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Note: my apologies for any typos or misrepresentations of the text - please consider purchasing the book. Christine C. Schnusenberg: "The mythico-dramatic scenarios of the primeval acts of the gods, heroes, and ancestors that we study in the following chapters were rooted in the rhythmic reenactment of the various seasonal festivals. The insertions of the seasons into the annual cycle were the cradle in which the acts of the gods, heroes, and ancestors of the beginning were embedded. During the appointed sacred time, these acts were retrieved, reenacted, and augmented in a process of mimesis or imitation, renewing the world, humanity, and society within the boundaries of sacred space. During the reenactment of the creation drama, temporal and spatial symbolism and iconic configurations intertwined. They intertwined within the structure of the etymologically related terms tempus (time) and templum (temple). Both tempus and templum relate to an intercession or crossing or turning. This designation of a cross-section is embedded in the very structure of the universe. The axis mundi, that is, the center of the world or the templum, is that center point at which creation occurred and emanated from there into the four cardinal points of the Earth. It designates a spatial turning, as axis mundi, or world axis, implies. The tempus is also a turning within the seasonal structures or within the spatial-temporal horizon. According to the ancients, the cross is the structural law of the universe..." [4] The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama "The seasons were intertwined with the wide spectrum of nature and its agricultural cycles, with the natural concrete phenomena of these cycles, such as sunrises and sunsets, the waxing the full and the waning moon, the rising and abatement of the Nile or the flowing of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the acts of planting and sowing new seeds or tending to a new flock, the blossoming and the reaping of the harvest. The New Year was embedded in the rhythms of the seasons at a point of juncture, where an old cycle ended and a new season began. This was a critical period of transition, a rite of passage, a passover from one period to another: from a season of darkness to a season of light, from a parched to a rainy season, from periods of inundation to dryness and drought. In the structure of the New Year and its festivals, end and beginning were intricately interwoven; the seasonal harvest and the beginning of the new season were of existential and ontological significance, for they tied in with human origins at a certain point in time. There was therefore a genuine concern for renewal of the cosmos, of humanity and human society. For the ancient Egyptians, the entire world was a theater involving every aspect of creation and its renewal during the seasonal festivals, with the pharaoh at center stage to restore Ma'at: order, truth, and justice. In Roman culture, the rotation of solar, lunar, and stellar constellations in the heavens regulated mimetically the periodicity and cycles of the various pompae, ludi, and life of the theater, with the king or emperor as the focal point to mantain the peace of the gods..." [5-6] The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama "Futhermore, in discussing liturgical drama and theater and its traditional mimetic patterns, it is necessary to understand the dramatic structure of the festival as myth, as drama or theater par excellence. We must try to envision that in its way of imagining the world, the reenactment or rendering of the cosmogonic myth at the new Year was filled with creative powers that involved mimetic configurations of the productive imagination. In this mimetic proess, a gesture, a glance, a symbol or configuration of symbols, of songs and dances within a vast cosmological framework, could invoke the realities of a whole spiritual universe, involving and reactualizing the acts of gods and mortals, and intertwining the visible and invisible. This is especially so in the mythological dramas of Egypt, in which every aspect of heaven and earth was interrelated and visibly represented on the stage of a world theater. They lofty Orphic mythical reenactments are another example... the presence of the gods at the festivals was of essential significance; it was a reality. The sacred powers and realities of a cosmic mystery could be evoked, made real, and reenacted visibly in a multitude of ways: for example, by a repetitive gesture that often had multiple meanings, a movement, a dance, songs, a chorus and a choric leader, shifting positional symbolism, or masks. This pattern can also be observed later, in the beginnings of Christian liturgical drama, culiminating in the complex structures of Syriac and Byzantine liturgical drama and finally in the complex allegorical drama of the Mass of the ninth-century Carlingian bishop Amalarius of Metz. The cosmogonic myth, as reenacted and celebrated at the New Year festivals, was therefore not a drama at a certain stage in which humans were spectators, but rather, human existence, as bound up with a certain cosmogonic myth or mythical acts, was that very stage itself; it was that theater in which humankind was creative in its own drama - where humans were in act, that is to say, where the drama became a self-representation in which humanity in its cosmos became the very hero whose acts were of existential-ontological and soteriological significance." [8] The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama "Thus human and divine reciprocity made the festivals a source of renewal for mankind, in which divine energy is infused into the participants during the collective reenactments of the myths with son and dance involving the divine choir leaders. In the festival, the pompe was an essential means of representation and organically connected with the sanctuaries of the respective gods. Within the mimetic and symbolic configurations of gestures, movements, choric and antiphonal songs, rhapsodies, dances, personification, positional and color symbolism, the cosmogonic drama of the life of a particular god unfolded with great splendor, mimetically incorporating any signifiant new event. Among the main dances were the pyrrhiche, a war and victory dance associated with the birth of Zeus and Athena; the dithyramb, in which the birth of Dionysos was embedded; and the Paean, a choric hymnic song and dance associated with the life of Apollo. Since dances were related to threshing floors, dancing floors, and orchestras, a brief discussion of these centers will aid our understanding of the cosmogonic matrices of the festivals. The threshing floor was part of the cosmogonic matrix from which the festivals arose. The threshing of the grain signified a cosmogonic act because the violent actions of severing and spliting the grain resulted in the sustenance of life and led to the potential of new life: the sowing of the new grain. The threshing floor, usually situated at the center of an agricultural field, was related to an archetype of a cosmogonic act through which creation began or was augmented. Patterns of labyrinth were most likely part of the threshing floor. Thus, it also defended the sacredness of threshing, its acts and products, against malevolent spirits from the North and meteorological interferences, such as rain and the wrong wind, connected with Poseidon. Threshing as a cosmogonic act is also well attested to in the Egyptian Osiris drama in which the oxen trample on the grain - that is, Osiris - to kill him, and with the new grain bread is produced. The threshing festival was also the most important festival in the calendars of Attica as well as those of Athens. Thus, the threshing floors were transformed into dancing floors throughout Greece. They too had labyrinth patterns. Here ring dances and choric dances, perhaps with labyrinthine steps, expressed the mystery of life. In the Iliad, Homer gives a description of the complex ring dance as a mimesis of the potters' wheel. Later the complex layers of the threshing floors and dancing floors were transformed into the orchestra of the theaters with elaborate labyrinthine patterns. The threshing festivals have generally been misunderstood or misinterpreted, but 'everywhere in the ancient world threshing gives rise to images and stories of violent conflict,' with Poseidon the mythical archenemy." [131-132] Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama "At the center of liturgy of the new Christian community was the Jewish synaxis of old, the word, and the act of the Eucharist that was embedded in and flowing from the first liturgical act of Jesus. From the beginning, Christian worship, the theater of the church, was a reenactment of the archetypical act of Jesus, albeit begun by the word of the synaxis, but is was not a reenactment of the pesach of old. The same temporal framework for the pesach of Judaism and the New Passover of Jesus, 14-15 Nisan of the spring equinox, became in the future the locus of tension rather than harmony. However, the matrix of the pesach of the nomad of times immemorial, signifying a Passover into new pastures, into unknown territory, remained the signature of the New Passover of Jesus for all time to come. The time of the drama of the passion and resurrection of Jesus was soon made present in the context of sacred liturgical time. Within this newly generated context of sacred time, the followers of Jesus needed to act, to do, as their founder had acted and done. With that reenactment, they fell into a similar pattern of other cultures and religious traditions that were formed in the mimetic process of the acts of their gods, ancestors, and their founders, such as we discussed previously. In the Christian community ... there was a complete transformation and augmentation of meaning, while at times the structure remained intact. The cosmogonic act of Jesus of the New Passover expanded throughout the centuries into the grandiose liturgical theater of the church. Every time the Christians reenacted the Last Supper or New Passover, they reentered the great universal drama of Jesus the Christ, not as mere spectators but as active particpants." [251] Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama "The church fathers engaged in lengthy and intense intellectual debates with the representatives of the Roman state. Idolatry or worship of demons was a main focus of church polemics. The Apologists regarded the Roman gods apostate angels who, so it was thought, had deceived and misled poets, mythologists, and rulers and had perverted the whole order of creation. Demonology began to be an important issue in patristic thought. The uncompromising attitude of the church fathers toward the theater must be understood in this context because the ubiquitous Roman theatrum and the network of its ludi were a visible expression of a culture that in the eyes of the church fathers was that of idolatria. Yet, with all their wrestling against an idolatrous culture, the church fathers themselves were rooted in that same represenational emblematic culture! In their vision of a new creation, the church leaders also imagined a great theater of the church, if not the world as a stage, for the reenactment of the new Imperium of Christ. Their vision of the world and church as a theater, as well as that of the Romans perceiving the Urbs as a templum-theatrum of the world. This controversy stretched over nearly six hundred years. It involved the church fathers of both Western and Eastern Christendom... Throughout their writings the theater was defined as a theatrum daemonicum, or pompa diaboli, crimen principale, or opera diaboli. The fiercest rhetoric is expressed by Tertullian in his influential works Apologeticus, de spectaculis, and de idololatria. Against his scripture-based exhortations to Christians to avoid the theater, some argued that there was no explicit commandment in the Bible forbidding them to attend the theater! Some regarded it as a contradiction that the fathers exhorted the Christians to forego the pagan theatrum and participate in the theatrum of God, the church's own theater, a real and spiritual theater (theatrum infictitium et spirituale), as Chrysostom defined it in one of his sermons. The problem was that the Christians would attend both the Roman theatrum and the theatrum of God. When Jacob of Serugh exhorted his Christians in Batnan not to go to the theater to watch the delusions of the devil performed on the stage, his faithful answered promptly that they did not go to theater to believe but rather to laugh, because they were not deceived by the fabrications and delusions of the myths performed there. They assured him that they themselves saw through all the deceptions of the stage! For Augustine, too, the theater was saturated with diabolic delusions and immoral acts. In his City of God he laments that even the most learned Romans counted the ludi as among divine things. It was precisely this definition of sacrality of the Roman theatrum and ludi that Christian Romans continued to hold when participating in the festivals and theater; they remained rooted in the soil that had nourished their understanding of sacredness. This explains why people attended both theaters, a custom that Augustine disdains... This tension between two cosmological worldviews can be documented endlessly. For instance, Prudentius (AD 348-410), the great Christian poet, introduced the myth of Roma Aeterna into Christianity. He applied the famous Virgilian expression imperium sine fine dedi to the eternal reign of Christ. To him, Roman patriotism and Christianity did not have to exclude but rather perfect each other. In a process of creative transformation, the Pax Romana became the Pax Christiana, and the Pax Augustus was now seen as a link to the Pax Christi. Then there was Orosius, an approximate contemporary of Augustine (AD 354-430). The bishop of Hippo had urged Orosius to write an apology in defense of Christianity, because the pagan Romans had accused Christianity of having caused the sake of Rome in AD 410. In his work Adversus Paganos Historiarum VII, Orosius employed a creative typology showing Christian tradition to be equal to Roman pagan tradition. He compared the poor sheperds who were present at the foundation of Rome to the presence of the shepherds watching the birth of Jesus at Bethlehem! He also argued that Jesus, according to the census taken by Augustus, was indeed a Roman citizen! It was also held that the tradition of the Roma ecclesia was similar to that of Roma Aeterna because the caput orbis of Romulus and Remus had now become the caput ecclesia of Peter and Paul, who had become the successors of the founders of Rome. In this interaction between two worldviews, the theatrum of the church and the ever-greater configurations of the cosmogonic universal drama of the New Passover of Jesus Christ had expanded considerably." [259-262] The Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama "In view of this development, we should finally ask, 'What then was the problem of the conflict of the polemics of the church fathers against the Roman theater?' First of all, the problem was mutual: the pagan Romans called the Christian Romans atheists because they refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods. By thus violating the prevalent customs and the peace of the gods, they were a danger to Roman society. In turn, the Christians considered the Roman pagans atheists because they did not acknowledge their God as supreme. The church fathers, however, considered the Roman gods not dead cult objects but living demons, the fallen angels who permeated the universe and whose special playing ground was the theater. Whether ordinary Roman Christians who lived side by side with their pagan Roman neighbors or the Christian aristocracy of the Senate shared this belief remains an open question. They certainly celebrated together the various festivals of old with which the gods were honored. They also went to both theaters! Thus the church fathers were caught in a dilemma: by exhorting the Christians to participate in the theater of God instead of going to the diabolical theater of the pagans, they acknowledged the same pattern of mimetic reenactment... The theater of God in which the drama of Jesus Christ was played out was already in existence before the church fathers began to exhort the Christians to go to the theater of God: Christian drama had begun with the memorial act of the breaking of bread of the Last Supper... The ultimate difference between the various theaters lay perhaps in the cosmological view that was expressed in the drama. The drama of Christianity slowly transformed with new meaning the cosmology it had inherited from Rome and, for that matter, from Greece and the other Near Eastern cultures where it took root..." [277-278] Mythological Traditions of Liturgical Drama |