Christian Melodrama or Tragicomedy

Melodramatic hero, victim, and villain characters emerged onstage in recent centuries in moralistic battles of good against evil, with projected stereotypes and violent victories, through evocative music (melody-drama), spectacular scenery, and popular stars. Melodrama then became a dominant mode of screen entertainment from moviesFootnote ³ to TV shows to video games to social media—and to current politics with the “melodramatics of the paranoid style” (Melley Reference Melley2021:59). But the melodramatic mode can be seen much earlier in theatre history or in religious myths, rituals, images, and buildings (see Pizzato Reference Pizzato2011, Reference Pizzato2019, Reference Pizzato2024). In Christian terms, God the Father demands the violent sacrifice of Abraham’s son in the Old Testament (though giving a last-minute reprieve) and of his own Son in the New Testament to save humans from Satan. The Evil One as a villainous serpent in Paradise tempts our first parents, Adam and Eve, to disobey in the Garden—as the Original Sin—and again tempts the Son in the Holy Land. But Jesus, as victim-hero, rejects temptation and obeys his Father’s will, conquering sin, death, and evil by emptying himself of divine power and dying painfully on the cross. This inspires further victim-heroes across the centuries, especially the faithful martyrs who defy villainous persecutors, accepting or seeking a torturous death while believing in heavenly rewards—as in medieval to modern plays or films depicting the melodramatic victory of Christ, martyrs, and later superheroes.

Figure 1.

Archangel Michael holding scales to weigh the souls of the dead, with the damned sent to the Hellmouth, in a detail from the Last Judgment scene by Veit Wagner (1496), altarpiece of the Church of Saint George, Haguenau, France. (Photo © Ralph Hammann - Wikimedia Commons; CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sacrificial torture is shown, sometimes vividly, in church imagery of various martyrs, plus Christ on the cross, exemplifying true faithfulness and immortal hope against immoral cruelty, through good and evil figures. Relics of saints’ bones, after violent deaths, are also exhibited in golden bejeweled cases. Melodramatic violence is shown, too, with supernatural imagery of the Archangel Michael battling a serpentine dragon, Saint George as warrior knight fighting such an evil creature from his horse, and the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus while stabbing the Satanic snake (based on a gender change from Greek to Latin scriptures).

Yet the Last Supper reenactment, performed by clergy in the role of Jesus, may evoke a tragicomic, rasa-cathartic questioning of the overall good-versus-evil melodrama of God versus Satan, with human victims saved and avenged. If Jesus knows that Judas will betray him, why does he allow it, making Judas a villain who will suffer eternally? Why does Jesus offer bread and wine as his Body and Blood, thus turning the bloodless (kosher) Passover into a future model for Christian Holy (cannibal) Communion? Why does an all-powerful, all-knowing Father demand the Son’s sacrifice, later represented at Masses around the globe, rather than save believers in a less cruel way? Is Jesus (or his Father) a tragically flawed hero, admirable yet error-prone, despite the happy ending of his Divine Comedy? Such questions may appear blasphemous to believers. But thinking and feeling theatrically from an ancient Indian angle, might various rasa juices be evoked, with distanced savoring, toward the ultimate flavor of peace?Footnote ⁴ Might this rasa savoring raise questions about the traditional melodramatic fear of evil (or Hell), courage against Satan, and raging yet joyous victory for “Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus,” as described in the refrain of the famous hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers?” Drawing from ancient Greek theory, would divine or saintly superheroes appear flawed, with tragic errors revealed, evoking sympathy, fear, and a catharsis of such emotions?

Tragicomic twists are also seen in the Virgin Mary’s story, inspiring numerous images as performance ideals, especially for women, in Catholic and Orthodox churches. In Annunciation scenes, a teenage girl is startled (traumatized?) by the Angel Gabriel’s sudden appearance, telling her that God, instead of her husband, will father her child. The Holy Spirit also appears as a dove above her and ray of light entering her body, usually through the ear—as the Word of God against Satan’s words, which tempted Eve to disobey Him—thus performing the divine concept of virgin conception. (This interpretation was developed in the Early Christian 4th- and 6th-century poetry of Syriac theologians Saint Ephrem and Saint Jacob of Serugh.) During nine months of pregnancy, did Mary ever think she made a mistake in accepting the divine insemination? According to tradition, she freely chose to accept it, becoming a model for acquiescence to God’s will (as the New Eve), while also reflecting the Father’s loving gift of freedom for all humans, even to turn away from Him. But scenes in Catholic churches of Mary riding a donkey from Nazareth to Bethlehem while fully pregnant, with a baby then birthed in an animal stable, display the hardships that the Father’s divine will sometimes demands. Another much longer trip on the donkey to Egypt, carrying a newborn, to escape Herod’s royal rivalry wrath—with soldiers massacring all the baby boys of Bethlehem under one year of age (shown in church paintings of the “Holy Innocents” as the first martyrs [Matthew 2])—might make some wonder at Mary’s tragic error or at God’s omniscient sacrificial will.

For Catholics who pray the rosary, in church or privately, performing scenes of its “decades” in their heads, joyful moments appear in Mary’s life, such as the Visitation with her cousin Elizabeth while they were both pregnant: Mary with Jesus and Elizabeth with John the Baptist.Footnote ⁵ Another Joyful Mystery is the story of Mary finding Jesus as a boy, teaching elders in the Jerusalem temple. But this involved an initial tragic fear in her, when he was lost for several days, as one of the Seven Sorrows of Mary, and then a tragicomic twist (Luke 2). One of the Luminous Mysteries, with Mary’s joy at her adult son’s first miracle of changing water into a fine wine upon her request, at the Wedding Feast of Cana, appears sometimes as a scene in church imagery. But her suffering is more frequently shown, especially as a witness at her son’s crucifixion and then holding his dead body in pietà (compassion) scenes or statues, such as Michelangelo’s in St. Peter’s Basilica. Yet that script turns into a divine tragicomedy with her son’s Resurrection, her own Assumption into heaven (through “Dormition” or death as sleep), and her crowning as Queen of Heaven—in various church artworks.

Such mythical biblical scenes were also performed on stages with local actors in the Middle Ages, and some continue in our time, like Christmas pageants with live manger displays. The Assumption and Coronation of Mary, in the 15th-century Mystery Play of Elche, in Spain, is still performed inside the basilica, with a horizontal platform lowered and raised vertically through the sky-painted dome. However, the transcendent birth of Christ with a sacrificial purpose (symbolized by the magi’s gifts), his Passion and death as victim-hero, and then his victorious Resurrection, with future rule at the Last Judgment, overshadow Mary’s drama, in commitment, conflict, climax, and resolution scenes represented in church art and medieval mystery plays. That overarching plot of birth, death, and resurrection makes Mary a mere maternal ally in Christ’s melodrama of superhuman goodness, conquering sin, death, and evil.

Defensive Scapegoating or Rasa-Catharsis

Anti-Semitism developed and staged its horrors in Europe across the centuries, partly due to Christians vilifying Jews as “Christ killers” (and baby killers), while designating their scriptures as the Old Testament that preceded and led up to their New Testament, with Christians as the new Chosen People through Christ’s victory. (Jews are also villainized in the Mystery Play of Elche.) Religions other than Christianity in various cultures bear such Manichean tendencies, as do our secular politics today. The melodramatic temptation to defensively deny yet also project the tragic flaws of one’s inner theatre or the group’s social theatre upon alien others as villainous threats is seductive, especially with an Almighty All-Good deity unifying believers against perceived infidels. This relates to Terror Management Theory with empirical research on subjects’ defensive psychological buffers of “worldview beliefs and self-esteem” against death anxieties, especially through religious ideals of immortality (Vail et al. 2019:264).

However, ancient Greek and Roman gods were not depicted as purely good but rather morally ambiguous. Even the Greek god of theatre is vengeful in monstrous ways, becoming both melodramatic and tragic in Euripides’s play The Bacchae (405 BCE). This tragedy evokes various emotional views of Dionysus, Pentheus, Cadmus, Agave, the Dionysian Chorus, and the offstage bacchae. Like other plays in ancient Greece, it was performed as part of a religious festival with ritual sacrifices of animals to honor Dionysus, framing the tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies, whose characters were sacrificed through fictional violence, satire, and laughter.

Ancient Greek theatre was highly stylized, without the spectacular violence shown in today’s action movies, although high-arousal bloody acts might be heard offstage and partially mimed, when described by a witness, with aftereffects shown. For example, in The Bacchae the dismemberment of King Pentheus by female worshipers of Dionysus, possessed by that theatre/wine/fertility god, occurs offstage, but is then described onstage by an eyewitness. At the end, the tragic effects are shown when the king’s mother, Agave, holds his bloody head (probably the mask the actor wore), while still in a trance, seeing it as a lion she proudly killed. Her father, Cadmus, brings her to her senses and she realizes the horror of the god’s revenge for not believing that her sister was Dionysus’s mortal mother. This may evoke in the audience tragic horror, sympathy, and cathartic questioning of the god’s flawed yet effective vengeance.

In ancient Greece, the term “catharsis” was associated with the katharma, an “evil object extracted” from the body of a “patient” in the shamanic healer’s “theatrical performance […as] commander in chief of the forces of Good, which finally rout the forces of Evil,” according to literary anthropologist René Girard (1977:286). He adds that the purged katharma was associated with pharmakos, the person sacrificed during a social crisis, such as plague, drought, or famine (94–95, 287). The annual Thargelia rite also involved a sacrificial katharma, when two pharmakoi were selected (as ugly or criminal), beaten, and exiled or killed, to refocus the potential violence of mimetic rivalry within the community, displacing it onto such scapegoats (Bremmer Reference Bremmer1983:300–05).

In my view, this highlights how melodramatic good-versus-evil catharsis, as katharma purging, from ancient rites to modern stage and screen performances, might have dangerous side effects as pharmakon (poison-cure). Cathartic high-arousal pain/pleasure emotions with violent scenes may backfire and spill over beyond fictional scapegoating, especially through vengeful righteous stereotyping and mimetic-mythic projections.Footnote ⁶ Thus, the melodramatic communication of emotions, from fear and sorrow to moral disgust, rage, and revenge, with victim-hero against villain (onstage, onscreen, and in religious/political contexts), might spread as a mimetic contagion.Footnote ⁷

Stage/screen violence evokes mirror-neuron mimicry and emotion contagion, to some degree, in every viewer.Footnote ⁸ This might develop in some, through meaning- and purpose-seeking, toward personal or group violence. Thus, existential anxiety can be channeled as disgust, fear, courage, and rage against a villain, objectified as evil threat (katharma). The object is purged, as evil is projected from inside the self/group to outside. The katharma becomes morally abstracted and actively routed. It is vomited from the person and society, like a pharmakos (as pharmakon), yet also routed with possible returns. As Girard puts it: “in all varieties of ‘sacrificial’ protection there is always the danger of a catastrophic inversion; a too virulent vaccine, a too powerful pharmakos can promote the illness it was supposed to prevent” (1977:290).

But Aristotle’s ancient theory of “catharsis,” in the ritual context of tragedies performed onstage, suggests the potential for more complex, unfixed identifications with good and evil figures. Viewers admire yet fear the hero, even sympathizing with the villain’s suffering, through plot twists and moments when they recognize tragic flaws and errors of judgment. Adding dialectical terms, with the pain yet joy of insight, we can see this as tragicomic catharsis (or comic-tragic). Katharsis derives from the ancient Greek kathairô (to wash). So, we might translate it as a cleansing awareness,Footnote ⁹ through self- and group-critical observation, akin to Indian rasa-tasting as immersive, yet reflective. Indeed, catharsis originally had various associations: bodily purging, medical purifying, spiritual/moral cleansing, or “a complex combination of all three,” related to the Christian “evolution of confession” and later Western psychotherapies (Jackson Reference Jackson1999:118).Footnote ¹⁰

Catharsis of body/mind/soul is related also to medieval and early modern ideas of Purgatory, as shown in detail by Dante and described briefly by Shakespeare’s ghostly King Hamlet: a place of “tormenting flames” where his “foul crimes” are being “burnt and purg’d away” (1.5.738–50). Yet the divine tragicomedy, for Christian souls moving from Purgatory to Heaven, becomes many more life cycles of karmic rebirth in Buddhism, progressing toward nirvana, which means “blowing out” the flame of desire and attachments. Through the aesthetics of religious buildings, this might involve a gradual rasa-catharsis of emotional desires and motivational attachments, especially with the ninth rasa of peace, shanta, passing through the others, according to Abhinavagupta’s theory from over a thousand years ago, influenced by Buddhism.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, the “hard knot of ‘selfness’ has been untied,” toward “sheer undifferentiated bliss” (in Gupta Reference Gupta2017:14, 15).

Rather than blaming all religions for the destructive tendencies of humanity, it is important to recognize how Christianity and other faiths give hope to numerous people, encourage moral cooperation, and produce acts of charity that also benefit others. So, what are the roots of our current melodramatic temptation to project stereotypes of good and evil (in religion or politics), while evoking fear of villains, the courage to fight them, and rage on behalf of apparent victims, thus making more victims by scapegoating others? How did patriarchal structures with such sacrificial views develop, giving meaning and purpose to our mortality, yet demanding bloodshed, at religious sites and elsewhere, from stage and screen to real life?

Animal-Human Drives with Inner/Outer

A Language of Images

Maternal, Patriarchal, and Supportive/Trickster

Long before religious buildings were created, our prehistoric ancestors evolved with recursive powers of reflection, self-awareness, and abstraction far beyond other animals, through unique forms of language, image-making, and symbolic culture (Corballis Reference Corballis2014). Evidence for such mime/designer, scriptwriter/critic image abstraction comes from the small sculpture of a lion-headed person (the Löwenmensch of Hohlenstein-Stadel, perhaps female) and various “Venus” figurines with exaggerated breasts and buttocks, carved from ivory, bone, or stone about 45,000 to 11,000 years ago in Europe (figs. 2 and 3). Prehistoric cave or rock art of that period (in Europe, Indonesia, Australia, and the Colombian Amazon) displays more animal than human figures. Yet it also involves hybrid forms, such as the bull head and adjacent lion head with human legs and female genitals on a stalactite in a large chamber with other animal images in the Chauvet Cave of France (fig. 4).Footnote ¹⁸

Figure 2.

“Lion-person” of Hohlenstein-Stadel, carved with a flint knife from mammoth ivory 35,000 to 41,000 years ago, according to carbon-dating. (Photo by Dagmar Hollmann; CC BY-SA 4.0)

Figure 3.

“Venus” of Willendorf, carved from oolite limestone about 30,000 years ago. (Photo by Matthias Kabel; CC-BY 2.5)

Figure 4.

Charcoal drawing of “Venus-and-Sorcerer” on a stalactite in Chauvet Cave, from approximately 30,000 years ago. 4 March 2016. (Photo by Claude Valette; CC BY-SA-4.0)

Such images show a kinship felt by Paleolithic humans with herbivores and predators outside the cave, through animal-human, mammalian-maternal, prey-wary/mating (yet also predatory) drives of their inner theatres. These were re-presented through handprints (often female or youthful), etchings, charcoal drawings, and ochre paintings. There is evidence, too, of performances inside caves using ritual objects (bear skulls arranged in a circle with one at the center) and musical instruments, such as bone flutes, scrapers, bullroarers, and hollow playable rock formations.Footnote ¹⁹

Cave images and related figurines demonstrate a radical change in the reflective awareness of self and Other, vis-à-vis animal life (see Pizzato Reference Pizzato2011:33–53). Humans began making tools and artworks that gave them new powers to survive and reproduce, as they gathered food, hunted, and scavenged in relation to the physically superior animals around them (mammoths, rhinoceroses, ibex, giant elk, aurochs, bison, lions, and others), which they etched, drew, and painted in underground caves. If these were mythic-mimetic, super-natural figures on cave walls, then the first temple-theatres appeared at least 36,000 years ago in Europe and 44,000 in Indonesia (Aubert et al. Reference Aubert, Rustan Lebe, Muhammad Tang, Hamrullah, Hakim and Jian-xin Zhao2019).Footnote ²⁰ Such temple-theatres were found spaces, crafted with animal and animal-human images, which may have been experienced first by shamans exploring the depths of chambers and hallucinating such figures on the walls (Lewis-Williams Reference Lewis-Williams2002). In the cave darkness with flickering firelight, the inner theatres of Paleolithic brains projected designs and images onto the walls, recorded them, and perhaps shared the sacred imagery with others in the clan through the womblike cave. They did this despite the danger and effort of walking or crawling deep inside the caves, with potential predators lurking in the darkness, because it was crucial for humans’ survival on the earth’s surface, where they lived with various animals and with imagined spirits.

Human cultural abilities evolved from the “paralanguage” of body signals and vocal calls among our animal ancestors, in their “ritualized doing-things-to-each-other” (Hurford Reference Hurford2007:185). They developed further through an “expanding spiral” of gestures and sounds as human “protolanguage,” based in mirror neuron and emotion contagion systems (Arbib Reference Arbib2012:231). From herbivores’ herd movements to predators’ hunting signals and primates’ deceptive calls, animal communications continued evolving toward human storytelling and artworks as further media of cooperative and competitive awareness, shown in caves and sculptures (Harari Reference Harari2015:21–24, 39). With this growing awareness of self, other, and mortality, through representations of animals and animal-human figures, our ancestors eventually projected super-human realms of collective imaginings. Prehistoric art reveals the inner theatres of their brains, expressed on cave walls, perhaps as hallucinations of animal spirit guides perceived by tribal shamans and traced in firelit chambers deep within the earth, as if the walls were spirit-world “membranes” (Clottes and Lewis-Williams Reference Clottes and Lewis-Williams1998; Lewis-Williams Reference Lewis-Williams2002:36–37). Even today, the languages of primarily oral, indigenous cultures “are more like permeable membranes binding the peoples to their particular terrains.” Their shamans “dwell precisely on this margin […] as intermediaries between the human and more-than-human realms,” thus keeping “the perceptual membrane fluid […] between the human community and the animate earth” (Lewis-Williams Reference Lewis-Williams2002:256).

Lion-person and Venus sculptures from tens of thousands of years ago may be sacred images of survival and reproduction, showing feline predatory and female nurturing energies, related to left-cortical patriarchal and right-cortical maternal networks in prehistoric or current brains. Venus figurines also suggest, to some theorists, “female political alliances,” possibly involving “a form of veneration not focused on control of spirits/animals,” but instead on the “celebration of fecundity or motherly embrace or protection” (McNamara Reference McNamara2011:65). The interplay between such figures appeared, with positive tricksters also, through biocultural networks of belief and ritual in many artistic traces from prehistory to ancient and modern history, reflected in religious buildings.

From agricultural groups with walled-in wealth, residences, and warriors to cities and empires, patriarchal hierarchies typically stressed vertical and rectilinear designs, with symbolic imagery involving time as well as space, through written myths and histories. These developments contrast with the earlier “horizontal shamanism” of natural ways, with animal-spirit supportive/trickster guides and ancestral ties, which persist today in many oral storytelling cultures (Lewis-Williams and Pearce Reference Lewis-Williams and Pearce2005). “The cyclical shape of earth time gradually fades behind the new awareness of an irreversible and rectilinear progression of itemizable events,” especially with “the influence of alphabetic writing upon the emergence of homogenous ‘space’ and linear ‘time’” (Abram [Reference Abram1996] 2017:188). This developed with ancient, Greco-Roman-Christian, alphabetic vowels, unlike in earlier Hebrew scripture, “dispelling the air of ghosts and invisible influences” (253). The ancient Greek psyche, which originally meant “breath,” came to mean “soul” after Plato and Socrates, creating a “new self […] independent of the body,” which was “understood in relation to the forgetting of the air” (255). Eventually, various styles of domestic and funerary, communal and sacrificial spaces emerged with European churches, often in more vertical, rectilinear designs, reflecting an independent self or soul. In that tradition of religious buildings, images of faith, hope, and love involve father, mother, and supportive/trickster dimensions, sometimes with sibling rivalries, expressing spiritual care and yet ideological conflicts.

Prehistoric Temples with Maternal Care, Vertical Shamanism, and Animal Aspects

The archeological remains of Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey show a key development in vertical shamanism during the early Neolithic Age, 11,000 years ago, just prior to the dawn of agriculture there. About 20 circular “temples” were built with multiple megalithic T-shaped stones, as high as 7 meters (23 feet), quarried, transported from up to 500 meters away (1,640 feet), and planted vertically in the ground (figs. 5 and 6). For each 10- to 20-ton stone, this would have required at least 500 people, according to today’s estimates (Dietrich et al. Reference Dietrich, Manfred Heun, Schmidt and Zarnkow2012:679). Such a huge, collective enterprise shows vertical, hierarchic, objective, left-cortical (patriarchal symbolic) devotion, through horizontal, nurturing, communal, right-cortical (maternal imaginary) inner/outer theatre networks of people who gathered at a central site, with semipermanent settlements 50–100 kilometers away (60–120 miles). These people also feasted together, as evidenced by the burned bones of gazelles, wild asses, and aurochs, plus limestone barrels that held wheat or barley beer. Such mass-performance provisioning, as collective maternal care, may have inspired the development of agriculture and permanent settlements across Mesopotamia during the next millennium. Likewise, the prehistoric evidence of monumental wooden structures in Eastern Europe, along with stone and wood “henges” in Britain, show seasonal “State” hierarchies of many hunter-gatherer bands joining together through various forms of “political self-consciousness,” as seen in historical examples studied by anthropologists (Graeber and Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021:89–117).

Figure 5.

Archeological remains of Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, from 11,000 years ago. View of the circularly aligned T-shaped megaliths and remains of walls, 29 May 2010. (Photo by Volker Höhfeld; CC BY-SA-4.0)

Figure 6.

Göbekli Tepe, Turkey, 12 November 2022. (Photo by Taylan Ozgur Uksal; CC BY-SA-4.0)

According to psychologist Ara Norenzayan, “Göbekli Tepe suggests the idea that early stirrings to worship Big Gods motivated people to take up early forms of farming, and not the other way around” (2013:120). In various parts of the world, hunter-gatherer communities grew into chiefdoms and large states through collective beliefs in punishing patriarchal deities as supernatural watchers, increasing cooperative trust within societies and across trade routes (120–21). Such “Moralizing High Gods” are apparent in “doctrinal religions,” especially monotheistic Abrahamic ones, which spread across Eurasia and North Africa (Dunbar Reference Dunbar2022:58, 163, 193–99, 212, 259). But they also appear in polytheistic traditions, as with the High Lord of Heaven, during the Zhou dynasty 3,000 years ago, “controlling the natural world, having powers of omniscience, and caring about moral behavior,” in relation to China’s human ruler with the Mandate of Heaven, which involved righteous ritual duties (Norenzayan Reference Norenzayan2013:134–35).

The remains of Neolithic temples at Göbekli Tepe from 8,000 years prior, with evidence of food and drink for large gatherings, reveal a key development in vertical, symbolic, abstract-ordering, hierarchic, patriarchal, more left-cortical networks. Yet they also show horizontal, imaginary, contextual, nurturing, maternal, more right-cortical dimensions in dealing with the supportive/trickster aspects of natural forces, within and around each brain-body. Such forces offer life, death, pleasure, pain, and various states of consciousness, with inner/outer stages involving emotional imagery (as in the dreamlike chambers of prehistoric cave art). A carved stone cup near the Göbekli Tepe site suggests this interplay with the image of two men dancing around a turtle figure, perhaps in an altered state of consciousness through communion with an animal spirit (Turchin Reference Turchin2016:10).

Various animal figures were carved on the Göbekli Tepe megaliths: vulture, boar, fox, lion, duck, snake, scorpion, and spider (fig. 7). Nearly all carvings are of predators or scavengers with male genitals. Images include “flesh-eating birds and other carnivores […] shown grasping, tossing about or otherwise playing with their catch of human crania,” plus anthropomorphic sculptures with heads “smashed off and […] buried adjacent to pillars within the shrines” (Graeber and Wengrow Reference Graeber and Wengrow2021:242–43). Abstract figures of human body parts and objects were also carved: a loincloth, decorated belt, arms, hands, and fingers (Dietrich et al. Reference Dietrich, Manfred Heun, Schmidt and Zarnkow2012:679). In 2017, fragments of three human skulls with cut marks were found at Göbekli Tepe, indicating the funerary defleshing of the dead in “sky burials” (for vultures to eat), as practiced historically and recently by Zoroastrians and Buddhists in Asia. This may relate to vulture, head, and anthropomorphic carvings on the Neolithic megaliths and to current shamanic ideas across the globe of psychic dismemberment and rebirth (Lewis-Williams and Pearce Reference Lewis-Williams and Pearce2005:118).

Figure 7.

One of the many megaliths with animal carvings at Göbekli Tepe archaeological site, Turkey. 21 July 2022. (Photo by Radosław Botev; CC BY 3.0 pl)

The prehistoric site of Göbekli Tepe reflects vertical, hierarchic, territorial drives of a sacred sanctuary, requiring heroic mass efforts done with moral devotion to build the various “temples.” If it was a memorial site for great leaders, it probably evoked awe and obedience toward transcendent patriarchal figures, through melodramatic trust/disgust and fairness/rage about their heroism and about others as villains, regarding a given meaning and purpose beyond mortality. Yet its evidence of mass feasting also suggests horizontal, nurturing-playful, tragicomic feelings of communal joy, care, grief, and fear, with maternal, memorial, and supportive/trickster dimensions in this life, tied to further realms of ancestral and animal spirits. Such maternal horizontal (and trickster subterranean) foundations for patriarchal verticality relate to the Neolithic shift in many parts of the world from “immersive” shamanic rites to “doctrinal” religions (Dunbar Reference Dunbar2022:188–91). Thus, in Neolithic forager and agricultural societies, “metapersons” are projected into a cosmic theatre as animal spirits, ancestors, and deities (Graeber and Sahlins Reference Graeber and Sahlins2017:2). “There are kingly beings in heaven even when there are no chiefs on earth.” Gods express “the lack of power in human society” regarding nature and mortality (57), yet also the building of patriarchal, more left-cortical, scriptwriter/critic power.

Egyptian Temples, Pyramids, and Performances with Parental Gods yet Tricksters

Starting about 5,000 years ago, Egyptians built small, rectangular, mud-brick temples. But over the next thousand years, their temples became much larger, increasingly constructed of stone, and more complex. They involved various types of priests, mostly male, plus singers, dancers, and musicians, performing twice-daily rituals, with food and drink offerings, also bathing and dressing the god’s statue, through patriarchal duty and maternal care. By the New Kingdom era (1550–1070 BCE), Egyptian temples typically had a walled enclosure, an entry yard for the public, and two massive watchtowers on the inner gateway or “pylon” (akin to later church facades and towers). The pylon was decorated with carvings of the king smiting enemies melodramatically, thus repelling “chaos and evil,” which led to a series of increasingly exclusive, hierarchic-territorial yards and chambers with gods’ statues on an east-west axis mimicking the sun’s path (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2000:20–25, 60, 77–78). Such rectilinear temples included the main god’s shrine at the rear as a private area for the king and elite priests, a “hearing ear” niche (with priest hole) for external public communication, and a sacred lake nearby for purification rites, plus a “birth house” for celebrating divine nativity and nurturing (70–73). These elements suggest exclusive/inclusive, patriarchal/maternal, rectitude/inclination aspects (Cavarero [2014] 2016) of later European churches: a screened-off sanctuary, confessional, and holy water font, plus an internal or nearby baptistery.

But the Egyptian precedent involved imagery of gods with animal heads on human bodies, reflecting animal-human stagehand drives, projected as maternal mime/designer and patriarchal scriptwriter/critic powers. The nurturing love goddess Hathor had a cow head. The domestic, childbirth, and also warrior goddess Bastet/Sekhmet had a cat or lion head. The protective warrior god Sobek had a crocodile head. The earth god Geb sometimes had a goose or snake head. The embalming god Anubis had a jackal head. The scribe god Thoth had a baboon or ibis head. And the ruling sky god Horus had a falcon head. Special powers and conflicts of animal-human gods also involved family relationships (e.g., Set as the evil uncle of Horus), reflecting inner memorial audience networks at various levels of society and primary/social emotions. Indeed, the Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus (c. 1970 BCE), found in the funerary temple of Ramesses II, suggests that Horus was performed by the king himself in ritual actions, with mythic ties at different named cities, as sites visited along the banks of the Nile (or by a priest in the temple).Footnote ²¹ The papyrus gives speeches, actions, mythemes, and illustrations of the sacred barque with a shrine, symbolizing melodramatic conflicts against the trickster god Set.Footnote ²²

The main chambers of Egyptian temples included subterranean crypts, functional roof areas, and a ceremonial barque chapel for oracles and processions. These three spaces symbolize the underworld, heaven (or goddess Nut), and the sun’s travel across the sky (Wilkinson Reference Wilkinson2000:68–70). They thus relate to inner, outer, and cosmic theatre aspects: supportive/trickster stagehand, maternal mime/designer, and patriarchal scriptwriter/critic. The roof edges also had lion-headed spouts directing rainwater, like medieval gargoyles. “The roof of the temple corresponded to heaven and was often adorned with birds or stars, the floor symbolized the primordial marsh. Great pillars topped with lotus, papyrus, and palm capitals sprouted from the floor like the first plant out of the primeval mound,” representing the world’s creation (Oakley and Rubin Reference Oakley, Rubin, McNamara and Wesley2012:75). Temples were mansions for the gods, with offerings made on altars, wall images of kings giving incense or food to deities, and mythic dramas performed in yards to defend against trickster forces. They had an outer wall with inner courtyards for the public to visit, watching and interacting with such performances or seeking oracle predictions. Yet temples also had an elevated innermost sanctum for the holiest statues, with exclusive rites performed by priests for Ma’at, both a goddess perpetuating the king’s dynastic power, and the order and harmony of the universe (75–76).

Like cult temples for the gods, Egyptian pyramids were afterlife homes for the mummies of deified rulers, initially built within mortuary temple walls more than four thousand years ago, with inner/outer theatre, survival-reproduction-care, territorial-hierarchic, yet playful dimensions. Riches and ushabtis (small servant and guard figures) were sealed inside with the mummy after burial for use by its various spirits (soul aspects), which needed to have the body preserved. A carved, “false” doorway, on the west (sunset) side, showed the spiritual threshold for offerings from the living of food and drink. It was also the imagined liminal site for the dead person’s essence (ka soul) to travel through, eventually uniting with the personality (ba soul, depicted as a bird with a human head).

Pyramids connected earth and sky with their square perimeter and triangular walls coming to a point above, covered with white limestone, reflecting the sun’s rays. They were thus memorial monuments, like temples, extending animal-human drives through inner/outer stagehands, audiences, mime/designers, and scriptwriter/critics, plus the rulers’ political powers. Similar shaped temples were also built in ancient Mesoamerica, by the Maya and other cultures (starting 3,000 years ago), showing animal-human, hypertheatrical drives, although as step pyramids with sacrificial offerings on top, like natural peaks or Asian sky-burial towers.

Pyramids reflected ancient Egyptian perceptions, feelings, and ideas about their earth-sky, death-rebirth cosmos, as in typical images of the earth god Geb as male and the sky goddess Nut as female, arching over him, with life-giving energy between them. Unlike depictions in other cultures of a male creator sky-god and “Mother Earth” goddess, the Egyptians inverted the genders. In an arid climate with little rainfall, the vital (inseminating) waters of the Nile seemed to emerge from the earth below, gradually flooding and bringing life to the dry cropland each season. Such seasonal flooding also inspired various creation myths, commonly involving the lifeless sea of chaos, Nu (masculine form of Nut), out of which rose a pyramid mound (benben, also the capstone of the pyramid tomb), like land when the floodwater recedes, and then a lotus flower, which birthed the sun—again showing patriarchal, maternal, and trickster aspects.

Osiris, Egyptian god of the dead, and Isis, his sister/wife, were depicted on the interior walls of temples and pyramids, along with Horus, their son. They were also performed outside. According to the Ramesseum Dramatic Papyrus, the dead Osiris was displayed with symbolic props, such as a djed pillar (placed on the Set actor), and with the former king’s mummy (or statue). His son, the new king, played Horus, avenging his father’s death and dismemberment, plus his own dismemberment, by Set. That trickster god, typically shown in Egyptian imagery as a hippopotamus or a human with an unknown animal head, represented the threat of desert storms and social chaos. Yet, Set was viewed as “necessary for the rejuvenation of Osiris” and was “not destroyed […] but judged by gods and later reconciled with Horus” in other versions of the myth (Geisen Reference Geisen2018:238).

Isis was a nurturing goddess, re-membering and reviving Osiris. Such dis- and re-membering, with the Eye of Power taken from yet returned to Horus (plus testicles and thighbone from Set), was acted out, re-presented symbolically in the Ramesseum drama. This was shown, in various scenes at different sites (or in the temple), with sacrificial animal killings (ram, goat, and goose), grain trampled, and offerings of bread, eye salve, frankincense, maces, animal thighbone, mummy cloth, milk, and wine as “flowing blood” (Gaster Reference Gaster1961:388). It was also performed at other times (dis/re-membering Osiris) with wheat-paste models of body parts sent out from a temple to specific towns, where they were found by Isis in the myth, and sacred bread pieces placed in a silver chest near the statue of Osiris in temples (Budge Reference Budge1961). Such acts are akin to later Christian performances of breaking bread, sharing Holy Communion (with bread and wine as Christ’s body and blood), and keeping the transubstantiated bread in an altar tabernacle.

In ancient Egyptian art, Isis is often depicted as a mother figure with the baby Horus on her lap (fig. 8), like later Christian scenes of Mary with baby Jesus, influenced by Greco-Roman images of Hera/Juno with Herakles/Hercules as well (Gkegkes et al. Reference Gkegkes, Darla and Iavazzo2012). The father Osiris is typically shown with green or black skin as a life-and-death fertility god. In temple wall scenes and books of the dead (such as Hunefer’s), Osiris presides over the soul’s judgment (fig. 9). This is sometimes shown with the goddess Ma’at as the feather of truth on a scale, weighed against the heart of the deceased by the jackal-headed Anubis, while Ammit as a crocodile-lion-hippo goddess waits to devour a heavy heart-soul. This involves further patriarchal left-cortical (judgment), maternal right-cortical (truth), and supportive/trickster subcortical permutations.

Figure 8.

Statuette of Isis nursing the child Horus. ca. 664–525 BCE. Slate, 7 1/2 × 1 5/8 × 4 1/4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 37.938E. (Photo by Brooklyn Museum; CC-BY)

Figure 9.

Hunefer’s heart-weighing scene with Anubis leading him and adjusting the scale, while Ammit waits and Thoth records, and then Hunefer led by Horus toward the seated Osiris, with Isis and Nephthys behind him, in Hunefer’s Book of the Dead, c. 1300 BCE (© The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0] license)

Likewise, medieval Christian imagery of the Last Judgment sometimes depicts the Archangel Michael with scales for weighing souls, while Christ sends those on his right to Heaven and on his left to Hell, as described in Matthew 25:31–46. Hell appears as a monstrous mouth with trickster devils, the inverse of life-giving mother earth. This shows a melodramatic view of the cosmos, extending inner theatre aspects. Good souls are on the right side of Christ as ultimate ruler-judge, with the body’s right side tied to left-cortical objectifying scriptwriter/critic and left-parietal binary (good versus evil) costume-body definer networks. Evil souls with cruel demons in and around the Hellmouth are on Christ’s left side, connected to right-hemisphere contextual circuits, as the “Devil’s Advocate,” which will “question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee Reference Ramachandran and Blakeslee1998:136).

With the Protestant Reformation, there was even more stress on left-hemisphere symbolic scriptwriter/critic functions, focused on Bible reading and preaching, over right-hemisphere imaginary mime-improviser/scene-designer (plus costume-body designer) icons and rituals. Sometimes this involved melodramatic iconoclasm and witch persecutions, plus Catholic Counter-Reformation inquisitions. Currently, such good versus evil ideals continue to feed hypertheatrical politics, in the US and Europe, with statue destruction, “aliens” persecuted, and patriarchal autocracy on the rise. In the early modern Reformation, however, there was also an emphasis on diverse relationships with the Divine, developing toward Enlightenment and later ideals of equal, individual rights as self-evident truths, involving science as well as religion.

In the natural and cultural environments of ancient Egypt, parental figures became fundamental to sacred buildings, images, myths, and performances. This extension of super-human parents also reflected the pyramidal power structure of earthly politics (with the king at the top), projected as a cosmic, afterlife framework. It involved numerous interactions, within and between brains, of more left-cortical, patriarchal, symbolic (objectifying, predatory) scriptwriter/critic rules and right-cortical, maternal, imaginary (holistic, multicontextual) mime-improviser/scene-designer alternatives. Religious sites also reflected parietal binary/contextual costume-body definer/designer, limbic memorial (or moralizing) audience, and subcortical supportive/trickster stagehand networks, with emotive spirits of symbolic rites and supernatural figures. Of course, inner/outer actor, character, director, stage manager, and operator networks were involved as well. Especially with melodramatic ideals of victim-hero against villain, such as Osiris-Horus versus Set, the believer’s inner director projected evil as the other’s actor, often with a dangerous animal-human character to match.

Across several millennia, patriarchal, melodramatic, inner theatre networks were expressed in related designs and images around the Mediterranean: from ancient Egyptian temples and pyramids to Greco-Roman temples, Christian churches, and modern neoclassical governing edifices, performing monumental ideologies with sacrificial demands. Such collective buildings display vertical, doctrinal shamanism, with territorial, hierarchic drives and emotions, extending prior animal-human reflections in prehistoric cave or mobile art and megalithic henges. Yet those earlier creations suggest more horizontal, immersive shamanism with reproduction and nurturing-care drives, as do some ancient Egyptian and later Christian images, myths, and designs. Thus, religious sites reveal the cultural evolution of humanity’s inner theatre, expressed as outer theatrical performances, in more competitive melodramatic or cooperative tragicomic modes. These relate to our choices today in religion, art, social media, and national politics to create further scapegoating and sacrifices, through melodramatic heroes/victims/villains (like Horus/Osiris/Set) and patriarchal autocratic (pharaonic) rulers, or a more tragicomic, rasa-cathartic, bottom-up awareness of errors and alternatives, with democratic flowering.