Rustic Shakespeare *
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In esoteric circles, Shakespeare was known as "The Rosicrucian Mask." These plays deal with man's outer and inner nature; with worlds visible and invisible. We see ourselves in his plays, raised to the mythic plane. The two sides of life, the material and spiritual, are treated with equal certainty and consistency. The supernatural elements in the dramas are not incidental devices introduced for the purpose of theatrical effects. They are fundamental to the theme. Anyone possessing keys to their deeper import discerns an added wealth of wisdom.
No one familiar with esoteric doctrines can have any question as to Shakespeare's familiarity with the wisdom of the Illuminati, even Qabalistic themes. It appears in Macbeth, The Tempest, Julius Caesar and riddles the tragedies. He makes dramatic use of supernatural elements. Shakespeare was familiar with the "symbolic importance of occult philosophy" and correlates the dimensions of magic, learning and drama as forms of art which endeavor to perfect nature. Masques and psychodramas were an essential element of ritual practice in secret societies. Public psychodramas were object lessons for the masses that functioned like modern propaganda.
Magic and science were not so separate in the Renaissance. "Natural science," the study of nature, was also referred to as natural (or "white") magic. The dramas of Shakespeare are not regard as "spiritual" literature but, by virtue of their double structure, they enshrine a compendium of Initiate Wisdom comparable only to that which informs sacred scriptures.The works of Shakespeare, like the music-dramas of Wagner, Goethe's Faust, Dante's Divine Comedy, and a few other books of comparable rank, are designed for esoteric as well as exoteric reading.
Occult studies of magic, black and white, are given illuminating treatment in Richard III and The Tempest, respectively. The spiritual significances of the Winter and Summer Solstices are unfolded in The Winter's Tale and Midsummer Night's Dream. Under the veil of fancy and frolic, the latter is a virtual transcription of the mystic marriage ritual as enacted in the Eleusinian Mysteries -- in keeping with which the locale of the drama is a wood near Athens. The Sonnets translate the Hermetic doctrines into poetry. While tragedies like Hamlet and Macbeth bring the beings and forces of the interpenetrating spiritual world into visibility. Each of the dramas treats of some occult law or spiritual principle. This constitutes its esoteric theme. Everything that finds expression in the unfolding plot arises inevitably in accordance with the nature of this central archetypal idea.
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