It had been placed there by Aleister Crowley, occult magician, poet, and author of the advertised ceremonies. It was located directly at the end of an article that rapturously praised a preview of the Rites held during the past summer. The article was signed “P.”—certainly not the most inventive of Crowley's numerous pseudonyms, which included “Lord Boleskine,” “Oliver Haddo,” “Count Vladimir Svareff,” and his favorite, “The Beast.”

Crowley's predilection for fictive names was matched by his fascination with costume, whether it was the leopard-skin robe he wore as a Magician of the Golden Dawn, the black gown of the alchemist, the Headdress of Horus with the eye in the triangle, or, as “Baphomet,” full Masonic regalia. The theatrical urge in Crowley becomes apparent from whatever direction he is viewed. His early interest in the occult and its secret systems of knowledge was quickly focused on ritual magic. His poetry was soon elaborated into dense mystery plays. He even dramatized the personality conflicts between himself and others—William Butler Yeats, for one—by engaging them in “magical combat.”

The Rites of Eleusis occurred in Aleister Crowley's life at a point midway between a series of visions he had in North Africa in 1909, which revealed to him his true nature as a Magus, and his involvement with a secret society called the O.T.O. in 1912, from whom he learned the rudiments of the sex-magic that obsessed him for years. He was 35 years old at the time of the performances. The persecution by the press, which was to last until he died in i947, had not yet begun. He saw himself as the prophet of a new religion— Crowleyanity—and the Rites were to be his first great evangelization.

Madeleine-Madelaine-Madeleine G.-Madame Madeleine-Madame Magdaleine—the many names under which the famous “sleep dancer” appeared early this century in Europe, only heightens the mystery surrounding her. We do not precisely know where she hails from nor do we know anything about her fate after closing out a strange dancing career of roughly one decade. She lived in Munich, but most certainly was not born there, and no information is available as to when and where her death occurred.

Two famous Munich painters—Fritz August von Kaulbach and Albert von Keller—made portraits of her on which she looks beautiful, even-faced, dark-haired, with extremely bushy eyebrows, protruding Jaws and a low nose bridge. In photographs she always wears a white wrap-around, with her eyes mostly closed.

Drawing on pre-Christian Assyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Sufi, Tibetan, and Persian elements at the time of the Russian Revolution, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff attempted to create a school of thought that would coordinate and expand Western man's anatomic and intellectual centers of energy Into newly dynamic forms. Certain physical and mental activities, Gurdjieff believed, could bring about a total alteration of consciousness. For over sixty years his philosophy has found adherents among the intelligentsia of the Russian, French, and English-speaking world. Directors, choreographers, musicians, designers, painters, writers, and psychologists like Nikolai Evreinov, Sergei Diaghilev, Thomas de Hartmann, Alexander and Jeanne Salzmann, Louis Jouvet, Felix Labisse, J.B. Priestley, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Peter Brook have all sought artistic inspiration in the esoteric teachings of the Russian-born mystic.

Between 1909 and 1913 the German section of the Theosophical Society held annual conventions in Munich. Part of the festival was the production of plays that were pertinent to spiritual science. It was Rudolf Steiner who gave the impulse for dramatic performances. His four “Mystery Dramas” were written for the Theosophical conventions. He wrote plays only when he knew that they were about to go Into rehearsal in Munich, and each was in production for about two months. In those days there was not yet any special training for the amateur performers in the plays, save in rehearsal periods. Each play was revived each year between 1910 and 1913 so that by 1913 all four plays were performed for the Society's two-week meeting.

In the tradition of Artaud's commitment to a theatre “whose only value is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger,” and in the tradition, too, of his complaint that “no matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign,” thrives an arts collaborative whose works of “performance art” cross industrial castoffs of urban technology (such as tin can poptops, recycled Yellow Pages, vinyl, spark plugs, and barbed wire) with ceremonies and icons now lost to secular culture (images drawn from Indian, African, and Catholic rituals, including body paint, masks, feathers, animal sacrifices, skeletal relics, and crucifixes). The group's purpose is articulated time and again by its members as an attempt to create, in the words of Mary Klaus, its newest member, “a magic moment.”

Some bizarre elements used in recent English performances are so startling or threatening or shocking to audience sensibilities that the dramatic illusion is broken. The spectator becomes aware of himself as being in the same time and space as the element rather than relating to it as if it were only fictional. In such instances the viewer responds as he would to other real-world events.

Traditionally, a theatre performance consists of an illusion created out of various actual materials including sound, paint, furniture, the bodies of performers, makeup, etc. Care is taken not to call attention to these materials because focus on them would break the fictional-world illusion. An attempt is made to assimilate into the illusion everything that falls within the space and time delineated by the work, although occasionally a mistake may cause the actual material to break out of the illusion—for example if an actor obviously forgets a line or a chair accidentally falls over. Such disruptions of the illusion are obstacles to the spectator's psychic absorption in the fictional world.