A Western Esoteric Understanding of Screens and Cinema: John Dee and Edward Kelley’S Scrying Practices

A Western Esoteric Understanding of Screens and Cinema: John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Scrying Practices

Student: Sascha J. van der Meer Master: Master Media Studies: Beroepsgeoriënteerde Specialisatie (Film Studies) E-mail: [email protected] University of Amsterdam

Date: 07-11-2016 Master Thesis

Supervisor: dhr. dr. F.J.J.W. (Floris) Paalman Word Count: 22541 Second Reader: dhr. dr. F.A.M. (Erik) Laeven

A Western Esoteric Understanding of Screens and Cinema: John Dee and Edward Kelley’s Scrying Practices

Sascha J. van der Meer, B.A.

A thesis submitted to

The faculty of Humanities

In fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of Media Studies

University of Amsterdam Amsterdam November 7th, 2016

©copyright

2016, Sascha Joëlle van der Meer

TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...... 4 KEYWORDS ...... 4 CHAPTER 1: Introduction ...... 5 1.1 Scrying and Western Esotericism ...... 7 1.2 Imaginary Media: The Influence of the Supernatural on Media Culture and the Possibilities of the Entanglement of Dee and Kelley’s Past Practice and Present-day Screens ...... 11 1.3 Interdisciplinary Research and One Audiovisual Tradition: Scrying as a means to Comprehend to the Turn to Digital Cinema ...... 15 1.4 Parallel Research of Pre- and Post-Enlightenment: Changed Manifestations and Discursive Transitions ...... 18 1.5 Methodology ...... 20 CHAPTER 2: A Western Esoteric Understanding of Cinema’s Dispositif ...... 23 2.1 Dee and Kelley’s Scrying Practices: Western Esoteric Discourses of Light and Dark ...... 23 2.2 A Western Esoteric Understanding of Cinema’s Dispositif in the Context of Plato’s Cave ...... 25 2.3 Esoteric Dispositif: Light and Dark in the Cinematic Dispositif ...... 30 2.4 Esoteric Dispositif: Prior Experience Enhancing Environments in the Cinematic Dispositif ..... 34 CHAPTER 3: A Western Esoteric Understanding of Screens ...... 39 3.1 The Materiality of Dee and Kelley’s Scrying Practice ...... 39 3.2 The Origin of Screens ...... 41 3.3 Material Similarities in Regard to Digital Screens and Scrying Screens ...... 43 3.4 The Esoteric Screen ...... 43 CHAPTER 4: Cinema, Screens and Scrying as Part of the Same Audiovisual Tradition ...... 48 4.1 The Audiovisual Aspects of Dee and Kelley’s Scrying Screens: an Inherited “Language” ...... 48 4.2 Contemporary Manifestations of the Scrying in Fiction as Imaginary Media ...... 50 4.3: A “New” Audiovisual Experience: Virtual Reality...... 54 CONCLUSION ...... 61 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 65 Media ...... 70 Images ...... 71

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank several people who helped me through the course of writing and researching this thesis. Firstly, I would like to thank my parents for giving me the opportunity and the resources to go to University and all the support they gave me while writing this thesis. Secondly, I would like to thank my boyfriend Iwan for his excellent memory of film titles and his support during stressful times. Thirdly, I would like to thank dhr. prof. dr. W.J. (Wouter) Hanegraaff and dhr. dr. P.J. (Peter) Forshaw from the Western Esoteric department of the department of Religion Studies of the University of Amsterdam, for their enthusiasms of the subject I have chosen and for the advice they gave me about finding useful sources. Finally, I would like to thank my supervisor dhr. dr. F.J.J.W. (Floris) Paalman for his support regarding my chosen subject and for helping me out to find a focus is the chaos of my enthusiasm. I can’t imagine a better way to apply for my master degree in Media Studies. I’ve experienced the process of writing this thesis as a personal enrichment, a better understanding of myself, my past experiences and my existence, as well as the beginning of my future. All in all, I’m very grateful for this opportunity.

KEYWORDS Western Esotericism, Scrying, Media Archaeology, Screens, Cinema

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

Mortlake, 16 November 1582. John Dee and Edward Kelley are preparing the room for a magic ritual (see figure 1 and 2). An obsidian stone is placed at the table in front of the window. Prayers can be heard as the light hits the stone. Kelley’s eyes focus on the surface of the stone. Then suddenly, a crowned angel wearing a red robe appears. Seven angels carrying a copper star with seven points, follow after him. One of the angels speaks out to John Dee “I am he which have powre to alter Figure 1: John Dee the corruption of NATURE, with [sic] my seal, I seale her and she [nature] is (Cleyn, Francis. John Dee. 1658. Line becom[m]e perfect. I prevayle in metalls: in the knowledge of them.” Then another Engraving. Welcome Library, London.) angel speaks: “I am Prince of the Seas: My powre is upon the waters. I drowned Pharao . . . My name was known to Moyses. I lived in Israel. Beholde the tyme of Gods visitation.” The angel’s speech continues in prophetic speaking of “the destructive powers of the sea”. Suddenly the angel opens his robe and feathers are revealed along with a golden girdle (belt worn by Elizabethans). Dee and Kelley watch as the stone shows a black cloth drawn, indicating the conversation has ended.1 Figure 2: Edward Kelley From the year 1582 till 1589 magus, natural philosopher (a precursor of (Cleyn, Francis. Sir Edward Kelley. 1659. scientists), alchemist, mathematician and astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I, John Dee etching and line engraving, 105 mm x 108 (1527-1608) and Edward Kelley (1555-1597) claimed to have been communicating mm. National Portrait Gallery, London.) with angels and spirits by gazing into a quartz crystal ball and an obsidian stone, to which is often referred to as a “black mirror”. These practices were performed as a result of John Dee’s quest for a revelation of the true wisdom and as “a means to increase the understanding of the cultural and intellectual issues in the period”,2 which he, in his opinion, could not satisfy enough by studying literature only.3 This quest was part of Dee’s idealistic aspiration to “unify the peoples, religions, and languages of the world through universal knowledge.”4 Whereas Kelley’s function was to gaze at the obsidian stone and crystal ball, to mediate between Dee and the angels and spirits and to pass on to Dee what he’d perceived, Dee made use of his extensive knowledge to

1 (Harkness John Dee’s Conversations 206) 2 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” Abstract ) 3 Dee wrote: “I could fynde no other way, to such true wisdom atteyning, but by thy extraordinary gift: and by no vulgar Schole doctrine, or human Invention.”(Peterson 58) 4(Peterson 9)  Why John Dee believed he could reach this goal by means of scrying is stressed by Peterson:

Dee seems to have had an almost obsessive fascination with the lost Apocrypha, especially the Book of Enoch, which is mentioned and even quoted in the Bible (Jude 14), and Esdras. He is told by the angels that the Apocrypha are not lost, but in keeping of the Jews. Most of his mystical exercises are focused on recovery of the lost wisdom that these books represented to him. The core of this book describes the revelation of the book of angelic wisdom, Liber Loagaeth […].The truth it contains will end religious disputes and restore religious unity. In short, it will usher in the new age. Since this book is so central to these angelic communications, it is amazing that it has remained unpublished. (Peterson 31-32)

interpret the symbolical information that was delivered to them and documented their findings and experiences.5 During their sessions Dee and Kelley were mostly alone and in private spheres. Sometimes a guest of higher social status joined the magic ritual and took over the task of Dee for the occasion.6 Dee and Kelley’s sessions resulted in the acquaintance of secret superior truths, prophetic pronouncements of Dee’s key role in redetermination of the connection amidst humanity and nature,7 and the revelation of the system of Angelic language called Enochian (see figure 3).

Figure 3: John Dee’s earliest notition of the Enochian alphabet.

(Dee, John. Earliest versions of Angelic or "Enochian" alphabet. 26 March 1583. Originally from John Dee’s Mysteriorum Libri Quinque edited and translated by Joseph H. Peterson in John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. Boston, MA/York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2003. 269-271.)

5 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 720) 6 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 720) 7 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 710)

1.1 Scrying and Western Esotericism

The ritual magic Dee and Kelley performed is an example of the practice of scrying, which is an individual form of experience that has many expressions. The verb ‘to scry’ means "to see images in a crystal, water, etc., which reveal the past or forebode the future".8 When someone is scrying, he/she is gazing at a medium aiming to experience as if his/her awareness is passing through the surface of the medium, which is experienced as if one is passing through the surface of water into the depth of a pool.9 When one arrives at this state of mind, one has access to information and knowledge that transcends the physical and spatiotemporal: one can find lost objects, visit faraway places, look into the past and future,10 or communicate and receive auditory and visual information from the deceased (necromancy) or transcendent entities and dimensions. Scrying is an individual experience that can involve all types of sensory perception.11 It takes place within the mind of the scryer as if it is a dream, though it is experienced as if it is directly perceived.12 The mediums: solid objects, gasses and fluids, that can be used for scrying include: smoke, mirrors (captromancy/enoptromancy), eyes (oculomancy), metal cups, bowls and cauldrons,13 polished coal,14 clouds, several types of stones (such as obsidian and quartz), crystal balls/spheres (crystallomancy) and the reflective surface of liquids15 (such as water (hydromancy),16 ink, oil and blood17). In the case of Dee and Kelley, their obsidian mirror and crystal sphere facilitated contact with the angels and spirits that delivered symbolically coded and audiovisual information. The ritual magic of scrying has a long and extensive history; known manifestations occur in various countries, cultures and times. Examples of scrying can be found amongst the Babylonians, Egyptians and the ancient Greeks, as well as, for example, the Olmecs (1800 B.C. till 200 B.C.), ancestors of the Maya civilization, who used obsidian mirrors for scrying and believed they were a portal to another world that they could be connected with through visions.18 Mayan priests used mirrors made out of natural material to search answers in supernatural worlds.19 Shamans, priests and elite people used mirrors in darkened chambers to reflect the rays of the sun for divination.20 But this doesn’t mean scrying is something anyone could simply do. As early as the fifth century, when Christianity was already established as the most dominant religious institution (since

8 (“Scry” Online Etymology Dictionary) 9 (Tyson 152, 154; see also Ezzy 133) 10 (Moody 89; see also Tyson 9) 11 (Tyson 3) 12 (Tyson 3, 5; see also Moody 89) 13 (Moody 97)  Even the Bible refers to scrying in reference to the silver cup of Joseph “from which [he] drinks, which in fact he uses for divination” (Genesis 44:5 cited in Moody 97). 14 Polished coal was a desirable material for scrying because it has electric properties which is associated with psychic abilities (Tyson 153). 15 (Moody 97) 16 A famous example of hydromancy is Michel the Nostredame’s (Nostradamus) hydromancy (See Tyson 93). 17 Moody refers to the use of blood as a speculum for scrying by the Maori in New Zealand (96). 18 (Pendergrast 24) 19 (Moody 98) 20 (Pendergrast 25)

the third century), a synod was held prohibiting Christians believing in and/or practicing scrying of any involvement with the church.21 Moody explains, this was probably done since there was no benefit for established religious institutions if people individually and independently had a firsthand connection with the spiritual world.22 The denigration of scrying as a devilish pagan practice continued during medieval times, when “books detailing such rituals were burned by the Inquisition.”23 Nonetheless, some of it was able to survive, for example in medical books concealed as something that served solely medical purposes.24 Consequently, the practice and (esoteric) knowledge of scrying was able to reach Dee and Kelley and their precursors, who knew all too well that their involvement in scrying could have deadly consequences. 25 Even though interest in esoteric works of knowledge flourished during the Renaissance,26 the scientific revolution was in progress27 and the new scientific norms as well as the explicit Christian rejection of ancient pagan beliefs and practices, put Dee and Kelley in a difficult position. Scrying was a contentious practice believed to be related to black magic and conspiracies with the devil. In fact, “Dee’s life was a continual battle” Christopher Whitby stresses, a battle “against the rumours of the ignorant who failed to perceive what he [Dee] believed to be the Christian nature of his experiments and the good that must ensue.”28 Therefore, it was so dangerous for Dee, notwithstanding his prestige as a skilled scholar on the subject of natural philosophy and although supported by Queen Elizabeth I, to be involved in scrying.29 Peterson stresses Dee and Kelley had only “narrowly escaped the papal nuncio and the possibility of facing the deadly inquisition.”30 As the result of this difficult and dangerous reputation of scrying, Dee’s documentations about the scrying sessions were never published or widely spread during his lifetime. The angels even

21 (Moody 100) 22 (Moody 100) 23 (Moody 99) 24 (Moody 99) 25 Namely:  Giordano Bruno, a likeminded contemporary mathematician with esoteric interests, was executed for heresy in 1600.  Likewise, “Roger Bacon, Trithemius, Agrippa” and “Paracelsus”, who Dee greatly admired, “had suffered greatly because of their reputation as magi.” (Peterson 4) Dee himself was very aware of the consequences: He had experienced imprisonment early in his life, and knew he had to be careful (Peterson 4).  John Dee had already had already experienced that he had to be careful. As a Student Dee had put himself into a difficult position when he had summoned expectations of his involvement in taboo practices of black magic, as a result of manufacturing a flying beetle in 1547. Even till 1592 Dee was busy explaining the factual mechanical conditions that made the beetle fly in full detail, he couldn’t get rid of part of the mistrust of the Elizabethan public (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 713-714). 26 The Renaissance knew a revival of esoteric interest. Esoteric works of knowledge were studied (such as the kabbalah) and integrated (as a philosophical foundation) within Christianity (see Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 28-29 and Hanegraaff “Teaching Experiential Dimensions”155). 27 Contemporary Francis Bacon provided one of the foundational ideas of modern scientism in his indication of the distinction between empirical/natural knowledge and divine knowledge and thereby ensured the continuation of the condemnation of practices similar to scrying . Ironically enough he was tutored by John Dee, asked Dee for advice (see Peterson 7) and had an approach to knowledge that was very similar to contemporary occult sciences; his thinking was influenced by natural magic and alchemy, “even though he pronounced them gravely deficient.”27 (Zagorin 40) 28 (Whitby 87) 29 Giordano Bruno, a likeminded contemporary mathematician with esoteric interests, was executed for heresy in 1600 (see Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 30). 30 (Peterson 33)

forbade him to do so.31 He only shared his work with a trustworthy small group of people for “private political aims”.32 Later his documentations titled Mysteriorum Libri Quinque and magical tools used during the scrying sessions were found “in a hidden compartment of an old chest.”33 Soon however, Dee and Kelley’s scrying sessions were shed in negative light when their contemporary Florence Estienne Méric Casaubon (1599-1671) published Dee’s writings in 165934 and accused Dee of speaking with demons instead of angels in an attempt to discredit him.35 Since that time many other scientists and historians have seen Dee’s involvement in angelic conversations as a sign that his “intellect was increasingly prone to idiosyncrasy and perhaps even instability in the latter years of his life”36 This trend continues until this day. Especially, since the Enlightenment, modern science and modern philosophy continue to discredit Dee and Kelley’s practices, amongst a whole range of other worldviews and ideas also belonging to “the ancient disciplines of astrology, alchemy, and natural magic”, which from the eighteenth century onwards became to be negatively known as the “occult sciences”.37 Whereas previously, for a long time, scrying, and other practices that relied “on hidden spiritual influences and invisible correspondences in nature”, such as mesmerism38, had collaborated with science in their quest for knowledge,39 now they broke away from science as they didn’t fit the modern scientific ideals of rationality and the pursuit of provable and empirical knowledge, that still dominates science today.40 As a result of this, a whole dimension of Western

31 (Peterson 1) 32 (Sherman 149) 33 (Peterson 1) 34 (see Dee A True and Faithful Relation for Casaubon’s comments on Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices) 35 (Szőnyi 277) 36 (Quote from Harkness, “Shows in the Showstone” 709)  An example of these discourses can be found in a nineteenth century publication of John Dee’s diaries, when the writer explicitly dissociates himself from Dee’s involvement in occult sciences:

In the other, however, he tells us his dreams, talks of mysterious noises in his chamber, evil spirits, and alludes to various secrets of occult philosophy in the spirit of a true believer. Mr. D’Israeli has given a correct and able view of his character in his “Amenities of Literature,” which is remarkably confirmed in almost every point by the narrative now published. “The imagination of Dee,” observes that elegant writer, “often predominated over his science; while both were mingling in his intellectual habits, each seemed to him to confirm the other. Prone to the mystical lore of what was termed the occult sciences, which in reality are no sciences at all, since whatever remains occult ceases to be science, Dee lost his better genius. (James Orchard Halliwell’s preface in Dee The Private Diary)

37 (Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions”156) 38 Mesmerism, or “magnetic somnambulism”, is believed to be founded in 1784 by the Frenchman Armand Marie Jacques Chastenet (Marquis de Puységur) who was inspired by Franz Anton Mesmer’s experiments of animal magnetism. A subject is put into a certain state of trance (altered state of consciousness) and in this trace he/she is believed to be able to cross the borders of space and time and have access to superior knowledge of past, present and future. For example, the subject gets to know his or her own disease and what cure is needed. In this process of attaining knowledge (gnōsis) the subject was assisted by a scientist who interpreted everything that occurred (Hanegraaff, “Magnetic Gnosis 118-120). In other words science and gnōsis went hand in hand in their quest for the truth. Also interesting is the connection Hanegraaff makes between computers and these “flying souls” that were considered “information machines” (Hanegraaff, “Magnetic Gnosis” 123, 134). 39 Pythagoras (575 B.C. to 500 B.C.) who is famous for his mathematical elaboration until this day, owned a magic mirror, which he used to catch the moonlight and see the future (Pendergrast 11). As is noticed by Pendergrast, his scrying probably underlies his Phytagoras’ Pythagorean Philosophical Doctrine of Contraries, namely “perhaps in his magic mirror he contemplated an orderly universe in which he believed, the world progressed by the interaction of contraries, pairs of mirror- image opposites.”(11) 40 (Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions” 155-156)

culture is denigrated as nothing more than superstition that should not be taken seriously by academics and intellectuals.41 The field of study that problematizes this is Religion Studies’ Western esotericism. The term Western esotericism stands for the field of study as well as for its object of study: the neglected dimensions of Western culture. The term Western esotericism is a “modern scholarly construct”,42 which applies to many different movements, worldviews and thinkers. As a result of this, there is neither a strict demarcation nor a singular definition of esotericism. Hanegraaff, a prominent researcher on the field of Western esotericism,43 has set out three dominant models to define esotericism:

(1) an ‘enchanted’ pre-Enlightenment worldview with ancient roots but flourished in the early modern period, (2) a wide array of ‘occult’ currents and organizations that emerged after the Enlightenment as alternatives to traditional religion and rational science, (3) a universal, ‘inner’ spiritual dimension of religion as such. (Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 4-5)

The latter refers to an understanding of esotericism which is based upon the meaning of the adjective ‘esoteric’ in “late antiquity, when it referred to secret teachings reserved for a spiritual elite” and highlights esotericism as an “‘inner’ tradition concerned with a universal spiritual dimension of reality, as opposed to the merely external (‘exoteric’) religious institutions and dogmatic systems of established religions.”44 This means that “regardless of the tradition in which one has been raised” one “will always be able to find access to the universal truth about the nature of the world, divinity and human destiny to which all the great mystics and spiritual teachers have been referring.”45 This Western esoteric idea can be recognized in Dee’s idealistic aim to use scrying to uncover this universal knowledge as a means to harmonize the world. To study Western esotericism means one must look beyond the dominant religious discourses of Christianity and Judaism and beyond “rational philosophy and modern science”, which dominate educational systems and modern understandings of history,46 to uncover “worldviews, practices and ways of knowing that have not succeeded in becoming dominant and have therefore been marginalized as ‘rejected knowledge’ since the age of the Enlightenment.”47 Hanegraaff argues that the study of Western esotericism is severely excluded from science until this day, which results into a “highly

41 (Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions” 156) 42 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 3) 43 Hanegraaff is the founder of first full-time university master’s degree program in Western esotericism, who since 1999 has the second ever university chair for Western esotericism at the University of Amsterdam (Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions” 157). 44 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 10) 45 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 11) 46 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 1) 47 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism Foreword VI)

selective” and “misleading” conception of cultural history.48 Since the last decades the study of Western esotericism is in attendance as a growing amount of people start to realize that something crucial has been neglected in our conventional understanding of the past and present of Western culture.49 What makes Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices particularly interesting, is the fact that regardless of its secrecy and its condemnation, it has remained influential until this day. Due to John Dee’s status as magus and as scientist supported by Queen Elizabeth, as well as the fact that, as Peterson indicates, his scrying documentations are the most extensive and detailed surviving descriptions of ritual magic,50 Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice has become a famous example of ritual magic, which has authority amongst Western esoteric movements, thinkers and practitioners and has inspired scientists to get involved in scrying and Western esotericism.51

1.2 Imaginary Media: The Influence of the Supernatural on Media Culture and the Possibilities of the Entanglement of Dee and Kelley’s Past Practice and Present-day Screens

Even today Dee and Kelley’s practices inspire people to gaze into crystals, ink and, most astonishingly, TV screens. 52 Also the digital screens of computers and smartphone’s are suitable mediums.53 Apparently, centuries later, these modern technological screens, in their turned-off state, have all the material characteristics that are needed to sustain Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices. These observations raise the question: is there a connection between Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and contemporary screen technology and culture? Some scholars have already indicated that a certain link does exist between esoteric beliefs and practices from Renaissance magi and computer technology. For example, Yates indicates there’s a link between the memory system of Giordano Bruno (Dee and Kelley’s contemporary) and the 1960s “mind machine[s]” and stresses that: "the Renaissance conception of an animistic universe, operated by magic, prepared the way for the conception of a mechanical universe, operated by mathematics.”54 Davis stresses that Bruno’s esoteric “conception of a densely interconnected universe alive with

48 Moreover, Hanegraaff stresses that it is widely ignored that “many of the most important philosophers, theologians, or scientists had been involved, deeply and persistently, in the “false” or “superstitious” beliefs of Hermeticism, astrology, alchemy, or magic.” (Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions” 156) 49 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 1) 50 (Peterson 29) 51  Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices have authority amongst Western esoteric movements such the German Rosicrucians and the Golden Dawn (Peterson 33-34).  Boyle was inspired by John Dee and had tried to scry in his angelic stone (Hunter 387-410).  The connections between John Dee and Isaac Newton have been explored and confirmed (see Harkness “Alchemy and Eschatology”). 52 (Crowley, DuQuette and Hyatt 29) 53 In practical guide YouTube videos I have seen experienced scryers confirm this scrying potential of television screens, computer screens and screens of mobile phones (see Valens). 54 (Yates, “the Art of Memory” 221; see also Yates, Giordano Bruno)

constant communication flickers on the screen” and links computer interfaces, combining mimetic and magical (alchemic) symbolism, virtual spaces and information systems to the allegorical science of Renaissance magi.55 Such claims find a theoretical home within Media Studies’ “hybrid discipline”56 of media archaeology. Including the study of imaginary media, the media-archaeological branch of “media history”,57 acknowledges the importance of cultural practices that are regarded “impossible” or fictional during a certain period of time, by recognizing and critiquing the extent in which the epistemological value of cultural objects and phenomena depends on cultural discourses while other “regimes of knowledge” are being excluded as unimportant.58 Zielinski stresses the study of imaginary media is important since their “meanings nonetheless have an impact on the factual world of media.”59 According to Kluitenberg imagination is an intrinsic characteristic of media.60 Also he emphasizes that imaginary media are sometimes realized.61 Kluitenberg stresses that research into imaginary media deals with fantasized, dreamed or impossible media that, for example, come to expression in films and stories.62 Parikka asserts a large part of the research focuses on the subjects of ghost, death, psychic communication and communication with aliens,63 such as the discourses of ghosts and aliens that accompanied television and the wireless technologies of telegraph and radio.64 According to Kluitenberg such conflations of discourses of supernatural communication with technological devices have a scientific value for media studies.65 Moreover, in accordance with Zielinski’s variantology, which broadens what can be considered “as media”, Beloff is inspired by such conflations to expand the definition of media to the context of supernatural communication, which in her case means to study the female body as a medium,66 as it was preferred over the male body in regard to psychic abilities. Parikka establishes that imaginary media can be found in the context of theological and metaphysical worldviews, such as Giambattista Della Porta’s (1535-1615) natural magic.67 Therefore, Della Porta’s contemporaries Dee and Kelley’s theological, metaphysical, magical and supernatural communication practice, fits what is studied under the heading of imaginary media. One of the common research themes is the (discursive) transcendent characteristics of communication technologies and digital information space, which are regarded very similar to the transcendent abilities of psychics. In order to reveal such similarities, Parikka recommends to “follow

55 (Davis) 56 (Strauven 63) 57 See Strauven’s disquisition of the three branches of Media Archaeology (63-67). 58 (Parikka 47-48,50 ; Foucault 36) 59 (Zielinski, “Modelling Media” 30 quoted in Parikka 50) 60 (Kluitenberg, “Second Introduction” ) 61 (Kluitenberg, “Second Introduction” ) 62 (Kluitenberg, “Second Introduction” ) 63 (Parikka 55) 64 (see Sconce) 65 (Kluitenberg, “On the Archaeology” mentioned in Parikka 49) 66 (Parikka 50, 55) 67 (Parikka 48-49, 51)

the Žižek guideline”: to look beyond the regimes of knowledge that ontologically establish the object as imaginary, fantastic or supernatural, to reveal its underlying essence of transcendent processes and materiality, “networks of communication” and “social relations”.68 On a material level, Parikka stresses how “modern media” and “transportation” technologies, introduced new systems/proportions of space and time just like imaginary media.69 On the level of time, Kittler and Parikka noticed an epistemological correspondence between ghosts and media technologies for recording of audio and images, regarding the transcendent possibility to preserve what previously would have been lost as a result of the passing of time and its insuperable ending in death.70 Moreover, Kittler stresses this “ghostliness of media” can be recognized in how electronic communication technology, made one capable to surpass the spatiotemporal limits imposed by the human body.71 Other scholars have indicated a more direct link between imaginary media and technology. Mauss culturally positions magic between religion and technology and stresses that it “promotes and protects” technology.72 Stivers argues that “individualized and secular” forms of magic such as “dream-guessing rituals” function as a “practical activity” and therefore are a technology.73 Andriopoulos stresses that, since “interest in the paranormal” often goes alongside technologies of “long-distance communication”, there must be some definite connection between imaginary media and technological development.74 Mysticist Carl du Prel (1839-99) claims there’s a direct influence; it is the occultist from whom future technicians “can learn from, and draw upon”.75 This means, Parikka argues, one “can understand later imaginary media reworkings of ghosts and aliens as archaeologies of the conditions of technical media.”76 Peters asserts, not only do metaphysical and supernatural imaginations and discourses are connected to radio, they are the result of the conceptual idea of “bodiless contact” that conditioned the invention of radio.77 In this respect the “metaphysical interests” inherently tied to the “mediumless” communication technology of radio,78 indicates radio is a continuation of metaphysical imaginary media such as the metaphysical communication media of psychics. In spite of the frequency of such claims and the methodological attempts to consider imaginary media as media technology, these claims don’t exceed the level of speculations. Namely, since the main focus of such discursive correspondences is based on the unattainable mental abilities of psychics, concrete evidence of a direct influence on technology remains non-existent. However, the until this day unrecognized imaginary media practice of Dee and Kelley might be able to provide

68 (Parikka 58, 60 and see Žižek 104-5)) 69 (Parikka 60 with reference to Kern) 70 (Parikka 60 and Kittler 1999 based on an article from the Scientific American, 17 November 1877, 304) 71 (Parikka 61 in reference to Peters 140) 72 (Mauss 142 cited in Stivers 36) 73 (Stivers 36) 74 (Parikka 58 and 60; see Andriopoulos) 75 (Parikka 59; Prel 19) 76 (Parikka 61) 77 (Peters 14) 78 (Peters 14)

concrete evidence, since digital screens that have a corresponding technological ability to transcend one’s physical and spatiotemporal existence in its facilitation of communication and information, even as a material object independently from the technology, can facilitate communication/information for the scryer that transcends the physical and spatiotemporal.79 Unlike the imaginary media of psychics who use their body as the medium for transcendent communication, Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice transcends its status as imaginary media because of the use of an external screen and opens up the possibility to study the correspondences between imaginary media and digital screen technology on a material level as well, since a similar scrying practice can be executed on both screens. This inquiry can therefore complement Parikka’s aim “to establish a more material definition” and approach of 80 81 imaginary media and builds on Kittler’s material approach of communication and technologies. By means of a material approach, the entanglement between the past practice of Dee and Kelley and contemporary screens, can provide the opportunity to avoid a subjective evaluation of its supernatural transcendental truth that has previously been unavoidable in the research of the imaginary media of unprovable mental abilities of psychics. Moreover, in understanding the obsidian mirror Dee and Kelley used as a screen this thesis builds on Huhtamo’s argument that mirrors used “as surfaces for 82 receiving and transmitting visual information” are wrongly unrecognized as screens. The question is however, does the direct link between imaginary media and technology, suggested by du Prel, exists? The past scrying practice of Dee and Kelley’s returning in the present- day materiality of a contemporary screen is an example of Erkki Huhtamo’s concept of topos (plural form: topoi) with which he refers to recurring phenomena and discourses in media culture.83 Topoi therefore are cyclic phenomena; they are variously latent or explicitly present. The fact that the topos of scrying occurs in the context of an, in following the Žižek guideline, in essence similar screen practice, suggests contemporary digital screen practice and technology might not be so “new” after all. Thereby, it fits the media-archaeological branch that considers the newness of media to be an illusion as it is the new in which the old can be found.84 Moreover, this topos fits the media-archaeological aim for a more cyclical conception of media, since it offers the possibility to debunk teleological conceptions of contemporary media technology as advanced and highly rational phenomena having surpassed such (primitive) practices.

79 The scrying medium enables to scryer to transcend one’s spatiotemporal and physical existence as it enables access to the departed, faraway places, unphysical dimensions and information otherwise unattainable. 80 (Parikka 44, 55) 81 Kittler complemented and expanded Foucault’s methodological ideas in order to make it suitable for executing a study of technological media as well (Parikka 6). Kittler focuses on the material aspects of technologies and the way in which the workings of the technologies influence culture (Parikka 66-70, 163-164; see also Elsaesser’s reference to Kittler’s “theory of the ‘materialities of communication’.” (“Early Film” 17)). 82 (Huhtamo, “Screen Tests” 145) 83 (Parikka 11 ; see also Huhtamo, “From Kaleidoscomaniac”) 84 This is the branch Strauven refers to as “new media theory” which questions the newness of media (66-67). However, looking for the new in the old the can also be used as a method to rethink temporalities (Strauven 68).

In fact the entangled manifestation of Dee and Kelley’s past practice in the present is a perfect example of what Parikka regards as the best way to study media culture, namely he argues that research of media culture should “start in the middle – from the entanglement of past and present”.85 As such, Dee and Kelley’s Western esoteric scrying practice as a heretofore unrecognized part of media culture, can fulfil the media-archaeological aim to discover alternative pasts, presents and futures,86 which originates from Michel Foucault’s archaeological approach in which he acknowledges the conditions (regimes of knowledge) under which discourses and cultural practices exist, and looks at the “neglected genealogies” of history.87 Inspired by Foucault, media archaeology investigates the “breaks” and discontinuities that are not included or doesn’t seem to fit in teleological conceptions of history.88 In doing so Parikka stresses one must be aware of the “objects, discourses and practices” of the present moment and question how it has become “to be perceived as reality”.89

1.3 Interdisciplinary Research and One Audiovisual Tradition: Scrying as a means to Comprehend to the Turn to Digital Cinema

In examining the entanglement between a Western esoteric practice and media culture, this is an interdisciplinary study combining Media Studies and Western Esotericism. Where interdisciplinary research is promoted by the media-archaeological approach,90 also Hanegraaff stresses that interdisciplinary research is where the study of Western Esotericism gets most valuable:

[…] the study of esotericism is never just about esotericism ‘in itself’ (whatever that may be). On the contrary, it is always more general, larger, even universal problems and questions that should be of eminent interest to all educated persons. Therefore one could not pay any worse service to Western esotericism than by leaving it to specialized scholars of esotericism alone […]. Without any exaggeration, esotericism stands for the single most neglected and misunderstood domain of research in the humanities, as least as far as Western culture is concerned, and this means that the possibility – even probability – of new discoveries and

85 (Parikka 5) 86 (Parikka 2, 12-13)  According to Fickers and Weber this is “a central motivation behind many media-archaeological investigations” (2). 87 (Parikka 6, 47-48) 88 (Löffler 174)  According to Elsaesser the task of the media scholar is to focus on precisely those things that doesn’t seem to fit neatly within a coherent and continues theorization of cinema. Namely, important aspects of cinema have been left out or been “forgotten” as the result of scientific preference to teleological (pre-determined) historiography (“Early Film” 22-23). 89 (Parikka 10) 90 From the media-archaeological broadening of what belongs to the history of media is also its interdisciplinary nature apparent. Parikka argues “the alternative histories for media cultures are sought somewhere on the fuzzy borders of art/science/technology.”(14; see also Strauven 63)

surprising new insights is nowhere so great as precisely here. (Western Esotericism: A guide for the Perplexed Foreword VII)

An interdisciplinary Western esoteric study of Dee and Kelley that comes closest to my inquiry is from historicist Deborah Harkness who expounds the similarities between Dee and Kelley’s angelic conversations and Elizabethan theatre.91 She stresses that Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices are a type of “private theatre”, 92 as what the screens screen depicted: the alchemic symbolism, symbolic settings, the dominance of speech, cast and special effects that supported the words spoken by the angels, is a continuation of the visual culture of the early modern period: Elizabethan theatre and alchemy.93 Furthermore, she claims would Dee and Kelley have lived today they would have perceived (audio) visual imagery alike contemporary cinema:

[…] if a scryer was employed to realize spirits in the late twentieth century, the spirits would be capable of winging through an infinite cosmos and fighting with bolts or jagged lightning – in shots, anything a Hollywood special effect director could produce for the camera. (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone”725)

Thereby, she positions Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices within the context of the same audiovisual tradition as cinema and theatre. However, in her argument for scrying to be a continuation of visual culture Harkness doesn’t acknowledge the transcendent(al) information and communication scrying screens provide, which is absent in cinema and theatre, and the extensive cultural tradition of scrying. She expounds her claim without investigating the visual experiences of scryers in other spatiotemporal contexts and therefore just assumes that the similarities between early modern visual culture and scrying couldn’t possibly be the result of the reverse situation that scrying influences visual culture. Moreover, because of her focus on Dee and Kelley’s time and the audiovisual aspects regardless of the screen, she overlooks the commonalities regarding their scrying practices and contemporary screen technologies. However, Gunning stresses that in order to understand the past one must take into

91 (See Harkness, “Shows in the Showstone”)  Harkness’s article was recommended to me by dhr. prof. dr. W.J. (Wouter) Hanegraaff and dhr. dr. P.J. (Peter) Forshaw from the Western Esotericism section of the department of Religion Studies of the University of Amsterdam. 92 (Harkness, “Shows in the Showstone” 709) 93 (Harkness, “Shows in the Showstone” 719, 721, 724-732)  “The words spoken by characters on the Elizabethan stage were often supported by special effects. In Dee’s angel conversations, the angels emphasized the importance of their messages by exhibiting supernatural powers. These powers – ascending and descending from heavens, causing thunder and lightning, spitting forth fire from eyes and mouths – were all within the special effects capabilities of an Elizabethan producer.”(Harkness, “Shows in the Showstone” 725)  “When the curtain drew aside and the images finally appeared, additional parallels emerge between the shows in Dee’s showstone and contemporary theater. The visions were not set, as one might initially think, in a scholar’s study, alchemical laboratory, or church. Instead, the settings resembled those common to Elizibethan stage, such as roads, meadows, forests, mountains, streets, market-places, gateways, bridged, and great halls.”(Harkness, “Shows in the Showstone” 722)

account the present, since “history always responds to the present” and the present can point towards aspects of the past that had previously been overlooked or repressed.94 In this case the entangled manifestation of Dee and Kelley’s past scrying practice with present-day (digital) screens indicates the importance of taking into account the screen and aspects of materiality that condition the continued existence of Dee and Kelley’s practice. Consequently, the present indicates Dee and Kelley’s scrying is a screen practice which can’t be considered equal to theatre. The fact that scrying can be executed on digital screens makes it into an example relating to both digital screens as well as (audiovisual) cinema. As such, scrying might be able to provide further insights regarding the turn to the digital and consequently the understanding of digital technology and cinema within one corresponding framework. The coming of digital cinema is often understood as a radical rupture in regard to analogue cinema, since digital technology enables the possibility to alter the image, to see films on any other digital screen, to intervene in its screening and to watch films at any setting. Consequently, theories of film based on old cinematic techniques, such as the importance of projection in Baudry’s dispositif95 and classical Film Theory’s “photographic understanding of cinema”96 in which the essence of cinema is thought to be the indexical photographic image, have become out-dated and scholars have gone as far as proclaiming the death of cinema. However, Elsaesser stresses that the turn to the digital should not be regarded as an ending of analogue cinema.97 Rather it should be used as a methodological tool to discover alternative histories of cinema and foster a renewed understanding of cinema.98 For Elsaesser, digital cinema provides even more evidence for the fact that cinema “has yet to be ‘invented’ ”, since it has many origins “and therefore also no specific essence”.99 Likewise, Gunning stresses the transition to the digital is just another step in an on-going process of cinematic adaptation; “Cinema has never been one thing”, it came forth out of a symbiosis of technologies and other media devices and has constantly been subject to change.100 One should therefore speak of film histories instead of film history. Gunning argues, what is needed is a rethinking of film history and theory.101 What is needed is a new paradigm of Film Theory able to comprehend analogue cinema and digital cinema within one theoretical framework. Such a heterogenous approximation of cinema, can be used to look for a wider cultural tradition of which cinema (also in its digital manifestation) is part of. Elsaesser hypotheses the digital

94 (Gunning, “Moving Away” 35) 95 (See Baudry 31) 96 (Gunning, “Moving Away” 38) 97 Elsaesser’s way of thinking is in accordance with the media-archaeological approach which does not agree with teleological assumptions such as “the death of cinema” as if it has passed away into nonexistence. In fact Media Archaeology is more concerned with the ways in which media, in the words of Wolfgang Ernst, appear to be “undead” (Hertz and Parikka 429). Parikka prefers to use the term “zombie media”; “the “living dead of media history”, to refer to media that have been surpassed according to teleological perceptions but nevertheless are still present within culture, she explains: “Zombie media is concerned with media that is not only out of use, but resurrected to new uses, contexts and adaptations.”( Hertz and Parikka 427, 429) Parikka uses the example of the playful (re)use of steam age technologies in steampunk culture, to explain how even steam age technologies have not yet died irreversible cultural death (Parikka 2). 98 (Parikka 10) 99 (Elsaesser, “Early Film” 17) 100 (Gunning, “Moving Away” 36) 101 (Gunning, “Moving Away” 36)

way of imaging might as well be “the logical-technological continuation of a long and complex history of mechanical vision”; a possibility that was never examined in “traditional film theory”.102 Parikka stresses one key idea underlying media archaeology is the understanding of film as “only one possible end result” from all that can be considered to be part of “(audio)visual culture” including simple ideas.103 Likewise, Zielinski stresses cinema is only just an “intermezzo” in audiovisual history.104 According to Elseasser, research projects into “early and pre-cinematic visual cultures” can help to understand processes of convergence and the turn towards the digital.105 Although the media-achaeological approach aims to discover many histories and origins of cinema, until this day major emphasis remains to be put on the 19th century.106 However, in correspondence with Zielinki who goes way further back in time, “the deep time of media”, such as the 5th century B.C., in his attempt to find the new in the old,107 this inquiry’s elaboration of (digital) screens and cinema in the context of scrying offers an opportunity to elongate as well as broaden what can be considered to be part of the audiovisual tradition of cinema, including digital screens and technology.

1.4 Parallel Research of Pre- and Post-Enlightenment: Changed Manifestations and Discursive Transitions

In order to research Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice and understand the use of screens of specific materiality, I take into account the discourses and practices it was founded on, which therefore also underlie the way in which scrying manifests itself as a topos on technological screens. Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices were inspired by past practitioners of scrying and the necessary intellectual background for the interpretation of the Angelic conversations and practical tools, were derived from John Dee’s “solid foundation in medieval and Renaissance science, magic, Kabbalah and the Hermetic arts”108, such as alchemy and cosmology. Dee and Kelley’s practices stand in the cultural tradition of

102 (Elsaesser, “Early Film” 13) 103 (Parikka 13) 104 (Zielinski, Audiovisions) 105 (Parikka 10 in reference to Elsaesser, “The New Film”) 106 Being regarded “as a key technology of modernity, cinema has been at the core of media-archaeological theories.”(Parikka 8) Building on Foucault and in deposition with early Film theory that was based upon teleological thinking in terms of an exact moment cinema supposedly was born, Elsaesser stresses that in today’s film theory, it is accepted/assumed that cinema has many origins (Elsaesser, “Early Film” 18). These origins are primarily indicated in the contexts of cultural and scientific (but also the study of light since the renaissance: stereoscopy) drive towards recreating the illusion of movement by establishing persistence of vision amongst with the development of technologies that were capable of projection, depiction of smooth movement and technically record real life events: photography. Especially, since the wave of New Film History in Film studies (1970s /1980s) and inspired by works Tom Gunning’s focus on cinema as an “attraction” (see Gunning “The Cinema of Attractions”), pre-cinematic apparatuses like the praxinoscope (1877), the stereoscope (1838) and the phenakistoscope (1832), are integrated in the history of cinema (Parikka 9). Main emphasis is put on the 19th century, which is also apparent from Parikka who stresses the audiovisual tradition of cinema can be found in the (audio)visual culture of “mid and late nineteenth century.” (Parikka 13) 107(Strauven 70 about Zielinski Deep Time 3) 108 (Peterson 2)

Western esotericism where they are an embodiment of the congregation of monotheism (Christianity) and Paganism. Moreover, in researching the entanglement of Dee and Kelley’s (past) practice with present screens one must take into account the cultural changes between the past (pre-Enlightenment) and the present (post-Enlightenment) due to changes in regimes of knowledge, for example, those caused by the Enlightenment and processes of secularization, which changed the way in which Western esotericism manifests itself in the present. This becomes clear in regard of a theoretical discussion between Hanegraaff, Faivre and Yates. Faivre, an important scholar in the field of Western Esotericism,109 and Yates, belief that the best example of Western esotericism can be found in the period from early modern period and the renaissance until the Enlightenment with the movements of “Christian theosophy and Naturphilosophie”, which were inspired by “literary sources” from the late antiquity and the revival of the “Hermetic tradition, such as Hermetic magic.”110 Hanegraaff refers to their way of thinking as the early modern enchantment model, which proclaims that “contemporary manifestations of esotericism, from the eighteenth century up to the present, proclaim ideas and convictions that have their historical descents in pre-Enlightenment models.”111 Even though Hanegraaff agrees the study of past manifestations of esotericism is important, he argues the essential characteristics of esotericism can be found in “modern and contemporary culture”.112 Namely, in the eighteenth century esotericism became detached from the intellectual and religious traditions where it previously had been part of, which results in the fact that post-Enlightenment manifestations of esotericism for the first time in history show esotericism as an independent and self-contained “social phenomenon”.113 My inquiry that researches the entanglement of Dee and Kelley’s practice with the present includes the periods of both Faivre and Yates and Hanegraaff, can therefore provide further insights in regard of this discussion. In correspondence to changes in the manifestation of esotericism indicated by Faivre, Yates and Hanegraaff, Castle’s discourse analysis indicates how the Western esoteric practice of psychic perception of ghosts as the result of demystification processes of the Enlightenment have passed into the realm of the imaginary.114 Where phantasms once were externally present phenomena they became metaphors for the misleading imaginative properties of the human brain.115 It is important for this inquiry focusing on the pre- and post-Enlightenment situation of a Western esoteric subject to take into account such discursive transitions. In this respect Castle’s discourse analyses serves as a guideline for this thesis on how to recognize and understand the continued existence of esoteric subjects and discourses. Moreover, Castle’s indication of discursive context of the pre-cinematic

109 Faivre is the “holder of the first university chair in the history of Western esotericism” (Hanegraaff, “Teaching Experiential Dimensions”156). 110 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 5-7). 111 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 5-8) 112 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 8) 113 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 8) 114 (Castle 52-54) 115 (Castle 49-52)

phantasmagoria, can provide a better understanding of workings of cinema and the cultural position of scrying and esotericism in regard to cinema. In accordance to the discursive transition indicated by Castle, Huhtamo stresses that metaphors and discourses can be topoi and can be used as an instrument to counterpart “technological determinism” which means an acknowledgement of the importance of including imaginations and discourse analysis into media research.116 Moreover, it is assumed that a metaphor can function as a methodological tool to elaborate on origins. For example, Michael Wedel used cinema’s metaphoric conceptualization as “plastic art in motion” to elaborate on the origins of cinema.117 Likewise, Friedberg stresses the fact that the window metaphor is used for screens, indicates screens are connected to the window as an architectural object.118 Whereas Elsaesser has rejected such claims in favour of the door metaphor to account for the experience of entering another “world”,119 both these metaphoric understandings have in common the connotation that the screen is something that is in- between two different spaces. Such metaphorical understandings are a common in regard to cinema and screens, which has led Manovich to expound the similarities between screens and the Renaissance paintings and understand these paintings as the first screens.120 However such understandings have also resulted in an insurmountable theoretical gap; why is the space of the screen understood as a virtual space as the immaterial connotations of the virtual don’t match its actual material existence and material processes? This inquiry takes into account the Western esoteric discourses and the fact that these can be present as topoi and is thereby able to offer new understandings of the metaphorical/discursive understandings of screens.

1.5 Methodology

In studying the entanglement between the neglected practice of scrying with present-day screens and cinema, this inquiry follows the media-archaeological methodology and approach, since its main focus on alternative pasts and presents of media culture, and its disapproval of teleological thinking is especially suitable for this inquiry. In doing so past and present are approached in parallel lines,121 and Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices is approached as an audiovisual screen practice part of the same audiovisual tradition as cinema and similar to digital screens in regard to the facilitation of imagery, information and communication that transcends one’s physical and spatiotemporal existence. As such, this inquiry takes into account the tradition of scrying and Western esotericism Dee and Kelley’s

116 (Huhtamo, “Tracing the Topoi”) 117 (see Wedel 206) 118 Friedberg indicates the window metaphor that was firstly used in the context of paintings by Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura (1435), remained a common metaphor for the screen’s framed visuality, regardless of the technological changes in respect to framed visual perceptions in twentieth-century’s projected and transmitted imagery (347 , 338 see also the rest of Friedberg’s book). 119 (see Elsaesser and Hagener) 120 (see Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology”) 121 Parikka stresses that “thinking the new and the old in parallel lines” is “the media-archaeological spirit of thinking” (2).

practice is part of, the Western esoteric discourses that underlie their scrying practices (and other scrying practices) as well as the use of technological screens for scrying and the changes as the result of the Enlightenment (regimes of knowledge). It is an interdisciplinary study combining Western esotericism and Media studies (media archaeology) with a focus on materiality, (ritual) proceedings, uses, functions, circumstances, experiences, discourses and audiovisual aspects, which studies the past and present in parallel lines and is thereby able to provide a new understanding of the past and present of screens and cinema as well as an understanding of the present-day cultural position of Western esotericism and scrying. This inquiry is able to provide concrete evidence for the direct influence of the occult on technology, as suggested by du Prel, in regard to media technology, and is thereby able to extend the cultural meaning and status of the imaginary media practice of Dee and Kelley beyond the imaginary. Although this thesis is building on media-archaeological research into imaginary media and Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice fits this category, this thesis does not refer to scrying and related Western esoteric discourses as imaginary nor provides subjective evaluations of the metaphysical and supernatural capabilities of scrying mediums, in an acceptance of the fact that its cultural existence and influence is nondependent on whether regimes of knowledge proclaim it to be (un)true; as is apparent from Dee and Kelley’s influence on present-day scryers. Therefore, this inquiry is building on Hanegraaff who states that Scholars “are not qualified to assess their [in reference to Western esotericism] truth or falsity” since there are no methods to prove if “a universal, hidden dimension of reality, really does exists”.122 The result of this thesis will be an alternative conception of the past and present of media culture that offers new insights concerning the origins of cinema and screens, but also two frameworks in which screens and cinema can be understood as a continuation of Western esoteric scrying practices, in the context of which gaps in the understanding and theorization of cinema and screens, such as the turn to the digital, the illusion of reality experienced by cinema’s spectator and the paradoxical material reality of the virtual, can be solved. This is researched by combining primary and secondary literature about Dee and Kelley, scrying and Western esotericism, with archival study of Dee and Kelly’s materials exhibited at the British Museum and visual representations of Kelley’s necromancy. As a media scholar who followed a course on the subject of Western esotericism, I was relatively familiar with its subject of study. However, for my selection of sources, since sources are limited, I asked some advice from dhr. prof. dr. W.J. (Wouter) Hanegraaff and dhr. dr. P.J. (Peter) Forshaw from the Western Esotericism section of the department of Religion Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Since Hanegraaff and Forshaw informed me there’s a lot of bad literature available on the subject of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices, I was extra careful in my selection of source material and selected sources close to the primary source of Dee’s documentations and used materials.

122 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 11, 13) 21

For example, I selected Peterson’s John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic since Peterson’s elaborations on the subject are directly based on his English translation of Dee’s documentations of the scrying sessions provided by the book. For information about the Western esoteric discourses underlying Dee and Kelley’s practices, Hanegraaff’s book Western Esotericism: A guide for the Perplexed and Harkness’s article were particularly useful. For a better understanding of the preferred materials and circumstances for scrying I use a wide range of different sources amongst which practical guides, since academic literature is limited.123 I selected the influential study of Raymond Moody who created a contemporary version of an ancient Greek scrying institution. His descriptions of scrying experiences based on firsthand experiences of himself and other scryers offered me a clear image of what scrying is, what it was and what it can be in the present, which proved to be very useful for this inquiry. The first chapter starts with a detailed disquisition of the Western esoteric discourses underlying Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and then uses this information to examine cinema’s spectators’ illusion of reality (paradox of fiction). A look at cinema’s correspondences with ancient Greek, Moody’s and Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and the phantasmagoria will provide a new understanding of cinema’s dispositif with the concept “esoteric dispositif”, which renders the turn to digital cinema less problematic and provides concrete evidence for what is suggested by du Prel. Moreover, it provides a new understanding of cinema (and other media) to be fulfilling a similar desire as scrying practices. In the context of Manovich’s study, chapter three examines the materiality of the screens Dee and Kelley used in a comparative analysis with digital screens, which provides concrete support for du Prel’s suggestion. Furthermore, this chapter provides a new understanding of the entanglement of scrying and screens culture with the concept “esoteric screen” which is a framework that includes both digital screens and the cinema screen, and further substantiates what was indicated by chapter two. Chapter four extends the notions of “esoteric screen” and “esoteric dispositif” with a focus on the audiovisual aspects of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice. Contrary to Harkness, the past and present are studied in parallel lines with a focus on materiality, experiences, discourses and the uses of screens in the context of the findings of the previous chapters. On the basis of a literature study, discourse analysis and film analysis, this chapter shows that scrying remains present in the discursive understandings of screens, in audiovisual culture and in regard to audiovisual experiences, how this provides concrete evidence for what is suggested by du Prel and how scrying provides a framework in which cinema and the digital can be comprehended.

123 Sources on the subject of scrying are limited. Whereas, in the past many sources were destroyed or kept in secrecy, most of the (accessible) sources on scrying stem from the last decades. Most sources are nonacademic and can be accessed through the internet. This is because, it remains a culturally and academically neglected subject, existing mostly around “underground” subcultures, that a lot of people haven’t heard of or wouldn’t take seriously.

CHAPTER 2: A Western Esoteric Understanding of Cinema’s Dispositif

2.1 Dee and Kelley’s Scrying Practices: Western Esoteric Discourses of Light and Dark

In 1581 John Dee started to hear strange noises and footsteps, which drove him to gaze into his crystallo at moonlight.124 Generally one finds the right conditions for scrying at moonlight, sunset, sunrise or candle light,125 a limited amount of light combined with a dark environment. In Dee and Kelley’s case the conditions of light and dark are a meaningful expression of the Christian nature of the Western Esoteric ideas that underlie their scrying practices. Harkness stresses that Dee from his medieval predecessors Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, took over the idea based on Genesis that the natural and supernatural worlds work under the influence of the luminous divine light created by the words of God.126 Grosseteste believed that “light formed a perfect sphere” around the earth, and in its reflection created “the nine heavenly spheres” existing between the earth and the divine realm above the outer sphere.127 Hanegraaff explains that the Western esoteric current of Gnosticism postulates that the divine above these spheres, can only be reached after death (like the Christian belief in Heaven). In Gnosticism, human bodily existence on earth is understood as an imprisonment of the soul: a sparkle of divine light.128 According to “gnostic mythodology” the physical world is a “lower world of darkness and ignorance” created by “the demiurge”, an evil and nescient godhead (“often associated with the God of the Old Testament”), to hinder humans from knowing “their true divine identity.”129 This means that, as the result of one’s embodied life on earth, one isn’t able to comprehend the full extent of reality and the divine. In Dee’s scrying documentations, Mysteriorum Libri Quinque, this Gnostic and Neoplatonist belief is included in what Peterson indicates as one “of the key messages of the angels” proclaiming “flesh is vile and corrupt”.130 However, Hanegraaf stresses that in Hermetism and Gnosticism that came forth out of “pagan Egyptian Hellenism” it is believed that during one’s bodily existence on earth the divine can be “reached” through spiritual ascent when attaining salvational gnōsis: a way of attaining transcendent knowledge that “was widespread among Christians as well”.131 This believe derived from Platonism proclaims that to attain gnōsis one must overcome “sexual urges”, surpass one’s bodily existence, surpass rational ways of thinking and open one’s eyes to receive the spiritual light and reconcile with the “Divine Mind”, so that eventually one will be spiritually reborn in the form of immaterial light, reunite “with the […] divine light” and realize that “the divine is invisibly present throughout the

124 His diary reveals this was firstly at May 25: “May 25th, I had sight in χρυσταλλω[Crystallo] offerd me, and I saw”( Peterson 17). 125 (Eason 61, 159, 178, 199, 248, 257) 126 (Harkness 716 in reference to/and McEvoy “The Metaphysics” 124-43) 127 (Pendergrast 71; James L Kelley cited in Dyer) 128 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 20) 129 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 20) 130 (Peterson 30) 131 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 18-20)

whole of creation.”132 As such one who obtains gnōsis experiences salvation, liberation and is released from material existence.133 Correspondingly, Dee and Grosseteste believed that the whole universe consists out of light.134 Moreover, as indicated by James L. Kelley, John Dee believed that the universe of light is radiant and that rays of light can transmit knowledge/information into the human brain when it is “refracted off objects” and perceived by human eyes.135 Therefore, inspired by the concept of gnōsis and Grotesseste, who underscored the theological idea that the divine light is connected to angels (the first creation of God),136 Dee and Kelley believed that the scrying medium could catch the divine rays of angelic light and concentrate it into a coherent message.137 In this way Dee and Kelley could receive knowledge from the angels, otherwise unattainable because of their physical existence. Namely, Harkness stresses they had a Judeao-Christian understanding of angels as an important part of “the natural and supernatural worlds” serving as “intermediary agencies between humanity and divinity” that deliver “the divine cosmic order” and teach the secret truths of the way in which the natural world works.138 Dee and Kelley’s use of a mirror and a crystal sphere for scrying corresponds to the ways in which one envisioned the materiality of the spheres and the divine to be mirror-like or made of crystal. So did Plato, who formulated the conceptual idea of gnōsis, and Socrates understand the world, as Pendergrast stresses, to be no more than an “illusory reality”, “a mirror-illusion”, a reflection of “a greater, abstract Goodness” located in the “upperworld beyond the mirrorlike dome of the sky.”139 Dee and Kelley’s used materiality resembles Donald Tyson’s indication of the Ancient conviction that lunar materials, such as obsidian and water, are in correspondence with the Moon which has power over metaphysical experience.140 This is an expressions of the astrological believe in the Quinta Essentia John Dee’s knew about since Hanegraaff stresses he was inspired by De occulta philosophia libri tres (1533) from famous esoteric thinker Agrippa (1486-1535/36).141 In Aristotelian natural philosophy the “sublunar world” consists of four elements: water, fire, air and earth, and is unable to

132 (Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 18-20) 133 (Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 18-19) 134 (Pendergrast 71) 135 (James L. Kelley cited in Dyer) 136 For Grotesseste’s ideas see McEvoy The Philosophy 58-140 mentioned in Harkness 716) 137 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 716) 138 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 717) 139 (Pendergrast 12) 140 Donald Tyson explains how in ancient times the Moon was understood “as a […] gateway between our ordinary, physical world and the mysterious realm of spirits.” due to its location as the closest planetary sphere to the earth (11). The Moon was believed to have power over all those things that transcend the physical and spatiotemporal ways of perception and until this day scryers make use of the cycles of the Moon (Tyson 11). Scrying mediums such as crystals, water, obsidian and mirrors are historically known as “lunar materials”, which comes forth out of the fact that their reflective properties are similar to water whose tides are directly controlled by the Moon (Tyson 11, 22). 141 (Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 29)  Agrippa’s three books are about the “Aristotelian and Ptolemaic three worlds of reality”; the “sublunar world”: the earth underneath the moon, the “middle realm of the planetary spheres”, located “between the moon and the” stars that are fixed on “the cosmic globe” outside of which one finds the third reality: “the angelic and divine realities”. (Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 29)

move on its own.142 However, the movement of celestial bodies made out of the fifth element Quinta Essentia is believed to be in correspondence with the Quinta Essentia invisibly present in all things on earth, consequently the celestial spheres influence what happens on earth. In Dee and Kelley’s case a Christian version of such believes is recognizable in the belief in the light entities of angels as intermediary forces between the earth and the divine and the believe that everything consists out of light created by the God’s words directing everything that exists. Also, the belief in Quinta Essentia is in correspondence with the fact that the materiality of Dee and Kelley’s scrying screens resembles the materiality of the sphere(s) that one who attains gnōsis is supposed to bridge in order to reach the divine.143 The writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626) living partly at the same spatiotemporal context as Dee and Kelley show how the underlying principle of scrying already passed into metaphoric meaning. Similar to Castle’s indication that the phantasm became a psychological metaphor for delusional qualities of the mind, Bacon wrote “God hath framed the mind of man as a mirror or glass capable of the image of the universal world, and joyful to receive the impression thereof, as the eye joyeth to receive light”.144 Consistent with the new scientific ideas Bacon formulated a strict distinction between rational empirical knowledge and knowledge obtained through scrying, the scrying screen as a means to have access to the truth became a metaphor of the mind, which marks the beginning of the idea still dominating modern science that one’s mind and senses are able to rationally find the truth in the physical world. Consequently, also the Western esoteric believes tied to light and dark adopted a more metaphorical function. In contemporary culture light remains to be used as metaphor for revelation of truth or positivity, whereas darkness has negative and evil connotations and is used as a metaphor for nescience. Furthermore, blindness, not able to perceive light, is bound to metaphoric connotations to not be able to see the truth.

2.2 A Western Esoteric Understanding of Cinema’s Dispositif in the Context of Plato’s Cave

In Film Studies the paradoxical fact that one has bodily responses to cinema though knowing it does not show reality is a much debated phenomenon referred to as the paradox of fiction. Building on Metz, Tom Gunning stresses cinema deals “with realism, not ‘reality’.”145 Where theatre deals with reality, since spectators are confronted with actual reality through the physical presence and proximity of the play, he argues in cinema it is “not its materiality” but the “images that possess an

142 ((Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 23) 143 The Attainment of gnōsis is often symbolically/metaphorically expressed as climbing a mountain, a ladder or staircase.  The fact that a scryer must look deeply into the scrying medium as if going through the surface into the depth of its matter, is in line with the idea that the above by means of the Quinta Essentia is present in all matter, and the idea that the divine is located behind a sphere of likewise materiality. 144 (Bacon 7) 145 (Gunning, “Moving Away” 44)

impression of reality”.146 Film theorists like Metz and Henri Bergson subscribe the realistic and kinaesthetic effect of cinema to the active participation of the subject with the movement of the image.147 According to Metz, it is “cinematic motion” that creates the effect of reality and renders “the world of imagination more real than it had ever been”.148 In accordance, Castle and Gunning notice the phantasmagoria made the projected ghosts more “realistic” by adding movement (change in size).149 Another way of approaching cinema’s illusion of reality is Jean-Louis Baudry’s influential conceptualization of cinema’s dispositif, which describes the spatial positioning of the viewer in cinema’s dark hall with a projector and a screen sustains the illusion of reality by concealment of the actual material conditions on which the screening is dependent: l’appareil de base. 150 Baudry stresses the positioning of cinema’s spectators and the dream state experience of fiction viewers resembles the illusive reality of the prisoners in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (see figure 4).151 In this cave the subjects are chained and imprisoned.

Figure 4: Visual representation of Plato's Cave based on Plato’s Politeia (Sascha van der Meer 2016).

Their gaze is fixed and the only thing they see is the moving image of shadowy figures on the wall in front of them. What they do not know and cannot see, is that these shadowy figures are projected images resulting from the light of a fire that falls on things that people carry above their heads while their bodies remain concealed behind a wall. In this viewing situation, the shadows and reverberating (sourceless) sounds become to encompass the entire reality of the subjects, since their imprisonment and the fixed position of their gaze, leaves the material conditions of the shadows concealed.

146 (Gunning, “Moving Away” 44) 147 (see Metz “The Imaginary Signifier” and Bergson 197-314) 148 (Metz “On the Impression” 15) 149 (see Castle 41; Gunning “Illusions Past” 4) 150 (Baudry 23, 31) 151 (Baudry 23; see Plato)

According to Baudry cinema’s dispositif works on an in essence similar principle. However, in Baudry’s understanding of Plato’s cave something is overlooked: the cultural context in which Plato’s lived. Namely, as Hanegraaff argues it is this Greek “Hellenistic culture of late antiquity” based on “Greek philosophy and indigenous religious traditions, especially those of the Egyptians” were Western esotericism came into being.152 In fact Baudry’s comparison of Plato’s cave with cinema’s dispositif is based on only just half of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave but its meaning is apparent from what happens when a prisoner leaves the cave. When the prisoner climbs up to the daylight, he is blinded by the sunlight and unable to look at it. Firstly, he can only discern shadows, secondly the reflections in water and lastly the objects themselves. Plato describes how eventually he would want to perceive the upper world and its phenomena, and that this can at best be done at night under the light of the moon and the stars. Eventually he would be able to see the true nature of the sun without the use of reflective surfaces and learn that the sun rules everything that happens in the visible world (see figure 5).153

Figure 5: Visual representation of the second half of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave based on Plato’s Politeia (Sascha van der Meer 2016.

Right after his hypothetical sketch, Plato stresses the world we live in is a prison and in this process the prisoner has ascended to the realm of true knowledge. It is apparent from the second half of Plato’s Allegory of the cave that it deals with a meaningful application of light and dark in the context

152 (Hanegraaff Western Esotericism 18) 153 (Plato 378-381)

of attaining true knowledge, which are a means to represent Plato’s conceptual idea of gnōsis that later inspired Western esoteric currents of Gnosticism and Hermetism and underlies Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices. Moreover, the conceptual idea of scrying is expressed in Plato’s reference to the use of reflective surfaces at moonlight as a means to have access to a truth otherwise unperceivable. Therefore, one cannot understand Plato’s cave in the context of the present-day cinema without acknowledging the foundations of Western esoteric thinking that underlies this Greek philosopher’s allegory. One must understand Plato’s cave as follows: The illusory reality the subjects experiences in the dark cave is metaphoric example of the illusive reality of human’s bodily imprisonment in the physical world, in which one is unable to grasp the full extent of reality/ truth. When the subjects come out of the cave into the sunlight, this metaphorically refers to the conviction that true knowledge, reality and freedom can be found in the light when one escapes his/her physical imprisonment in the dark world. In acknowledging Plato’s cave as an expression of the basics of gnōsis it changes and clarifies certain (mis)understandings of the cinematic dispositif that are overlooked until this day. For example, building on Baudry the realistic effect of cinema’s experience has been understood as the result of the imprisonment of the spectator, which has resulted in theoretical discontinuities since viewers are not imprisoned nor tied to their chairs. This has led Manovich to understand the imprisonment of the spectator as a metaphoric expression of “a general tendency of the Western screen-based representational apparatus” in which the spectator’s body has to be still and “fixed in space” in order to see the image.154 Nonetheless, in his attempt to understanding this imprisonment as a metaphor, Manovich doesn’t let go of the literal connotations of imprisonment,155 stating that the body has to remain in a strictly demarked space. Baudry as well as Manovich here do not realize that the imprisonment in Plato’s cave transcends such connotations of being trapped or fixed in space since the imprisonment is an expression of the limitations imposed by human’s bodily existence in the world of darkness and illusory realities. Consequently, if one considers cinema equal to the first half of Plato’s cave that would mean cinema is equal to the situation of human physical imprisonment on earth and cinema’s illusion of reality would therefore be no different than the everyday/unavoidable illusion of reality of human existence. However, cinema’s images express something that is unequal to “reality” since they express a different order of space and time; cinema’s narratological and editorial logic exists out of leaps, accelerations, delays and a restructuring of fragments of space and time. Moreover, Cinema’s images show things that are impossible and do not take place in the “real” world, even more so since digital technology. In contrary to the spectator’s physical existence on earth of which the spectator does not recognize its illusive reality since he/she knows no other “reality”, the spectator knows

154 (Manovich “Towards an Archaeology” 35) 155 Especially when he argues that some apparatuses did in fact imprison the spectator, such as the (of ancient Greek descent) Camera Obscura’s imprisonment of the spectator in a dark room, and regarding, what he considers to be the “first screen apparatus”, the perspectival method of Alberti’s Window (Renaissance) (Manovich “Towards an Archaeology”36).

cinema’s images show something unlike “reality” and the spectator knows about the projection mechanisms, camera’s, the transmitting screens, the people and the software, with which it is created. Therefore, cinema doesn’t work similarly to the situation of the prisoners in Plato’s cave. In contrary to these prisoners, cinema’s spectator knows that the images do not belong to “reality” and recognizes it shows things that are different than reality because he/she has an existence outside of cinema’s image. Therefore, the cinema spectator has more in common with Plato’s escaped prisoner who knows the construction of the images and that these images are unequal to reality. However, knowing that his reality portrayed by the images is constructed and no more than an illusion, this prisoner is no longer able to belief in the reality portrayed by the images, whereas cinema’s spectator is able to at least temporarily belief in the illusory reality portrayed by cinema’s images regardless of knowing the image its untruth. So what makes the situation of cinema’s spectator different than Plato’s prisoner? Both take place in a dark environment and it both cases the image is projected. Consequently, these aspects do not account for cinema’s effect on the spectator, which is substantiated by the fact that cinema’s illusion of reality is independent on whether the image is projected or transmitted via digital screens. In fact, it is cinema’s image which is essentially different than the prisoner’s shadow play. Cinema’s image is a light image, transmitted into a comprehendible image by the screen. In correspondence to the screens used by Dee and Kelley for scrying and Plato’s description of the prisoner’s use of reflective screens as a means to make sense of the light, something he couldn’t achieve with only just his eyes, cinema’s spectator wouldn’t be able to make sense of what is transmitted by the light without the screen. Moreover, in contrary to the shadow play, also cinema’s image corresponds to Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice, in the sense that it shows something that appears the be “physically” present within a “reality” that is unlike the reality one knows (see introduction). Both scrying screens and cinema screens show past events, (imagined) futures, other realities/worlds or things that are unlike physical reality and express a beyond the spatiotemporal logic; things one wouldn’t be able to perceive without the screen because of one’s physical and spatiotemporal existence. Just like Plato’s prisoner where the fact that he comes from the cave, his physical existence into illusive reality, underlies his need to perceive the light on reflective screens, out of a desire to get to know that which transcends illusive reality, cinema’s spectator’s desire for the screening of light image is derived from the fact that one has a physical existence on earth in which one is incapable of perceiving and experiencing such things. Correspondingly, Dee and Kelley used screens to catch the light out of a desire for physically ungraspable truths/realities as a means to transcend the limitations of their physical existence in the dark world of nescience. Moreover, similar to the preferred circumstances of dark and light in scrying practices Plato expresses one must use this reflective screens at night to catch the moonlight. It are these circumstances of darkness and a limited amount of light that offers the scryer and Plato’s prisoner the capability to receive and perceive transcendent information carried by the light, that corresponds to the cinema’s spectator looking at the

transcendent “reality” of cinema’s light images in a dark auditorium. Since such circumstances in scrying practices and Plato’s cave make one capable to perceive something that is unlike the reality one knows, the fact that cinema’s image is also unlike reality, constituted out of light, watched on a screen and seen under corresponding light and dark circumstances proposes the question: does these light and dark circumstances have a similar effect on cinema’s spectator as on the scryer, resulting in an receptiveness to something that is unlike one’s physical and spatiotemporal reality?

2.3 Esoteric Dispositif: Light and Dark in the Cinematic Dispositif

In the 1980s, psychologist Moody executed a research project of the ancient Greek scrying institution known as the psychomanteum. In the psychomanteum “the spirits of the dead” were contacted for the purpose of solace or to get access to “hidden knowledge” and the future.156 The purpose of Moody’s psychomanteum, which in reference to John Dee is called The John Dee Memorial Theater of the Mind, was to investigate whether his duplication of the mirror-gazing phenomena would result in apparitions of the departed by mentally healthy, intellectual participants with no experience and interest in scrying, esotericism or seeing apparitions of the deceased.157 On their day in the psychomanteum the participants had several sessions, such as walking through nature and extensive talking about the departed person they wanted to have contact with and

Figure 6: Visual representation of Moody’s scrying chamber based on Moody’s description of it (Sascha van der Meer 2016).

156 (Moody 114) 157 (Moody 108, 110)

the artefact that reminded them of this person.158 The participants were invited into the scrying chamber at dusk (see figure 6).159 This chamber is shielded from daylight and mostly covered in black velvet.160 In the chamber one finds a mirror on the wall in front of a chair of which the legs are removed so that the distance between the floor and were the participant’s head rests is a little bit higher than the mirror’s distance to the floor.161 Participants were asked to take position in the comfortable chair and gaze at the mirror in which no reflection of the participants could be seen.162 As soon as all the lights apart from a glass light bulb (25 Watt) positioned behind the chair were turned off the scrying experience could begin. Since 12 of 25 participants experienced a connection with the departed and no one questioned his/her experience, Moody shows that apparitions do occur to “normal” contemporary people and thereby made the ancient scrying institutions more accessible to contemporary people and research.163 What is especially interesting here is that the disposition of the participant in the scrying chamber is similar to analogue cinema’s spectator. Both are characterized by a physically passive viewer gazing at a screen in a dark room with a light source from behind that makes the perception of the image on the screen possible. From this it is apparent that scrying works under similar disposition circumstances as cinema. However, unlike cinema, the images the scryer sees are not technologically produced; they are an expression of the participants’ previously unknown ability to transcend spatiotemporal and physical existence. Therefore it seems, these disposition circumstances are conductive of facilitating receptiveness to something other than spatiotemporal and physical reality, which evokes the hypotheses that the solution to cinema spectator’s illusion of reality can be found in regard to the use of a screen device in similar disposition circumstances of light and dark in scrying practices. Moreover, the phantasmagoria which is regarded as a forerunner of cinema in its use of projection and its by Gunning indicated late 18th century pioneering of the disposition of the spectator in a dark auditorium,164 made use of similar light and dark circumstances as cinema and Moody’s psychomanteum as a means to enhance the experience of its technological reproduction of apparitions of the departed. Gunning indicates that the use of darkness in the phantasmagoria’s room of apparitions resulted in the loss of spatial reference, which contributed to the realistic effect of the light

158 (Moody 108-109) 159 (Moody 109) 160 (Moody 108) 161 (Moody 108) 162 (Moody 108) 163 (Moody 110-111, 115)  Not all of them were the people the participants had wished to communicate with, to the irritation/disappointed of the participants (Moody 111).  Even nowadays research in esoteric subjects encounters a lot of resistance. Raymond Moody discusses he was prescribed a mental condition and medicine as a result of his interest in the psychomanteum. The reaction to his research project varied from people who didn’t want to hear from it to people assuring him his scientific career was over. Nonetheless Moody’s study has been influential and inspiring since (see Moody 117-118). 164 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 2) 31

image.165 This is apparent from Gunning’s indication of discursive expressions of the experience of the dark auditorium: Wagner’s Bayreath described its effect as if “sinking into a dream-like obscurity” and in the context of André Antoine's Théâtre-Libre it was expressed that it increased “the naturalism of the “fourth wall” [the screen]”.166 These discourses indicate on one hand that darkness contributes to a state of consciousness similar to that of a dream (opposed to physicality) and on the other hand that it makes the images of the screen appear as if naturally present. This is the result of the fact that darkness results in the loss of physical perception of one’s physical environment since it is no longer visible, and consequently a loss of awareness of being physically existent in this physical environment. In fact the phantasmagoria’s illusion of the presence of ghosts worked so effectively that it caused women to faint and men to storm at the light images.167 This is especially interesting in the context of Castle’s indication that the phantasmagoria regardless of its post-Enlightenment context in which the belief in ghosts was ridiculed and regardless of the fact that the audience knew it was a technologically produced illusion, made the phenomenon of apparitions of the departed livelier than it had ever been.168 Therefore, the phantasmagoria’s use of light images in dark circumstances showed a spectacular ability to make its spectators receptive to experience an illusory reality regardless of knowing its unreality. Taking into account that cinema uses similar light and dark circumstances as the phantasmagoria it is no wonder that cinema is capable of facilitating the experience of the illusory reality for spectators knowing the unreality of the light images. However, contrary to Gunning, this thesis’ focus on scrying indicates that the spectator’s positioning in darkness originates way further back in time. In the context of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and the ancient Greek psychomanteum, were Moody’s psychomanteum was based on, dark spaces already contributed to the experience of transcendent phenomena, which indicates the phantasmagoria’s use of the dark auditorium at the utmost is its first appearance in the context of technological reproductions of transcendent phenomena/experiences. Consequently, the use of darkness in cinema also stems from that what is conductive for the experience of transcendent phenomena.169 In accordance to the use of such circumstances in scrying and the idea underlying Dee and Kelley’s scrying and gnōsis that in order to experience transcendent

165 (see Gunning, “Illusions Past” 4) 166 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 2) 167 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 4) 168 (Castle 49-50) 169 A claim Elsaesser approached in considering Alberich’s crystal ball to be projecting on the wall of the cave in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (Fritz Lang,1924) based upon an A.D. 1200 epos, to be a reference to the history of the meaning and the cultural position of cinema (“Wie der frühe Film” 3-4). Here, taking the claim of this section into account, the fact that the scrying medium of the crystal ball is projecting in a cave, corresponds to use of caves for scrying, as well as the fact that the light and dark circumstances of the phantasmagoria and cinema are derived from this uses of caves and dark spaces for scrying.

“reality” one must get “loose” from one’s physical limitation, dark auditoriums facilitate a receptiveness to “belief” the transcendent “reality” portrayed by the light images.170 So what does it mean to understand cinema’s dispositif and its workings to be similar to scrying practices regarding the circumstances of darkness and light? Apart from the mere necessity of darkness to let the light image prevail, the use of light and dark in cinema has a meaningful function, similar to the attainment of gnōsis by means of scrying. Cinema’s spectator surrounded by darkness is similar to Plato’s subject in the sense that the darkness (metaphorically) establishes the spectator’s physical existence (imprisonment) in the dark world of nescience and illusory reality, whereas at the same time diluting one’s sensory perception and consequently one’s awareness of physical and spatiotemporal existence by positioning him/her in a dark isolated space, in essence similar to a cave. This all to sustain a receptiveness to the transcendent “reality” of the light image.171 Although its importance and meaningful attribution is heretofore overlooked,172 the circumstances of light and dark contribute to viewer’s experience and therefore must be included in cinema’s dispositif. I introduce the concept “esoteric dispositif”; a framework that represents the Western esoteric discourses that are crucial for an understanding of the workings of cinema’s dispositif and considers cinema’s dispositif to be continuation of scrying practices. When using this framework to understand cinema the turn to digital cinema becomes less problematic since, unlike the importance subscribed to projection in Baudry’s understanding of cinema’s dispositif based on a misinterpretation of Plato’s cave, projection of the light image is not a necessary condition for cinema’s illusion of reality; it is subservient to the workings of light and dark circumstances. This is further supported by the concealment of the projection behind the screen in the phantasmagoria and the way in which the light in correspondence to digital screens appeared to be coming from the screen but nonetheless was able to facilitate the spectator’s into believing the light images. In fact the very idea that light can carry images/information, that perception of it is preferable in the context of human’s physical and dark existence and that humans can have access to it by means of a screen, is founded on scrying and the application of Plato’s philosophical thinking in the Western

170 Tom Gunning unconsciously expresses a connection between the spectator’s illusion of reality in cinema and Dee and Kelley’s Western esoteric belief in angels as intermediary agencies made out of light in his metaphorically comparison of the effect of cinematic motion on the illusion of reality with the “winged messengers of the Gods” that cross “the boundaries between heaven and earth”; between the imaginative and the physical world/reality (“Moving Away” 45). However, were Gunning connects this conceptual understanding to motion, the elaboration of the cinematic dispositif in the context of Dee and Kelley’s and Moody’s scrying practices and Plato’s cave (gnōsis), reveals the illusion of reality is the result of circumstances of dark and light and it is the light that is historically bound to the believe that it is able to deliver a transcendent “reality” that can be perceived by humans by means of a screen. 171 The fact that in cinema the physical surroundings of the spectator are diluted and the light image prevails is already indicated by Manovich, but he proclaims it is the result of the frame:

“I have discussed: painting, film, television, radar and computer display. In each of these, reality is cut by the rectangle of a screen: ‘a pur cut-out segment with clearly defined edges, irreversible and incorruptible everything that surrounds it is banished into nothingness, remains unnamed, while everything that it admits within its field is promoted into essence, into light, into view.”(Manovich “Towards an Archaeology” 35)

172 Dulac’s (1925) assertion that cinema is the art of movement and light (Dulac cited in Gunning, “Moving Away” 38), is emblematic for the ignorance of the importance of darkness in cinema’s dispositif.

esoteric tradition, and underlies cinema as well as digital technology. Thus, the “esoteric dispositif” offers the possibility to understand digital and analogue cinema within one corresponding framework. Cinema’s “esoteric dispositif” enables one to temporarily let go physical constrains as no spatiotemporal and physical awareness nor physical movement is needed to experience the light image; what is needed is only just the inner body processing of the workings of audio and vision. Like scrying, cinema is a form of individual inner experience and therefore an understanding of cinema in the context of scrying makes the increased individualization of cinema caused by digitalization and problematized by Elsaesser as an intrinsic difference in regard to early cinema, nonproblematic.173 Metz and Elsaesser are right stressing cinema’s image is no reality. However it is no realism either. Not only do unrealistic things that are unlike human’s physical and spatiotemporal existence happen in films, in current regimes of knowledge the word realism bears the connotation of having an intrinsic relation to empirical/physical reality that doesn’t account for the transcendent experience of cinema’s light image that is incomprehensible in the context of current regimes of knowledge, but comprehensible in the context of Western esoteric discourses underlying scrying.

2.4 Esoteric Dispositif: Prior Experience Enhancing Environments in the Cinematic Dispositif

One must take into account that the circumstances of light and dark are not the only aspects that contributed to the spectator’s receptiveness to the light image that is unlike spatiotemporal and physical reality in the ancient Greek psychomanteum, Moody’s psychomanteum and the phantasmagoria. All these apparatuses made use of circumstances and environments prior to the spectator’s positioning in the dark room for the experience of transcendent phenomena. One of the participants entering Moody’s phychomanteum described the experience as: “like stepping through into another world. It makes you feel that time is unreal.”174 Moody was inspired by the way in which circumstances prior the apparitions contributed to the experience by facilitating altered states of consciousness in the ancient Greek psychomanteum and applied a similar principle in his 20th century version.175 Moody explains that the ancient Greek “built their oracle centers at impressive places”, often believed to be places “where this world touched another”.176 At Ephyra apart from the effect of its subterranean location, acknowledging that “spiritual seekers” visit caves “for their strange effects on the spsyche”, “the required interdimensional effect was achieved by harmonizing numerous known ways of altering consciousness within a single unified space.”177 At Ephyra the 29 days long subterranean imprisonment prior to the apparition room

173 (“Wie der frühe Film“) 174 (Moody 107) 175 (see Moody 85) 176 (Moody 102-103) 177 (Moody 103)

consisted of dimly lit, dark corridors, dream-like states, blood offerings, hypnotic singing priests and the intoxicating food or substances to enhance the experience.178 Moody’s psychomanteum consisted of an 1839 gristmill surrounded by nature that is known for its precipitation of “mystical and […] spiritual experiences.”179 The old house, its antique furniture and library of stereoscopic cards, facilitated the experience of being in earlier times far from the familiar world. No artefacts were allowed that had any reference to contemporary human constructions of time as it could disturb the process. The only time indication came from objects of earlier times such as a sundial and hourglasses, as a means to alter and distort one’s sense of time in accordance to people who lose their sense of time while experiencing altered states of consciousness.180 The interior setting consisted out of objects that did not match to circumvent predictability and make sure that the participants’ minds are “in a constant state of wonder.”181 In the house the participants are intellectually stimulated, since contact with spiritual dimensions is historically bound to human’s quest for knowledge,182 such as in Dee and Kelley’s case. Moreover, since adults who explicitly dissociate themselves from children’s play “often have difficulty entering altered states of awareness”, Moody designed the rooms to provoke “unconscious associations with childhood playgrounds” by means of swings, kaleidoscopes and picture books.183 Moody applied art, humour and creativity for their facilitation of altered states of consciousness and made use of distorting mirrors since distortion of the body in the mirror-image further dissociates the participants from reality.184 Mirrors were placed “at prominent places throughout the building” for their effect on the mind as the result of their symbolic meaning as tools for “self-understanding” through their supposed reflections of the soul and for the supernatural believes attached to them.185 Another important element is Moody’s use of music and relaxation.186 Especially interesting regarding the previously indicated similarities between Moody’s psychomanteum and cinema’s dispositif, is the fact that Moody used objects in reference to cinema. Similar to 1920s and 1950s movie theatres, Moody displayed “effigies and other representations of iconic celebrities, such as laurel and Hardy and Humphrey Bogart”,187 “at selected spots” as he believes these artefacts to have an “symbolic force” in their representation of “interdimensional beings”,188 moody explains: “People respond as they do to celebrities, I believe, in part because

178 (Vandenberg 5-12 and Moody 98) 179 (Moody 104) 180 (Moody 104) 181 (Moody 105) 182 (Moody 105) 183 (Moody 105-106) 184 (Moody 104-105, 107) 185 (Moody 107) 186 (Moody 107) 187 (Moody 106-107) 188 (Moody 107)

celebrities constitute a link between a world that appears to us through the media and the world of everyday reality.”189 If Moody’s symbolic application of representations of celebrities are conductive of interdimensional associations and therefore contribute to altered states of consciousness, their presence in the cinema building might have a similar effect on cinema’s spectator. But this is not the only aspect in which the above descriptions of stimulating environments are similar to cinema. First of all, the cinema theatre resembles Ephyra in the sense that it represents an impressive environment. Cinema buildings are often unordinary buildings; it be classically styled, nostalgic theatres that bring one back to earlier times or modern cinema buildings characterized by impressive architecture and glass constructions. The interior of cinema buildings exists out of puzzling and playful arrangements of dimly lit corridors and spaces, big and playful stairs, heavy doors, funny shaped furniture, posters, screens and an over-abundant load of colourful, experience enhancing foods. Cinema’s environment fits Moody’s application unordinary environments and children’s play and fits Ephyra in its application of experience enhancing foods and dimly lit, puzzling structures of corridors and spaces. Whereas Manovich already acknowledged the role of the architecture of the cinema building in the experience of film: cinema’s “physical interface”,190 the similarities between cinema and the experience inducing environments in regard to scrying practices are heretofore unacknowledged. Since similar environments are effectively contributing to altered states of consciousness in Moody’s and Ephyra’s psychomanteum, one must take into account how alongside cinema’s light image and dark auditorium, cinema’s prior environments would be able to contribute to the spectators’ receptiveness to the transcendent experience as well. The fact that such elements work also in technological reproductions of light images of transcendent phenomena, is apparent from the conscious use of prior events and circumstances in the phantasmagoria. Tom Gunning stresses that Robertson’s phantasmagoria made use of the cultural context for its effect, by positioning it between the new scientific post-Enlightenment and post-revolution world and the old superstitious and religious world.191 In the phantasmagoria one saw gravestones of nuns, “crumbling walls”, uninhabited cloisters and a court at twilight.192 Then one entered long corridors painted with “dark and fantastic paintings” leading to a scientific room exhibiting the uncanny wonders of electricity as something that could make dead bodies move.193 This room contained optical devices such as “distortion mirrors”,

189 (Moody 106) 190 (Manovich, The Language 73) 191 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 2)  As the result of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, old religious ideas were demolished and the influence of The Church was decreased. (Gunning “Illusions Past” 2) 192 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 2) 193 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 2-3)

peepshows of landscapes, and “aural devices” such as a ventriloquist and in later years “a disembodied voice” as a means to “confuse and transform the senses”.194 Accompanied by the “unearthly tones of the glass harmonica”, sounds bound to ethereal and angelic associations due to its use in esoteric contexts,195 the spectators passed a big door with hieroglyphics and entered the dimly lit auditorium/apparition room with skulls and “ancient masks” on the walls.196 In correspondence to Moody’s psychomanteum this room was “draped in dark curtains”.197 As soon as the spectators were seated, the light went off and sounds of rain, thunder and glass harmonica stimulated the senses already stimulated by the prior experiences, and heightened the feelings of suspense in the dark before the projected light images of ghosts appeared.198 The phantasmagoria corresponds to Moody’s psychomanteum in its use of optical toys, nature/landscapes, art, music, distortion mirrors, a dark apparition room and environments representing a (lost) past, and corresponds to the ancient Greek psychomanteum in its use of dimly lit/dark corridors and its dark apparition room. Therefore the prior environments and the dark auditorium used by the phantasmagoria is a technological continuation of what works in the real phenomena of seeing apparitions of the departed. Not only did cinema took over the dark auditorium and the (projected) light image, the similarities between the environments of the psychomanteums, the phantasmagoria and cinema buildings, indicate that cinema like the phantasmagoria is a continuation of the (esoteric) tradition of facilitating altered state of consciousness, which is further substantiated by Moody’s use of cinematic objects and Moody’s and the phantasmagoria’s use of optical and aural devices part of the audiovisual tradition of cinema. Consequently, where the phantasmagoria is able to facilitate the spectators’ receptiveness regarding the transcendent illusory reality of the light images regardless of them knowing its untruth, cinema’s application of similar environments is able to have a similar result. Therefore, the “esoteric dispositif”, a framework to understand the workings of cinema’s dispositif in terms of (esoteric) scrying practices which underlies cinema’s ability to facilitate the spectator’s transition from reality to an receptiveness for transcendent “reality”, must also include the altered state of consciousness facilitating environments prior to the film screening in the dark auditorium. It includes architecture, foods, interior designs of the movie theatre, light and dark circumstances of the cinema theatre, as well as objects referential to or representative for cinema such as posters, merchandise en trailers. Because of the internet the spectators’ state of consciousness could be affected by cinema’s referential “objects” possibly anywhere, therefore cinema’s “esoteric dispositif” extends beyond cinema’s building.

194 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 2-3) 195 Anton Mesmer’s used this instrument in his Western esoteric practice of animal magnetism (Gunning “Illusions Past” 3). 196 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 3) 197 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 3) 198 (Gunning, “Illusions Past” 4)

Since the “esoteric dispositif” facilitates the transition to something that is unlike reality and thereby uses objects and circumstances that dissociate the spectator from day to day physical and spatiotemporal existence, the fact that cinema and other transcendent audiovisual experiences such as games and social media are successful and desirable cultural phenomena indicate the desire to escape the limitations of one’s physical existence underlying scrying is still present in contemporary screen culture. This parallel between scrying and contemporary media fits the way in which anthropologist and sociologist Gilbert Durand (1921-2012) considers the human need for imagination to be a substitute for the insuperable gap between the known of human physical existence in the physical world and the unknown surrounding human mortality: “we exist ergo we are mortal ergo we imagine ergo we exist”.199 This imagination gets expressed in “images, symbols, rituals, […] poetry, games and legends”.200 Since both scrying as well as cinema are products of imagination in the sense that they deal with images which are not physically, spatially and/or temporally part of one’s physical reality, which makes these screen experiences at least partially constituted within the human mind, this would mean scrying as well as cinema exist out of a need for imagination as a means to be able to live with the unknown.201 The elusive reality of the “end” of human existence propels this need to experience something that transcends one’s physical existence, which underlies cinema and scrying. Moreover, the fact that Durand refers to this human metal ability to transcend one’s physical existence as imagination corresponds to Castle’s indication that although old beliefs in spirit-worlds were proclaimed superstitious and denied it remained to be a cultural phenomenon that couldn’t disappear from culture completely and consequently one was forced to explain the Phantasm to be the result of human imagination.202 Though negative connotations are attached to imagination in contemporary culture which proclaims it to be unreal and unreliable, it refers to a faculty of the mind that underlies human’s enjoyment of media and fiction, and has long been known as a reliable method to attain knowledge or transcendent experiences in scrying. Alongside the transition of phenomena and images to be understood as imagination also the attached “esoteric dispositif” takes on different shapes within the confines of rational and technological society as can be indicated in regard to the phantasmagoria and modern, technologically advanced cinema buildings. Nonetheless, this chapter showed that in order to reveal the way it works, it is necessary to look beyond current regimes of knowledge.

199 (Ansell, 134) 200 (Ansell, 134) 201 The fact that children are known for being good in imagination and Moody proclaimed that to put people in a state of children’s play was conductive of facilitating altered state of consciousness suitable for the inner experience of scrying, and the use of playfully constructed environments in cinema further substantiates the fact that cinema as well as scrying are dealing with imagination. 202 (Castle 29) 38

CHAPTER 3: A Western Esoteric Understanding of Screens

3.1 The Materiality of Dee and Kelley’s Scrying Practice

The importance of environments and objects prior to experiences of transcendent phenomena is also evident regarding Dee and Kelley’s scrying practice. Dee and Kelley made use of ritual items accompanied by prayer and other ritual proceedings, which provided the right setting to advance a connection with the spirit world, and as Peterson indicates: “helped the scryer summon courage to face the possible confrontation with demonic presences.”203 Some of these items were discovered and are preserved and exhibited at the British museum (see figure 7 and 8).

Figure 7: John Dee and Edward Kelley’s scrying tools at the British Museum (Watson, Paul. The magickal paraphernalia of Dr John Dee. Photo. Pinterest.).

203 (Peterson 17)

The picture shows Dee and Kelley’s scrying screens: a quartz crystal ball and a circular-shaped, flat and black obsidian stone mirror with a handle and within a frame (see figure 7 and 8204). 205

1. Wood case of the obsidian mirror 2. Obsidian mirror Height: 22 centimetres Diameter: 18.4 centimetres Width: 1.3 centimetres 3. Wax seals that supported the

2 “Table of Practice” 3 1 4. Golden (disc) talisman 5. Crystal ball 6. A wax seal refered to as the Sigillum Dei or the “Seal of God” whose true name is “Seal of Æmeth”,

5 6 which means “truth” in Hebrew 4

Figure 8: Explanatory visual representation of Dee and Kelley's scrying tool as it is exhibited at the British Museum (Sascha van der Meer 2016). Occasionally, during the scrying sessions the angels instructed Dee and Kelley to adjust the ritual proceedings and to manufacture several ritual items, such as wax seals (figure 7 and 8) and a ritual table: the “Table of Practice”. These items had to be made out of specific materials and colours, and had to be inscribed with meaningful and sacred symbols, the secret and truthful names of angels and God and the letters of the Angelic alphabet.206 Other materials included in Dee’s documentations are: a rod “el”,207 a ring of Solomon, robes, chains, and a “triangular lamin”.208

204 Information and identification of the tools is based on Harkness, Peterson and the billboard belonging to the tools exhibited at the British Museum and information found on the website of the British Museum (see Dr Dee’s Magic; Harkness, “Alchemy and Eschatology” 5; Peterson 14). 205 (see Peterson 19)  The mirror is believed to be of Aztec descent. The Aztecs believed that the images they saw while gazing into black obsidian mirrors, revealed “the future and the will of the gods.”(Pendergrast 27)  John Dee described this obsidian mirror as “half an inch thick” (5 May, 1583) (Peterson 19). 206 (Peterson 22-24)  “The use of the Sigillum Aemeth (or Emeth) is central to Dee’s system, as well as other forms of magic.”(Peterson 22) Between the outer circles is to be written the 72-letter name of God, or Schemhamphoras.”(Peterson 22)  During the renaissance practical manuals of magic were in circulation in which rituals were described that relied on “knowing the secret names of God and of the angels or spirits themselves.” (Peterson10) Most of the literature also deals with the use of talismans or symbols of some kind, and often with squares of letters or numbers.” (Peterson 10)  “After intense prayer, the stone was placed in a frame and set on a specially prepared table. The angels were then called to appear in the stone to answer questions.” (Peterson 20) “As soon as the angels appear in the stone, they “give thanks to God, and Welcome to the good Creature.” (Peterson 20) Then they demand the angel’s name. (Peterson 20-21) These steps are all consistent with the texts of ritual magic.”(Peterson 21)  Peterson indicates that the “consecrated tools” used by Dee and Kelley’s and other examples of “ceremonial magic reflects their use in religious ceremonies.” (Peterson 10) 207 “The rod “el,” divided into three parts, the ends painted black, the middle red.” (Peterson 14) 208 (see Peterson 23-24 and DuQuette 86).

Dee’s detailed descriptions of the scrying sessions provide scryers the possibility to reproduce the ritual as best as possible.209 Some people tend to be more inspired by the use of the black obsidian mirror and purchase and construct black mirrors, or, make use of technological screens.

3.2 The Origin of Screens

In contrast to the changes caused by digital screen technology to the form and experience of (audio)visual objects, these screens are, in their turned off state, able to sustain the (audio)visual experience of the “old” scrying practice of Dee and Kelley. This suggests, in a material sense and in their function as screens, digital screens might not be so “new” after all. Manovich has previously supported a similar materiality based claim against the newness of screens whereby he used a material and spatial definition of screens as “a flat, rectangular surface positioned at some distance from the eyes”,210 to explicate three “different stages” in the history of the screen, starting with the Renaissance painting.211 Thereby, Manovich considers computer screens to be the continuation of the centuries-old use of the screen “to present visual information”.212 Manovich’s first stage of the screen “the classical screen” applies to Renaissance paintings.213 Characterized by its “frontal viewing” position, this screen brings the “space of representation” into the space were the body is located.214 Manovich explains this screen “acts as a window into another space” that is “of a different scale”, which is similar to cinema screens and digital screens that serve as “window[s] into the virtual world”.215 According to Manovich the proportional characteristics of “the classical screen” do still apply to computer screens, which is also apparent from the fact that conceptualisations such as “landscape mode” and “portrait mode”, which stem from paintings, are used in regard to computers.216 Manovich’s second stage “the dynamic screen” differs from “classical screens” because it “display[s] an image changing over time”, as can be seen in cinema.217 Manovich stresses that this implies that the viewer has to “disregard” his/her “physical space” more than with the “classical screen” situation to be able to identify “with the image” so that the representation can prevail. 218 His indication of the necessity to disregard physical space corresponds to the workings of cinema’s “esoteric dispositif” indicated by the previous chapter.

209 DuQuette is an example of these people. He has written a book in which he offers a detailed description of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and makes YouTube video’s in which he is seen performing his contemporary version of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices (see Magical Egypt). 210 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 27) 211 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 27, 28) 212 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 27) 213 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 28) 214 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 28) 215 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 28,41) 216 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 28) 217 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 28 218 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 28 )

Manovich’s third stage “the screen of real time” started with radar technology and has since the past decades become to “dominate modern visual culture”.219 Where “dynamic screens” could only “show past events”, these screens depict imagery changing correspondingly to real time events.220 Although Manovich’s media-archaeological approach, apparent from his questioning of the newness of the screen, his elaboration of the history of the screen into three stages approaches a teleological way of thinking. Namely, with his selective indication of the differences between Renaissance paintings and “newer” screen technologies he establishes that the visual depictions of the already materially present screen became increasingly more complex due to technological development. In this way, as he himself correctly indicates, “computer displays both continue and challenge the tradition of the screen”.221 Regardless of the similarities in terminology, conceptual understanding of two spaces (physical space and virtual/representational space) and proportion, he overlooks several important differences that challenge his definition and his subscription of the first screen to be the Renaissance painting. Firstly, digital screens differ from Renaissance paintings regarding their facilitation of communication and information and the fact that they enable people to become actors in regard to what the screen depicts/the screen’s representational space. Secondly, a painting shows only visual information, whereas digital screens and cinema screens integrate audio as a meaningful complementation of the visual. Thirdly, the visual image is part of the material existence of the painting whereas digital screens have a material existence independent of their audiovisual imagery when turned off. Lastly, Manovich’s understanding of screens as by definition rectangular and consequently his claim about the Renaissance painting as the first screen, becomes problematic when noticing that the early radar screens he talks about and early TV screens where circular and convex. However, the fact that digital screens in turned off state sustain the scrying practice of Dee and Kelley who used screens that have circular and/or convex characteristics, were actors in regard to dynamic and real-time (audio)visual imagery222 and used these screens for communication and information, indicate the discontinuities in Manovich’s elaboration with regard to materiality, imagery, function and user/spectator are all containable within one framework when looking at Dee and Kelley’s scrying screen practice, provided that one lets go of Manovich’s definition proclaiming screens are rectangular. The fact that this entanglement between scrying and digital screens takes place on a material level indicates that these materials have something intrinsically contributory regarding their facilitation of a, in using the Žižek guideline, similar screen practice. Therefore studying this material entanglement provides the opportunity to circumvent teleological thinking and to rethink

219 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 30-31) 220 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 20-31) 221 (Manovich “Towards an Archaeology” 27 ) 222 See for example the introduction from which it is apparent that Dee and Kelley had a real-time transcendent connection with the angels during which Kelley saw the angels move and heard them talk. 42

Manovich’s material definition of screens and origin of screens as well as the “newness” of digital screen technology.

3.3 Material Similarities in Regard to Digital Screens and Scrying Screens

Dee and Kelley’s obsidian stone is reflective because of the volcanic glass crystals that doesn’t let all the light pass through. Likewise, digital screens are reflective since they are coated with a layer of glass and/or liquid crystals (LCD= liquid crystal display). Similarly, water is reflective because light gets reflected when it hits the surface of the water. Because of the reflective materiality water and obsidian functioned as early mirrors, just like turned off digital screens can be used as mirrors.223 However, for scrying, screens must not be too reflection, as this would lure the scrying into fixating his/her gaze upon reflected patterns, and thereby disrupt the gaze that is needed to “draw the awareness of the scryer in it, as though it were a midnight well of water.”224 Reflective and black materials such as obsidian (the blacker the better225) and digital screens are suitable for scrying. Likewise, scryers use black bowls filled with water or induce the water with ink to make it suitable for scrying.226 For scrying it is important that one doesn’t see his/her own reflection.227 Therefore, either the scryer must look at the screen from a specific angle or the screen must be tilted.228 Dee and Kelley’s obsidian mirror as well as the crystal sphere were put in a vertical position by means of a frame. Correspondingly, digital screens often have the possibility to be tilted or adjusted, since light images can hardly be perceived when too much light gets reflected by the screen. Another correspondence is that both these screens are even and smooth. This is preferred since a rough surface would scatter the reflected or transmitted light, consequently disrupt the image and the gaze and make the object appear less reflective. Similarly, scryers make use of still surfaces of water.229

3.4 The Esoteric Screen

The previous section showed that digital screens have all material characteristics: smooth surface, black and reflective, that made Dee and Kelley’s obsidian stone into a suitable scrying medium. In regard to materiality as well as function, digital screens are a technological double of Dee and Kelley’s obsidian scrying screen, which provides concrete support for du Prel’s statement. Since Dee and

223 This declared why Dee and Kelley’s obsidian scrying screen is mostly referred to as a “black mirror” or “magic mirror”. 224 (Tyson 152)  “The scryer does not seek reflections, but visions.“(Tyson 152) 225 (Tyson 153) 226 (see Ezzy 40 and GypsySeaWitch) 227 (Tyson 153-154), 228 (Tyson 154) 229 (Moody 89)

Kelley’s screen existed centuries before digital screens and the fact that obsidian mirrors were used for scrying by ancient societies long before Dee and Kelley, the history and materiality of the screen stems from way further back than the Renaissance painting. Furthermore, since scrying screens also functioned as mirrors this provides concrete support of Huhtamo’s statement that mirrors are wrongly unrecognized as screens.230 This connection between mirrors and screens gets more historically relevant noticing that many pre-cinematic optical toys had been reliant on mirrors for the perception of images, such as magic mirrors and the praxinoscope (see figure 9 and 10).

Figure 10: Praxinoscope. Figure 11: Demonstration of the use of the phenakistiscope. Photo MD.Museum for Figure 9: The Magic (Reynaud, E. Praxinoscope. 1877. 12 the History of Sciences, Ghent. Mirror (Front Cover). mirrored Praxinoscope; metal cilinders upon wood base.) Mcloughlin, Bros. The Magic Mirror: An Antique Optical Toy. Dover Publications, 1980.

Especially relevant in this respect is the phenakistoscope of which the shape and its positioning in a frame are similar to the obsidian mirror Dee and Kelley’s used (see figure 11). Moreover, the fact that the spectator has to stare through the black screen in order to see the moving image in the mirror, is similar to the act of gazing through the “surface” of the obsidian in order to perceive its (audio)visual imagery. Thus not only does scrying underlie digital screens, the influence of scrying regarding design, materiality and technology is already recognizable in optical toys regarded as origins of cinema. There are also contemporary examples of this phenomenon. In 2005 Philips introduced “Momento” in which the scrying media of the crystal ball seems to have been technologically remediated (see figure 12).231 Not only does its shape and wireless, transparent design correspond to crystal balls, its caption indicates its function does also:

230 (Huhtamo “Screen Tests” 145) 231 The concept “remediation” comes from Bolter and Grusin, who use it to refer to the ways in which new media repeat and refashion older media (see Bolter and Grusin 273).

Momento stores the most cherished moments, recorded as short clips, and replays them as floating magical fragments in a glass ball. Gaze at your past memories in this wireless glass ball to treasure and re-live memorable moments from your life. (Philips Next Simplicity 130)

Similar to scrying in crystal balls “Momento” offers the possibility to transcend the transience of memories by providing access to them via this glass ball. Moreover, in describing its fragments as “magical” Figure 12: Philips’ “Momento” Snippet from page 130 from the and “floating”, and in enouncing the user must “gaze” at it, in order to book Next Simplicity Philips, 2005 “re-live” the past, it discursively corresponds to the gazing subject at

the magical ritual of scrying attaining access to information that transcends the physical and spatiotemporal. Consequently, its function, design and attached discourses are topoi of scrying. “Momento” is another concrete example of the fact that contemporary screen technologies are influenced and inspired by scrying as well as the fact that screens aren’t necessarily rectangular. Elsaesser and Hagener indicate the word screen meaning “a surface that can be used to depict an image” firstly appeared in the 1864 with the “silver screen” and “smoke screen” in the context of the Magic Lantern projection device,232 which was also used in the phantasmagoria. These screens doesn’t correspond to Manovich’s material definition of screens and neither to the Renaissance painting, but do so to the use of smoke screens and reflective and silver screens for scrying.233 Especially with regard to indicated similarities between the “esoteric dispositif” and the phantasmagoria and the phantasmagoria’s representation of apparitions of the departed, the used screens to be likewise a continuation of scrying practices seems logical. Nowadays the scrying medium of water remains to be used as a screen in water projection shows in the dark.234 Contrary to Manovich’s material definition of screens as rectangle objects with specific proportions, contemporary projection on buildings and three-dimensional objects indicate anything can become a screen under dark circumstances.235 Moreover, smoke-screens and water screens indicate screens aren’t necessarily materially vast or (rectangular) framed (which according to Friedberg is a characteristic of screens236).

232 (Elsaesser and Hagener 38) 233 Silver is a medium used for scrying that resembles the reflection of the surface of water (Tyson 22). Moreover, Tyson stresses that frames of silver are preferred around obsidian mirrors (153). 234 To promote the movie Inferno (Ron Howard, 2016) a clip was projected on a water screen (see IGPDecaux). 235  At the Formula 1 race in Singapore there was a Rolex watch projected on a Ferris wheel (18 September 2016).  At the Dunkirk themed guided tour at Dover Castle an informational film of the Second World War is being projected on a three dimensional bumpy object on the floor. Also there’s a movie projected on the inside of the underground tunnel slowly moving further and further on the wall, so that the spectator must physically follow the projected image (“Operation Dynamo: Rescue from Dunkirk”). 236 (see Friedberg) 45

The many ways in which screens correspond to screens used for scrying: in materiality, design, uses and function, indicate scrying offers a more promising framework to question the newness of (digital) screens, to offer a “material” definition and to elaborate on the origin of screens. Therefore, I introduce the concept “esoteric screen” which offers a framework in which every screen and its uses and function can be understood as a continuation of the screen tradition of scrying: a topos of “esoteric screen”. 237 This framework includes an esoteric (Platonism) definition of screens as things that as the result of light can make one experience/perceive something that one’s body as a result of the spatiotemporal and physical limitations of physical existence would be incapable of perceiving/experiencing without the screen; it could be angels, an image of a faraway country, a mirror-image of oneself, a picture of a deceased person, a computer game or an audiovisual-recording of an actor or a setting in a movie.238 This definition implies screens can be “esoteric screens” regardless of having a similar shape or materiality, since the purpose screens fulfil is in essence similar to that of the scrying screen. Like its definition, the manifestations of the “esoteric screen” transcend the course of space and time. A screen doesn’t necessarily have to be physically existent or visible; the human mind can also be a screen and belongs to the “esoteric screen”, since it can depict past events the body is far removed from or physically impossible events in dreams.239 But as previous examples indicated, screens can have (in fact more often than not) similar material characteristics as scrying screens. The “esoteric screen” can manifest itself as a material topos, such as the use of crystal in LCD screens, the (increased) flatness of screens already present with regard to the obsidian mirror and the use of mobile screens since Olmec shamans and priests (900 B.C. to 400 B.C.) wore mobile scrying mirrors240 and Dee and Kelley’s scrying screens were mobile screen. All these examples indicate the “esoteric screen” has no singular expression and is variably latent or explicitly present The “esoteric screen” also comes to expression as discursive topoi, such as in the caption of “Momento” or Gunning’s metaphorical comparison of the working of the cinema with “winged messengers of god”.241 Part of the “esoteric screen” are the supernatural discourses tied to communication technologies that are capable of surpassing physical and spatiotemporal limitations of the body similarly to scrying screens used for supernatural communication. As the result of cultural changes, discursive topoi of the “esoteric screen” can also be identified in attempts to reinterpret,

237 Here I do not refer to every meaning of the word screen, but to screens as surfaces that depict. The “esoteric screen” does not refer to the screen being used for scrying per se, although it applies to screens used for scrying 238 Since the perception of light is part of this definition this implies that vision is inseparably bound to screens. 239 Eventually such experiences are the result of one’s ability to perceive light. For example, when one relives a memory one “sees”/experiences fragments of this visual memory or is able to visually imagine it, since it has a visual origin or because one makes visual sense of it by using other visual experiences. Moreover, since dreams are based on real-life experiences (although this connection is sometimes unrecognizable), eventually the visual aspects of dreams are the result of vision/visual memory. Often memories and dreams also imply the experience of audio, however audio is not an intrinsic element of screens but an intrinsic element of many screen experiences. As such, one can also relive or experience other bodily perceptions such as memories tied to certain smells, which I do also not consider as an intrinsic element of screens. However, other types of perception can be experiences while scrying and therefore are part of the “esoteric screen”, but not part of every screen. 240 (Pendergrast 25) 241 (Gunning 45) also mentioned in the footnotes of Chapter 2 section 3.

counteract or condemn the transcendent workings of screens, such as the cultural tradition of covering up the mirrors in the house of a recently deceased person out of the fear of perceiving transcendent images of this person. Moreover, taking into account that the frameworks “esoteric dispositif” and “esoteric screen” apply to cinema and the fact that mirrors are used as scrying screens in similar disposition circumstances (see Moody), the fact that cinema’s image is (metaphorically) understood as a mirror, is likely to be a discursive indication of the connection one makes between cinema’s image and the transcendent images facilitated by scrying screens: a discursive topos of the “esoteric screen”.242 Donald Tyson’s compares the way in which scrying works with a computer. He explains how information that in essence is beyond one’s understanding reaches the unconscious and gets processed into a message one’s conscious awareness is able to comprehend, just like excessive amounts of bits gets processes by the computer into an audiovisual symbolic language one can comprehend.243 Whereas, this comparison further substantiates the similarities between the practice of scrying and (digital) computer technology, it does also points to another topos of the “esoteric screen” namely the fact that Dee and Kelley’s communicated with the angels by the use of mathematics and the secret language of the angels, and the fact that computer technology functions on its own (mathematical) language system of bits. 244 Taking into account the ways in which cinema and digital screens are a continuation of scrying practices, the metaphoric understanding of the cinema image as having its own language245 is likely to be a discursive topos of “esoteric screen” that becomes more explicitly present regarding the turn to digital cinema. Topoi of the “esoteric screen” can also be indicated with regard to the ways in which one interacts with/uses the screen. Both computer screens and the scrying screens of Dee and Kelley are used in similar fashion: vertically positioned on a desk/table. Dee and Kelley’s obsidian screen resembles the modern day tablet screens that can be either connected or disconnected to the keyboard, in the sense that is was put in a frame and positioned on a table inscribed with boxes each containing one letters of the Enochian alphabet which function was similar to that of a keyboard: facilitating screen communication with another “space”/”reality” with a different language.246 Not only does the “esoteric screen” apply to the screen and its uses, materiality and discourses, from the next chapter it will be apparent that the “esoteric screen” also includes audiovisual aspects and corresponding experiences.

242 For an extensive elaboration of the use and theoretical understanding of the understanding of cinema with the mirror metaphor see Elsaesser and Hagener (63-80). 243 (Tyson 8) 244 “[…] he found an uncorrupted way of communicating with angels based on their own language, and on mathematics.”(Peterson 13) “otherwise unkown names, derived mathematically from letter squares.” (Peterson 14) 245 In an attempt to comprehend human’s ability to understand film’s audiovisual images and its corresponding logic of manipulation of time and space, (structuralist) linguistic tendencies in film studies traditionally studied film in comparison with human language systems as if it were a language on its own. Since, then “language” became a common used methaphor in film theory (Elsaesser and Hagener 64). 246 Descriptions of this table inscribed with Enochian letters and symbols can be found in DuQuette (52-54) and Peterson (23- 24).

CHAPTER 4: Cinema, Screens and Scrying as Part of the Same Audiovisual Tradition

4.1 The Audiovisual Aspects of Dee and Kelley’s Scrying Screens: an Inherited “Language”

Harkness argues that the ways in which supernatural phenomena are being expressed, is subject to “the imaginative boundaries of any particular place and time”.247 One example of the imagery perceived by Dee and Kelley while scrying she recalls is:

Typically the visions began in an interior setting, where the angelic spirits gathered around a “chair of perfection”. […] The angel with the highest rank in the spiritual hierarchy sat in the “chair of perfection” to introduce the show, and after the show ended, the angel returned to the chair to explain it in more detail. As the show began and new characters were introduced, the interior setting dissolved, giving way to a series of outdoor spaces. One show, for example, followed a spirit as she moved along a road from a banquet hall to a hill, a bog, a thorned hedge, a “fair place”, and a castle exterior. Another featured a spirit moving from a hill to a garden and continuing on to a bridge, gates to a castle, and a wilderness. (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 722-723)

Where Harkness focuses on the resemblances with Elizabethan theatre regarding symbolic use of settings and characters, she doesn’t acknowledge the way in which the experience of these settings and the transitions between these settings, were not technological reproducible in Dee and Kelley’s time, but are so in today’s cinema and digital technology. Cinema can show settings dissolving (transition) and can grant its spectator the illusion of following a spirit flying through an environment. Harkness didn’t see this connection, since she’d only focused on the past moment of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and didn’t take into account the fact that unlike theatre these visual and auditory images were depicted on a screen. Moreover, unlike Harkness’s prediction that would Dee and Kelley’s have practiced scrying today that the depicted imagery would have been a continuation of today’s visual culture/cinema, Moody’s description of the imagery perceived by today’s scryers is similar to what was perceived by Dee and Kelley. Today’s scryers see panoramic natural settings “such as lakes, forests and mountain ranges”, see several entities involved in dramatic action in one setting and are guided by a moderator: an entity that appears over and over again, which corresponds to the young spirit called Madimi Dee saw “again and again over a long period of time”.248 Therefore, the experiences of modern scryers contradict Harkness’ prediction, since scryers do not report to see extreme special effects and because

247 (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 725) 248 (Moody 89, 91 see also the introduction of this thesis)

in today’s cinema explicit moderators are almost non-existent and natural settings don’t have the prominent/dominant symbolic function as they have in scrying and in Elizabethan theatre. Therefore, as the result of my methodological focus on the past and present, scrying practices appear to be (at least partly) independent manifestation of visual culture rather than an imaginative continuation of the visual culture of a specific time and place. In correspondence of previous indications of that some visual elements of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices are technologically reproduced in cinema, Moody indicates similarities with cinema noticing that the scrying images “are usually iridescently colored and three-dimensional and they often appear to move in a natural way, like characters and scenes in a movie.”249 These similarities become more relevant, noticing that cinema can provide an understanding of the curtains Harkness couldn’t comprehend with regard to Elizabethan theatre:

Yet this particular use of a curtain to signal the beginning and end of a conversation is puzzling, for most scholars believe that curtains in the Elizabethan theater were hung on the back and side walls and functioned as screens. In the early modern theater curtains were not used to open and close scenes or draw a halt to dramatic action, but to conceal actors until they entered onto the stage. (Harkness “Shows in the Showstone” 722)

The act of the black cloth being drawn is similar to the use of curtains in early cinema, to the “blackening” of the cinematic screen with fade-to-blacks, and the use of curtains in theatre after the early modern period. The fact that these were present in scrying before appearing in visual culture of theatre and cinema, suggests the opposite of what Harkness claims, namely that visual culture is (at least partly) a continuation of (Dee and Kelley’s) scrying practices. Likewise, are the panoramic natural sceneries recognizable in pre-cinematic (moving) panoramas. Thus, the (audio)visual aspects of scrying appear as a topos in (digital) screens and cinema, and therefore also are an expression of the “esoteric screen”. Whereas teleological conceptions of film history understood the competition with television and other leisure activities as the driving force behind cinematic development resulting in sound and colour being added to film, an understanding of cinema in the context of the “esoteric screen” indicates that colour and sound were already present with regard to scrying on which cinema’s dispositif and the desire underlying cinema are founded. Also the dynamic and real-time imagery and the facilitation of communication and information that transcends the spatiotemporal and physical limitations of the human body already present in scrying practices, subverts teleological thinking with regard to digital technologies. Moreover, were digital technology changes the ways in which films are being seen on screens of different proportions and challenges analogue cinema, Moody shows that

249 (Moody 89) 49

scrying is similar to these screens since the imagery is “proportional to the size of the speculum”.250 Therefore, cinema and digital screens understood with regard to the (audio)visual aspects of the “esoteric screen” implies the changes as a result of the turn to the digital can be understood as continuities instead of ruptures. That cinema and digital screens are both a continuation of scrying practices is also apparent from the discursive understanding of these screens in terms of water apparent from expressions as the screen’s surface251, the use of the term “dissolve” and the use of the term “streaming” for real-time digital audio and imagery,252 which are discursive topoi of the “esoteric screen”. Namely, where such understandings are logical in the context of scrying regarding the use of water and scryers envisioning the screen is a pool of water, this imagination is absent in regard to digital screens and cinema.

4.2 Contemporary Manifestations of the Scrying in Fiction as Imaginary Media

Within Religion Studies and the study of Western esotericism it is increasingly acknowledged that esotericism is an inherent part of modern culture. Hanegraaff stresses that the ways in which esotericism is part of contemporary culture indicate religious ideas are constantly taking on new forms as the result of “new historical and social conditions”.253 “The emerging scholarship” on the way esotericism “manifests itself in contemporary culture” studies for example “the fascination with ‘superpowers’ in popular comics or role-playing games as an example of how ‘the sacred’ manifest itself in contemporary popular culture.”254 However, esotericism is also more explicitly part of contemporary fictional cultural expressions. The scrying screen has manifested itself in films, stories, legends, games, television and books. The folklore stories of Bloody Mary and Snow White (Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 1944) include explicit examples of the use of mirrors for the purpose of superior knowledge and prophetic pronouncements. In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson, 2001), Galadriel is an explicit practitioner of scrying. The Mirror of Galadriel, a silver bowl of water, shows her "things that were, and things that are, and things that yet may be."255 Harry Potter contains numerous examples of scrying and corresponding discourses regarding the transcendent capabilities of water, crystal and mirrors. Firstly, Dumbledore’s Pensieve, a bowl with fluid, can immerse people into someone’s memories. Secondly, the crystal ball in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (David Yates, 2007) contains saved, secret and superior knowledge: a past prophecy about Harry and

250 (Moody 89) 251 An example is Microsoft Surface which is a digital screen table (see Derene). 252 Which is apparent from Friedberg:“As we spend more and more of our time staring into the frames of television, computer and hand-held screens – windows full of text, icons, 3-D graphics, streaming-images, streaming audio – a new post-perspectival, post-Cartesian subjectivity has emerged.”(Friedberg 348) 253 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericism 9) 254 (Hanegraaff, Western Esotericim 9) 255(see Tolkien)  This explicit example of scrying is no coincidence following Joscelyn Godwin’s claims that Tolkien, the writer of Lord of the Rings, was inspired by and made use of esotericism (see Godwin 18-21).

Voldemort. Thirdly, The Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone (Chris Columbus, 2001) can show one’s hidden desires: it resurrects Harry’s departed parents in the vicinity of his mirror-image, and provides superior knowledge when it reveals who is carrying the philosopher’s stone. Fourthly, in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - part 2 (David Yates, 2011) Harry uses a piece of Sirius and James’s two-way mirror to call Aberforth Dumbledore who is out of his physical reach, for help. In horror films and games the transcendent capabilities of scrying screens appear as an uncanny subject. Often mirrors are the objects through which the evil or supernatural is perceived and is able to have an influence. In Oculus (2013) a mirror shows the subject her true image when it reveals the evil force that dwells inside. In Roberta Williams' game Phantasmagoria (1995) the horrific past of the house is revealed to the protagonist by mirrors, which is an explicit expression of the transcendent capabilities of mirrors in scrying practices.256 In Mirrors (Alexandre Aja, 2008) the evil force enters through a mirror. In Amityville: A New Generation (John Murlowski, 1993) the mirror has a deadly influence; it shows its past and takes it to the present. Contiguous with the fact that contemporary technological screens can be used for scrying as well, in The Ring (Gore Verbinski 2002), a TV screen appears as an uncanny object that provides a connection between the real world and a transcendent “world”: a memory of a deceased girl. The above examples of the presence of scrying within audiovisual culture point towards a direct implementation of discourses surrounding scrying practices and screens, referring, although mostly erroneously and negatively, to the fact that these devices once were and still are used for scrying. The fact that scrying screens often had a secondary or primary function as mirrors explain that esoteric discourses remain to be connected to mirrors in contemporary films and stories. The way scrying comes to expression as a dangerous practice: one can lose oneself in the illusion of The Mirror of Erised and the evil eye depicted by Galadriel’s mirror is able to effect the One Ring worn by Frodo, a practice connected to dangerous people: the evil queen in Snowwhite, and the way it is portrayed as the uncanny in horror films, reflects on the century old cultural condemnation of scrying as evil and irrational. From this it is apparent that this condemnation has become an intrinsic element of audiovisual culture, something one must take into account when studying the ways in which esotericism manifests itself in contemporary culture. Therefore in regard to audiovisual culture, Hanegraaff’s ultimate example of independent esotericism doesn’t exist in the present, since its present manifestations are still entangled with its (past) condemnation. Evidently, there’s a cultural need for audiovisual culture to give expression to scrying and to position itself in regard to this screen practice. The same applies to the more positive portrayal of esotericism within The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Although these movies explicitly escape the tradition of its condemnation by

256 (see Letande YouTube)

establishing it as a useful objects and by attaching it to wise and gifted characters, its condemned cultural position is nonetheless established by explicitly positioning the scrying practice within a fictional world that is very unlike the real. Here the practice of scrying is allowed to exist prominently as imaginary media far from being regarded the status of real/actual media. Firstly, this corresponds to what Castle indicates in regard to the changed cultural status of the phantasm resulting in its culturally positioning within the theory of imagination. Secondly, this indicates that the audiovisual screen practice of scrying has remained attached to audiovisual screen culture and imagination. Taking into account Marshall Mcluhan’s claim “that the content of the medium is the form of the previous medium”257 this means the appearance of scrying on audiovisual screens establishes scrying as the medium that preceded audiovisual screen media, which substantiates the frameworks “esoteric screen” and “esoteric dispositif”. This is also supported by Lev Manovich who stresses “that the technically more advanced and historically more recent modes of media-practice do not oppose the previous ones, but in their organization subsume them, making their content and properties into mere “effects” that can be reproduced, usually faster, cheaper and in automated fashion.”258 In films and games the practice of scrying gets technologically reproduced and becomes an experience available to a lot of people. Therefore, in correspondence to the phantasmagoria’s explicit condemnation and technological reproduction of apparitions of the departed, which made the experience of ghosts available to everyone and therefore more livelier, the explicit condemnation of scrying as “evil” and the establishment of scrying as an imaginary media in audiovisual culture, paradoxically establishes the cultural connection between scrying and contemporary audiovisual screen phenomena and ensures the cultural presence of the condemned practice within mainstream media culture, so that it becomes more accessible and prominently present than it has ever been. This is also apparent from my personal experience that people do not know or easily understand what scrying is, but as soon as I refer to Galadriel’s mirror, they can envision it. Not only does this implementation of scrying within audiovisual culture indicate scrying is one of the origins of cinema and screens, the way it is portrayed reflects on the similarities between these screen practices. Firstly, when looking at it independently from its fantastic and imaginary characteristics (Žižek guideline), these fictional scrying screens do show an audiovisual screen practice and capabilities to transcend the spatiotemporal and physical limitations of bodily existence similar to cinema and digital technologies.259 Secondly, the appearance of scrying screens in fiction reflect upon the fact that these scrying screens are just like cinema screens and (digital) screens in the way they depict audiovisual images. In Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings the experience of scrying is recreated quite authentically so that the scrying screen experience remains explicitly

257 (Elsaesser “Early Film” 17) 258 (Elsaesser “Early Film” 18) 259 For example, cinema’s screen’s depiction of past audio and visual images correspond to the portrayal of scrying screens in Harry Potter and The Ring. The transcendent abilities of screen to transcend spatiotemporal limitations of bodily existence for example comes to expressing in regard to Harry Potter’s two way mirror.

established as a belonging to scrying while at the same time it shows that audiovisual images depicted by the scrying screen are similar to audiovisual images of films. This means the connection is established between two distinct (scrying ≠ cinema) though audiovisualy similar screen practices. For Example, in Galadriel’s mirror the fragmental audiovisual scenes dissolve into each other, like the images in Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and like the use of this effect in cinema. Moreover, similar to actual scrying, Frodo and Harry have to bow over the water and gaze at its surface in order to see the screen’s depiction. In Harry Potter the spectator experiences the use of the scrying screen, Dumbledore’s Pensieve, as if one uses it oneself. As with scrying, one experiences movement through the surface of the water into its depths where black inky figures260 take on the shape of the memory.261 This memory, apart from some visual effects and coloration, is cinematographically not different than the rest of the movie. Consequently, it reflects upon its audiovisual similarities with cinema. Moreover, Dumbledore’s memory of the young Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (David Yates, 2009), corresponds to Moody’s description of the scryer’s experience of “iridescently colored” imagery as the used effect make the environment bloom. Moreover, in Harry Potter, correspondingly to Moody’s and the phantasmagoria’s use of mirrors prior to the scrying experience, the Pensieve is partially surrounded by mirrors in the cabinet where it is hidden. 262 These old mirrors dramatically reflect the light that escapes from the Pensieve, mysteriously showing multiple vague ghostlike reflections of Dumbledore’s illuminated body,263 which alongside the mirrors, further enhances the transcendent capabilities of the Pensieve and the fact that it enables Dumbledore to escape the limitations of his physical existence. For the spectator of the film it functions as an “esoteric dispositif”. But this is not the only way in which these movies give expression to the “esoteric dispositif”. As these scrying screens are being used during night (Lord of the Rings), or in a dark environment (Harry Potter), these films reflect on the dark and light circumstances preferred in scrying practices as well cinema. In Harry Potter, light is the material of which the materially elusive concepts magic and memories appear to be made of, which is an expression of the Western esoteric understanding of light as a substance that enables access to phenomena that transcend the physical and spatiotemporal. In Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings the scrying screens emit light. Although this doesn’t correspond to the external light source in real scrying practices, it does correspond to the way in which light reflects from scrying screens, cinema screens and digital screens (which are also a light source in itself). All these screen situations have two things in common: the screen’s depiction of a light image and the light coming from the screen that falls on the body of the user/spectator. Therefore when the light of the scrying medium falls onto Frodo, Harry and Dumbledore, these movies reflect upon scrying, digital screens and cinema’s similar disposition of the spectator in regard to light and

260 Which corresponds to the fact that water induced with ink can be used as a scrying medium (see Ezzy 40). 261 (See Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2) 262 (See Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) 263 (See Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire)

dark circumstances, and consequently that cinema and digital screens can both be comprehended within the frameworks “esoteric dispositif” and “esoteric screen”. Consequently, the way in which scrying gets expressed audiovisual culture reflects on similarities between scrying, cinema and digital screens and thereby establishes scrying as a framework in which cinema as well as digital screens can be comprehended. Moreover, as a result of this it reflects on the similarities between imaginary media and actual media and thereby shows the ways in which scrying preceded and influences contemporary actual media. This influence of imaginary media on actual media also applies to imaginary media in fiction, which is apparent from people who are inspired by Tony Stark’s mirror in Iron Man 2 (Jon Fravreau, 2010) to make themselves a “magic mirror” that displays digital information.264 This imaginary media reflects on the cultural and historical connection between digital screen technology and the use of mirrors as screen devices. Moreover, since the depictions of the scrying screen is audiovisual and cinematographically similar to that of the rest of the film, especially in this context of similar dispositions of the spectator in regard to circumstances of dark and light, films reflect on the similarities regarding the experience of the light images of cinema and scrying screens both facilitating access to phenomena that transcend the physical and spatiotemporal. Therefore, audiovisual culture reflects on the ways in which cinema and (digital) screens are topoi of scrying/the “esoteric screen, which is in accordance with the actual correspondences on regard to audiovisual aspects, materiality, discourses, uses and circumstances, its function and fulfilment of a similar desire, indicated throughout this thesis.

4.3: A “New” Audiovisual Experience: Virtual Reality

“The virtual” is a metaphor by which the interaction with the screen is, as Elsaesser and Hagener indicate, conceptualized as interaction with a “space”/“world” that opposes “actual space” and “physical space”.265 Friedberg and Manovich stresses this conceptualization/understanding was already present in regard to Renaissance paintings and continues to be used for cinema screens, TV screens and computer screens.266 Since virtual bears the connotation of an immaterial world/space267 many scholars (see for example Manovich 42) have wondered: why do people conceptualize this as virtual while in fact it is nothing more than material reality, since its material conditions and processes are situated in the real (material) world? In order to answer this question I firstly explicate what it means to interact with this virtual “space”.

264 Tony Stark’s mirror in Iron Man 2 is a mirror and a digital information display in one. It has inspired numerous people to make these “smart mirrors” that they refer to as “magic mirrors” themselves by putting digital screens behind the frame and glass of a mirror (see “Magic Mirror”). 265 (Elsaesser and Hagener 79) 266 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 27-28, 41 and Friedberg 338) 267 “What needs to be borne in mind with respect to the digital (or virtual) window is that the (material) screen functions as a (metaphorical) window onto an imaginary (cyber) space, which is the ultimate negation of space.”(Elsaesser and Hagener 34) 54

Firstly, apart from digitalized clocks and calendars, in the virtual the passing of time doesn’t correspond to the real world, since there’s no unavoidable presence of seasons, day, night and death, and if such elements of time are present, often they are not synchronized with the real or can be altered. Secondly, there’s the experience that interacting with the screens means to travel from the real world to the virtual, in which the screen is experienced as permeable: a gateway between two worlds.268 Manovich stresses that users experience “the illusion of navigating through virtual spaces, of being physical present somewhere else or of being hailed by the computer itself.”269 Likewise, Bergson claims the experience of being within the virtual is essential to sustain cinema spectator’s illusion of reality.270 Despite that it is experiences as if physically “being” within the virtual space that transcends the physical and spatiotemporal,271 it is in essence nothing more than physical interaction with material. Whereas the virtual is regarded as a strange way of understanding interaction with contemporary screens, in regard to Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices there’s no theoretical problem to conceptualize interaction with the screen as interaction with a nonphysical “space” (dimension) that transcends the spatiotemporal, since this is the screen’s essential function. However, such an understanding becomes a metaphor when applied to the material reality of the capabilities of modern screen technology. The only time the modern day screen user interacts with a nonphysical “space” (dimension) is when the turned off black reflective screen is used for scrying. Therefore, the same as Castle indicated regarding the phantasmagoria applies to the virtual: where (scrying) screens could/can be used to connect to this other world/dimension of reality, these discourses that remained attached to screens, in the context of contemporary culture stand for nothing more than the imaginative capabilities of the mind. Another argument that supports this connection between the virtual and scrying can be found when looking at its meaning. The word virtual descended from the word “virtue” that in one of its meanings means: an order of angels.272 The meaning of “-Al” is “of the kind of, pertaining to, having the form or character of”.273 And in the context of optics “virtual” means: “noting an image formed by the apparent convergence of rays geometrically; but not actually, prolonged, as the image formed by a mirror (opposed to real).” 274 Thus, these meanings of the word virtual refer to something that belongs to an order of angels, which in optics has to do with rays of light on a mirror resulting in an image that is opposed to the real, which would be an exact reference to the material and discursive reality of Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices. Therefore, taking into account the many ways in which the

268 Games like Second Life (2003) express the conceptual idea that the “virtual” world is something you can live in (see Second Life) 269 (Manovich, “Towards an Archaeology” 27) 270 (308) 271 In the virtual, global communication networks are able to transcend the spatiotemporal limits of human bodily existence. Text messages can travel faster than any human or human transport technology is capable of, whereas vocal and visual recording techniques can make one virtually present on the other side of the world in a matter of mili-seconds. 272 (“virtue” and “virtual” Dictionary.com Unabridged) 273 (“-al” Dictionary.com Unabridged) 274 (“virtual” Dictionary.com Unabridged)

term/concept virtual is literally present in scrying practice and the way in which other metaphors attached to cinema and screens correspond to the materials and discourses of scrying practices, it seems likely that the concept virtual stems from the discursive, audiovisual and material entanglement of contemporary screens and scrying practices as well. In this sense the virtual is a topos of the “esoteric screen”.275 Furthermore, the discursive expression of being in or travelling into an unphysical world, is recognizable in regard to Kelley’s necromancy, portrayed by the images below that show Kelley and Paul Waring (though some sources claim it is John Dee) summoning the dead at the church-yard. Above their heads is a torch of fire, which enables them to see in the darkness and refers to the importance of light with regard to scrying/necromancy for revelation of knowledge otherwise unattainable in the physical world of darkness and nescience.276 Although they appear to be physically present within the same space/dimension as the deceased person, the circular surrounding underneath their feet, on which among other words/names the name Raphael and symbolism is visible, which therefore seems to function as a means of (angelic) protection and artefacts they brought with them, refer to the communicative interface of ritualistic objects and proceedings (“esoteric dispositif”) that facilitate this “travelling” to the “realm of the dead”. The portrayal of Kelley and Waring being surrounded by and standing on artefacts of the physical world, points towards the fact that, at least partially, they remain to be inside or connected to the physical world. Therefore, it seems they are not fully (physically) present within the same nonphysical space or dimension/world as the deceased person, but nonetheless experience it as being so, which is similar to the experience of modern day people interacting with screens.

275 In this Section I do only use the metaphor “Virtual” to show that it is a figurative discursive expression of an experience that can be found literary in scrying practices. I do not intent to claim anything in regard to the origin of the word. In the context of this thesis I do only look at past scrying practices and present scrying and screen culture, which doesn’t cover all the meanings and cultural contexts in which the word virtual and corresponding discourses were used. My only intent of this elaboration of the similarities between “the virtual” and scrying and this reference to one of its many meanings is to point at the correspondences it has with scrying practices, which could be an explanation for the fact that one still understands screens in this way. 276 Smith stresses that the deceased person on this images “delivered several strange predictions concerning persons in that neighbourhood, which were literally and exactly fulfilled.” (229)

Figure 13: Edward Kelley raising a ghost in the church Figure 14: Edward Kelley in the Act of invoking the Spirit yard. of a Deceased Person.

“Edward Kelley a Magician, raising the Ghost of a (Ebenezer, Sibly (drawer). Edward Kelly, a Magician. In Person lately deceased, in the Church Yard of Sibly Ebenezer’s Astrology, A New and Complete Walton-le-dale Lancaster.” In Smith’s The Astrologer Illustration of the Occult Sciences (1784) London, 1806.) Of The Nineteenth Century . London: Knight & Lacey,1825. 228-229.)

The portrayal of the experience of scrying on these images doesn’t stand on its own. In fact the experience of traveling to this other world/dimension is common in past and present scrying practices: “shamans claimed to be able to take voyages into the spirit world through their magic mirrors and to see the spirits of the dead there.”277 Also, Moody stresses that, while mirror gazing, eleven persons including himself have experienced “the feeling that his or her center of consciousness goes into or through the mirror.”278 Moody describes this as a panoramic experience, namely “at this point, the visionary world seems to surround or to encompass the mirror gazer.”279 From this it is apparent that the experience expressed by the concept virtual of being immersed in the nonphysical world/dimension that transcends space and time is common in scrying practices. This experience of being fully immersed in the nonphysical experience, discursively present within the concept virtual, is technologically established accomplished with Virtual Reality technology. In scrying, interaction with screens as well as Virtual Reality, although one experiences it as being within the virtual/nonphysical, one remains physically present within the physical world, and

277 (Moody 115) 278 (Moody 90-91) 279 (Moody 91)

only one’s consciousness can travel through the screen into the nonphysical “space” of the screen’s depiction. Interestingly, Moody stresses that the exact opposite can happen as well: “From time to time, subjects do report that the visions seem to leave the speculum and enter the surrounding environment.”280 A man visiting Moody’s psychomanteum reported to have seen three of his departed relatives “emerge from the mirror and surround him”281 Likewise, a woman reported she saw a bird flying out the crystal speculum into her room.282 Similar events took place regarding Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices. Dee mentions a girl called Madimi, occasionally “emerge[d] from his crystal and cavort around his study.”283 Such experiences were the (audio)visual “space” comes out of the screen into the space of the spectator are the equivalent of 3D technology. Ezzy explicitly establishes this correspondence between scrying and 3D visuality by claiming one must look into the scrying medium “in much the same way as you look at those magic pictures that reveal 3-D images.”284 Therefore the audiovisual experiences of 3D-cinema and Virtual Reality are topoi of the “esoteric screen”, already present regarding Kelley’s necromancy, still present regarding today’s scrying experiences and technologically reproduced in contemporary screen culture. This correspondence between scrying, Virtual Reality and 3D visuality, is further supported by the visualization of scrying experiences in audiovisual objects. When the girl in The Ring crawls out of the world depicted by the screen into the physical world, a past curse travels to the present, where it appears to exist in physical form. This screen is able to three-dimensionally “resurrect” the dead which resembles the man in Moody’s psychomanteum who saw his deceased loved ones emerge from the screen. The fact that the girl in The Ring emerges from the TV screen, indicates how this three- dimensional experience of phenomena that transcend the physical and spatiotemporal remains present in the discursive context of technological screens that can actually be used for scrying. An expression of the immersive experience of scrying can be found in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell, 2005). When Harry accidently uses Dumbledore’s Pensieve, he experiences it as if he’s physically falling/passing through the screen into the memory of Barty Crouch Junior’s trial. Although Harry experiences this as being physically present as he sits in the crowd and is immersed in Dumbledore’s memory, he soon realizes his physical presence is only an illusion when Dumbledore doesn’t hear him and someone’s arm goes through his body. The portrayal of Harry’s

280 (Moody 91) 281 (Moody 111) 282 (Moody 92) 283 (Moody 92) See also Tyson 148  Moody asserts “no scholar has taken this seriously, but my research shows it is to be consistent with the phenomena of crystal visions.”(92) Furthermore, Moody stresses these scrying events have led to the cultural phenomena of “the genie getting out of the bottle magic lamp” after it is being rubbed, as is expressed in Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Moody explains that the rubbing or polishing of the surface turns it into a reflective surface through which the genie could be exposed to the gazer (Moody 92). 284 (Ezzy 133)

scrying experience therefore is similar to what is experienced by scryers, the spectators of cinema and the users of screens and Virtual Reality. Whereas, Manovich argues that Virtual Reality “[…] establishes a radically new type of relationship between the body of the viewer and the image”,285 a look at scrying practices shows this is in fact not “new”. On one hand Manovich argues it results in “a fundamental break” with the tradition of the imprisonment of the body in cinema since the spectator now has to move in “physical space in order to experience the movement in virtual space”.286 One the other hand he stresses, it imprisons the spectator even more profoundly, since the spectator’s movement is limited because he/she is literally tied to the machine.287 Contrary to what Manovich, building on Baudry’s consideration of imprisonment to be part of cinema’s dispositif, claims, in the context of this thesis’s interpretation of cinema’s dispositif as an “esoteric dispositif”, physical movement does not free someone from imprisonment, since physical existence is imprisonment. However, the experience of being present within the virtual can provide the experience of being free from physical existence/imprisonment similar to what is experienced while scrying. Building on chapter 2 and 3 which showed that the same drive to escape the limitations of physical existence underlies scrying as well as cinema and screens, where such transcendent experiences of light images and the facilitation of such experiences (“esoteric dispositif”) get technologically reproduced imprisonment gets technologically reproduced as well: where light and dark/physicality are independent on each other as an opposition, so are the imprisonment and transcendence they stand for. If one wants to perceive rays of light better it has to become darker and if one wants to know what darkness is one must know what light is. Likewise, if one wants to know what imprisonment is one must know what it means to be free and if one knows the constraints of physical existence one knows transcendent phenomena. Moreover, the increased physical imprisonment regarding Virtual Reality indicates that the more immersed in the transcendent experience one wants to be, the more needed is physical imprisonment. Where Ephyra imprisoned its spectators in a subterranean space, Moody’s phychomanteum, the phantasmagoria and cinema take their visitors away from the day to day reality, all to eventually place/“imprison” the spectators in a secluded and demarcated dark space to establish physical existence in darkness as well as enable him/her to demolish his/her awareness of physical existence and the unnaturalness of the screen to facilitate an receptiveness to experience the light images, Virtual Reality increases the naturalness of the screen (visual disappearance of screen) as well as the immersive transcendent experience and consequently increases the establishment of one’s physical existence (imprisonment) as well as its demolishment by taking over one’s consciousness/awareness/perception by means of the synchronization of the (audio)visual virtual

285 (Manovich “Towards an Archaeology” 39) 286 (Manovich “Towards an Archaeology” 39) 287 (Manovich “Towards an Archaeology” 39) 59

environment with movement of one’s body. This corresponds to Manovich’s indication of the increased need for the demolishment of the space one is located in with regard to cinema with respect to paintings. Therefore, unlike claims that the movement of the image or the spectator’s impossibility to move is the reason behind cinema’s spectators’ experience (illusion of reality), this thesis has shown with the “esoteric dispositif” how dependent such experiences are on the oppositions light and transcendence versus dark, imprisonment and physicality. This section further substantiated that the experience of scryers correspond to the experience of the spectators of cinema and the users of (digital) screens, provided a concrete example of du Prel’s speculations that the occult signals future technologies as well as further establishes cinema, scrying and screens to be fulfilling a similar desire: a desire for an experience that transcends the physical and spatiotemporal limitations of physical existence. Similar to the idea of the attainment of gnōsis underlying Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices during the immersive experiences of light images conceptualised with the concept virtual, when one’s consciousness takes on the form/a being of light “inside” the light image, one “reunites” with the realm of light.

CONCLUSION This inquiry started with the observation that digital screens (and other technological screens) in turned off state are used by people inspired by Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices to scry in. This entanglement between a past screen practice and the materiality of digital screens provided the opportunity to take on a more material approach to imaginary media, which is encouraged by Parikka, and a chance to provide concrete evidence supportive of (media) scholars suggesting there’s an influence of imaginary media on actual media and particularly du Prel who stresses there is a direct influence of the occult (Western esotericism) on technology.288 Following on Harkness’s indication of Dee and Kelley’s scrying to be part of the audiovisual tradition of cinema and theatre, the fact that their scrying practices have similarities in regard to digital screen technology, and Elsaesser and Parikka’s indication that a focus on cinema as part of a wider audiovisual tradition as a potentially useful approach to understand anew cinema with regard to the turn to the digital, scrying could be especially useful for rethinking the turn to the digital and the possibility to comprehend cinema and digital technology within one framework. Throughout this thesis a parallel research of past and present was conducted to examine cinema and (digital) screens in the context of scrying with a focus on audiovisual aspects, materiality, discourses, uses, experiences, (ritual) proceedings, circumstances and functions, which resulted in the acquaintance of two frameworks: “esoteric dispositif” and “esoteric screen” through which cinema and (digital) screens can be comprehended as continuations of scrying practices. Consequently, Scrying practices provide a framework including both cinema and the changes the turn to the digital implies, as well as provided concrete examples for the direct influence of scrying and Western esoteric ideas underlying scrying, the occult, upon media technology. In fact cinema and digital screen technology exist for the fulfilment of the same desire underlying scrying practices, namely the desire (originating from the unknown of existence) to transcend the limitations of physical and spatiotemporal existence by means of light images culturally bound to Western esoteric understandings of light as a revelatory transcendent substance enabling one to transcend the limitations of one’s spatiotemporal and physical existence in the dark world of nescience and illusory realities. In the second chapter the framework “esoteric dispositif” was realized to account for the resemblances between cinema’s dispositif and scrying practices (as a means to attain gnōsis) in regard to objects and circumstances prior to the screening and the use of darkness and light in the auditorium to facilitate altered state of consciousness needed to get one loose from spatiotemporal and physical existence resulting in an receptiveness for the experience of the transcendent “reality” portrayed by the light images; an experience stemming from a desire for imagination: a desire to overcome the limitations of bodily existence (death and nescience) present in scrying, cinema and other media. In

288 (Prel 19) 61

emphasizing the previously unacknowledged importance and meaningful function of light and dark, this framework renders previous theorizations of cinema focusing on the importance of projection not so important in regard to cinema’s illusion of reality and provides a solution to theoretical confusion and discontinuities in regard to the turn to the digital since it applies to digital cinema as well as analogue cinema. The third chapter is was substantiated that the materiality and function of digital screens is a topos of scrying screens such as Dee and Kelley’s obsidian mirror and thereby provided evidence for du Prel’s suggestion by indicating a direct influence of the occult on media technology as well as support of Huhtamo’s argument that mirrors are wrongly unrecognized as screens. Then, through a comparison between scrying screens, digital screens and other pre-cinematic and contemporary screens, the framework “esoteric screen” was set up in which every screen can be understood as a continuation of scrying screens whether discursively, materially or in regard to its function. This means each screen can be understood as something that is offering the same possibility to as the result of light make one experience something that one would otherwise be incapable of experiencing due to the limitations of one’s physical and spatiotemporal existence. The “esoteric screen” offers an alternative to Manovich’s material definition of screens showing screens have neither specific materiality nor shape and can even be immaterial, detaches Manovich’s teleological thinking by indicating real-time and dynamic imagery is already present in Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices and provides a framework that comprises all overlooked aspects regarding Manovich’s elaboration. In Chapter four the framework “esoteric screen” was extended to the domain of audiovisual aspects. Contrary to Harkness’s claims a focus on past and present indicated scrying has (at least partly) its own independent (audio)visual aspects as well as that discourses and elements of the visual culture of cinema and digital screens where already present in regard to what Dee and Kelley’s scrying screens depicted. Then it was shown that scrying screens remain to be part of audiovisual culture, which in following McLuhan and Manovich’s indication of the content of media to reflect on the media that preceded it, and in regard to the way it is present in media culture, substantiates the two frameworks in which cinema and (digital) screens are comprehended as a continuation of scrying practices as well as shows the cultural condemnation of scrying remains tied to its presence in media culture that paradoxically make scrying more accessible. Lastly it turned out that a look at scrying can resolve theoretical confusion surrounding the conceptualization of “the virtual”: an expression of an immaterial “space” depicted by the screen and bound to the experience of “being there”, since such experiences are common in regard to scrying and therefore comprehendible as a topos that stems from (the ways in which screens and cinema are a continuation of) scrying. Moreover it substantiates the indicated desire underlying cinema and screens, since it shows that the experience to transcend spatiotemporal and physical existence present in scrying is expressed in regard to contemporary screens, and underlies the development of technologies of immersive “virtual”/transcendent experiences such as 3D cinema and Virtual Reality; audiovisual experiences already present in regard

to (Dee and Kelley’s) scrying practices. Since one’s physical imprisonment in the dark world underlies the desire to transcend physical and spatiotemporal limitations my means of light (images), in scrying as well as technological fulfillment of such experiences, light and dark and consequently the experience of transcendence and physical imprisonment are independent on one another. Cinema’s dispositif and Virtual Reality shows this means the more one wants to feel immersed in the light image as a means to transcend the physical here and now, the more one has to demolish his/her own physical space and the more (technologically) physically imprisoned (in darkness) one has to become. This all was examined by taking Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices as a starting point and by taking into account the cultural phenomena of scrying and the Western esoteric discourses underlying Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices to be part of a wider tradition that extends from past to present, in an acknowledgment for it to be crucial for an understanding of the entanglement of a past (and present) practice and present media culture. This approach turned out very useful since ancient Greek scrying, Moody’s 20th century version of ancient Greek scrying institutions and Plato’s allegory of the cave all provided extra support for connections indicated between cinema, screens and scrying. Acknowledging scrying to be part of this broader context that stretches out from pre-Enlightenment to post-Enlightenment has helped to make Dee and Kelley’s scrying practices more comprehendible and turned out to be useful to reflect on the cultural position of scrying (beyond spatiotemporal specific regimes of knowledge), such as the indication that scrying (at least partly) has its own independent visual aspects of which the presence in cinema indicates cinema’s visual culture to be influenced by scrying rather than the opposite claimed by Harkness. Moreover, Castle’s indication of the discursive transitions regarding esoteric subjects as a result of the Enlightenment has been important for this inquiry. With help of the Žižek guideline it has helped to look beyond the constrains of Regimes of Knowledge proclaiming Western esotericism and scrying to be irrational and delusional in an acceptance of scrying and its underlying desire/need to be a cultural expression that (regardless of its condemnation) is inseparably part of human culture and human existence and is essential to culturally and historically understand media. Also Castle’s indication of the workings of the technological reproduction of the scrying phenomena of apparitions of the deceased in the pre-cinematic phantasmagoria provided to be very useful for the elaboration on cinema’s dispositif in the context of scrying and for an understanding of the role/effects of media/technological representations of esoteric subjects. This inquiry showed the media-archaeological approach of parallel research of past and present is a suitable method to study the entanglement of media and a Western esoteric subject. This thesis fulfilled the media-archaeological aim since scrying practices provided a cyclical understanding of cinema and digital screen technologies as continuations/topoi of scrying. The result is an alternative conception of the past and present (and future) of screens and cinema from which it is apparent that screens and cinema are inherently tied to the cultural dimension of Western esotericism.Therefore, I plea for media scholars to tackle Western esoteric subjects since this thesis has proven it to be valuable

for a thorough understanding of the past and present of media culture. One could study the ways in which other Western esoteric practices or transcendent phenomena underlie media culture and technology, such as mesmerism, or the influence of media on Western esotericism as a means to expand the understanding of the entanglement of media culture and Western esotericism. Furthermore, to extend the findings and claims of this inquiry I recommend to execute further research regarding the ways in which scrying is part of media culture, for example by studying other examples of scrying practices in regard to media such as Notradamus’s hydromancy, or by studying other manifestations of scrying in media. Since the main focus of this thesis was put one the entanglement of scrying with digital screens, it would be interesting to conduct a similar research project with a focus on television and scrying taking the use of TV screens for scrying as a starting point.

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Media

Amityville: A New Generation. Dir. John Murlowski. Republic Pictures, 1993. Die Nibelungen. Dir. Fritz Lang. Universum Film AG, 1924. GypsySeaWitch. “Simple Water Scrying.” YouTube. 28 March 2012. 6 November 2016. . Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1. Dir. David Yates. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2010. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. Dir. David Yates. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2011. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire Dir. Mike Newell. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2005. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Dir. David Yates. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2009. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Dir. David Yates. Warner Bros. Pictures ,2007. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Dir. Chris Columbus. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2001. IGPDecaux. “Inferno Water Screen – IGPDecaux Live.” YouTube. 13 October 2016. 6 November 2016. . Inferno. Dir. Ron Howard. Columbia Pictures, 2016. Iron Man 2. Dir. Jon Favreau. Paramount Pictures, 2010. Letande. “Roberta Williams' Phantasmagoria (Longplay / Uncensored / GOG): Chapter 5 / Part 1: Mirror, Mirror.”YouTube. 28 June 2012. 6 June 2016. . Magical Egypt. “Enochian Vision by Lon Milo DuQuette – Part 1.” YouTube. 17 July 2008. 6 November 2016. . “Magic Mirror: Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the weather going to be like today? Should I bring an umbrella?” 2016. The MagPi Magazine. 6 November 2016. . Mirrors. Dir. Alexandre Aja. 20th Century Fox, 2008. Oculus. Dir. Mike Flanagan. Relativity Media, 2013. “Operation Dynamo: Rescue from Dunkirk.” Dover Castle. Castle Hill, Dover, Kent, CT16 IHU. 17 August 2016.

Phantasmagoria. Designed by Roberta Williams. Sierra On-Line and Kronos Digital Entertainment, 1995. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Dir. Peter Jackson. New Line Cinema, 2001. The Ring. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Dreamworks Pictures, 2002. Tolkien, J. R.R. ”Chapter 7: The Mirror of Galadriel.” The Fellowship of the Ring. 1954. Crows Nest, New South: George Allen & Unwim, 1954. Second Life. Designed by Philip Rosedale. Linden Lab, 2003. Valens, Samantha. “How to Scry.” YouTube. 9 May 2014. 6 November 2016. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-GCAFFP1iY>.

Images

Figure 1: Cleyn, Francis. John Dee. 1658. Line Engraving. Welcome Library, London. Welcome Images. Web. 4 November, 2016. . Figure 2: Cleyn, Francis. Sir Edward Kelley. 1659. etching and line engraving, 105 mm x 108 mm. National Portrait Gallery, London. National Portrait Gallery. Web. 4 November, 2016. . Figure 3: Dee, John. Earliest versions of Angelic or "Enochian" alphabet. 26 March 1583. Originally from John Dee’s Mysteriorum Libri Quinque edited and translated by Joseph H. Peterson in John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic. Boston, MA/York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2003. 269-271. Esoteric Archives. Web. 4 November, 2016. . Figure 4: Meer, Sascha van der. 2016. Based on Plato’s Politeia. Figure 5: Meer, Sascha van der. 2016. Based on Plato’s Politeia. Figure 6: Meer, Sascha van der. 2016. Based on Moody. Figure 7: Watson, Paul. The magickal paraphernalia of Dr John Dee. Photo. Pinterest.. Figure 8: Meer, Sascha van der 2016. Based on the exposition “Dr Dee’s Magic” at the British Museum. Figure 9: Mcloughlin, Bros. The Magic Mirror: An Antique Optical Toy. Dover Publications, 1980.< https://www.amazon.com/Magic-Mirror-Antique-Optical-Toy/dp/0486238474>. Figure 10: Reynaud, E. Praxinoscope. 1877. 12 mirrored Praxinoscope; metal cilinders upon wood base.< http://www.geh.org/fm/precin/htmlsrc/me110700001_ful.html>. Figure 11: Demonstration of the use of the phenakistiscope. Photo MD.Museum for the History of Sciences, Ghent. .

Figure 12: Philips’ “Momento” Snippet from page 130 from the book Next Simplicity Philips, 2005. Figure 13: Ebenezer, Sibly (drawer). Edward Kelly, a Magician. In Sibly Ebenezer’s Astrology, A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences (1784) London, 1806. . Figure 14: “Edward Kelley a Magician, raising the Ghost of a Person lately deceased, in the Church Yard of Walton-le-dale Lancaster.” In Smith’s The Astrologer Of The Nineteenth Century . London: Knight & Lacey, 1825. 228-229..