Closely associated with pageantry is theatrical spectacle. This has always gone hand in hand with the drama. The drama is human life in action, and spectacle is the visionary world shown upon the stage. The highest manifestations of this were seen in the Elizabethan and Jacobean masques of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spectacle has become much more visionary in recent years as a result of advances in technology. Thanks to the invention in the late eighteenth century of the parabolic mirror, which permits the projection of a narrow beam of light, the invention of limelight, which came in 1824, and the discovery of electricity in the 1880s, we are now able to cast a light such as never was on land or sea upon figures on the stage and to produce the visionary effect of an intense preternatural colour and light. The apotheosis of this comes in the great coloured movies, the big spectaculars and the big coloured documentaries, which really do produce a visionary effect.
On a humbler scale, we can see this now as we walk out on the streets with their Christmas decorations—which are essentially a kind of popular visionary art. These little twinkling lights do remind us of this other world; they seem in some way magical. We give them names like fairy lamps, as we have given the name of magic lantern to the projector of luminous images. So we see that there has been always in the popular mind a curious awareness of the visionary world and a response to even the crudest kind of visionary art. There is something I find extremely touching about these Christmas decorations. They are slightly commercialized, unfortunately, and slightly absurd, but nonetheless they are a symptom of the strange fact that all of us carry around at the back of our head this mysterious other world which I have called the world of visions.
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