I’m getting too tired to be productive anymore tonight, but I still have a couple things I want to research some more. They mostly relate to the historical development of drama. Specifically, I want to look more into the inter-twining of religion and the dramatic arts throughout history.

I read a few things earlier talking about how our modern concepts of drama are mostly derived from the Greek theatre, which was originally a form of worship dedicated to Dionysus. One of the more interesting aspects of this was somebody brought up the concept of “enthousiasmos“, and how one of the significant components of Dionsysian worship was that you could become possessed by the god himself, and actually “become” that god. This is also kind of similar in some way to this whole vicarious identification thing.

A lot of resources also mentioned that drama probably developed from shamanic rituals also, although I didn’t find any good information specifically on that. I’ll have to look around for more.

The other cool thing I read was about the history of drama in relation to the Catholic Church. Originally, they put on “mystery plays” in the Church itself, and priests played the parts of different Biblical characters in order to teach people Bible stories. These plays were usually performed according to different pagan festivals and feast days, in order to re-imprint these older beliefs and practices to the relatively new Christianity.

At some point, one of the Popes outlawed this practice of putting on dramas inside the Church (aside from the actual Mass itself, that is), which simply meant that these same stories were just performed elsewhere in the town, by people who were not priests. One thing that I really liked was that for particular types of Bible stories, different trade guilds would be assigned responsibilty for putting together a production of that story. For example, the guild of boatwrights would be the ones who put on a play about Noah and his ark.

Then, for some reason, the plays stopped being as overtly religious, and started being allegorical tales about morality. There was also some point where the Church tried to distance itself altogether from plays, and called them “immoral” where they had formerly been a vehicle for indoctrination. I’m kind of fuzzy on why these shifts happened, and I’ll try and find more info on them.

The other thread that I want to pick up on tomorrow is this whole idea of catharsis. Evidently, the term goes back to Aristotle, who said that tragedies served the purpose of catharsis for the audience - that is, they purged the audience of negative feelings. I want to look more into the relationship between vicarious identification and catharsis. I’m thinking maybe that catharsis is some kind of means whereby perhaps the cognitive dissonance between the vicariously identified hero and the audience member is brought back into harmony again. Or else that catharsis is a sort of ritualized way of bringing people out of the sacred space created by a story, back into their own life and personality - ie, it “breaks” in a satisfying way the process of vicarious identification. I definitely think there is also some kind of psychologically imprintable point that is reached in the catharsis as well (possibly similar to a spillover state). Anyway, I’ll write more about all this as I find it tomorrow. I’m hot on the trail.

Some other things I want to look for:

1. The similarity between the medieval heretical French gnostic sect The Cathars, and the term catharsis. They both come from the same Greek root, “to purify”
2. Using Google’s new “scholar” search, I want to look for papers on religion, games and ritual.
3. The idea of story as a “sacred space”
4. Found this really interesting page of links, which I want to explore more fully: Belief System - Influences & Biases

Whoo, well goddamn. It’s been an enormously productive day of research and writing. I’m getting pretty to whatever it is I’m after. Good times.