The Drama of Freemasonry

Masonic ritual is a full-body experience, offering total sensual immersion. The initiations are not unlike visiting a modern-day IMAX theatre; however, the latter experience is synthetical, whereas Masonic immersion is organic. Dramatists of the ancient world understood this principle: that theater was not about entertainment but initiation, religion, catharsis, and psychological development. The creators of Masonic ceremonies also understood this, and they succeeded in converting the theater into a Masonic temple. French occultist Édouard Schuré calls this the “Theater of the Future” in an essay from 1922 entitled “Le Thêatre de L’Ame,” and he closes his book The Genesis of Tragedy with the following evocative passage:

“The light of the Divine is not dead in this world, though it now seems powerless because it is scattered and divided. Once more Dionysus has been rent and dismembered by the Titans. He awaits the liberator who will restore him to life. Faith is crystalized Love; let us have Faith. Let there be shining within us the torch of Enthusiasm, which can be lit by none but ourselves — and the spiritual sun will rise on the horizon. It may be, at the present time, that this is the only way to prepare, in view of a still uncertain future, the coming of that theater where the human soul, at present crippled and abased, will recover its might and employ its sacred rights in the advancement of synthetic art — of redemptive and initiatory drama.”

[Edouard Schure, The genesis of tragedy and the sacred drama of Eleusis, (London: R. Steiner Publishing Co., 1936), 264.]