If you’ve been following along, we’ve been posting on a series of seven short videos wherein we discuss our creative process and the lessons we learned along the way during our twenty years producing The Rites of Eleusis. In this video Melissa talks about the idea of “Found Objects Art”, which applies in ways that might surprise you!
Seven Lessons – Lesson Six, The Rite of Jupiter: Found Objects Art
In other news, yesterday we rolled out some updates to our Past Projects page. Check it out, and drop us a comment to let us know what you think.
During this week we are hoping to hear back from two more Film Festivals about whether or not The Rite of Saturn will be featured. We’ll let you know as soon as we do!
Once we have more information for virtual attendance at the Madrid International Film Festival, we will be posting it here as well!
Thanks again to everyone who has been watching The Rites of Eleusis, and sharing the videos with their friends. The outpouring of support has been moving, and we are so grateful to everyone who helped to make this work a reality!
The last two posts have been a discussion of mythology and symbol, and how we can employ them in crisis management and problem solving.
This is an excellent jumping off point for the real power house of esoteric thought and practice, ritual.
We are all familiar with rituals. Weddings, funerals, Baptisms, Proms, Christmas, Easter, Halloween and the Forth of July are all cultural rituals that we are literally so accustom to that most people might not even realize that they represent the firmament that our lives revolve around. These events are where families connect, unions are cemented, news shared, achievements celebrated, traditions established and memories created.
If advertising has taught us nothing else, it has taught us that these rituals represent an opportunity to express the ideal. The perfect dress, or costume, or dish, or song will transform an event into the living embodiment of that ideal. While this is an exploitation of the drive to create a life that reflects our inner values (and the marketing of that drive for financial gain) these impulses exist to be exploited, and we can learn some effective means of doing so.
All that advertising is accurate in so far as the trappings of ritual have the ability to promote it’s efficacy. This is because the attention to detail we put into those trappings taps into the real driving force, the thing that the trappings represent: Intention.
Intention – Framing the Mythic Narrative
The intention behind a ritual act is the story that provides context for that action. It is what transforms the idea of blowing shit up for fun into a celebration of Liberty on the Forth of July! It is perhaps more difficult to convince your friends and family that it is a good day, in the middle of the driest part of the year, to blow shit up. But present the narrative that you are doing so in commemoration of an act of rebellion against tyranny, and it is suddenly a picnic with explosions, and everyone wants to be there!
That’s fine, you say, but that is hardly magick!
Except it is. It is an action undertaken to inculcate a specific type of consciousness, under specific circumstances, during a particular time of day at a particular time of the year. There is nothing more or less magickal in the history of mankind than that, as it is the same technology at work during a Christian Communion, a Wedding, or the Invocation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
A set of actions undertaken in a specific context in order to create a specific state of awareness, that is ritual.
So, the question becomes, how can you use this to your advantage? Great question! First you need to learn to control it!
Banishing
Once you start to work with symbols, you are going to awaken certain motives or complexes within your conscious mind that have been resting in your unconscious, where they have likely been wreaking havoc. This is a perfectly natural part of the process, that is nevertheless problematic, as they can rear their heads at inopportune moments. If only there were a way to shut them off!
Enter the banishing.
Simply speaking, a banishing is a ritual that creates a space or circle in which to work. It is a barrier against outside influence. And it is the cornerstone of any beginning practice.
You can employ it in daily practice to set up a sacred space for meditation. You can employ it before a job interview to quiet your racing mind. You can learn to do it in your sleep and literally confront nightmares with it. It is a simple, powerful and effective tool.
Rather than recreate a full course of study here, I am going to recommend several books that will be useful for a beginner if this is something you would like to explore. After all, this blog is little more than an overview tinged with personal observations, not a fully fleshed out course of study.
The first would be “Magick in Theory and Practice” by Aleister Crowley. Like the names says, it is a comprehensive guide to the Art. It also contains a few intentional blinds that a careful reading of the footnotes should clarify, but it can be difficult to interpret for beginners, especially if you are working without the benefit of guidance.
With that in mind, I find The Magick of Aleister Crowley by Lon Milo DuQuette much more approachable, containing many practical instructions for doing the work on your own.
Lastly, because this is still a theater blog, how about we premiere a clip of the Ritual of the Pentagram from The Rite of Saturn? The video clip was edited by Bob Jones, the audio provided by Christian Ballard, while the scene features Ryan Holsather, Melissa Holm, Josh Kibbey, Daniel Christensen and Richard Cardone. The group adaptation was conceived by director Melissa Holm and developed by the ensemble.
The Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram is a standard Banishing, although this version employs Invoking Earth Pentagrams. (If you want to know what that means, maybe pick up one or both of the books I suggested.)
One of the little aphorisms I have said to myself over the years, just to keep myself going, is that “Faith can certainly move mountains, in so far as we employ our faith to move that mountain one rock at a time.” All art is magick. All creation falls into the mundane order of miracles we shape with our will, and build with our sinews. Inspiration and perspiration are closely interwoven.
With that in mind, picking up where we left off in our previous post, we will proceed to step three of our Doing Rites Right flow chart.
3. Have your planning meetings
This step is much as we covered in the first post in this series, but you will likely need to plan several meetings, covering specific areas. Don’t neglect any of the A,B,Cs we covered before: Artisit Vision, Budget, Casting, Dates, Effects and Fallout!
Come prepared with copies of the annotated script that you can share with your cast and crew; copies that they can scribble on and generally use to keep track of evolving landscape of your vision. Your meeting topic may include:
Stagecraft and Lighting – depending on whether you are using a theater, you may need a professional for this. Props – Don’t forget to give yourself time to make these before rehearsal, so your cast can work with them. Costumes – Depending on the theme, thrift stores can be a fantastic resource. Casting – As your production size increases, your cast size may too. You may need to plan for auditions, so be sure to give yourself some advance time to advertise.
The Rite of Mercury Set, 2010
Sets – These can be simple or complex. Anything you can do with theater cubes will make your life easier, but if you are like me, you will what to do something big. Give yourself a lot of time to figure out how to construct your vision. Start with a cardboard model. I built them out of pizza boxes with duct tape. Rehearsal Schedule – Plan the number of rehearsals based on the chart about, then add 2 for tech and dress rehearsal. It is best if you plan scene by scene, and give cast members the night off it they are not in the scenes being rehearsed that night. For our productions, music and choral rehearsals – This is a whole other aspect, and should be planned prior to the blocking rehearsals, so that the choir knows it’s parts before they start acting. For each of these you will need to plan who will be responsible for the task, what sort of time frame will be required, and what sort of budget you will need.
4. Readers-Theater/Rehearsal
With a more complex vision, you will require a more granular rehearsal. Each scene and poem will need to be broken down and run repeatedly.
You can still start with a readers-theater in an early rehearsal in order to familiarize the cast with the structure, and brainstorm ideas for interactions between the characters.
Given the spartan nature of the script notes, there will be a great many questions about what motivates these characters, and how you choose to answer these questions will shape your presentation. This process will go on throughout the rehearsal schedule.
As your performance date approaches, you may find yourself invoking a rule coined by Melissa during our runs: “Simplify, do not embellish.” Your vision may be rich and complex, and creating it is certainly part of the learning process, but it will not always translate to stage. At some point, you will have to let go of the vision a little bit in order to be ready for opening night. Don’t let this discourage you! It is part of the process.
Sol Crucified, The Rite of Sol, 2012
5. Presentation
Again, depending on scale, you may do a single performance, or many. By the time opening night rolls around, the work of the director should be done. Again, I strongly advise that once the show opens, there in no more tweaking. The cast will have an idea how the show should run, and changes at this point will simply cause confusion and undermine the performance.
Allow the magick to run it’s course.
6. Review and relax. At this stage in the game, we may be talking about theatrical reviews. Here I would urge you, don’t be too worried about it. As it turns out, criticism falls into two categories. Useful, and stupid. Seriously.
A useful critique from an eloquent and professional source will undoubtedly discuss areas where your presentation either succeeded of failed in the eyes of the critic. It will contain information on the impressions that the critic received during the staging, and some indication about whether they would recommend their readers attend. Even a negative review might be very helpful in shaping your future work.
A stupid review is usually provided by someone who is unpaid on the internet. It will contain expletives, insults, and no useful information. Disregard these. Don’t even read the whole thing. If it is a comment you have control over, delete it and move on.
And don’t forget to relax and enjoy your achievement! Laugh about the hard parts! Consider all you have learned! And above all:
Party in a construction site! The Rite of Saturn 2018, photo by David Parks
Having covered getting started last post, we are going progress to advice on scaling the Rites to a larger size. Not everyone is going to want to do this. Remember that The Rites of Eleusis started out as elaborate house parties, and an intimate setting is very enjoyable, and illuminating for performers and attendees.
Doing the Rites on a large scale is certainly not a requirement, but it is possible if you want to do it, and following these steps, mostly painless.
As you recall I wrote about rehearsal time and planning, and I am going to start by including that information here, and then expand upon it.
[You may also note that while I copied this, I corrected it. Because for some reason I wrote all of this backward in the original post. I fixed it there, too.]
“Plan your rehearsal dates. I have a handy guide for amount of rehearsal time required. Each of the Rites runs a little more than an hour if not embellished.
Readers-Theater: One hours of rehearsal per 20 minutes of stage time. On-Book: One hour of rehearsal per 15 minutes of stage time. Memorized: One hour of rehearsal per 10 minutes of stage time. Embellished: One hour of rehearsal per 5 minutes of stage time.
Using the above rules, a “Readers-Theater” style presentation, three one hour rehearsals would be adequate. For an “On-Script” presentation, four one hour rehearsals is called for. For a memorized production, 6 rehearsals is optimal, with everyone off book for the final two. For an embellished production, which will probably run closer to two hours, you will need to plan as many as a dozen two hour rehearsals. Note that I am talking about actual rehearsal time. You can plan for 15 minutes at the beginning and end of meetings to discuss related matters like costumes, props, etc.”
Disregarding the information on shorter presentations, this handy guide is very useful for planning your rehearsal schedule, and it assumes that you have planned every embellishment in advance.
Set building for The Rite of Sol, 2012
Read that again: in order to employ this schedule, you will need to plan every embellishment in advance!
What this means is that, before you launch into one of the larger presentations of The Rites of Eleusis, you are going to have to spend some serious time doing research and planning. I cannot recommend more strongly that if you plan to stage a large production, you complete your annotations before you start your auditions. For the record, this is something Melissa Holm took point on throughout our productions, and excelled at. This inclusion of annotation, will result is some adaptation of our previous steps. They are very similar in essence, but differ in execution, just as a larger presentation will differ in scale.
Rehearsal for The Rite of Mars, 2014
1. Find your cohort
Imagine and approach who you would like to work with, but be ready to be flexible. Your cohort now becomes your dream team, and you might not be able to get all of them on-board, as a larger lead time and rehearsal schedule will shrink your available pool. That said, I make this step one because:
A. People who are skilled are busy, so asking early allows them to free their calendar.
B. If you can work your schedule around people with specific skills, it will inform your annotations and adaptations early in the process. We often started penciling rehearsal and performance dates 2 years in advance for our productions, and it worked rather well.
Pan and Cancer, The Rite of Luna, 2005 Photo by Raven Erling
2. Find your director (or plan your direction!)
Much as previously stated, you will need to select your director at this point, and refine your vision. This is where script annotation happens! Other than your specialty talent from the previous step, your really shouldn’t worry too much about casting until the annotation is 80% completed.
As the annotation takes time, you will find that if you cast before your annotations are complete, attrition will lead to recasting. Better to wait until you are within 6 to 8 months of your target performance date before really casting.
Unless you have an encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and symbolism, you should plan on doing a great deal of research at this stage. You should also read the Rite you are planning to stage repeatedly, and look for your own inspiration within the poetry.
Lastly, you are entirely free to substitute different poetry, or to edit the verses included in the original Rites. Allow yourself the latitude to make this artwork your own, and shape it into what you truly desire. Now, with this in mind, I am going to provide an example of an annotated Rite of Venus I accidentally found in 2006 when I forwarded the link to our cast without reading it. This is NOT the Rite of Venus presented by Aleister Crowley, but it is a Rite of Venus clearly adapted from his work, and one it may have been a great deal of fun to present.
If you have been enjoying our blog posts so far, but thinking, “I really want this to get more granular and nerdy!” well, you are in for a treat. And since I am going out on a limb with my nerdy self, feel free to play along at home!
In part three of our discussion of The Rites of Eleusis as Magickal Textbook (or study guide, if you will) we are going to wander into the weeds of interpretation!
To start with, allow me to say for the record, “I love The Rites of Eleusis presented as strict A.:. A.:. style rituals.” If you are a purist, who wants to present the material exactly as Aleister Crowley did, to the best of your ability, I am all for it! Hell, yes! And please, let us know when you are staging it! Put a link in the comments! I’d love to be there, and will bring friends!
Also, God I hope you find a violinist who can perform that music! I have never seen that done, and would LOVE it! I just wanted to go on record and say that as much as I love interpretation, I love all the interpretations, including the purist variety.
The Rite of Saturn – Caxton Hall, London 1910
That said, our work with the Rites is highly interpretive, and the study that informs our interpretation can be broad and eclectic. As an example: Let’s discuss Capricornus Emissarius from The Rite of Saturn. (If you didn’t make it to see The Rite of Saturn last September, we are sorry you missed it! You’ll have to wait for the video in June to watch all the scenes I am referring to. I included pictures.)
In order to fully appreciate our interpretation of Capricornus Emissarius in The Rite of Saturn, allow me to provide this helpful chart:
You can see that we have graphed the astrological figures present in each Rite against the dominant planetary force, and included the small card Tarot attributions that present information along the same axis. The meanings of these cards in the Tarot also include numerical and elemental influence, much as the characters in The Rites incorporate additional influences from the paths and myths associated with the God forms.
You may note that there are no astrological attributions for Jupiter. There are several ways that the central figures can be interpreted in The Rite of Jupiter, and strict astrology is the least satisfying. Seeing as the Sphinx represents the attributes of the Fixed Signs of the Zodiac taken in conjunction with one another (see The Key to the Mysteries by Eliphas Levi), it is not much of a stretch to interpret Hermanubis as the Mutable Signs, and Typhon as the Cardinal Signs.
This is consistent with the alchemical attributions associated with the elements that the figures on the wheel represent, Salt being Fixed, Mercury being Mutable and Sulfur being Cardinal.
The Wheel of Fortune from The Book of Thoth
Additionally, we can interpret the principal characters in The Rite of Jupiter as exemplifying all of the planetary rulers from The Rites that follow, but presented in their infancy. Thus Typhon represents Mars, Dionysus as the hidden God becomes Sol, The Sphinx evolves into Venus, Hermanubis becomes Mercury and Hebe and Ganymede become Luna and Pan, respectively.
Taken in combination, these two interpretations are immanently more satisfying than any singular astrological attribution for these figures in The Rite of Jupiter, which is why I left them off the chart. But I digress.
Returning to the question of the attribution of Capricornus Emissarius. First note that Sagittarius, alone, of all the astrological signs, has no representative in The Rites of Eleusis, unless you ascribe that association to Capricornus Emissarius. Otherwise, this seems like rather an obvious oversight. But looking at the various meanings of Emissarius we have: “emisary”, “agent”, “spy” and the literal meaning “stallion”. If we see Capricornus Emissarius as a spy (as he is depicted in The Rite of Saturn) and as the precursor to Capricorn, Sagittarius becomes a logical attribution.
Especially given the literal meaning stallion, which we turned into a double-entendre, as horse is also slang for heroin, and our Capricornus Emissarius was depicted as an alchemist, creating laudanum. To add another layer, the conjunction of Saturn and Sagittarius is depicted in the 10 of Wands in the Rider-Waite Tarot. Which is just the sort of thing one might symbolically use to their advantage in creating the iconography of a scene. (Tip of the hat to Melissa Holm and Ryan Holsather, who developed this motif so beautifully, and Richard Cardone, who breathed life into it).
The 10 of Wands, Rider-Waite Tarot DeckRichard Cardone as Capricornus Emissarius The Rite of Saturn, 2018
Obviously, this is all interpretive! Far outside of the bounds of anything we can claim Aleister Crowley intended, but that is hardly the point.
As creative magician, we should always look deeper, strive for more! Exceed! What wild interpretations have you seen? Anything you would like to share?
