), this fragment acquires an aura of mystery and real poignancy: three astrologers from distant lands, a strange new star in the heavens, a superstitious King, court astrologers and seers. The only supernatural aspect of the original story missing from the Spanish fragment is that of the vision or dream of the Magi in which an angel advises them to leave Herod’s court. The Auto de los Reyes Magos becomes another important indication of the occult ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Evolution
• Part Two: Devolution
• Part Three: Bibliography
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index