Religion Myth and Magic in Fifth Business - Essay Example

Religion, Myth and Magic in Fifth Business Given the brief of writing about religion and magic in Robertson Davies Fifth Business, it is hardly possible not to talk about myth also, since it is in myth that Davies is principally interested. In line with its main characters self-identification as fifth business, its hero and villain (Boy Stauton and Magnus Eisengrim, though it would be difficult to say which is which) are defined by their rejection and embrace of myth. Boy sinks entirely into the mythless religion of his boyhood, while Eisengrim recreates the world of myth through magic. The religious world that Dunstan grew up in was quite prescribed: We had five churches: the Anglican, poor but believed to have some mysterious social supremacy; the Presbyterian, solvent and thought—chiefly by itself—to be intellectual; the Methodist, insolvent and fervent; the Baptist, insolvent and saved; the Roman Catholic, mysterious to most of us, but clearly solvent. (12) No form of religion but Christianity existed for him, and everything outside of a narrow range of Protestantism was mysterious: even the Anglicans are at the limit. These churches play no role in what might be called a spiritual life of Deptford. Rather, they are concerned with the merely social relations of their members. This is why Dunstan estimates the wealth of each church: one of their chief importance is as a social marker for their members. Religion in Deptford is not something one believes, but something one does, like a job. Religion in Deptford is part of a daily routine that helps to regulate life, anything that varies form that routine is too much, like adultery compared to monogamy: "We had family prayers at home, a respectable salute to Providence before breakfast, enough for anybody. But he [sc. Baptist minister Amasa Dempster] was likely to drop on his knees at any time and pray with a fervour that seemed indecent" (41). The fact that Dempster prays outside the appointed schedule and for very personal ends is the enormity. Demspter makes this very clear to Dunstan when he catches him out in teaching Paul magic tricks and reading him the lives of the saints. To Demspter, the only use magic could have is theft, either through cheating at cards or pick-pocketing. Still worse, he considered the cult of the saints to be, not Christian, but "Papistry!" (43). He rejects the miracles and acts of heroic asceticism performed by the saints to be precisely the same kinds of cheats as card tricks, but in this case perpetrated by the devil for the stakes of human souls. This is very much in line with one modern understanding of magic as a term of competition between rival groups: what we have is religion we do miracles: what our enemies have is magic and they do magic tricks (Aune; Gager). Even before her miracles, Mary Dempster was Dunstans introduction to another kind of religious life. Mary was ostracized from the community and its religious ties, and tyrannized by her husbands religious fanaticism. But to her all of these external facts of her life were completely unreal. Instead, "She lived by a light that arose from within" (56). While still a child living in Deptford, Dunstan began to realize that the Biblical text and Christian liturgy were a category of myth. Of course he did not have the technical vocabulary to describe it as such, but simply began to put it in the same category as the Arabian Nights (44), a comparison he will revert to later in the novel (e.g. 77). He also realized that the essential similarity consisted of metaphor. The one atheist in the village interpreted everything in the Bible literally, making much of it risible. But Dusntan says , "I knew a metaphor when I heard one, and I liked metaphor better than reason" (58). As he might have phrased it his later years, he realized the metaphorical language of myth was the language spoken by the unconscious mind, so it ws the only form of expression that can have real meaning and resonance (77). Eisengrims magic show, the Soireé of Illusions is the opposite of Deptfords idea of religion. In that world magic was a cheat. And indeed the kinds of trickery used in stage magic has sometimes been used to stimulate religious belief (Poulsen). The ancient cult of the snake god Glykon was entirely based on its founders Alexander of Abonouteichos abilities as a ventriloquist and his talent at getting to know the contents of sealed letters (Fox 241-250), nothing different than the techniques Eisengrim used (e.g. 231, 244). More recently, the Spiritualist religion popular in the nineteenth century and with some transformations even today, presented a very traditional magic show (mentalism and escape artistry) only with the difference that the audience was expected to accept the illusions as real miracles (Houdini; Jackson). These deceptions succeed because they illustrate the mythical language of the unconscious (231). It is because Eisengrims show makes the same appeal that he becomes so spectacularly popular in distinction to magicians who debunk their own act with nervous laughter (230). Dunstan found the secret of Eisengrims and his own profession of a hagiogrpaher at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe. There the "Petitioners had no conception of art; to them a picture was a symbol of something else, and very readily the symbol became the reality. They were untouched by modern education" (227-28). Both men are essentially Romanticists, they cannot cease to be modern but they desperately want to communicate in the unconscious language of myth which modernity rejects because it cannot accept metaphor and rejects the literal meaning of myth (Abrams 182; Stillinger xvi-xvii). Rather than fakery, even when it is so palpably all trickery, Davies seems inclined to take magic as the operative language of myth. Dunstans own inner life, its growth and change, expresses itself in metaphorical mythical terms. That is why he becomes a hagiographer, because he finds the same myth expressed in that literature. He reads the lives of the saints in order to understand himself. Boy Stauton, on the other hand, finds this interest "queer" because he has no understanding of himself, he has retreated entirely into the formalist religion of Deptford which was the opposite of myth, and even further so that his second wedding "was neither a religious ceremony nor a merrymaking. It is best described as A Function" (274). And when he is suddenly brought to self-understanding through the mythical deception of Eisengrim, his life is destroyed (though the full details of that are not revealed until Worlds of Wonder). References Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1971. Aune, David E., "Magic in Early Christianity," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Wolfgang Haase, ed. II.23.2 (1980): 1507-57 Davies, Robertson. Fifth Business. New York: Viking, 1970. Fox, Robin Lane. Pagans and Christians. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. Gager, John J., "Moses the Magician," Helios 21 (1994): 179-188. Houdini, Harry. A Magician among the Spirits. New York: Harper, 1924. Jackson, Herbert G. The Spirit Rappers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Poulsen, Frederick, "Talking, Weeping and Bleeding Sculptures: A Chapter in the History of Religious Fraud," Acta Archaeologica 16 (1945): 178-195. Stillinger Jack ed. John Keats: The Complete Poems. Cambridge: Belknap, 1978. Read More